The House On Mango Street By Sandra Cisneros Essay

What is it like to be living under the light of you brothers? Or better yet, what is it like being the only Chicana in the English Department (19)? Nicolas Kanellos from the University of Texas states that Sandra Cisneros is well known for her “first and only novel, The House on Mango Street” ( par. 1). Cisneros has won an award for this book, this award was called “the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award”(Kanellos, par. 1). Cisneros’s book is required to be read in “middle schools, high schools, and in universities.” As we know from her essay, “The Only Daughter” Sandra Cisneros was “the third child and only daughter in her family of seven children” (Cisneros, par. 1) she was born in Chicago on December 20th in the year 1954.

. . . I never had to change my little brother’s diapers, I never had to cook a meal alone, nor was I ever sent to do laundry. . . . but I don’t recall it interfering with my homework or my reading habits. (Rivera, 18) Although Cisneros was only ten years old when she wrote her first poem she “started to take writing more seriously as a teenager”(Rivera, 19). In high school she became the “editor of the school literary magazine” to which she published her poems (Rivera, 19). She started attending Loyola University on a scholarship she had received “to pursue a college degree" (Rivera, 19). She had realized that she was the only Chicana in her English Department she felt like she could not relate to any authors, Cisneros thought the only author she related to was to Emily Dickinson (Rivera, 20). Sandra Cisneros graduated from Loyola University with a Bachelors degree then later studied at the University of Iowa. While she was studying in Iowa she was hoping to that she would be able to get into a class with a poet named Donald Justice, but to her luck he was “working on his own research project” and was on leave (Rivera, 21). Finally Sandra had made a friend! Her friend’s name was a Native American named Joy Harjo, Harjo and Cisneros were alike because they were both were “isolat[ed] and different from the rest of the students in the program”(Rivera, 21). She also became friends with a fiction writer, Dennis Mathis, of which he also “bec[ame] her editor and help[ed] her gather and assemble her stories for publications”(Rivera, 22). During this time she was trying to figure out what kind of voice she would use in her writing. The type of voice she would mostly use was the voices from her home in Chicago (Rivera, 20). She would mix her “mother’s punch-you-in-the-nose English and [her] father’s powdered-sugar Spanish”