To Defy the Myth: On Sandra Cisneros

To understand Sandra Cisneros’s poetry, it is important to know that she grew up the only daughter among the seven children of a Mexican father and Mexican American mother. At that time, in the fifties and sixties, cultural prescriptions dictated she remain in the household until she became a wife and mother. She became neither. Instead, she left to study poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in her twenties, thanks to arts grants, sojourned in Europe. Cisneros’s travels show up in her first full-length collection, 1987’s My Wicked, Wicked Ways: “Women fled./ Tired of the myth/they had to live.” These lines resonate with what she later called an “escape route” from patriarchy and the cultural legacy of her gender.

In 1980, Mango Publications issued Cisneros’s chapbook Bad Boys, a slim poetry volume that examines the lives inside a Chicago working-class neighborhood—a precursor to her classic novel The House on Mango Street (1984). That same year, Cisneros met Norma Alarcón, a PhD student, at the Midwest Latina Writers’ Workshop. Alarcón would become the founder of Third Woman Press, which championed Cisneros’s early work in its journal and published the first edition of My Wicked, Wicked Ways. The Workshop strived to write “outside cultural nationalist narrative” by decentralizing Aztlán, the mythical Chicano homeland. Cisneros would later write that she “was bullied by hard-core Chicano activists who thought my writing was not Chicano enough,” despite her references to pre-Columbian gods and use of Spanish colloquialisms. “I am evil. I am the filth goddess Tlazoltéotl./I am the swallower of sins./The lust goddess without guilt” are lines in her second full-length collection, Loose Woman (1994), that exemplify the mezcla of sexual agency and cultural heritage typical of her poems. Although published by a New York publisher, Loose Woman became the apotheosis of what Third Woman Press had sought to create: “a space for Latina self-invention, self-definition, and self-representation.”

A new collection, Woman Without Shame (2022), is Sandra Cisneros’s return to poetry. At sixty-eight, the poet writes about the admiration of the aging body as “a life lived,” the dalliances of her younger self, and her resettling as a successful artist in the Mexico of her “abuelos/Who couldn’t read.” The voice is assured, defiant, optimistic. In 2015, Cisneros spoke to the long gap between collections: “Poems were to be written as if they could not be published in my lifetime. They come from such a personal place. It was the only way I could free myself to write/think with absolute freedom, without censorship.” Liberated from expectations, Sandra Cisneros’s third poetry collection is just that: recalcitrant, vulnerable, guiltless.