In A House of My Own, Sandra Cisneros arranges 30 years of writing around the quest to find a home of her own. Born in Chicago, Illinois to a Mexican father and Mexican-American mother, Cisneros was expected by both family and culture to stay home with her parents until marriage. Flouting those expectations to become a writer required far more than Virginia Woolf’s single room. Cisneros needed a house:
A house for me is a space to decide whether I want to be sad and not turn on the lights, to sleep until noon or beyond, read a book propped up by fringed pillows, shut off the ringer of the phone, wear my pajamas all day, and not venture farther than the backyard fence if I feel like it.
— From the essay “Tenemos Layaway, or, How I Became an Art Collector”
Comprised of essays, articles, introductions, and lectures, A House of My Own spans topics from family to Mexican textiles to singer Chavela Vargas. Though explanatory headnotes help the narrative cohere, the material doesn’t always bend to the author’s intentions. In this, A House of My Own suffers the unevenness common to many anthologies, be they authored by many writers or one. Fortunately, the successful essays outweigh the weaker pieces, reminding readers why Cisneros is both widely respected and beloved.
The most troubling portions of A House of My Own concern the years Cisneros lived in San Antonio, Texas. In 1997, she painted her Victorian home periwinkle, or purple, an event causing civic upheaval with undeniably racist implications. In the resulting uproar, the house was painted over and Cisneros’s privacy was permanently invaded. The experience, discussed in “¡Que Vivan Los Colores!”, is unsettling reading. When Cisneros writes in the headnote that she leaves Texas “with no regrets”, the reader understands why.
Conversely, the enormous falling-out that lead Cisneros’s tightly-knit circle of friends to bitterly break is never explained. Cisneros arrived in San Antonio expecting to find a supportive niche with fellow feminists. Instead, she found friendship within the gay community. The essays “Infinito Botánica”, “El Pleito/The Quarrel”, and “Chocolate and Donuts”, evoke a period of intense friendship and artistic ferment. Then something goes awry, though readers never learn what. These same essays are sprinkled with broad hints at an ugly ending:
Some of us aren’t speaking to each other anymore,” (“Infinito Botánica”). “It’s interesting for me to reread this and remember how much Texas felt like home once.” (“I Can Live sola and I Love to Work”). Most damning of all is this drunken pun, made by a woman at a final party: “It’s the end of an error.” (“Infinito Botánica”).
While discretion is understandable, the reader is left more than a little bewildered.
The finest articles are the most personal. Cisneros’s parents are now deceased, leaving her an incisive yet empathic observer of their lives. Alfredo Cisneros del Moral is tenderly recalled as a man who adored children, a handsome dandy, a snappy dresser. A skilled tapicero, or upholsterer, his work was in constant demand. When he and his wife grew prosperous enough to purchase a building with two rental units, one family was consistently late on rent. (“Un Poquito de Tu Amor“). Sent to speak with the tenants, Alfredo Cisneros solved the problem by reducing the rent. His daughter writes:
“Mother was ready to throw a fit. Until Father said, remember when ten dollars meant a lot to us?”
In “An Ofrenda for My Mother”, Cisneros describes Elvira Cordero Cisneros “banging on the bars of her cell all her life”. When not raising seven children, cooking, and cleaning house, Elvira Cordero Cisneros insisted on spending her Sundays at museums. Years later, she visited her daughter’s San Antonio home with its separate office, climbing the stairs to the roof, where her daughter set out yoga mats. Mother and daughter lay on the rooftop, gazing at the stars. “Good lucky you studied,” her mother said.
Other essays address continuing racism and injustice. “Huipiles” is a shattering exposé of the impoverished native women who make garments they could never afford to buy for themselves. “Who Wants Stories Now” is an anguished cry for a friend lost in the Serbo-Croatian conflict. In “The House on Mango Street’s Tenth Birthday” Cisneros addresses the stark social inequities she encountered while attending the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she found herself amongst teachers and classmates who knew nothing of shared bathrooms, communal stairwells, or vermin-infested basements.
“The House on Mango Street’s Tenth Birthday” isn’t just about the circumstances leading to the book’s inception, though readers have the Iowa Writing Workshop’s stuffy classical syllabus to thank. Cisneros choose to write the book in “an anti-academic voice”, one “as deliberate to me as if I was tossing a Molotov.” It was a direct response to everything she wasn’t seeing in Iowa—the people, the voices, the need and noise and directness of life.
Cisneros now lives in Mexico, a place that “breaks my heart on a daily basis.” All is not perfect; unmarried and childless, Cisneros is an anomaly in Mexican society. In the “Epilogue: Mi Casa Is Su Casa”, she describes being addressed as “señito“, neither señora nor señorita, a country term loosely translating to ma’am. The peace she had hoped for eludes her, for the poor knock on her door, seeking work. Turning them away is difficult.
The racism we Americans might blithely assume would lift in her new surroundings is just as pervasive: Cisneros’s darkly complected employees cannot get waited on in a cheese shop. When Cisneros takes a friend to an upmarket restaurant called the Restaurant for dinner, the hostess refuses to seat the women indoors. They are told they can eat at the bar or outside. The eatery is deserted. Why? The Restaurant is for tourists. White tourists. When Cisneros complains to the manager, he splutters. She tells him it will make a good story. Indeed: I pass it along here.
“There’s no place like home, ” Cries Dorothy in the The Wizard of Oz. It’s not entirely clear that Cisneros, far from her birthplace, has finally found a home of her own. Her readers can only hope so.