Sandra Cisneros was born December 20, 1954, in Chicago. Although she grew up mainly in Chicago, the family often visited her father’s relatives in Mexico, and Cisneros would later say that she felt “displaced” during her childhood. In 1987, Cisneros would tell an interviewer in Texas that she had never felt a strong sense of connection to Chicago. Nevertheless, her book The House on Mango Street is set there.
To the same interviewer, Sandra Cisneros expresses a little annoyance at readers who assume that she is her Mango Street protagonist, Esperanza Cordero—that the book, in other words, is autobiographical. (In a later interview, she calls it “an invented autobiography.”) The difference between writing factually about one’s own life and writing imaginatively out of one’s experience can be subtle, of course, and there are undeniable similarities between the fictional Esperanza and Cisneros, who grew up during the 1950s and 1960s in a working-class Latino family. One obvious difference between them is that Esperanza has three siblings, a sister and two brothers; Cisneros, on the other hand, grew up as the only sister to six brothers. One imagines that her mother must have been pleased to have a daughter among so many sons. And, unlike some women in similar situations, Cisneros’ mother did not insist that Sandra spend all her time helping with the traditional “women’s work,” but encouraged her to develop her intellect and imagination by reading. In this respect, certainly, Cisneros’ childhood resembles that of her character Esperanza, whose reading as reported in Mango Street has included such children’s classics as the Alice books by Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies. Although her published fiction (to 2000 at least) is firmly realistic, Cisneros conveys a sense of wonder and magic that reveals a grounding not only in folklore but also in these grand old literary fantasies.
Educated in Catholic schools and at Chicago’s Loyola University, where she took a B.A. in 1976, Cisneros was admitted to the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and was awarded the M.F.A. degree in 1978.
