Celebrating 25 years on 'Mango Street'

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - Sandra Cisneros is humble enough to believe she had nothing to do with the success of her first book.

It was 25 years ago when a small press issued her little compilation of interconnected stories, "The House on Mango Street." Central to it was life as seen and experienced by Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old girl growing up in working-class Chicago. Esperanza's household was Mexican-American, as was Cisneros', but her brief stories over the years clearly transcended her world and the author's expectations.

Now, with more than 4 million copies in print and translations in something like 14 languages around the world, "The House on Mango Street" endures as an American classic read by young people and old and by people of every skin color under the sun.

Her native Chicago has launched an all-city read of the novel, and Cisneros has been on a kind of quarter-century celebratory tour supporting a new edition (from Vintage Books).

"I feel very honestly it doesn't have anything to do with me," Cisneros said by phone the other day from her longtime home in San Antonio, Texas. "We write from our hearts as writers, and whether a book arrives at the time when the public needs to be nourished by that story is out of our hands."

Yet, a critic would be quick to add, the story wouldn't connect if it weren't a marvel to begin with, and "The House on Mango Street" is filled with marvels of writing and character and story.

Esperanza Cordero's hold on readers has to do with her voice and her attitude and all the things that are said and left unsaid about the people around her and their situations _ Louie and Alicia and "Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark."

She prompts frequent comparison to another young and influential character of American literature.

"Many of us have always seen Esperanza as right there with Huck Finn," says Susan Bergholz, Cisneros' literary agent in New York.

But the power of Esperanza's tales may stem even more from how they resonate in and inspire the private lives of her readers.

"I always get wonderful testimonies," Cisneros says, "from people who say I read this book when I was in middle school, or I read this when I was going through a divorce, or I read this when I was in college. Or I read this when I was going through a difficult time in my life and this book changed in my life.

"I have had young women who come up to me and say I'm in UCLA, in graduate school, and my counselor said I wasn't going to amount to anything. Or my mother and father said I wasn't going to amount to anything. Or I didn't believe in myself. Or I was in a destructive marriage and I couldn't leave it.

"Whatever their story is, this book motivated them to make change in a positive way. And that to me was astonishing.

"Because I wrote it from a powerless place myself. I was a teacher and I just didn't know what to do."

Cisneros, now 54, was a teacher and counselor in a Chicago middle school. She was not long out of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, an experience she pretty much despised, especially, she says, because it seemed to coddle students from upper-class backgrounds. (So, I asked, you had mixed feelings about it? "No," she said. "I hated it.")

As she writes in a new introduction to "The House on Mango Street," she found a spare apartment and began to write stories. Her influences ranged from the American canon to fairy tales to the great fabulist and experimentalist Jorge Luis Borges.

The stories came from her own life, but increasingly from the lives of her students, and like many first novels it evolved from its origin in memoir to pure fiction.

In the decades since its publication in 1984, Cisneros has issued poetry collections ("My Wicked Wicked Ways"), essays and in 2002, a big, intergenerational novel, "Caramelo." She admits to being a slow writer whose books seem to arrive at a time in her life when she needs them.

In her 20s, for example, as she wrote the "Mango Street" stories she felt smothered by what society expected of young women.

"For me, writing that book, I was filled with questions. I was filled with doubt and fear for my students. But I kept asking the questions. What good is teaching them literature? What can I do to make change? How does art save lives? Can art save lives?

"I didn't know the answer, and I didn't realize that the book would serve as the answer."

___

In San Antonio, Cisneros created a nonprofit foundation that sponsors an annual summer writing workshop among other activities. This year for the first time, the workshop is open to general applicants. For information, go to www.macondofoundation.org .

___

Steve Paul is senior writer and arts editor for The Kansas City Star.

___

© 2009, The Kansas City Star.