From the start of her life Sandra Cisneros didn't have what you or I would consider a "normal" childhood. "As a person growing up in a society where the class norm was superimposed on a television screen, I couldn't understand why our home wasn't all green lawns and white wood like in the ones in 'Leave it to Beaver' and 'My Father Knows Best'".(Ghosts). She had a tough time believing her fate was to be spent in poverty, so she looked for an escape. An escape that led her to a book called 'The Little House', which she would continually check out of the library as a kid. It was her favorite because it contained her dream house, one house for one family that was secure and lasting.

Throughout Cisneros' life she was never allowed much time to get settled into one place or one home. Her Mexican-American Mother, her Mexican father, and her six brothers were constantly moving between Mexico City and Chicago-

Five years after receiving her M. A. from the writing program at the University of Iowa, she returned to Loyola University in Chicago. She had previously earned a BA in English at Loyola University, this time she went to work as an administrative assistant. Prior to this job, she worked in the Chicano barrio in Chicago teaching to high school dropouts. Through these jobs, she gained more experience with the problems of young Latinas. Her time spent teaching at the Latino Youth Alternative High School shows how much she reaches out to the less fortunate of her minority.

Discussing her poetry with David Mehegan of the Boston Globe, Cisneros stated that her poetry "is almost a journal of daily life as woman and writer. I'm always aware of being on the frontier. Even if I'm writing about Paris or Sarajevo, I'm still writing about it from this border position that I was raised in." In her poetry, as in all her works, Cisneros incorporates Latino dialect in ways that reveal the fears and doubts unique to Latinas and women in general.

Cisneros' alienation gave rise to anger, which in turn prompted the writing of House on Mango Street; the lyrical novel describing the life of a young Mexican-American girl growing up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, much as Cisneros herself did. In an attempt to establish the di

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Approximate Word count = 895
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)