Sandra Cisneros Is Nobody’s Mother

This year is the 40th anniversary of the publication of Sandra Cisneros’s classic The House on Mango Street. The novel tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a Mexican American girl coming of age in a Latino enclave in Chicago, observing her family and community as she decides who she wants to be. Cisneros was only 21 when she started writing the book; it has sold more than 7 million copies, and earlier this year became the first title by a U.S.-born Latino writer to become part of the Everyman’s Library.

I was a teenager in the 1990s when a librarian gave me my first copy of The House on Mango Street. As a mixed Latina—Puerto Rican and Mexican—I had never seen either of my backgrounds on the page, and it was a revelation. Oh, how I hated the ugly house where I lived in Brooklyn with my grandparents, and how awful I felt about it until I read about Esperanza, too, wishing for a “real house” like the ones she saw on TV. We both harbored a desire for something more, something bigger. Neither of us knew what it was, only that it was out there, on the other side of leaving. But what struck me most—perhaps more than anything that was actually inside the book—was the author’s biography on the back of it: Sandra Cisneros, it said, “is nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.”

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Even at that young age—far from marriage or child-rearing—I found the sentence shocking. I’d been conditioned to believe that all women should want both of those things and be quietly apologetic if we failed to achieve them. The line was like some of my favorite of her poems—shameless about what we’d been told we should be ashamed of. Sin vergüenza. Today, when Childless Cat Ladies are boldly defending their choices, such an assertion might be seen as cheekily feminist, but in 1984, it was outrageously radical. Not only had a Latina writer showcased the pain and joys of Latina lives; she had done so while defying the traditional roles of womanhood. With one sentence, she declared her independence and provoked her readers to do the same.

Fewer than 8 percent of published authors are Latino, and among writers for TV and film, the percentage is even lower. When we do show up in stories, Latinas are still far too often flattened, reduced to the roles of mothers and wives and other caregivers, nothing else. But Cisneros depicts us as the vivid, complex human beings we are. We suffer and have secrets, but we also travel the world and while away the hours over poetry and take lovers and lose lovers and make love again—and again and again. We are allowed to feel. Everything.

This independence is most perfectly embodied in Cisneros’s 1994 poetry collection, Loose Woman. I came across the titular poem a year after it was published, when I was a freshman at a predominantly white university in New England. The poem begins:

                  They say I’m a beast.

                  And feast on it. When all along

                  I thought that’s what a woman was.

                  They say I’m a bitch.

                  Or witch. I’ve claimed

                  the same and never winced …

I did not think I was a poetry person; the only poems I’d encountered at that point were part of the Poetry in Motion series on subways. But this one required no explanation or understanding of the form’s technical rules. It simply seized me and cracked me open. I took my hard-earned, saved-up pennies and went to the school bookstore—where, I assure you, there was no special section for Latino writers, no selected readings for any kind of “Hispanic Heritage Month”—and I bought this book of poems.

Women like me—Latinas with college educations, Latinas who left Mango Street—now seem commonplace. Today, more than 3.5 million of us live in America, but back in 2000, that number was only 1 million. Latinas like me being educated in the ’90s had no model. We had been told to go forth and obtain as much education as we could, but then we were expected to go back home, to wherever we were from, so we could meet and marry a nice man and become—as our mothers, without our education and experiences, had done before us—mothers ourselves. But in the Land of Loose Women, verse by verse, page by page, Cisneros lays out an alternative path. Here is the big rebellious sister most of us have never met, raised under the same expectations and cultural mores, shaking them off and forging a different future. And my God, was I excited by it.

                  “¡Wáchale! She’s a black lace bra

                  kind of woman, the kind who serves

                  up suicide with every kamikaze

                  poured in the neon blue of evening.

I’ll tell you right now, that poem made me run out and buy my first black-lace bra. The poem is dedicated to a woman named la Terry. She’ll ruin your clothes and make you miss your curfew, and all I wanted was to know her or be her.

Later in the collection, in “Mexicans in France,” we meet a traveler making her way through the south of France. Her French “is not that good,” and she’s talking with a guy who seems a little ignorant—“Is it true / all Mexicans / carry knives?” he asks. But what stuck with me was this woman—this Chicana!—so far out in the world. Alone! In Europe! I had, until then, thought Rhode Island exotic. Cisneros showed me that such an adventure was possible for someone like me, and the notion nestled in my head and grew into an idea, and then a plan. In 1997, I found myself traveling through the south of France, fielding ignorant questions with my own bad French—alone and delighted.

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Oh, and the sex and sexiness that I had been told was a secret or a sin unless it was happening with a man to whom you were married? That sex and sexiness were celebrated here: “Make love to me in Spanish, / not with that other tongue.”

The first time I fell in love—truly in love—I remember muttering her words to myself: “I want you inside / the mouth of my heart, / inside the harp of my wrists …”

There are lines on these pages that made my younger self blush—lines about being machete-d in two and suggestions of red lipstick on penises and a poem titled “I Am So in Love I Grow a New Hymen.” But as I walked through the bedrooms of my first lovers at that young age, I knew—because Cisnoeros had told me—that pleasure was my right. That pleasure was the purpose.

In those college days, during our long-distance calls home, my friends and I could not confide in our mothers about the lovers who were driving us crazy. Our mothers would not patiently tell us that it was normal for love to drive us mad. But we had Cisneros’s poems.

Cisneros has never stopped writing. Her 2002 novel, Caramelo, was a part of The Atlantic’s great-American-novels list. She released a new poetry collection, Woman Without Shame, in 2022. And she’s never stopped breaking new ground for Latino writers; she founded the Macondo Writers Workshop to support and nurture new voices. Today, it’s impossible to read the depictions of carnal pleasure and crazy longing in the works of contemporary Latino writers such as Carmen Maria Machado, Elizabeth Acevedo, Lizz Huerta, and Angie Cruz without hearing the echoes of Cisneros. After all, she was a mother, in a sense, to many—all of the Latinas striving to add to the literary landscape full-throated, complicated women rendered beautiful and bitchy and real.

I will admit now that at too young an age, I did in fact do what was expected of me. I went home after college, and I became somebody’s wife. And it was not, I realized quickly, a role I was intended to play. I’d been called early by Cisneros’s siren song to be a loose woman, a black-lace-bra kind of woman, to live a life that no one else I knew was living but that I knew Cisneros had lived, because she had put it into those beautiful words. So I cast off the husband and the normal job and the normal life, and I embraced who I truly was. Nobody’s mother, nobody’s wife. A writer.