Sandra Cisneros

And it's the one I really took probably the second longest to land on an answer for.

I then thought of Sandra Cisneros, although I don't know.

First of all, I'm pretty sure she's American, but I don't know that she writes originally in Spanish even.

And so I kind of let that fall to the wayside as well.

So that happened to me, it happened to you.

When I was a kid, I read I read Sandra Cisneros, but I didn't read it in school.

The House on Mango Street.

I just read the book because of Sassy Magazine, RIP Sassy Magazine.

There are about three people hearing this right now who know what I'm talking about.

I love all three of you.

Um, so I remember trying to like copy Sandra Cisneros because that was the only mirror I had.

And it wasn't even a very accurate mirror because I didn't grow up in Texas.

The trick is knowing how to read them that way.

Let's look at Sandra Cisneros' 1984 novel, The House on Mango Street.

It tells the story of a 12-year-old Esperanza Cordero and her family in a working-class Chicago neighborhood.

Having grown up in an apartment, Esperanza is thrilled to put down her roots in her family's new home.

In Sosaviada's words, the pink house is the queerest boarding house in the world, one that complicates our preconceived notions about home, family, and belonging.

In literature, like in life, houses can hold all the nooks and crannies of who you are as people, cultures, and nations, And in some ways, sitting down to read a book is a little like an invitation into an author's home, so we can all become chismosos.

You can peer out the window of Sandra Cisneros' childhood home, meet Isabel Allende's family of politicians and revolutionaries, or stay up late talking with Sosa Villada and her friends.

And when you're done visiting, you can say your goodbyes, close the book, and return to your own house with your own family drama.

What is that group's mission?

So that group was founded actually in response to the outlawing of the Tucson Mexican American Studies curriculum by Tony Diaz and his fellow literary community in Houston, and they were outraged, rightfully, when they heard not just that Shakespeare's The Tempest was being banned, but works by Sandra Cisneros or Gloria Anzaldua, Ana Castillo were being banned.

And so they organized, um, a caravan from Houston all the way back to Tucson, and they gathered hundreds of thousands of books and people along the way.

They had banned book bashes in their various cities.

And I think even though like completely not applicable to my life, right? But you feel for those teens and what they're going through.

So I I think reading when you're a teenager is so important because again, you know, you're not alone.

Other people have felt the way you felt.

If you can't talk to your friends about it, like they

And this was back in the 70s.

coming to the ultimate conclusion that like religiosity is like as necessary to humans as like anything else like as like you know relationships and breathing and like all of our kind of primal cravings it's a great book that one really affected me recently um and is the forward in my new book and poets i love sandra cisneros i really loved her poetry say the

name again

sandra cisneros she did a house on mango street but she also has like my wicked wicked ways Also, what is that book? A Hundred Years of Solitude.

Oh, I

love Garth.

And then those would be farmed out to whatever particular teacher, whatever grade level they had been assigned.

And so, you know, when you ask that question about these experiences and what changed me, one was working with a close read around Sandra Cisneros' Eleven.

That is a magical piece of writing.

It's just north of a thousand words.

This list of eight isn't the whole story.

It leaves out missing masterpieces like Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give, and the incredible traditions of verse novels and graphic novels that have completely reshaped the field recently.

Right.

I mean, you could easily argue that The Hate U Give belongs in the top five of any modern list.

One last poem for Bombay.

after Sandra Cisneros.

Someday we'll forget I ever lived inside you, my heart beating to the rhythm of your snarl, running on the fumes of humidity and the smell of impossible dreams, the way you held me when I was lonely.

with claps of thunder and the lilt of traffic at 4 a.m. on your sleepless streets.