Sandra’s 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 Sandra 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 Sandra 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 fairy tale about another heroic girl who saves her six brothers from an evil fate, definitely struck a chord with Sandra. 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 Sandra’s "own dream" as her family piled into their station wagon to move from Chicago to Tepeyac, Mexico, and back again.

However, Sandra wasn’t picky about her printed friends. She gobbled up anything that she could find in her poor school’s poor library--including such far-flung choices as saint’s lives and stuffy 19^th-century children’s fables. (Ghosts, 46) Eventually, Sandra 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, Sandra began to extract the imagination that created these voices, and transferred her ideas to paper. 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 Sandra guarded her outpouring of emotions from the world.

Because Sandra’s father considered good education the key to getting a good husband, Sandra and her family scrounged up enough money and loans to send her to Iowa State College. (Daughter, 11) In her junior year, Sandra joined a Writers’ Workshop program that encouraged her to share her writing, but most importantly, encouraged her to 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." But this was the voice of her poverty, her fragmented upbringing—the very things that she tried to escape with her writing. So Sandra 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, Sandra 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. Sandra 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. Wachale, muchacha. With those maracas and the

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

quieres, mi carinito? Verdad que si?" (Alamo, 67)

Now that Sandra 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, Sandra disagrees. She believes that a sprinkling of Spanish words and expressions adds "spice to the English language." Sure, Sandra will translate a crucial phrase: "Tu o Nadie. You or no one." (Creek, 44) but often she requires the reader to figure it out through the context. Sandra is "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." 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?"

Sandra explains, "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." (Interview) Perhaps, but with a paltry year and a half of Spanish instruction, I can get the gist of:

" Ayudanos con nuestras cuentas, Senor, y que el cheque del income tax

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

But the Spanish that I’ll never learn from my textbook—I can figure that out (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 Sandra’s writing is rather demanding of a non-Spanish-speaking reader. Chicanas in her audience may laugh at jokes that even her editor doesn’t get, according to Sandra, but I certainly giggle at:

The idea that kitschy representations of the Virgin Mary are so overdone that they make her look like a streetwalker! Sandra’s 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 constrict yourself to only that?

Cual es peor?

Estar siempre sola,

o estar con alguien para siempre.

(Which is worse? To be always alone, or to be with someone forever?)

Ever since Sandra was a kid, she's competed with men-even accounted for as one of them; now, she'll never surrender herself to one. "Nobody's mother and nobody's wife," she is quick assure us in her books' notes on the author. According to Sandra, she's found success-by doing something that she loves, writing in her own words about her own experiences-by avoiding the emotional bonds of marriage and children. She's grateful that she didn't marry "her first boyfriend, that pest who never gave me time alone, something crucial to any writer…and who couldn't understand why I didn't want what he wanted: marriage, kids, and a house in the suburbs." (Notes 51)

The narrator of Loose Woman shares this attitude, declaring:

"My cousins and I,

we're all old

maids at thirty…

The aunts,

they've given up on us.

No longer nudge-You're next.

Instead- What happened in your childhood?

But we've studied

marriages too long-

Aunt Ariadne,

Tia Vashti,

Comadre Penelope,

querida Malintzin,

Senora Pumpkin Shell-

lessons that served us well." (Old Maids, 9-10)

By marrying, the narrator-and most likely Sandra herself-fear that they will lose not only their independence, but eventually the man she sacrifices it for. She looks at Ariadne, who helped her lover Theseus outwit the labyrinth but was abandoned by him; Vashti, cast off by her husband King Xerxes for refusing to appear before him, Penelope who had to wait 20 years while her husband Odysseus fought wars and loved other women; Malintzin, mistress of Hernan Cortes, blamed with ensuring the success of the Spanish conquest; the belligerent wife of a Mother Goose rhyme, whose husband "shut her in a pumpkin shell/where he kept her very well."

Sandra has learned not only from the characters of myth and legend, but the characters of her own stories. They search for the ideal man-almost always someone who fits their romantic ideal of a Mexican man-but once they find him, he abuses her, abandons her, or both. For example, a mysterious man claiming to hail from a line of Indian kings seduces the teenage narrator of "One Holy Night." He enthralls her with his stories of temples and his boy-child who will bring back the glory of his nations; he tells her that he loves her "like a revolution, like a religion," but takes her virginity and runs off without a word of farewell. The saddest part of the whole story, however, is when the narrator discovers that "his name is Chato which means fat-face. There is no Mayan blood."

Another one of her characters, Lupe Arredondo, falls madly in love with a poet (moonlighting as a roach-killer) named Flavio. He's something that Lupe has tried to find all her life-a real Mexican, someone who teaches her to tango and makes love to her in Spanish.

"a real Mexican (the test is that if he hits his thumb with a hammer he says "Ay!" rather than "Ow!") only to have her heart and soul torn away from her when he leaves the country, with no forwarding address and no letters."

The narrator of Sandra's poems in Loose Woman have learned the lesson that eludes her Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek characters. With titles like "Man in My Bed Like Cracker Crumbs," we see that she doesn't want men for marriage, or any lasting commitment-but sex, and only maybe "love, that old shoe." (Lorenzo, 62) The arrangement that pleases her most is when "we do not belong one to the other/except now and again intermittently/Of that infinity, freely you give yourself to me to take/andI take freely." (Los Desnudos, 87)

Only Daughter

Bibliography

Cisneros, Sandra. "Ghosts and Voices: Writing From Obsession." Lecture, Indiana University, November 11, 1986. Reprinted in Hispanic American Literature, Nicolas Kanellos, ed. Berkeley, California: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1995.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Notes to a Young(er) Writer." Lecture, "Second Annual Hispanic Achievement Festival," La Cumbre Santa Barbara Junior High School, October 22, 1986. Reprinted in Hispanic American Literature. Berkeley, CA: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1995.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Only Daughter." (1990) Reprinted in The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, Wendy Martin, ed. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996.

Cisneros, Sandra. "One Holy Night." Woman Hollering Creek, 28-35. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1991.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Woman Hollering Creek." Woman Hollering Creek, 43-56. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1991.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Remember the Alamo." Woman Hollering Creek, 63-67. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1991.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Anguiano Religious Articles." Woman Hollering Creek, 114-115. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1991.

Cisneros, Sandra. "With Lorenzo at the Center of the Universe, el Zocalo, Mexico City." Loose Woman, 60-63. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1994.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Los Desnudos: A Triptych." Loose Woman, 86-88. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1994.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Old Maids." Loose Woman, 9-10. New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1994.

Zumwalt, Delores. " 'A House of My Own': Sandra Cisneros and the Art of Storytelling."

Dasenbrock , Reed."Interview with Sandra Cisneros." Online. Accessed 26 February 1999. Available: http://acunix.wheatonma.edu/rpearce/MultiC_Web/Authors/Sandra_Cisneros/body_sandra_cisneros.html