Sandra Cisneros

Who Is Sandra Cisneros?

Sandra Cisneros is the foremost Chicana literary voice of her generation — a writer whose debut work, The House on Mango Street (1984), transformed the landscape of American literature by introducing a voice and a world that had been almost entirely absent from it. Born in Chicago in 1954, the only daughter among seven children of a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother, she grew up moving between Chicago and Mexico City, inhabiting two cultures fully and belonging completely to neither.

The House on Mango Street, written during her time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a series of interconnected vignettes narrated by Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl growing up in Chicago. Its formal innovation — something between poetry and prose, between novel and story cycle — was itself a statement about the inadequacy of existing literary forms to render the experience it was describing.

Cisneros is significant for TLA because her work insists on the full humanity and the full literary dignity of a community that American culture had treated as invisible. Her Esperanza’s desire to leave Mango Street without forgetting it — to become a writer who returns in her writing for those who cannot leave — is one of the most moving statements of literary vocation in contemporary American fiction.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The House on Mango Street — 1984
• Woman Hollering Creek — 1991 — short stories
• Loose Woman — 1994 — poetry
• Caramelo — 2002
• A House of My Own — 2015 — essays