Chicano Sandra Cisneros and the Cultural Construction

Chicano Sandra Cisneros and the Cultural Construction of Latin-American Womanhood 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.

However, 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' novel and her subsequent works have not stinted in their criticism of certain aspects of Hispanic life and reality, such as the inequality between the sexes. Cisneros is an author, and he first novel attempted to give a certain beauty and dramatic weight to the innocent perspective of a young, Latina girl.

The work 'argued' that young Latina life was interesting and a culturally significant topic for modern fiction. However, Cisneros is also quite critical of the role that popular Latino culture has had in contributing to the oppression of women in Latin America, both abroad and within the Latin-American community within the United States. This oppression is not manifested only in the way that white culture has portrayed the 'exotic' Hispanic female, or the Hispanic 'earth mother' or mamacita.

Latin culture itself, through the use of melodramas such as the popular telenovias, creates an idealized view of suffering women. In these telenovias, women willingly endure the abuse of unfaithful, even physically battering men.

Although they are often strong and noble in the fortitude they exhibit in the face of such constraints, these media creations also encourage women in real life to stay in untenable situations, because women come to believe that suffering physical abuse at the hands of men gives them a nobility akin to the actresses they see on the screen. 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. Cisneros' recent work suggests that Mexicans on both sides of the borders cannot be complacent, nor can they simply fight the encroachment of Anglo culture upon their own cultural territory.

The idea that the only 'borders' that must be protected are physical structures delineated by politics must be done away with -- rather more policing of the equally artificially created borders of gender relations must be addressed. For instance, one issue is of particular concern to both Cisneros and her contemporary author Ana Castillo, namely the high rate of teenage pregnancy in the Mexican community. Mexican nationalists have often taken umbrage about criticism leveled at 'Mexicans' for a high pregnancy rate.

It is true that racism may play a role in the virulence of such criticism. However, Cisneros and Castillo suggest that this does not mean that there is not a problem for young, Mexican women who do become pregnant. The problem for these women is not simply a loss of a hope, though this does play a part in their despair, as it does in the increasing need of young men to articulate their masculinity through the violent medium of gangs.

However, the image of maternity, even within Chicano culture, is often the only positive role model for young women, through which they can articulate their femininity -- but alas, far too soon, before they are fully mature, mentally as well as physically. One of the reasons Cisneros turns again and again to children in her writings is because they offer an innocent perspective on the fears of what it means to become a woman, such as the Latina children whom debate the meaning of growing hips in her first novel.

Cisneros suggests that what it means to be a woman in the context of a family and even as 'a body' does not necessarily have to be fixed and unalterable, and that change through education is possible, in Mexico and in the U.S. Other Latino writers, such as the poet Carlos Cumpian have taken up Cisneros' challenge to reinterpret Latino masculinity, as he does over the course of his most recent volume of poetry,.