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Photograph by Henry Cisneros
Angry Woman: Writer Sandra Cisneros shares her mastery of voice, hope, and rage at San Jose State next Tuesday, May 4.
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Celebrated Latina novelist and poet to deliver reading at San Jose State
Sandra Cisneros celebrates the power of language in her Latino Scholar Address
By Mary Spicuzza
Surrounded by pontificating peers in a lofty graduate seminar about imagination and memory, Sandra Cisneros just assumed she wasn't as smart as everyone else. Other students were busily constructing "houses of memory," reminiscing about the cellars, attics, and foyers of their childhood homes. But Cisneros, who grew up in a Chicago barrio, tripped over memories of her family packed in third-floor flats, stairways heavy with the aroma of Pine Sol, and basements that landlords were afraid to explore.
Silence was her first reaction. Then she got angry. Then she started to pen The House on Mango Street. Now, after twenty years and ten language translations of Mango Street, as well as countless poems, novels, essays and short stories, Cisneros' powerful words continue to change lives. On Tuesday, May 4, the award-winning writer visits San Jose State University for the 3rd Annual Distinguished Latino Scholar Address.
Written in 1984, Mango Street weaves together vignettes told through the voice of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up the Latino section of Chicago.
"In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting," Esperanza Cordero laments. "It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing."
Written in a simple and poetic style mirroring a child's voice, Cisneros dedicated the book 'A las Mujeres' ('To the Women'). While the young author set out to capture the "ugliest subjects" and the "most un-poetic slang" she had experienced growing up, she instead found her own voice. A beautiful, accessible one fueled by well-placed anger.
"I got angry, and anger used to act, when it is used nonviolently, has power," Cisneros says.
Over more than a decade since then, Cisneros has shown the incredible range of that voice. In her 1991 collection of short stories and vignettes, Woman Hollering Creek, she navigates themes of womanhood, betrayal, sensuality, Mexican folklore, popular culture and love affairs gone bad. In one story, a scorned woman attacks the wife of her beloved--with gummy bears. She jams them in tubes of her lipstick, drawers, and coat pockets. In another story, an academic over-achiever falls in love with her cockroach exterminator.
"Not even the I Ching warned me what I was in for when Flavio Munguia drove up in his pest-control van," Cisneros writes in "Bien Pretty."
Like her short stories and book, My Wicked, Wicked Ways , her poems included in Loose Woman capture Cisneros' trademark honesty, poise and humor.
In "You Bring Out the Mexican In Me," she writes, "You bring out the.../The stand-back-white-bitch in me./The switchblade in my boot in me/Brandish a fork and terrorize rivals./ The corporal and venial sin in me."
Cisneros, heralded as the most widely-read Latina author in the US, has won numerous awards, and her books have been selected as "Noteworthy Book of The Year" by The New York Times and the American Library Journal.
At the Latino Scholar Address, Sandra Cisneros will read from her works and present a lecture. Inaugurated in 1997 with a keynote address by world-renowned author Carlos Fuentes, the forum has served a critical role throughout Silicon Valley. The event, presented by MACLA/ San Jose Center for Latino Arts, seeks to create a space for discussion about "cutting edge themes of our times by highly distinguished Latino authors, artists, and scholars."
And as Cisneros proves, words can change lives. More than 10 years after finishing Mango Street, she still receives letters praising her for inspiring prose. And for her ability to transform the ugliest objects, like four skinny trees struggling to survive surrounded by a concrete-covered housing project, into beautiful symbols of power.
"Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger," Cisneros writes. "This is how they keep. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be."
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
