Sandra Cisneros is a Mexican American, with dual citizenship, writer who was born December 20th, 1954. She is the 3rd out of 7 children and was the only daughter. Which made her feel isolated and excluded because her brothers would go off in pairs, leaving her alone. She considered herself “the odd number in a set of men.” Her family was constantly moving between the 2 countries and when she settled in a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood she didn’t know that the neighborhood and the people living in it would be her inspiration for her best seller and coming of age novel, The House on Mango Street, which has sold over 6 million copies and has been translated into 20 different languages and is part of today’s literary canon. She also writes poetry, novels, short stories, essay and is a performer and artist. Her stories center around the lives of working-class people that experience misogyny and discrimination, such as her short story Woman Hollering Creek. She was so immersed in her writing that when she was writing her short story “Eyes of Zapata.” She woke up one day, in the middle of the night, she thought she was one of the characters who was a young bride of the Mexican Revolutionary. She used that dream to create the dialogue in her story.

She has won awards such as the PEN/ Nabokov Award for International literature, the Fredrick Douglass 200, Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, The Texas medal of the Arts and she was presented with the National Medal of Art by Barack Obama, himself, the NEA fellowship and more.

She has founded two non-profits (The Mancando Foundation and the Alfredo Cinseros del Moral Foundation) and is the organizer for 2 community activist groups 

  (Los MacArturos and Latino MacAuthor Fellows). She is a woman of many talents. She has never been married or has kids and I absolutely love what she has to say about it.  “I’ve never seen a marriage that is as happy as my living alone. My writing is my child and I don’t want anything to come between us.” Because why not.

Questions:

+ What did the Arroyo represent at the end of the story?

Freedom and independence, the screaming lady was happy to be on her own, owned her own pick up and was outspoken.

+ What did you think it represented in the beginning?

I thought it represented the beauty she thought she would have but the reality of the pain and suffering she went through. 

 + What did she use to foreshadow the life Cleoflias would have with her husband? What did they symbolize?

. Living in between “Soledad” and “Dolores” = being stuck between pain and loneliness.

. When she mentioned The Rich also cry which can relate to how she was excited to have her own home, family and pickup truck so she thought she would be happy. Turns out she would still suffer even if she has money in the beginning.

. “I am your father; I will never abandon you.” Pulled together with “only now as a mother did, she remember. Now when she and Juan Pedrito say by the creeks edge. How when man and a woman love each other, sometimes that love sours. But a parent’s love for a child, a child for its parents, is another thing entirely. “She will be left with a bad relationship and have to go back to her father who will welcome her with open arms