‘House on Mango Street’ joins global classics
More than a century ago, a British bookbinder turned publisher named Joseph Dent established the Everyman’s Library.
Its goal was grand, to put the world’s classics in the hands of every reader who wanted them.
The goal was also modest, even “proletarian,” San Antonio scholar John Phillip Santos said of the original and affordable pocket-sized reprints.
Over the years, it became a global “library of record.”
But more representative of diverse authors? That journey was glacial.
So much so that next month, Santos emphasizes, the very first classic by a Mexican American writer, a U.s.-born Latinx author, joins the Everyman’s Library shelf.
It arrives in Penguin’s re-release of “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros, a native Chicagoan who now lives in Mexico and spent a long season in San Antonio.
Her coming-of-age novella, written in ultra-short episodes and scenes, was first published in 1983. It propelled her career.
It made “The House on Mango Street” required reading. It remains on the syllabi of U.S. middle and high school classes and college coursework.
Set for publication Feb. 20 in the United States and March 7 in the United Kingdom, “Mango” joins an auspicious group of authors in the Everyman’s Library, including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë.
She’ll join George Orwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende, among other writers of the world’s classics.
This week, Cisneros was in San Antonio. She and Santos will be guests on Texas Public Radio’s podcast “Book Public,” hosted by Yvette Benavides. It airs Feb. 20.
Santos, a professor of borderlands humanities and creative nonfiction at the University of Texas at San Antonio, wrote the book’s new introduction, describing it as beautifully republished, including an annotated bibliography, a timeline of Cisneros’ life and lots of “little bells and whistles.”
His essay situates Cisneros in a “compressed account of the emergence of Chicano letters, in the movimiento period and the significance of what Mango Street represents.”
The two met in the early 1980s, when both were finalists for the Guadalupe Cultural Art Center’s literary directorship.
He doesn’t go into specifics in his introduction, but it was awkward.
Santos, the first Mexican American Rhodes scholar, recalls the call he got from someone at the Guadalupe this way, “Hey man,” he heard, “the other finalist for the job is coming in and we can’t pick her up. “Can you pick her up?” The center hired her. Santos and Cisneros became fast friends and began a long dialogue about writing and Dharma.
Santos addresses it in the introduction, referring to Cisneros’ “late teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s call to become ‘spiritual revolutionaries’ and her selfdescription as a ‘Buddhalupista.’ ”
In describing her success and influence, Santos credits Cisneros as pivotal in San Antonio’s transformation into the city it was meant to become, one with a clear, colorful and dominant Mexican aesthetic.
“People had this vision of another way of being San Antonio, connected to our history and connected to cultura,” Santos said. “In a lot of ways, they ushered in this very different sensibility in San Antonio.”
Some readers will note that none of the writers who came out of the Chicano Movement were selected for inclusion in the Everyman’s Library, though we can hope some of them will.
That will chide readers cheering for the 1971 novel, “Y No Se Lo Tragó la Tierra/and the Earth Did Not Devour Him,” by Tomás Rivera and the equally beautiful 1972 novel by Rudolfo Anaya, “Bless Me, Ultima.”
Both of them are coming-ofage American classics.
“Sandra was very different from the kind of Chicano-era literary esthetic,” Santos said.
Her lens was perhaps wider. Already a traveler to Mexico, she’d been in Europe, and Santos noted her “matrix of influences.”
There’s the other reality. Cisneros became far more widely read, selling 7 million copies of “Mango Street” nationally and translated into dozens of languages.
“Cisneros brings a profound new embrace of a unique literary legacy of the Americas to the Everyman series, as an American writer who is mestiza, feminista, urbana, cosmopolitana, and sin vergüenza — all without shame,” Santos writes in the introduction.
She became part of a strong movement of Chicana and other U.S. Latina feminist writers.
Penguin UK describes “Mango Street” as a masterpiece, “one of the most cherished novels of the last 50 years.”
“It is also one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’ ‘Main Street’ or Toni Morrison’s ‘Sula,’ it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct.”
I love Cisneros’ own description of her stories and the people who populate them.
“They know best when there’s no more to be said.
“The last sentence must ring like the final notes at the end of a mariachi song — tan tán — to tell you when the song is done.”