How Sandra Cisneros Found Her Voice

What makes someone into a writer? In Cisneros' case, it seems that her solitary childhood encouraged her to read, then write. The only daughter in a family continually on the move, Cisneros had neither a sister nor friend to confide in. (Ghosts, 46) Only books could spark her interest and take her away from her mundane life, as well as reply to the issues of her youth.

Cisneros' parents, occupied with raising seven children in the midst of poverty, couldn't spare her any individual attention; at school, she felt herself "ridiculous, ugly, perenially the new kid" (Ghosts, 47). It's no surprise that found Cisneros found more things that addressed her concerns in fantasy stories than in her own life. The heroic Karana of Island of the Blue Dolphins lived completely alone for eighteen years, surviving on a deserted island using her wits. Even though Cisneros had to share a tiny flat with eight other people, she must have felt the same isolation as Karana, using the same self-reliance to survive her fragmented childhood (at least with sanity intact). "Six Swans," a Brothers Grimm fairy tale about another heroic girl who saves her six brothers from an evil fate, definitely struck a chord with Cisneros. Yet the book she read and reread (and even considered stealing from the library) was The Little House (Ghosts, 47). It told of a family who lived in one house and stayed put, which was Cisneros' "own dream" as her family piled into their station wagon to move from Chicago to Tepeyac, Mexico, and back again.

However, Cisneros wasn't picky about her fictional friends. She gobbled up anything that she could find in her poor school's poor library--including such far-flung choices as saints' lives and stuffy 19th-century children's fables (Ghosts, 46). Eventually, Cisneros read more than she talked with people; even when she did get into a conversation, she would start hearing a "voice in her head" that narrated the ordinary events of her life, further blurring the lines between her real life and her life in books (Ghosts, 46). Later, she would recognize this as her first "writer's voice."

Gradually, Cisneros began to extract the imagination that created these voices, and transferred her ideas to paper. She says that everyone in high school knew her as "the poet," partly because of the dog-eared spiral notebooks that she dragged around everywhere she went. (Notes, 50) No one else ever saw these--no one ever asked, and so Cisneros guarded her outpouring of emotions from the world.

Because Cisneros' father considered good education the key to getting a good husband, Cisneros and her family scrounged up enough money and loans to send her to Iowa State College. (Daughter, 11) In her junior year, Cisneros joined a Writers' Workshop program that encouraged her to share her writing, but most importantly, encouraged her to find and use her own voice. It was a juxtaposition of her mother's "punch-you-in-the nose English," and her father's "powdered-sugar Spanish." (Daughter, 11) But this was the voice of her poverty, her fragmented upbringing--the very things that she tried to escape with her writing. So Cisneros suppressed her own voice in favor of "big, male voices like James Wright and Victor Hugo and Theodore Roethke, all wrong for me." (Ghosts, 48) Looking at her affluent classmates, Cisneros finally despaired, "What could I write about that they couldn't? What did they know that I didn't?" Then it struck her--"third-floor flats, and fear of rats"-her life's mishmash of English and Spanish, Mexico and America, poverty and hope. In her writing, Cisneros had tried to forget everything unique about herself and her life; now she resolved to share this with the reading public. A short example of this style:

"What a pair! The two like Ginger and Fred tangoing across the floor.

Two angels, heavenly bodies floating cheek to cheek. Or nalga to nalga.

Ay, girl, I'm telling you. Wáchale, muchacha. With those maracas and the

cha-cha-chá of those bones-bones-bones, she's a natural. Verdad que me

quieres, mi carińito? Verdad que sí?" (Alamo, 67)

How the Cisneros Girl Will Keep her Accent

Now that Cisneros has captured the attention of mainstream America--as well as a MacArthur Genius Grant and a NEA fellowship-some debate that she should revise her style, make her work more accessible to her largely Anglo readership. Not surprisingly, Cisneros disagrees, considering that staying faithful to one's culture entails staying faithful to its language. In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Cisneros' fellow Chicana writer Julia Alvarez describes four Dominican sisters who move to the U.S. and eagerly assimilate themselves into the American culture. The sisters eventually forsake their Latin American culture--shown by their forgetting of Spanish and loss of their accents.

Cisneros, who has realized the value of her Latino American culture, refuses to follow the path of the Garcia girls. She believes that a sprinkling of Spanish words and expressions adds "spice to the English language." Sure, Cisneros will translate a crucial phrase: "Tú o Nadie. You or no one." (Creek, 44) but often she requires the reader to figure it out through the context. Cisneros explains, "I'm very conscious when I'm writing about opening doors for people who don't know the culture. I try my best. I won't do it for the sake of an Anglo reader." (Dasenbrock) In other words, she won't sacrifice the flavor and flow of her writing to call to her readers, like a tour guide, "Are you with me here?"

Cisneros adds, "the readers who are going to like my stories the best and catch all the subtexts and all the subtleties, that even my editor can't catch, are Chicanas." (Dasenbrock) True, but it only takes a paltry year of Spanish instruction to get the gist of:

Ayúdanos con nuestras cuentas, Seńor, y que el cheque del income tax

nos llegue pronto para pagar los biles" (Miracles, 123)

("Help us with our problems, Lord, and that the income tax check will come

quickly so we can pay our bills."--my translation)

But Anglo students like myself can figure out the Spanish they'll never learn from their textbook. (for example, nalgas and chichis, which refer to certain parts of one's body). Some of her phrases still stump me, but I muddle along; I may have to read a passage two or three times, but when I do understand it, I'm grateful that Cisneros' writing is rather demanding of a non-Spanish-speaking reader. According to Cisneros, Chicanas in her audience may laugh at jokes that even her editor doesn't get--but I certainly giggle at:

"I was thinking about [buying one of] those framed holy pictures with

glitter in the window. But then I saw some Virgen de Guadalupe statues

with real hair eyelashes. Well, not real hair, but some stiff black stuff like

brushes, only I don't know how La Virgen looked with furry eyelashes-

bien mean, like los amores de la calle. That's not right." (Anguiano, 115)

The idea that kitschy representations of the Virgin Mary are so overdone that they make her look like a streetwalker! Cisneros' work proves anew the power of words-how can she limit them to one language? You might want to use just black and white if you have the advantage of an expanded palette, but why forever constrict yourself to only that?

Artwork by Alma Tchildran

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