Mango Street Research Articles

Establishing Sisterhood:

This paper attempts to study Esperenza, the Chicana protagonist of Sandra Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street, who desires to establish her identity as a woman and a poet to represent the marginalized women of her community. She believes that she needs to come out of the role imposed on her by society to establish herself as a writer and to proclaim her true female identity. Esperanza searches for self-respect. In doing so, she discovers the reasons behind women’s confinement and the sources of patriarchy’s hold over women. She understands that social conditioning plays a vital role in holding women back. In her quest for identity as a Mexican American, she also tries to create a space in literary tradition as she feels a strong desire to speak out for those women of her community who cannot come out of their social imprisonment. She realizes that she must do something for them and finds that writing their untold stories could be a way of paying tribute to them. She has intensely observed their pain, suppression, and unfulfilled desires. So she takes the initiative to break the barriers of patriarchal control to ensure women’s rights in her society. Thus she feels the necessity of establishing a sisterhood to break the patriarchal web and to give due credit to women’s contributions to society, which would allow her and her fellow women to come out of internment and find the route to freedom.

Moral Values Reflected in “The House on Mango Street” Novel Written by Sandra Cineros

It is obvious that Literature is an important subject to be studied since it reflects every single aspect of human life such as happyness, sadness, truth, justice, respect, corage, faith, and other urgent elements. In this article, the researcher investigates moral values where it becomes one of the aspects to be analysed in Literature where the novel of “The House on Mango Street” written by Sandra Cineros is chosen by the researcher as the subject of the research with some important considerations. The criteria of moral values used by the researcher is based on the theory proposed by Kinner et.al. that consist of six major parts. In addition, the design of this research is qualitative research since the researcher tries to explore the moral values as reflected in the novel of “The House on Mango Street” descriptively. As the result, the researcher finds that all of the elements of moral values exist in the content of the novel except the point of “respect and caring for others” exactly in the element of “to not hurt others”. Meanwhile, the researcher also explains parts of novel subtitles which consist the facts which oppose with some elements of moral values.

From the Editor

From the Editor Amanda Cockrell (bio) In an election year marked by relentless robocalls wanting to know if I would be more or less likely to vote for Candidate X if I learned that he/she ate puppies, I am relieved, not to say delighted, to have ten nice critical articles on children’s literature to contemplate instead. All the news is all around us, all the time, in a constant bombardment, accompanied by varying interpretations and leaving the suspicion of considerable gaps. And as life, art, and scholarship invariably reflect each other, these articles deal in varying ways with just that—with gaps and interpretations, with the unsaid, the unacknowledged, the liminal, the impossible to know, and occasionally the outright fabrication. In “Imaginary Conquest and Epistemology in Nineteenth-Century Adventure Literature: Africa in Jules Verne, Burmann, May, and Twain,” Florian Krobb looks at the “stories of daring and adventure in challenging circumstances, which still purported to inform comprehensively about the visited places, [and] were designed to enable young readers to understand themselves as inhabitants of a globalized world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ into a realm of the familiar and a realm of the strange that awaited ‘familiarization,’” the civilizing of its native inhabitants, and acquisition of its valuable resources, following on the colonial assumption, not entirely vanished today, that what “foreign” cultures really want and need is to be more like us. In “Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record: Accuracy, Authenticity, and Closure in Ann Rinaldi’s Wolf by the Ears,” Brian Dillon considers the question of creating a voice for someone who has no voice in the historical record—in this case Harriet Hemings, daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings—and the difficulty inherent in judging the authenticity of that voice, an attempt further complicated by questions of historical accuracy. Accuracy refers to facts, including perhaps facts conveniently left out. Authenticity is the ability of the author to fill gaps between the facts with speech and events that are plausible, given those facts. Because Harriet Hemings left no writings behind, and because Jefferson “chose silence rather than any acknowledgement of his Hemings children,” the reader is left to evaluate the authenticity of the speculation with which Rinaldi has filled those gaps, and finds [End Page vii] it a slippery business, since even historical “facts” have been told to us in ways influenced by who did the telling. The essay following, “Coming of Age in a Divided City: Cultural Hybridity and Ethnic Injustice in Sandra Cisneros and Veronica Roth” by Suzanne Roszak, examines The House on Mango Street and Divergent for their depictions of social injustice and segregation and the pressure to forsake hybrid identities that shape the characters’ coming-of-age process. Roszak explores the lack of a direct voice in the pattern of “echoing without naming” prevalent in dystopian young adult fiction, and argues that because dystopias reflect our own society, but only at a slant, while they may “indirectly draw attention to and attempt to help eradicate the racial injustice that they do not acknowledge directly… [a]t the same time, such novels do not fully capitalize on the potential of young adult dystopian literature … because they do not overtly name and give real weight to issues of race and ethnicity,” using the example of the factions in Divergent, which are separated by social values, and not by race (their ethnicities are not given), and thus provide an incomplete parallel. A sometimes problematic view of modern Africa, and a less than complete examination of environmental crisis is the subject of Clare Echterling’s “Individualism, Environmentalisms, and the Pastoral in the Picture Book Biographies of Wangari Maathai.” Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and the first African woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, worked to help women reverse the deforestation that had caused streams to dry up and food supplies to dwindle, and forced women to walk long distances to collect firewood. The movement has since grown into an international organization and Maathai has become the subject of five picture books for children. Assessing what has been left out, Echterling notes how these books often focus so closely on Maathai...

The analysis of Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Steet based on social criticism of Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands: La Frontera

The article deals with the main female characters that appear in Sandra Cisneros' collection of vignettes, House on Mango Street (1991). It sheds light on their lives and motives for their actions, through social criticism of Gloria Anzaldúa and the main points she establishes in her semi-autobiographical collection of essays Borderlands: La Frontera (1999). The topics Anzaldúa addresses give an insight into the Chicano identity, and the struggle of Chicano women in particular. Through her vantage point, I discuss gender roles, the immigrants' search for identity and their quest for a more dignified life, by trying to reconcile the antagonizing forces of the different parts of their identity.

The House on Mango Street: Searching for Identity

This paper studies a Chicana adolescent Esperanza Cordero’s search for a “self” that she believes is essential to come out from the prevailing suppression she observes as a woman and as a Mexican-American. She realizes that to achieve her goal she has to establish herself in the society to eradicate her dependency on anyone. In her quest she has found some symbols that gradually helped her to construct her identity. Her imaginary house where she wishes to be alone to nurture her innate ability of writing is her first step toward her identity. Her name given after her grandmother and the sad past of the namesake is another symbol through which she searches for self-definition. Three skinny trees out of Esperanza’s window come as a metaphor of her own position in her father’s house and clear her perception about belonging and existence. Esperanza’s meeting with three sisters from Mexico serves as a turning point of her life. Their prophesy about Esperanza’s future enhances her search and ensures that she is in the right track. The three sisters appear as a fairy godmother for Esperanza and guide her toward her search. Through this “self” searching journey, Esperanza matures as a woman and as a writer.

Campobello’s <em>Cartuchos</em> and Cisneros’s Molotovs: Transborder Revolutionary Feminist Narratives

Author(s): Gano, Geneva M. | Abstract: Though “revolutionary” acts and attitudes were frequently claimed in various civil rights–era movements in the US, this article considers the specific meaning of the term in a Mexican-Chicano context through a simultaneous examination of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984) and Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: relatos de la lucha en el norte de Mexico (1931). By way of a formal allusion to Campobello’s revolutionary text, Cisneros forces her readers to reconsider Mango Street from a hemispheric perspective, prompting new readings of her work. Most broadly, it resituates the text within a broader Latino tradition of the modern testimonio, which demands recognition of its sociopolitical significance. More specifically, the formal connection Cisneros forges insists on a similarity between the violent spaces of the post-WWII barrio and revolutionary Durango. Thus Cisneros collapses national and temporal distinctions that would assure US readers (Cisneros’s main audience) that poverty, violence, and revolution cannot happen here. To Gano, this radical use of form threatens not just literary conventions (this is not simply an assertion of “revolutionary style”) but also contains the suggestive threat that the barrio is a potential site of revolution, inseparable from violent acts. That this is a woman-centered story is significant: Cisneros’s kindling world is comprised largely of women and children who are inundated with daily episodes of violence. Often dismissed as political actors, these individuals are transformed in Cisneros’s work into potential revolutionaries.

The translation of identity on the frontera. Sandra Cisneros in Mexican Spanish, Galician and Catalan

Apart from referring to a geographical or physical border, the notion of frontera has also become a metaphorical or psychological construct which represents any situation of contrast, such as belonging to two different national, cultural or linguistic communities. Latino writers in the United States live and write on the frontera. The coming together of two cultures forges a new hybrid identity which fights against essentialism and homogenization. This hybrid identity is reflected in these writers’ language, a border tongue constantly switching from English to Spanish. Sandra Cisneros is one of those Latina writers who resort to code-switching as an identity hallmark. By introducing Spanish words, phrases or syntactic constructions into her English texts, Cisneros tries to evoke the feeling of inhabiting two worlds which can be conflicting and complementary at the same time. Departing from the notion of frontera, several translations of Cisneros’s works are analysed, paying special attention to those aspects related to identity and language. Particularly, I focus on the Mexican Spanish, Galician and Catalan versions of The House on Mango Street, the translation of Woman Hollering Creek into Mexican Spanish, the Catalan versions of several short stories from Woman Hollering Creek and the Galician translation of Loose Woman. In all the analysed versions, the translators use strategies which reflect the border identity present in the source text, such as the resource to code-switching and typographical markers or the use of calques and other borrowings, dialectalisms, and non-standard vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar.

Santa Fe's Biblioteca Amigos Library

photos : marilyse figueroa outpost F ive minutes away from Santa Fe’s historic downtown, a wooden cart goes in and out of the Youth Development Center. It has been loaded and unloaded, dragged and pushed, narrowly avoiding throwing off the precious words stacked on top of it. The rickety wooden cart has been the secondmost essential commodity for Mara Taub and Demetria Martínez. The first ones were books. Taub, a prisoners’ rights activist, and Martínez, an activist and writer, were contacted by Santa Fe County Corrections advisory committee to come into the youth detention center as volunteers. “All we wanted to do was give extra dictionaries,” Taub explained. She has sent hundreds of copies of dictionaries to residents over the years. However, when Mart ínez visited Taub’s home, the idea to put new books into the library came to each of them. “I think I’ve always had a frustrated librarian in me. I got so excited at the prospect,” Martínez said. They both realized this library needed more than dictionaries. They believed the library should be a haven for the inmates. A young man at the center affirmed their dream by saying he “reads books to escape.” When they arrived, the library was more a closet for books than a vessel for them. The books were unreadable : some had torn covers; many were missing pages. With the support of the staff, especially Aaron Garcia and Renee Hernandez, no one saw a mess; instead, they saw an opportunity to bring new life into the library. After four months of dedicated work, the Biblioteca Amigos Library was ready to open in July. The honored guests were the young residents themselves. Guest speakers Pablo Kelly and Blanca Ortiz spoke about thepowerofwordsandhowbookscan change lives. Martínez read poems written at the center’s poetry workshop . A poem called “Trapped” thickly coated the room in silence; another , “Joy,” was like a ladder to the sun. After the ceremony, the residents investigated the library. On the door was the sign Biblioteca, Spanish for library. “We didn’t ask,” Martínez said. “We just put it up.” By adding a bilingual atmosphere, the volunteers hoped the library would feel welcoming to young men and women who have frontera /borderland identities. The House on Mango Street, Bless Me, Última, and many other recognizable works of Latin American literature were available . The inmates looked through a new fantasy and science-fiction section , young-adult novels, and the volunteers ’ favorite section, Spanish-language and bilingual books. The residents browsed and made their final selections. A young woman went straight to the outdoor enclosed area, sat underneath a panel of sunlight , and began reading her new book immediately. “Sometimes what we do isn’t so visible,” Taub said, “but to see these young people walk out with armloads . . . I could’ve wept.” For the young men and women here, this may be just a place they pass through. However, Taub and Martínez want them to leave with some hope and, of course, with an armful of books. Marilyse Figueroa is a former WLT intern. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. Santa Fe’s Biblioteca Amigos Library Marilyse Figueroa 80 worldliteraturetoday.org Demetria Martínez (left) and Mara Taub Visit the WLT website to view additional photos and to read Marilyse’s blog post about literature and activism. ...

SANDRA CISNEROS'UN "CARAMELO", "THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET" VE "THE WOMAN HOLLERING CREEK AND OTHER STORIES"ADLI ESERLERİNDE ERKEĞİN GÜCÜNÜN YANSIMASI

This paper focuses specifically on the connections between Cisneros’s male characters and their phase of existence ranging from the manners of society to the lower position of women characters. The aim of this study is to point out the privileges of male characters that have been bestowed upon an absolute authority over women and to focus on the motivations leading them to be the sole power. In the procession of characters and events Cisneros makes some of her main concerns more explicit than others and though her novels may seem different from each other, they are indeed connected by the common themes of propositions and delineate the power of men to the reader. This study aims to reveal male characters in relation to female figures. In this context, it will look into male figure through the women protagonists of “Caramelo”, “The House on Mango Street” and “The Woman Hollering Creek.

The Charged Strolls of the Brown Flâneuse in Sandra Cisneros's “The House on Mango Street”

ABSTRACT This essay shifts the perspective oí flânerie from the European metropolis and the white flâneur, and suggests that the protagonist of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street can be categorized as a flâneuse through her fluid stroll in a Chicagoan barrio. Cisneros's novel introduces re-conceptualizations of flânerie by presenting a Chicana stroller whose Odyssey comes across additional social, cultural, and economic afflictions particular to the inner city. Her flânerie falls into three main configurations: mapping ethnicity, mapping gendered spaces, and mapping identity. The analysis is anchored by Walter Benjamin's work on flânerie and recent revisions of the term in the works of Keith Tester and Anne Friedberg.

National Fantasies, Exclusion, and the Many Houses on Mango Street

This article argues that understanding what the house in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street symbolizes is foundational to contextualizing the radical possibilities that Cisneros enacts in her work. Unlike most critics who read “the house” as referencing the title of the text, I argue that the novel is full of houses, notably the house located on Mango Street that narrator Esperanza Cordero longs to escape from, and the house away from Mango Street that she longs to one day have. By reading these two houses through Homi Bhabha's notion of the “unhomely” and Gaston Bachelard's notion of “felicitous space”, we can better understand a critique of the house in light of its resonance with the American Dream on the one hand, and a reconfiguration of that symbolism through a feminist intervention on the other.

Silent Speech: Narration, Gender and Intersubjectivity in Two Young Adult Novels

Combining feminist and narratological perspectives, this paper examines the construction of subjectivity in two young adult novels with a range of narratorial positions. The investigation is grounded in Robyn McCallum’s work on intersubjectivity, in which interrelationships affecting subjectivity are only possible when the narrative permits a variety of and exchange between textual voices and ideas. Keeping in mind this view of intersubjectivity and the importance it places on polyphony, the paper examines male and female subjectivity in The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

The Inter-ethnic Return: Racial and Cultural Multiplicity in Foundational Asian American and Chicana/o Literatures

This article advocates that inter-ethnic contact and cross-cultural traffic condition the possibilities of imagining Asian American and Chicana/o identities, respectively, in early Asian American and Chicana/o novels. Using Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street as my primary examples, I demonstrate how early Asian American and Chicana/o literatures that have been critiqued almost exclusively within binary analytic paradigms articulate identity within a diverse field of racial and cultural differences. I argue that, in order to regard properly the inter-ethnic trends of recent US fiction and to liberate foundational minority texts from ethnic specific enclaves within US institutions, scholars need to recognize how negotiating a diverse spectrum of racial and cultural distinctions is a critical element of the early Asian American and Chicana/o literary imagination.

Page and Screen

Courses on ethnic American literature can unintentionally reinscribe students' preconceptions and stereotypes about ethnic American subgroups or create the false impression that each ethnic group is homogeneous. A student with limited experience with people of color might think she now understands an ethnic group after reading an ethnic American novel, for example. By using fiction and non-fiction film, teachers can destabilize students' oversimplified views of ethnic groups and of the concepts of race and ethnicity themselves. The course described here started with Toni Morrison's short story, “Recitatif,” which ingeniously leads readers to examine their own racial preconceptions. Then, novels (Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, Sent for You Yesterday by John Wideman, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen) are paired with films to demonstrate that greater diversity exists within any ethnic group than between any two. Students also engage a few key articles about canon formation so they can understand ethnic literature in the context of American literary traditions. By the end of the course, students have a healthy uncertainty regarding race and ethnicity, their oversimplifications having been undermined by their work with diverse texts.

Border crossings and beyond: the life and works of Sandra Cisneros

Author of The House on Mango Street, which has sold more than two million copies in English alone, activist, MacArthur grant genius, figure of inspiration and controversy, Sandra Cisneros is unequivocally one of America's most important and much discussed contemporary literary figures. In a writing career that has spanned more than three decades, Cisneros has written acclaimed poetry and prose, including, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Loose Woman, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, and Caramelo, or, Puro Cuenta. Border Crossings and Beyond: The Life and Works of Sandra Cisneros traces the ways in which Cisneros's personal history, art, and influence are intertwined. The result is a revealing and multi-faceted portrait of the artist as writer, woman, and Mexican American. From a childhood defined by repeated migrations between Texas and Mexico, to the Chicano and women's movements, and the impact of her father's death, author Carmen Haydee Rivera offers a comprehensive and thoughtful engagement of Cisneros's writings, as well as her tremendous personal struggles and significant gifts. It will become mandatory reading for those who wish to understand the significance and power of Cisneros's contribution to Latina/o literature and American letters.

Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America Rob Latham Clarke, Deborah. Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xiv + 225 pp. $25.00 paper. Driving Women is an intelligent and useful study of American women’s writing in relation to the development of automobile culture over the course of the twentieth century. While it covers some of the same ground traversed in recent studies of contemporary road narratives–e.g., Ronald Primeu’s Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green, 1996) and Kris Lackey’s Road Frames: The American Highway Narrative (Nebraska, 1997), both of which contain chapters dealing with issues of gender and automobility–it is the first work to canvass a full century of literary production in which the car figures as a potent, iconic presence. (As Primeu’s and Lackey’s subtitles suggest, their books are focused principally on the postwar period of highway travel, a delimitation that also marks Katie Mills’s The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving through Fiction, Film, and Television [Southern Illinois, 2006]). The comprehensiveness of its discussion is one of Driving Women’s key strengths, though its quasi-survey format, with reading piled atop of reading, tends at times to thin out Clarke’s larger analyses. The book’s unifying argument, to the extent that it has one, is that the automobile has been a vehicle of cultural empowerment for women, a bestower of autonomy and agency, and that this function has been reflected in novels and stories featuring cars and car-bound travel. Clarke focuses primarily on literature written by women, but also pauses to consider important works by male authors, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). “In providing access to the public sphere–to work, to escape–the car transformed women’s lives as profoundly as suffrage,” Clarke asserts (3). Drawing on historian Virginia Scharff’s study Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (Free Press, 1991), Clarke shows how the advent of the automobile helped to break down Victorian proscriptions on gender roles and behaviors, coming to be seen as “a contested site in which the very notion of femininity is challenged and ultimately reformulated” (4). Over the course of the century, as the car became more thoroughly integrated into everyday life, it continued to function in literary texts as a complex icon, “destabilizing conventional ideology surrounding the home, gender, race, ethnicity, and ‘Americanness’” (4). This basic if rather diffuse thesis is tracked through six well-researched and effectively-argued chapters focusing on different ideological articulations of the automobile with female lives and identities. Chapter one looks at the early-twentieth-century culture of automobility via advertisements, girls’ books, and the novels of Edith Wharton, focusing on how the car was constructed in relation to issues of gender, social class, and sexuality. Chapter two examines how the discourse surrounding automobiles, within literary and cultural Modernism (e.g., in the work of William Faulkner and Gertrude Stein), intersected with the discourses of masculinity, race, and imperialism, attending especially to the implications for women of the “bridge between bodies and technology” (72) that the car seemed increasingly to offer. Chapter three analyzes how the car came to figure as a symbol of the mechanization of female bodily functions, especially maternity, during the postwar period, offering particularly compelling readings of stories by Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, and Toni Morrison. Chapter four looks at the phenomenon of “Women’s Road Trips” in popular works by Bobbie Ann Mason, Barbara Kingsolver, and Erika Lopez, showing how, while “women may exercise agency” through automobiles, they “are always reminded of their vulnerabilities in a technological age” (138). Chapter five considers the car’s “Reconstruction of Home” in a range of contemporary women’s novels and [End Page 258] memoirs, such as Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street (1989), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992). Finally, Chapter six analyzes the car as a symbol of American citizenship and national community in work especially by ethnic women writers such...

Leaving Mango Street: Speech, Action and the Construction of Narrative in Britton’s Spectator Stance

This paper attempts to unite The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros with the participant and spectator theories of James Britton and D. W. Harding in the hopes that such a union will provide new insights into each. In particular, this article explores how the speech acts of Esperanza, the novel’s protagonist, are indicative of a shifting stance during the course of the novel. This shift, from participant to spectator, enables Esperanza to objectify her experience and eventually narrate her departure from Mango Street. Aside from its attempts to join theory and literature, this argument has implications for the classroom as well, a space in which the value of the spectator stance is often overlooked.

Multicultural Hybridity: Transforming American Literary Scholarship and Pedagogy (review)

Grobman, Laurie. Multicultural Hybridity: Transforming American Literary Scholarship and Pedagogy. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), 2007. $37.95 s.c. 207 pp.Multicultural Hybridity is readable, ambitious, methodical, helpful, and perhaps too tame. It speaks with refreshing frankness about curricular and pedagogical troubles facing the discipline of college literature with reference to multiculturalism; it connects those struggles to contemporary theory; and it offers concrete suggestions for both individual classroom instructors and departmental re-visioning of coursework. I was disappointed, though, that it does not offer a more fierce critique of the aesthetic standards of literary scholarship.Hybridity is a notion associated with post-colonial work, such as Homi Bhabha's, one of many theorists to whom Grobman cites her indebtedness. (On occasion, I found myself wishing for more limited lists of scholars and scholarship, or, conversely, deeper delving into the ways that various theories inform her own.) Used in the nineteenth century to justify colonialism, in recent reformulations, hybridity is a contested, problematic, but ultimately generative, mixing of cultures, forms, and values: ambivalent and contradictory space in which the colonizer and colonized interrelate, deconstructing-and then reconstructing-subjectivities and cultural systems (21). Grobman's book sets out to theorize multicultural texts as literary spaces, texts located in the interstices. In five tight chapters, Grobman methodically lays out the terrain of multiculturalism in English studies, explains her theory of literary hybridity, describes a hybrid aesthetics, specifies the political value of a theory of literary hybridity, and, finally, suggests a revisioning of U.S. literature as a whole.The book begins with a very readable discussion of the larger question of versus critical multiculturalism. The liberal version is the one Grobman's students (and many of my own) seem most familiar with: we are all essentially human (universality and the call to assimilate); we can all be different on the surface (food, rituals, dialect) but underneath, we are all the same (plurality with the call for equal treatment). Later in the book, Grobman highlights the ways that such a perspective leads her students to see only universal tropes in books such as The House on Mango Street or A Lesson Before Dying, such as the healing power of love. Such analyses miss the specificity of these texts: the lived realities of racism or poverty, or intra-group tensions among men and women in a particular culture, or the myths and narrative forms called upon by an author which are particular to her way of life.As Multicultural Hybridity progresses, Grobman effectively describes the pedagogical work she does to move both general education students and English majors beyond such homogenizing tendencies. These details, while not exhaustive, will be helpful reading for many faculty looking to shift their practice. But be warned: it is work. In order to get at lived and textual intersections, Grobman asks students to bring independent, sometimes primary community-based research, back to the classroom, or engages them in service-learning projects; she brings speakers to her classes or requires that students attend related campus events. Grobman provides many concrete examples of the varied textual linkages that she provides for students, too, such as among Judith Ortiz Cofer's Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood and Virginia Woolf 's A Room of One's Own as well as Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior.These mini-syllabi and course descriptions-where an entire course is structured around one central text, and many other literary and rhetorical texts are brought into dialogue with it-are valuable, and Grobman presents them in the hope that this model will take hold more broadly in the discipline. …

Imagine a Brown Queer: Inscribing Sexuality in Chicano/a-Latino/a Literary and Cultural Studies

Imagine a Brown Queer:Inscribing Sexuality in Chicano/a-Latino/a Literary and Cultural Studies Richard T. Rodríguez (bio) Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. By Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. 176 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians. By Catrióna Rueda Esquibel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 245 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). El ambiente nuestro: Chicano/Latino Homoerotic Writing. By David William Foster. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2006. 201 pages. $19.00 (paper). In her 1993 essay "Imagine a Lesbian, a Black Lesbian," writer-activist Jewelle Gomez queries the infrequency of African American lesbian representation in the "literary arena." Gomez maintains—as does Barbara Smith before her in the pathbreaking 1977 essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism"—that literary culture plays a critical role for verifying black lesbian existence. For Smith, "Black women are still in a position to 'imagine,' discover, and verify Black lesbian literature because so little has been written from an avowedly lesbian perspective. The near nonexistence of Black lesbian literature [which other Black lesbians and I do deeply feel] has everything to do with the politics of our lives, the total suppression of identity that all Black women, lesbian or not, must face."1 More than a decade and a half later, however, Gomez finds herself reiterating Smith's urgent declaration, foregrounding her predecessor's words so that they serve as the epigraph for her essay and the motivating force behind its title. Gomez's essay has in turn animated my piece, as is evident by its title alone. Yet while the focus here is not specifically on lesbians or on the shared historical consignment to invisibility faced by Chicana/Latina and African American [End Page 493] lesbians in literature (although that project is long overdue), the general concern is with imagining queer Chicano/a and Latino/a sexualities in literary and cultural production. Gomez understands "the art of critical writing" as a necessary component of literary representation; the recent books by Frederick Luis Aldama, Catrióna Rueda Esquibel, and David William Foster critically assess novels, poems, performance, and film and are texts that simultaneously investigate and record brown queer existence.2 Esquibel's study charts an exhaustive archive of Chicana/Latina lesbian literature while critically examining it from thematically interlocking perspectives. Esquibel's "starting point that Chicana lesbians are central to understanding Chicana/o communities, theories, and feminisms" dispels at the fore any assumption that sexuality—particularly lesbian sexuality—can only lead to cursory discussions that lack considerable weightiness (3). Given how "communities, theories, and feminisms" are more often than not contoured by heterosexual and heteronormative presumption, With Her Machete in Her Hand does more than place "the" essential Chicana lesbian center stage but instead vigilantly unveils how Chicana lesbians—in the fitting words of Hortense J. Spillers—"have had to be invented" for safeguarding these allegedly essential attributes.3 Esquibel's concept of "Chicana lesbian fictions" (also the title of the book's first chapter) appropriately captures the complexity of representational politics with which she grapples. Noting how the "issue of visibility . . . is full of ambiguity," Esquibel understands that to locate Chicana lesbian sexuality one cannot simply turn to texts distinctly marked as lesbian. In fact, the "fictions" she requires for "reading Chicana lesbians" span three categories identified as "nonlesbian," "lesbian-friendly," and "lesbian." Illustrating the intertextual relationship between these categories, Esquibel excavates a compelling genealogy of lesbian representation from the intricate terrain of Chicana/Latina literary history. The result is a firm challenge to what qualifies as a lesbian text. Akin to Barbara Smith who, in "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," identifies Toni Morrison's Sula as a lesbian novel, Esquibel also grants Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street and Denise Chávez's The Last of the Menu Girls this status (while reading them alongside readily identifiable lesbian texts by Terri de la Peña and Emma Pérez, Margins and Gulf Dreams, respectively) "not because the characters (or their authors) self-consciously claim a lesbian identity, but because the texts, in...

Mango Street and Malnourished Readers: Politics and Realities in an “At-Risk” Middle School

This article presents results of a literature-response study conducted with at-risk middle school students of Latino, African American, and Caucasian backgrounds. The study was guided by an assumption of students' ability to read and coherently assimilate elements of The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros (1984). Although centered in research and theory related to literary reading and aesthetics, the power of the work is based in a political belief that students in “at-risk” schools need literacy experiences that ennoble their backgrounds and abilities. Methods through which students aesthetically engaged the novel are described, and suggestions for practitioners are offered.