Latina’s Writing Hits Home for Students

Seventeen-year-old Belinda Martinez had never met a published writer before, and certainly not a Latina whose poignant stories about coming of age mirrored some of the teen-ager’s own experiences.

But here Martinez was, standing in the gymnasium at La Puente High School, about to shake hands with Sandra Cisneros, whose book “The House on Mango Street” is required reading for all high school seniors in the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District.

“Thank you for making me aware of my culture and who I am,” Martinez told the author shyly. “You made me feel it’s OK to grow up the way I did and to feel the way I did.”

Cisneros, who is touring the country to promote her new, critically acclaimed short story collection “Woman Hollering Creek,” usually speaks to crowds in bookstores. But she agreed to visit two San Gabriel Valley high schools recently because she said she feels a special affinity for their teen-agers.

At a reading in Cambridge, Mass., Cisneros said, listeners didn’t “know who I am or what I’m writing about. . . . But it’s thrilling to have these tough guys (at La Puente High) come up to me and say, ‘Thanks for writing those stories.’

“This is who I’m writing for. I know these kids. I’ve taught them. I grew up with them.”

Last year, recognizing that the school district had become 80% minority and 60% Latino, administrators revamped the core English curriculum to include contemporary works by writers of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

“A lot of us were very concerned about kids making connections with their cultural heritage. We thought it would be appropriate for them to read authors who represent the ethnic population of the school district,” said Marita Kroeker, who heads the English department at Los Altos High School in Hacienda Heights and was instrumental in getting Cisneros to visit the district.

These days, high school seniors in the district read “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez; “Clay Walls” by Korean-American Kim Ronyoung; “The Joy Luck Club” by Chinese-American Amy Tan; “No-no Boy” by Japanese-American John Okada and works by African-American poets Angel Brunson and Elizabeth Smith.

The books depict “people who feel set apart and different from the rest of society,” Kroeker said. “Our hope was to show our children through these works that feelings of isolation are common to every man . . . and it’s when you acknowledge and accept that difference that you really develop as a person.”

Cisneros, 36, reinforced this point in her talk, saying she found her literary voice only after she abandoned the idea that she was an “ordinary American” and began writing about what she knew best: growing up in a tightknit Chicago barrio; the hopes and fears of Latin women in a male-dominated society; precariously balancing between two cultures while feeling completely at home in neither.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cisneros now teaches English at the University of New Mexico and has become a nationally known writer. But with her cowboy boots, red miniskirt and silver sombrero earrings that jiggled when she spoke, she also spoke a language that students could understand.

“I was pretty stupid till I was 21,” Cisneros told them. “I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t reading stories about poor people, Chicanos, people of color and women. Those stories weren’t being taught in my classes.”

So Cisneros began writing them herself. Stories about children with “clothes crooked and old” who pooled their money to buy one bike to share. About the shame of young Esperanza, who would like a new name because “at school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish, my name is made out of a softer something, like silver.”

About Sally, whose hair is “shiny black like raven feathers,” with “eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke” who grew up too fast and married before eighth grade to escape an abusive home.

Some stories were autobiographical. Others were culled from her years teaching high school dropouts and counseling women on the fringes of society. They included Texas border operettas, tales of immigrants who pined for home and tragic seductions by shady characters who claimed descent from Mayan kings.

“Write in a voice as if you were sitting at your kitchen table and talking in your pajamas,” Cisneros told the students. “Write about what makes you different . . . you give things power by keeping them silent.”

When she finished, students crowded around to say hello and request autographs. Some said they had passed on her book to younger siblings. Others explained that they had never read a book by a Latina but could identify with Esperanza from “The House on Mango Street.”

Richard Alaniz, 18, said he understood Esperanza’s longing for fancy toys and the shame she felt at having to wear clunky saddle shoes when she wanted dancing slippers.

“We didn’t have expensive tennis shoes and expensive bikes either,” said Alaniz, who plans to major in biology at Cal Poly Pomona next fall. “We had to make up games to amuse ourselves.”

The La Puente High senior said he will recommend the book to his family, which is much like Esperanza’s family, where the father is the breadwinner and boss and the mother stays home to care for the children.

“It caught my attention because it was by a Latino author, even if it was about a girl,” Alaniz continued. “The girl was just symbolic in this; what was important was the ideas she represented. And these things need to be said, they need to come out into the open.”