More on Sandra Cisneros
Now available: A one hour "Lannan Series" Video with Sandra Cisneros who reads the story "Eleven," a new piece from her novel in progress and has a very interesting and humorous conversation with writer Dorothy Allison about being a "bad girl."
Sandra Cisneros's Official site
Sandra Cisneros, una Latina bastante classy! She grew up in the sixties as her family continuously migrated between Chicago and Mexico City, because of moving so often she had no friends. Being the only female child in a two parent household with S-I-X brothers wasn't a piece of cake either. So it is of absolutely no wonder that she turned to the make belief world of books. Like many of us Latinos with our toes touching two cultures (Are we Mexican, Puerto Ricanä Dominican or are we American?) and our hands grasping at two separate life styles (Rural or urban?) the "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" television portrayals of the happy little family just did not connect.
Once Sandra Cisneros enrolled in her first college level writing course she found her calling, to write. Realizing that the big male voices of the time were not befitting her she began writing in a style different than those of her fellow students. She wrote what she knew, her stories are of "feminism, love, oppression, and religion" isn't that the core of being Latina!?
I could sit here and tell you about her stories, her characters, or her poetry. I choose not to, you already know them, they are our stories and those of our neighbors. Instead I'll tell you what I felt within me when I read her interview with Reed Dasenbrock. Total understanding! She was asked what incorporating the "Spanish" into her writing does. And her answer was, "äit changes the rhythm of my writing. It allows me to create new expressions in Englishãto say things that have never been said before. All of a sudden something happens to the English, something really new is happening, a new spice is added to the English language."
If you begin to read her works and you stumble over Spanish phrases and wonder why she didn't bother to translate that one word, don't bother asking 'cause she has a reply to thatä "I will try my best everywhere else if it flows into the piece, but if the seam is showing and it's obvious that the character is saying something like, The grandmother cried because I was going to dar a luz, I was going to give birth, that's clumsy. I'm not going to do that for the person who's monolingual, but I will try to weave it in such a way in the rest of the story so they don't lost [loose] it." So I suggest you pullout a Spanish-English dictionary to enjoy the pleasure that is Sandra Cisneros written work.
Elivette Mendez-Angulo
Above quotes ccme from an interview with Sandra Cisneros published in Dasenbrock's and Jussawalla's Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (University Press of Mississippi, 1992). As it appeared on the web on 10/22/98 at 10:23 AM
See the University of Minnesota page on Sandra Cisneros
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