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Sandra model set collection1/29/2024 ![]() According to Ganz, although Elvira was too dependent on her husband and too restricted in her opportunities to fulfill her own potential, she ensured her daughter would not suffer from the same disadvantages as she did. Cisneros' one strong female influence was her mother, Elvira, who was a voracious reader and more enlightened and socially conscious than her father. Ganz notes that Cisneros's childhood loneliness was instrumental in shaping her later passion for writing. Her feelings of exclusion from the family were exacerbated by her father, who referred to his "seis hijos y una hija" ("six sons and one daughter") rather than his "siete hijos" ("seven children"). ![]() Eventually the instability caused Cisneros's six brothers to pair off in twos, leaving her to define herself as the isolated one. ![]() Taking work as an upholsterer to support his family, Cisneros's father began "a compulsive circular migration between Chicago and Mexico City that became the dominating pattern of Cisneros' childhood." Their family was constantly moving between the two countries, which necessitated their finding new places to live as well as schools for the children. Cisneros's biographer Robin Ganz writes that she acknowledges her mother's family name came from a very humble background, tracing its roots back to Guanajuato, Mexico while her father's was much more "admirable". After getting married, the pair settled in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. While roaming the southern United States with his brother, Alfredo visited Chicago where he met Elvira Cordero Anguiano. However, after failing classes due to what Cisneros called his "lack of interest" in studying, Alfredo ran away to the United States to escape his father's anger. Her paternal grandfather Enrique was a veteran of the Mexican Revolution, and he used what money he had saved to give her father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral, the opportunity to go to college. Cisneros's great-grandfather had played the piano for the Mexican president and was from a wealthy background, but he gambled away his family's fortune. The only surviving daughter, she considered herself the "odd number in a set of men". Early life and education Ĭisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 20, 1954, to a family of Mexican heritage, the third of seven children. In 1998 she established the Macondo Writers Workshop, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and in 2000 she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas. Ĭisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities, to the extent that The House on Mango Street has been translated worldwide and is taught in U.S classrooms as a coming-of-age novel. ![]() but not belonging to either culture." Cisneros' work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. Ĭisneros' early life provided many experiences she later drew on as a writer: she grew up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant migration of her family between Mexico and the United States instilled in her the sense of "always straddling two countries . She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature. ![]() Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer. The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other StoriesĪmerican Book Award, MacArthur Genius Grant ![]()
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