Deborah L. Madsen (Essay Date 2000)

SOURCE: Madsen, Deborah L. "Sandra Cisneros." In Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, pp. 105-34. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Madsen explores Cisneros's dual marginality as a Latin female, examines her self-determination and control over the physical, sexual and social aspects of her life, and highlights the autobiographical elements in Cisneros's poetry and fiction.

In a 1990 interview Sandra Cisneros joked that after ten years of writing professionally she had finally earned enough money to buy a secondhand car.¹ Her struggle for recognition as a Chicana writer earned her critical and popular acclaim with the publication of The House on Mango Street (1984), the success of which was followed by Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her poetry collection My Wicked, Wicked Ways was published by the Berkeley-based Chicana Third Woman Press in 1987, and the...