by Catherine Marenghi

This article is part of a continuing series on poets and poetry with roots in San Miguel.

If Sandra Cisneros were to write her autobiography today, the first word she would use to describe herself is "poet." This might surprise those who know her best for her international bestselling novel, The House on Mango Street, a coming-of-age classic that has sold more than 6 million copies.

Cisneros nonetheless plants herself firmly in the realm of poetry. "I've always thought of myself as a born poet who also writes fiction, essays and other things, but everything stems from poetry," she said.

Currently a permanent resident of San Miguel de Allende, Cisneros is the author of four poetry books: Bad Boys, My Wicked Wicked Ways, Loose Woman, and Woman Without Shame. The titles alone give more than a hint of the raw, exuberant and unabashed sexuality of her poetry. And some of her other books, like the bilingual novella Martita, I Remember You, cross genres with exquisitely poetic language.

I spoke with Cisneros recently in San Miguel's Santa Ana Café, following the poet's Biblioteca presentation with filmmaker Soco Aguilar. The two talked about an upcoming feature-length documentary, Sandra Cisneros: Uncensored, which Aguilar is directing; the film is targeted for release in 2026. It was a rare moment to catch some fleeting minutes with the notoriously private writer.

Her most recent poetry book, Woman Without Shame (2022) was published 27 years after her previous poetry book, Loose Woman, but Cisneros confirms that she never stopped writing poetry during this book publishing hiatus. Like Emily Dickinson, she simply "threw her poems under the bed." The book's opening poem, which was also published in the New Yorker in August 2022, contains a line that gives the book its descriptive title. The following excerpt reveals her characteristic frankness and free-spirited sexuality.

The penultimate poem in the same collection, "You Better Not Put Me in a Poem," was cited by Cisneros as one of her favorite poems. It is laced with frank descriptions of the bodies, and body parts, of her many lovers. Here are the opening lines of the 12-page poem:

Like her opening poem, these lines immediately establish an intimate conversation with her readers, making us her closest confidante. She holds back nothing, spares us no detail. A later stanza shows the poet's wicked sense of humor:

And yet other lines from the same poem expose her most naked and vulnerable self:

The poet's gleeful sense of mischief is palpable in the final lines of the poem:

The poem is only briefly excerpted here, both because of its length and explicit content. "I don't get to read this poem publicly very often, because children often come to my readings. And I always take a roll call of my audience so that I don't offend or embarrass my hosts. That's very important. It's one of my favorite poems, because it took me on such a rollercoaster to write it," she said.

A clue to the visceral source of this and other Cisneros poems may be found in the Acknowledgments section in Woman Without Shame, in which Cisneros described her poetic journey. "It was after the release of My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987) that it occurred to me that publishing poetry was the antithesis of writing poetry. I wrote poetry because I had to push a truth from my womb. Publishing felt as if I were celebrating the messy afterbirth."

By the time her third poetry book, Loose Woman, was published in 1995, her fearless narrative voice had been firmly established. "By then I had learned poetry had to be written as if I could not publish it in my lifetime. It was the only way for me to get past the worst censor. Myself."

Childhood in Chicago

Cisneros, a dual citizen of Mexico and the United States, was born in Chicago in 1954 to a Mexican upholsterer father and a Mexican-American mother. She was one of seven children, and the only girl. The family moved frequently between Chicago and Mexico, contributing to her early sense of feeling rootless and disconnected.

Cisneros recalled being a painfully shy little girl, far more comfortable playing alone than with other children. In her childhood photos, she was typically shown looking downward.

"I spent most of the time alone and separated from society and the world. I didn't have a mother who was sensitive to things of the spirit, and she was always too busy. My father was more like me, but he was also very busy working several jobs to pay for our first home. So I thought I could talk to trees, animals, rocks – all these things were very sacred to me.

"That's the reason why I collected sticks and piled them next to the house. They were gifts from the trees, souvenirs that the trees gave me to keep them in my heart. No one ever knew those little bunches of sticks by the door were very special to me. They were like magic sticks. And I captured that in The House on Mango Street with the main character Esperanza and her communication with things of the spirit. That's how I felt at that time of my life," she recalled.

Her childhood was transformed by an unlikely cause: frozen pipes. Frustrated by the frozen water pipes in his modest Chicago house, Cisneros's father moved the family to another neighborhood, one that was even poorer than the first. But her new school gave her access to a teacher who would change her life.

Mrs. Celler was Cisneros's sixth-grade teacher for only half a year, from February through June of 1966, but she noticed something special about the girl. She told Cisneros that she was an artist. That recognition "transformed me from pumice to obsidian," Cisneros later wrote. "She changed my life as much as the frozen pipes did – by telling me that I am an artist."

Cisneros understood the term applied broadly to all the creative things she did. Cisneros moved easily between drawing pictures and writing words. And she credited Celler for helping her see her own promise. "At that age, you need to hear someone say it, someone to see your potential," she recalled.

"Poetry was that sacred communication I had with the spiritual world that kept me alive at a very desolate time, when we leave childhood and enter adolescence. Because I was in a house with six boys, I really needed beauty, even if it was just a bunch of dandelions I had gathered in a cup. I needed beauty to nourish my spirit, to keep me from plunging into depression," she added.

Cisneros recalled the first poems she read in a child's textbook, mostly traditional forms in iambic pentameter and iambic trimeter. "Very kind of galloping, you know, in their rhythm. The music is what I delighted in, and I knew that I would write poems, too."

And so she did, excelling in writing through her high school years and acting as editor of the school literary magazine. "In high school, I would send away for those little paperback poetry anthologies. They cost 25 or 35 cents. I couldn't get enough poetry. Of course, I did go to the library, but these anthologies were something I could afford."

Cisneros went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree from Loyola University, Chicago, in 1976, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, in 1978, studying under poets such as under Donald Justice and Louise Glück, alongside classmates Joy Harjo and Rita Dove, both future Poet Laureates.

Some of Cisneros's early poetic influences were Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg, both poets with roots in Chicago. "They were my literary ancestors, as I call them. I read a lot of writers, but I think Gwendolyn Brooks stands out. I got to meet her in my 20s and read with her. And later when I was teaching at an alternative high school, my class was awarded the Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Award. So I met her on the page, I met her as a teacher, and I met her as a poet."

Brooks was also a primary mentor in Cisneros's life. "She taught me how to treat your audiences. How to be very present moment with each one, no matter how tired you are, or how long the line is. And I learned this just by watching her. And I realized, this is who I want to be."

While attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Cisneros made a crucial discovery. The very things that had always made her feel like the "other," that she didn't belong – her race, gender, and social class – were actually the things that would differentiate her writing. "That's when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn't write about." Instead of being something to be ashamed of, her cultural heritage and environment became a powerful source of inspiration.

That's when Cisneros intentionally began writing about her unique experiences in small vignettes that would find their way into her poetry – including My Wicked Wicked Ways, containing poems on her identity and personal experience – and into the childhood stories told in House on Mango Street.

From San Antonio to San Miguel

Cisneros moved to San Antonio, Texas, in 1984, shortly after the publication of House on Mango Street. The book was not an overnight success. It was initially released by a small independent publisher, Arte Público Press, and was known only within academic and Chicano literary circles. However, her word-of-mouth following grew steadily for several years until a major publisher, Vintage Contemporaries, republished the book in 1991. The book's critical acclaim helped Cisneros win, among other prizes, the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award, and a MacArthur "genius" grant.

As a struggling young writer, her choice of living in San Antonio had initially been driven by economics. She had rented an apartment for $200 a month. In the early 1990s, as her success as an author grew, her literary agent encouraged her to buy a house – which she did. It was a proud achievement because it was purchased solely from her earnings as a writer.

Cisneros had become deeply attached to her San Antonio house, which helped inspire her memoir A House of My Own. The house stirred controversy because she painted it purple – not an approved historic color. The Historic Design and Review Commission ultimately painted over the house.

The year she won the MacArthur, in 1995, Cisneros started teaching a class in San Antonio that developed into the Macondo Writers Workshop – a name inspired by the town Macondo in 100 Years of Solitude. Three decades later, Macondo continues to attract acclaimed poets as teachers and offers workshops to a diverse student body on subjects ranging from young-adult literature to translingual poetics.

However, Cisneros came to realize that her investment in San Antonio was a double-edged sword. If she stayed there, she feared she might never write another book. "I was devoting too much time to philanthropy and teaching – at the expense of my writing."

Because she had no children, she decided to bequeath her Texas house as a retreat for future artists to write there. And she came to San Miguel de Allende in 2011, initially to attend the San Miguel Book Fair. Staying at an Airbnb, she noticed white egrets nesting in a nearby tree. She saw the birds as an auspicious sign.

By 2013 she had purchased a home in San Miguel, not far from the San Juan de Dios church. She named the house Casa Coatlicue after the Aztec earth goddess, symbolizing both creator and destroyer, mother of gods and mortals. "I had to think, what goddess truly personifies a writer's life? I couldn't think of any goddess stronger than her. And I saw her as a protector of my solitude – I wanted people to keep their distance. In San Miguel I became very private in a way I wasn't in Texas," she explained.

Mexico, as the home of her ancestors, had long inspired Sandra, although her journey across borders made her question her identity: "I thought I was Mexican until I came to live in Mexico," she said. Although English is her primary language and she is proficient in Spanish, Cisneros found herself writing and thinking more in Spanish while living in Mexico. Sometimes she wrote poetry first in Spanish and later translated it to English. "I found these poems in my throat," she said.

In one of her recent poems, which appeared in the New Yorker in September 2024, she shared her delight in the nuances of Spanish words:

Emerging Spiritual Powers

Noting her 71st birthday later this year, Cisneros spoke of feeling a great urgency to get work done. "I'm running out of time," she said. "This next phase of my life is the third phase, as they call it in Mexico, which really is about my spiritual powers."

Cisneros began discovering in recent years that she is a medium. "I didn't know that before I came here. I can now talk about and understand it and open myself to it in a way that would have been frightening in the United States. I can't force it. It just comes to me. I believe I have had it my whole life, but am just now seeing it clearly.

"Artists, I think, are more sensitive and attuned to their intuitive powers. It's not just my indigenous heritage. I think as poets, we channel spirits when we're writing. And we can sharpen this power. Over time, I've learned I can solve a lot of problems by dreaming, by going to sleep. I'll say, I have this issue. I'll sleep, and then I'll get the answer I wanted. I lost a check once when I was moving, and I knew if I lay down and just put myself in a relaxed mode, an image would pop up and tell me where it was. And, you know, I had a dream where I needed to warn my brother, to make him go to the doctor right away, and it turns out that he did have seriously high blood pressure that needed medication.

"We all have those dreams in some form, and we need to pay attention to them. As a child of six, I thought all our dead neighbors visited me: my mother would say I was dreaming, or just imagining things. Like having an imaginary friend."

Cisneros revealed that her novel in progress, Infinito, is about someone who has these spiritual gifts. "He doesn't know how to use it, but that's how I'll learn how to use it myself – the author will learn through the character," she explained. She also revealed she is working on a poetry book with the working title Bruxa – spelled with an "x." Unlike the Spanish word for witch, bruja, the bruxa is a figure from Portuguese myth, a type of vampire that usually takes the appearance of a dark-haired female, but whose natural form is that of a large black bat with fangs and claws.

"Animals have spirits, too," she added. "I've had a lot of dogs over the years, and I've had to put a lot of them down, but I never felt the spirit of a deceased pet except once. I only had to experience it one time to understand that every person, every animal, is unique. Everybody's energy is as distinct as a song. For lack of a better term, I'm calling it a song. If my mother's song came to me, I would know it was her, from the feeling I get, the emotion. It's the way I felt when she laughed. And she comes to me in different ways now, in dreams. We all have that feeling when you look across a room, at someone you love unconditionally. That's it. That's the light – la luz. It's not anything greater or less than this feeling.

"I don't think I'm special when I tell people I medium: I always quickly add, 'You are, too.' Everybody has this ability. We need to nurture and practice it, like meditation. If you dismiss it or if you don't practice it, you'll lose it. Artists, however, are practicing all the time."

At the same time, Cisneros distanced herself from "magical realism," a genre where fantasy merges with real life, most often associated with Latin-American writers. "You know, I despise the term, because there's no magic in what I'm telling you. My spiritual life is very grounded in the environment I'm living in, which is not unlike that of my ancestors. And I mean 'spiritual' without the religious connotations. Religion usually crushes spirituality," she noted.

So how does Cisneros capture these spiritual impulses in her writing practice? With a breakneck travel schedule that includes public readings worldwide and numerous projects – e.g., her upcoming documentary, an opera based on House on Mango Street, etc. – it can be difficult to find time for writing poetry.

"I have found that you can capture moments to sneak in even a single line of poem, what I call a button, or a sequin. That will sustain you through your poemless days. You can recite poems into your phone, as voice notes, or you can jot down a line or two in the 'notes' app. And then when I have a moment, when I go home, after I finish all of my obligatory tasks – what I call the 'sewing basket' – I take a little break. And that's when I can get to the poem. It's wonderful."

Comparing the work of writing a novel vs. writing poetry, Cisneros quoted the writer Denise Chavez: "Writing the novel is marriage, and writing poetry is having sex." Cisneros acknowledged she has never been married; it was a conscious choice to devote her life fully to writing. "If I ever had a marriage, it would come with too much compromise."

However, Cisneros doesn't leave her poetry writing to chance or spontaneous inspiration. "An important message I give to poets is that we have to get into the 'zone.' And what should we do to get there? Reading poetry. And only reading poetry that makes you feel like writing poetry. That's what I tell my audiences. Find a poem or a poet that makes you run for the pen. Not the poems someone has decided are the '100 best.' Get your own favorite poems that make you want to write with absolute freedom. You are not obliged to share or publish. No one else has your experience; no one else can write your truth. Only you do. That's my prescription for poets today."

Gratitude to Ancestors

Cisneros mused about the many decisions, large and small, that past generations made that defined her extraordinary life. "As I reflect on my life, I'm struck by a remarkable set of circumstances that made me who I am. If my grandparents hadn't been pushed out of Mexico by the Mexican Revolution. If they hadn't emigrated to Chicago. If the pipes hadn't frozen in our house. If my mother hadn't hungered for education. If I hadn't been born in 1954, which aligned my youth with the civil rights movement and access to financial aid for college."

Cisneros has always been deeply interested in her ancestry, especially the women in her family history. In 2016 she made an appearance on the TV series "Finding Your Roots," and took particular interest in finding the names of female ancestors – names that are often lost to history. At the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum, Cisneros created "A Room of Her Own: An Altar for My Mother," an installation that honors her mother, Elvira Cordero Cisneros, during annual Day of the Dead observances in November. The altar includes items from her mother's room, such a dresser, dolls, books, political pins, a lock of her hair, photographs, traditional wax flowers, and candles.

"I still have a wall of those additional women's names that I was able to uncover from past generations, and they become part of annual ofrenda at the Museum. Those names are Maria Gertrudis Rodriguez. Tomasa Anguiano. Sanjuana Durán. Juana Alfaro. María Cruz García. Florencia Oliva. Gertrudis, Rangel. Leocadia Torres. Every time the altar gets installed in the future, they have to include those names.

"I often think of my grandparents, who didn't learn how to read or write in any language until they were elderly, and only then they learned to read and write in Spanish – I can't imagine how they did it. My family were like trout swimming upstream. My life is the unlikely result of generations of effort."

Sandra Cisneros' life is ultimately a mirror of the U.S. Latino experience, shaped by cultural upheaval, displacement and discovery. Although she was born in Chicago, she often felt out of place in the U.S. Now, guided by history and her own indigenous ancestry, she has expressed in her poetry – and in her life – both the richness and absurdities of straddling two worlds.

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Catherine Marenghi is a local poet, novelist and memoirist who has been active in the San Miguel literary scene for more than a decade. She has published three poetry books, a memoir, and a historic novel. A native of Massachusetts, she has made San Miguel her permanent home.

www.marenghi.com

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