Sandra Cisneros

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Sandra Cisneros stands as one of the most formative Chicana writers of her generation. She has inspired many other Chicano novelists, poets, and essayists because of the critical and popular success of her first novel, "The House on Mango Street". It analyzes how, despite the book's attempt to give validity to a more positive view of Latin American culture as it exists in the United States, Cisneros's novel and her subsequent works have not limited their criticism of certain aspects of Hispanic life and reality, such as the inequality between the sexes.

From the Paper:

"The media itself is not all to blame, however. Cisneros believes that a girl, from birth, is raised with a different set of expectations in a Hispanic household. Within the common and accepted cultural framework, the father emerges as an unquestioned patriarch of the Latino household. Women's education is not valued on the same level as male education. Even girls who desire to better themselves through education are forced, because of cultural stereotyping, to assume care-taking functions that their brothers do not. Family relations inevitably affect the life of children in the school system when girls must do chores before their homework, or stay inside to preserve their safety and chastity, rather than wander where they might fall prey to young men."

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