Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisnerosis an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Streetand her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Her work experiments with literary forms and investigates 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 the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and is...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 December 1954
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
When I was a child, I was very shy, and there's still a part of me that's very shy.
I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance.
You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, "Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something". But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.
I grew up with this kind of grocery store that caters to the poor. They serve you the worst food
When I was writing Caramelo the last couple of years, a sixty-hour work week was normal. And now I'm lucky if I have eight hours.
I look at Thich Nhat Hanh and I look at Marshall Rosenberg, and they're more concerned about the long range. And that long range means that you have to sit down with people who don't think like you. I want to reach people who don't think like me.
If you live in poor neighborhoods - I know from living in several poor neighborhoods - the worst supermarkets in the city are in the poorest neighborhoods, where people don't have cars.
Why don't we have people like Thich Nhat Hanh or Marshall Rosenberg and Nelson Mandela solving violent situations in a peaceful way?
I've come to some balance now and calmness. If anything happened to me and I got hit by a bus - I hope this doesn't happen, but if something happened - my body of work is something I could rest on. I don't feel, "Oh God, I have to hurry up . . ."
Afterwards, people come and say, "I felt like you said that just to me. What you said is something I'm going through right now," so you know that spiritual connection is going on.
Even my mom. I have to tell her, "If you want a snack, don't go to bed with potato chips. Eat a handful of pistachios and a handful of dates."
I know the American Library Association has models for working with the poor. They do have that, and I think that we really need to put our efforts - if we want to think long-range and invest in the community so that we don't have to, you know, invest in prisons - into making a change, because I know that the library can make a change in a life, because it made a change in mine.
I want to write an essay called "Fear of Mexico," because I always feel like Mexico's this lover that never writes to me.
I live in a town that's two and a half hours from the border. I know people who have lived in San Antonio for generations, sometimes seven generations, their families are from there, and they are of Mexican descent, and they've never gone farther than the border.