Sandra Cisneros Analysis

Chicago Illinois on December 20th of 1954 was the birthplace of Sandra Cisneros. Her father is Alfredo Cisneros, a Mexican immigrant in the United States from Mexico City and her mother is a Mexican-American from ILLIONOIS. The couple had seven children and Sandra Cisneros is the only daughter in between six brothers, reason why she grew up as a lonely child but developing in her inner self the contribution to be a writer (Herrera-Sobek 2011, 9). In the fifties and sixties, the working-class Cisneros family moved many times because Alfred Cisneros had a deep relationship with his mother in Mexico, Sandra Cisneros’s grandmother (Herrera-Sobek 2011, 9). These events made Cisneros feel in a limbo between the American culture and the Mexican culture.

In a traditional Latino family, the women of the families are supposed to do all the work inside the house, everything that is related to the inquilines of the house too. In Sandra Cisneros case, her mother did not make the gender difference between her children. All of them had chores to be accomplished, but never bother her daughter to pay attention to the house or her father nor her brothers if she was studying at the time. Cisneros went to Loyola University in Chicago. She was the only Hispanic majoring in English in 1976 (Herrera-Sobek 2011,

In the same year, she is accepted in creative writing master program at the University of Iowa. It was the first time Cisneros went out of her parent’s house to live by herself. In 1980, she writes her master’s thesis called “My Wicked, Wicked Ways” a book of poems but it was published in 1987. From the beginning to the end of her education, she worked as a counselor in a Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago. From 1982 to 1983, Cisneros is awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) with a grant to be a poet in residence at the Karolyi Foundation in Vence, France (Johnson 2010, 13). During the 80s, Cisneros was one of the few writers of Chicana literature, emerging her voice after times of racism and gender relegation. (Herrera-Sobek 2011, 190). In 2002, she published her novel “Caramelo; or, Puro Cuento” another of her well know fiction (Johnson 2010, 13). In 1984 Cisneros published her novel “The house on Mango Street”, a work who took her four years to finish it. A year after, she received the Before Columbus American Book Award for The House on Mango Street (Johnson 2010,