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Texas Standard commentator W.F. Strong examines how one of the state’s most celebrated writers found a home in San Antonio.
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W.F. Strong: Sandra Cisneros, probably the most celebrated Hispanic writer in the Southwest for the past 30 years or so, attracts enormous crowds of particularly young admirers. Anytime she speaks, she is a rock star. She often tells would-be writers not to write what they can remember, but to write what they cannot forget.
She knows she has written herself out of melancholic states several times in her life by focusing on what she can’t forget. For instance, when she moved from Chicago to Texas at the age of 30 to take a position as the literary director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, she rather quickly found herself in a state of depression.
She could not dismiss it or forget it. She had to write her way out of it. It’s hard to imagine that she would’ve been depressed considering that she had just published a bestselling book, the House on Mango Street to enthusiastic critical acclaim. Perhaps she found in Texas what Bernard Malamud once encountered in Oregon.
Friendliness, but not friends. At least not immediately. She recalled later that walking along the San Antonio River in the wild undeveloped part, she found her depression lifting the river was welcoming her and healing her. She said that she had expected to be welcomed by people, but the river welcomed her instead with its peaceful, inviting waters.
It was in Texas, a place where both her cultures blended in a unique and complex way that Cisneros eventually found a new literary footing, but it took a while. In fact, she was about to give up on Texas entirely when she was awarded a j. Frank Doby Paisano Fellowship Doby to the Rescue of Texas Letters once again.
Cisneros lived on Dolby’s Paisano Ranch for four months thinking and reading and writing. She told Texas Highways the experience changed her attitude about Texas. She said, I just kind of remember sitting out there in those Adirondack chairs and looking at the huge sky and thinking, what a beautiful place.
So it was very healing. It kept me in Texas. She said it shifted me and made me realize that Texas was not a bad place. Once she was comfortable here, she was able to rediscover and redefine her literary voice that was both personal and universal. Ciro’s House on Mango Street published 1984 became the cornerstone of that voice.
It wasn’t just a book, it was an anthem for countless Hispanic readers who saw themselves in the coming of age. Stories of Esperanza Cordero. The young girl at the heart of the novel, the book was like a photograph of an American neighborhood taken through the lens of a child whose world was shaped by both the poetry and the struggles of growing up Latino in an urban setting and Texas embraced it from the Rio Grande to Dalhart and El Paso to Beaumont readers saw in Esperanza’s life the echoes of their own.
The book told of the lives and dreams of those who felt caught between two worlds. Living in a place where identity is constantly in flux, Texas. A place that was often shaped in the conflicts of borderland, politics, race and cultural negotiation became a willing host to a voice that spoke to these very themes.
In Texas, CTO’s rockstar status was cemented, not because of the recognition she received in literary circles, so that was important, but because she became something else, entirely, a symbol for Texas’s Chicano community, her work was revolutionary. A shining testament to the power of authentic voices. Her influence wasn’t just literary, it was cultural.
As the book found its way into classrooms, community centers, and living rooms across Texas, it gave a voice to those who had been for too long silent in the larger cultural conversation. And like any rockstar, CTOs rise to prominence was not just about her words, but about what those words did for others.
After her mother died, she found oppression settling over her again, but she didn’t want to take pills. She wrote in, have you seen Marie that she needed to feel things deeply, good or bad, and weighed through an emotion to the other shore? Toward my rebirth, she said the San Antonio River helped her heal again.
She describes it this way Behind my house, the river is more creek than river. It still has its natural sandy bottom. It hasn’t been covered over with concrete yet. Wild animals live in the tall grass and in the waters. My dogs and I can wait across and watch tadpoles and turtles and fish darting about.
There are hawks and cranes and owls and other splendid winged creatures in the trees. It is calming and beautiful, especially when you are sad and need a big dose of beauty. Texas is a state where culture is defined by blending, by merging, by navigating the space between two or more worlds. And in this Cincinnati’s stories fit perfectly.
She came to Texas not just to tell her story, but to help shape the stories of countless others. And in so doing, she became undeniably one of the state’s most important literary voices, a true rock star in the world of Texas Lit. I’m W Strong. These are stories from Texas. Some of them are true.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
