Mango Street Research Articles

Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment

Critics of Sandra Cisneros have not paid much attention to her career-long advocacy of private enjoyment, possibly because it seems incompatible with the political commitment that is an equally prominent feature of her work. This essay argues that we cannot name Cisneros's politics without first coming to terms with her representation of the pleasures of withdrawing from face-to-face sociality. In the central chapters of her most famous work,The House on Mango Street, Cisneros maps the political salience of private enjoyment by means of a complex evocation and transformation of a poem by Emily Dickinson. Private enjoyment becomes in Cisneros's hands democratically accessible—the technologies of privacy range from writing to self-talk to masturbation—and constitutively insecure. Because privacy signifies not a space into which one might retreat but a point from which one must depart, it is for Cisneros the precondition of new collective formations.

Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment

Critics of Sandra Cisneros have not paid much attention to her career-long advocacy of private enjoyment, possibly because it seems incompatible with the political commitment that is an equally prominent feature of her work. This essay argues that we cannot name Cisneros's politics without first coming to terms with her representation of the pleasures of withdrawing from face-to-face sociality. In the central chapters of her most famous work, The House on Mango Street, Cisneros maps the political salience of private enjoyment by means of a complex evocation and transformation of a poem by Emily Dickinson. Private enjoyment becomes in Cisneros's hands democratically accessible—the technologies of privacy range from writing to self-talk to masturbation—and constitutively insecure. Because privacy signifies not a space into which one might retreat but a point from which one must depart, it is for Cisneros the precondition of new collective formations.

The "Dual"-ing Images of la Malinche and la Virgen de Guadalupe in Cisneros's The House on Mango Street

In Some More, a story from Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, two young girls discuss nature of snow: There ain't thirty different kinds of snow, Lucy said. There are two kinds. The kind and dirty kind, and dirty. Only two. There are a million zillion kinds, says Nenny. No two exactly alike. Only how do you remember which one is which? (35) At first glance, girls' conversation appears to be a bit of childish nonsense, and, on a surface level, is. Read in a broader context, however, Nenny and Lucy's debate highlights a conflict that is at heart of Cisneros's work: insistence on culturally defining world by a rigid set of black/white, good/bad, clean/dirty dualities, versus reality of individuality, uniqueness, and infinite differentiation. Cisneros comments on difficulties inherent in this clear-cut dichotomy, and she relates this binary specifically to Mexican influences in her life and writing: Certainly that black-white issue, good-bad, it's very prevalent in my work and in other Latinas. We're raised with a Mexican culture that has two role models: La Malinche y la Virgen de Guadalupe. And you know that's a hard route to go, one or other, there's no in-betweens. (Rodriguez-Aranda 65) According to Cisneros, then, females, like snow, are not seen in Latino culture as unique individuals but are labeled as either good women or bad women, as clean or dirty, as virgins or malinches. Cisneros is not first writer to acknowledge difficulties in dealing with this duality nor cultural archetypes upon which is based. As Luis Leal observes, the characterization of women throughout Mexican literature has been profoundly influenced by two archetypes present in Mexican psyche: that of woman who has kept her virginity and that of one who has lost it (227).(1) These archetypes, embodied in stories of la Malinche, violated woman, and la Virgen de Guadalupe, holy Mother, sharply define female roles in Mexican culture based on physical sexuality; however, as historical and mythical figures, these two archetypes take on both political and social significance that also influence perceptions of femininity in Latin American world. As Mexican manifestation of Virgin Mary, la Virgen de Guadalupe is religious icon around which Mexican Catholicism centers. Consequently, versions of her historic origin are prevalent throughout national literature. Although several variations of story of Virgin's initial apparitions exist, Stafford Poole identifies version published in 1649 by Vicar of Guadalupe, a priest named Luis Laso de la Vega, as definitive source (26). According to Poole's translation of de la Vega,(2) la Virgen de Guadalupe originally appeared to a converted Indian, Juan Diego, in 1531, on hill of Tepeyac, identifying herself as mother of great true deity God (27). The Virgin tells Juan Diego that she ardently wish[es] and greatly desire[s] that they build my temple for me here, where I will reveal ... all my love, my compassion, my aid, and my protection (27). Diego immediately proceeds to bishop in Mexico City, but he is greeted with disbelief. On his second visit, bishop asks Diego for proof of apparition. The Virgin sends Diego to top of hill, where he gathers every kind of precious Spanish flower, despite fact that these flowers are out of season and do not grow on that hill, and Virgin places them in his cloak (27). When Diego visits bishop, bishop's servants try to take some of blossoms, but they turn into painted flowers. Finally, when Diego sees bishop and opens his cloak, flowers fall out, and an imprint of Virgin is left on lining of cloak. The bishop becomes a believer, begs for forgiveness, and erects shrine to la Virgen de Guadalupe on hill of Tepeyac. …

The Last Nine Weeks: Helping Seniors Say Goodbye

Describes a unit for the final nine weeks of a senior English class which helps seniors say goodbye. Discusses how reading Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street” and writing their own versions of excerpts of it (along with other class activities) helps students define what they are leaving and come to terms with it.

Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the "Bildungsroman" in Sandra Cisneros's "The House on Mango Street" and Jamaica Kincaid's "Annie John"

Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the "Bildungsroman" in Sandra Cisneros's "The House on Mango Street" and Jamaica Kincaid's "Annie John"

Promoting Adolescent Voice Through Latina Fiction

The voices of adolescent girls are often lost around the time they reach the middle school classroom. This paper reflects my experience in incorporating Latina literature into a curriculum that speaks to this disaffected group. Focusing on the reactions of three students, I examine the potential for this literature to change the nature of the middle school experience, especially for girls. I found that an active approach to reading books such as Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and Esmerelda Santiago's autobiography When I was Puerto Rican can promote increased confidence, visible through candid writing.

A Ride down Mango Street

amanEnglish teacher. I like to read big books with the big name on the cover. Give me Shakespeare, and I'm happy Throw me that Dickens over there. Yeah, the thick one with 800 pages of small print. How about Thoreau, Whitman, or Twain? Now I'm in my glory So when my friend Barbara recommended The House on Mango Street (1989, New York: Vintage) I was skeptical. Who was Sandra Cisneros? And the book. It looked small, thin, undernourished, weighing in at only 110 pages. That's really not my idea of a good read. I like heft. And weight. Well, maybe I could give it a quick look. I opened the book and started to read. Suddenly, Cisneros' narrator, Esperanza, jumped out from somewhere between the pages, grabbed me tight, shook me hard, and wouldn't let go. I read the whole book in two hours and had to read it again. And then again. Even when I finally put the book back on my shelf, I just couldn't get that voice out of my head. I've been around the Mediterranean

Tender accents of sound: Spanish in the Chicano novel in English

Tender Accents of Sound: Spanish in the Chicano Novel in English. Ernst Rudin. Tempe: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1996. xiii + 285 pages. $20.00. The analysis of is nothing new to Chicano/a social and literary studies. After all, language constructs personal, social, and literary identity, so the studies of Chicano/a poetry and theater inevitably examine code-switching between English and Spanish as an interlingual literary technique that registers the liminal social position of Chicano/a identity between Anglo and Mexican culture. However, despite the linguistic richness of Chicano/a literary production, Ernst Rudin is correct in asserting that neither in the field of the Chicano novel nor in the more spectacularly ones of poetry and theater has there been a book-length analysis on the subject to date. Rudin's project, then, is quite unique and also quite daunting: he examines the use of Spanish in nineteen Chicano/a prose narratives written in English and concludes, among other things, that [t]he Chicano novels published between the late sixties and the mid-eighties offsprings of the Chicano movement, ... and often marked as `revolutionary literature,' are--on the level of language--very reluctant to use experimental techniques and to be subversive. In the first of his three-part study, Rudin judiciously clarifies his project: he is not analyzing texts--texts written in both English and Spanish. Rather, he embarks to examine the bilingual strategies of Chicano/a narratives in English written between 1967 and 1985 to show that they are, generally speaking, as `monolingual' or `bilingual' as Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Except for The House on Mango Street and Victuum, the literary corpus Rudin examines are by men, and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, from which Rudin's study takes it title, seems to be the master narrative informing Rudin's reading of other Chicano/a narratives, since the structuring theme of his text selection is the assimilation of the Chicano (author-narrator-) protagonists [who] cease at the end of the text to belong to the world, the society, and the value system that surrounded them at its beginning, and try reconstruct their former cultural self for an Anglo American audience whose culture has now become theirs. Along these lines, the first section culminates with Rudin's lucid discussion of the levels of linguistic and cultural translation in Chicano texts, which he demonstrates with an effective analysis of Rolando Hinojosa's English translation of his own Spanish narrative Estampas del valle y otras obras. Unfortunately, parts two and three of the study only show glimpses of the detailed literary analysis with which the first part concludes. Generally concerned with the types of Spanish-language entries in Chicano/a texts, the second part does not offer significant textual analysis until it specifically examines the works of Estela Portillo Trambley, Alma Luz Villanueva, Mary Helen Ponce, and Ana Castillo, all of whom are not included in the primary corpus of the study. And the final section offers a series of lists categorizing the number of times specific words or phrases appear in a text. Granted, Rudin implores that the statistics tables have to be taken with a grain of salt, but the section highlights the study's tendency to point out Spanish-language entries without fully developing an analysis of how and why they function as competing forms of social discourses. …

Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek"

If were asked what it is write about, Sandra Cisneros commented in a lecture in 1986, I would have to say write about those ghosts inside that haunt me, that will not let me sleep, of that which even memory does not like to mention.2 Poverty, unrecorded lives of powerless, unheard voices of thousands of silent women, are some of ghosts that haunt The House on Mango Street,3 dedicated in two languages, A las Mujeres/To Women. Cisneros's narrator Esperanza chronicles unhappy histories of the ones who cannot out, women immobilized by poverty, cultural and linguistic barriers, restrictive gender roles, and domestic violence. Gazing out of windows they cannot open, standing in doorways they cannot exit, woman after woman on Mango Street is trapped at threshold or boundary of a room or house not her own. Marin moons in doorway, waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life. Mamacita sits all day by window and plays Spanish radio show, afraid to go outside because she doesn't speak English. Because Rafaela is young and beautiful, her husband locks her in her room each Tuesday night while he plays dominoes. Minerva comes over each week black and blue with same story. Sally claims her father never hits [her]

Mexicanas and Chicanas

Elena Poniatowska, Mexico's leading woman writer and journalist, gave thefollowing lecture at Hampshire College in thefall of 1991, when she was writer-in-residence at the Five Colleges in Western Massachusetts. Her admirationfor Chicana writers has not lessened in the interveningfive years, and, as usual, she has put her money where her mouth is by translating Sandra Cisneros's now-canonical early novel, The House on Mango Street (1989), into Spanish (New York: Vintage, 1994; Mexico City: Alfaguara Literaturas, 1995 [with Juan Antonio Ascencio]. The novel was previously translated and published in Spain in 1992.). I met Sandra Cisneros in 1991 as well, when she gave a memorable reading of Woman Hollering Creek at Mount Holyoke College. Both women have immense charm and humor, and I had the goodfortune to coincide with both of them in Mexico City in January of 1994, just when Elena was finishing her translation of The House on Mango Street. We spent two and a half hours in the lobby of Sandra's hotel, laughing until our sides ached. It was a rare privilege. Elena Poniatowska gave MELUS permission to publish this lecture. It is good to see that some of her remarks then are now out of date, especially when she referred to thefact that no Chicana writer had ever been published in Mexico. She herself has seen to that. Nina M. Scott

Reading Asian American Poetry

In the 1960s and 1970s, with the historic emergence of and ethnic consciousness movements in the United States, was considered an important vehicle for expressing the politicization of race. Indeed, this could be viewed as a racial in relations theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant's sense of forging links between cultural representations and social dynamics of inequality and racialized empowerment. Poems were at rallies, fundraisers, and other events, and circulated in independent low-budget and ethnic publications. Rodolfo Gonzales's Yo Soy Jouquin/I am Jouquin (1972 [1967]) is a prime example of a poem that was valued for articulating a cultural and political subjectivity and history that had previously been marginalized. The anthology Time to Greez! Incantations from the (1975), focusing on U.S. Third World writing and edited by a multiracial collective, included mainly poetry. Although published in 1984, Audre Lorde's argument that is a genre suited to those with few material resources and little uninterrupted time might have been formulated by her observation of emergent racialized and gendered poetries during this earlier period. Of all the art forms, is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Poetry, Lorde argues, has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women (116). Lorde's well-known formulation that poetry is not a luxury posits that the knowledges conceived and produced by poetic discourse are vital to the cultural survival of marginalized peoples. We can see an apparent turn away from toward prose, however, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when prose fiction became a prevalent means of circulating narratives of difference among a larger audience. Immensely popular works of this period, Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior were crossover hits that were considered successes in the mainstream marketplace, i.e., among consumers not necessarily of the same identity as the authors. No longer mainly the political tools of movement audiences, narratives of became explicitly commodified and promoted by publishing corporations to white as well as nonwhite readers and to secondary- and college-level educational institutions as teaching materials. When we consider what works are de rigeur in the multicultural literature curriculum and in multicultural literary studies, we think mostly of prose fiction and nonfiction: Richard Wright's Native Son, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, essays by Richard Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, in addition to the above-mentioned titles by Walker and Kingston. I give this recent historical account of the genres in which we read race in order to situate my project of reading Asian American within the context of Asian American and multicultural literary studies. What accounts for the contrast in the reception of prose versus within multicultural literary studies? What difference does it make to specifically recognize poetic practices as part of racial, and specifically Asian American, discourse? 1 When Asian American literature is recognized at all as a body of work distinct from Asian literature, it is assumed to be a recently invented and individualistic phenomenon, associated with the names of bestselling authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. Those that are aware of specific Asian American poets again often assume that the body of Asian American poetic writing originated in recent volumes of by individual critically-lauded writers. …

Remembering Always to Come Back: The Child's Wished-For Escape and the Adult's Self-Empowered Return in Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street

Remembering Always to Come Back:The Child's Wished-For Escape and the Adult's Self-Empowered Return in Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street Reuben Sánchez (bio) In an essay on "home" and "homelessness" in children's literature, Virginia L. Wolf suggests that one distinction between literature for children and literature for adults may be that the former tends to embrace myth while the latter tends to embrace reality: "Whereas much adult literature laments our homelessness and reflects the fragmentation or loss of myth, most children's literature celebrates home and affirms belief in myth" (54). In doing so, however, children's literature might very well offer an unrealistic view of the world: "Even though I celebrate all those wonderful mythic houses in children's literature as an invaluable legacy of comfort, I worry that they deny too much of reality. Certainly, if children are to reach their potential and make their contribution to humanity, they must eventually move beyond a perception of the world as they desire it to be and accept it as it is—enormously destructive, turbulent, and chaotic as well as creative and peaceful" (66). Though children find myth attractive, they might nonetheless acquire a distorted "perception of reality" should the book emphasize myth—or if myth and reality are irreconcilable. Wolf's distinctions between myth and reality and between literature for children and literature for adults are crucial to scholars who wish to fashion a hermeneutics of discourse concerning children's literature. But as one might expect, the practice of literary interpretation could render such distinctions problematic in certain texts. The foremost proponent of archetypal criticism, Northrop Frye, describes the structure of the monomyth in historical terms as a movement in Western literature from primitive myth to modern irony, a schema that does much to subordinate myth to irony. Frye's rigorous schema has since been critiqued by historicists, structuralists, post-structuralists, and feminists, but there nonetheless remains [End Page 221] a tendency in literary studies to view myth as the opposite of reality. Such a tendency might limit the appeal, perhaps the usefulness, of texts that are said to be mythic. For the purposes of this essay, however, I should like to consider myth in the sense that Joseph Campbell defines it in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth" (3). Campbell's definition blurs the distinction between myth and irony, which allows us to recognize how and why myth moves us and is useful to us, adults and children alike. Through story telling the writer's perception of the world is manifested. We might think of myth, therefore, as cultural story telling, a way by which the writer who belongs to and identifies with a particular community explains why the world is the way it is, from the point of view of that particular community. The writer either validates a myth, or modifies a myth without rejecting it, or rejects a myth and creates a new myth based on his or her own experience. In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros participates in the third type of story telling by combining myth (home) and irony (homelessness) in her depiction of life in the barrio as seen through the eyes of a girl. Cisneros addresses the theme of home versus homelessness in a series of forty-four vignettes—some as short as a few paragraphs, others as long as four or five pages—written in a language that is easily accessible and in a style that is sophisticated in its presentation of voice and theme. There is no single narrative strand, though the vignettes are loosely connected to each other in that they concern a brief period in which Esperanza, the book's protagonist, lives on Mango Street. We are never told her age, but she seems to be about ten or...

Le dialogisme poétique de Sandra Cisneros

Dwelling on both Cisneros' poems, My Wicked Wicked Ways, and on her two collections of short stories, The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek, the article attempts to analyze the ways in which Cisneros' writings move beyond the cultural authenticity precept of Chicano literature. Through a permanent questioning of feminine identity in an increasingly heterogeneous world Cisneros reaches a more comprehensive vision of American society on both sides of the Mexican-American border.

More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street

continue each other, Virginia Woolf told an audience of young women some sixty years ago, spite of our habit of judging them separately (Room 84). Books such as Ellen Moers's Literary Women, Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, Patricia Meyer Spacks's The Female Imagination, Tillie Olsen's Silences, and Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens continue Virginia Woolf's own book, A Room of One's Own, extending her fertile meditations on the effects of economic deprivation on women's literature, and her pioneering efforts to reconstruct a female literary tradition. Tillie Olsen has uncovered a rich vein of writing by American working class women, and has offered poignant personal testimony to the obstacles to writing posed by gender and class. Alice Walker has explored the silences created by gender and race in America: What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood (233). While feminists following Woolf's advice to think back through our mothers have expanded the literary canon in the past two decades, too many have ignored the questions of race, ethnicity, and class in women's literature. Adrienne Rich laments the solipsism of white feminists-not the consciously held belief that one race is inherently superior to all others, but a tunnel-vision which simply does not see nonwhite or existence as precious or significant (Disloyal 306). Barbara Smith, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison have angrily denounced the canon implicit in early studies of women's literature such as Moers's and Spacks's.1 To Spacks's tepid defense that she preferred to dwell on authors depicting familiar experience and a familiar cultural setting (5), Walker counters: Why only these? Because they are white, and middle class, and because to Spacks, female imagination is only that-a limitation that even white women must find restrictive (372).

Self-Baptizing the Wicked Esperanza: Chicana Feminism and Cultural Contact in The House on Mango Street

Self-Baptizing the Wicked Esperanza: Chicana Feminism and Cultural Contact in The House on Mango Street

Down These City Streets: Exploring Urban Space in <em>El Bronx Remembered and The House on Mango Street</em>

Down These City Streets: Exploring Urban Space in <em>El Bronx Remembered and The House on Mango Street</em>

In Search of Identity in Cisneros's The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros (1954- ), a Chicago-bora poet of Mexican parentage, published her first novel in 1984.1 The House on Mango Street is written in the manner of a young girl's memoirs.2 The forty-four pieces are, however, not the day-to-day record of a preadolescent girl, but rather a loose-knit series of lyrical reflections, her struggle with self-identity and the search for self-respect amidst an alienating and often hostile world. The pieces range from two paragraph narratives, like "Hairs," to the four-page "The Monkey Garden."

The House on Mango Street

The House on Mango Street