Sandra Cisneros Biography

Sandra Cisneros is an American writer best known for her first novel 'The House on Mango Street' in which a young Latina woman comes of age in Chicago. She is acknowledged as a pioneer in her literary field, as she is the first female Mexican-American writer to have her work published by a mainstream publisher. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages. During graduation, she realised that she had no nice memory of growing up to write about, like her peers. All she could remember was constantly shifting between Mexico and US, growing up with six brothers and a misogynist father, and feeling alone. But, rather than being afraid, she decided to pen these experiences and bared her tale of limited opportunities and a restricted lifestyle. When it came to novel writing, she worked on the formation of the Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitude present in both these cultures, and poverty. While writing Cisneros alternates between first person, third person, and stream-of-consciousness narrative modes, and ranges from brief impressionistic vignettes to longer event-driven stories, and from highly poetic language to brutally frank language. Generally critiquing the social norms, she was amazed by the recognition she received beyond the Chicano and Latino communities.