At 60, Sandra Cisneros is adjusting to life in a picturesque mountain town, putting another book to bed, and keeping herself open to inspiration for what will fill the coming decade. If her December birthday fiesta was an indication, her sixties will be anything but dull.
She set the party’s tone by wearing a “doll cake” — a pinata-like skirt with three tiers that covered most of her body and an oversized bouquet pinned to one side that dwarfed her head. Guests were required to come in pastry-themed costumes, the better to get in the mood.
The celebration was at a mezcaleria known for good food, and when it closed for the night, the doll cake and cookies, pan dulce and Bimbo bread paraded to San Miguel de Allende’s main square where mariachi musicians, splendid in white and gold, serenaded them. Joined by passersby, the sweet treats danced until the musicians left.
“But then I shouted and begged them to come back and play two more, and they did!” Cisneros wrote the next day on her website, about her best birthday ever. With maturity, she has learned not only to ask for what she wants, but to go ahead and buy it.
Sandra Cisneros
■ When: Wednesday, 7 p.m.
■ Where: Stranahan Theater. Seating is first-come, first-served.
■ Admission: Tickets, $10, will be sold at the door and at library branches.
■ Book signing: Her talk will be followed by a Q&A and a book signing. Books will be for sale.
For those of us who couldn’t join the fun, Cisneros will be in Toledo at 7 p.m. Wednesday, speaking at the Stranahan Theater as part of the Authors! Authors! series cosponsored by The Blade and the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library. Perhaps she'll roll her Rs, which she does with remarkable gusto.
Born in Chicago, Cisneros has crafted two novels — The House on Mango Street (1984) and her favorite, the rollickiing Caramelo (2002) — as well as collections of short stories and poetry. A key figure in Chicano literature (work by Mexican-Americans) she's won the $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the Texas Medal of the Arts. She spoke with The Blade from her home in San Miguel.
As a writer, she becomes a fly on the wall listening to conversations. Like an amphibian comfortable underwater and on land, she has straddled divergent cultures as the only girl in a family of six boys, as the daughter of a Mexican immigrant growing up in America's Midwest, and as an American living in Mexico.
"Stories come to me from someone; a native here with very little money or someone who's very wealthy and enjoys a luxurious lifestyle. Both those people confide in me and tell me things ... I feel like it's my duty to write about both these kinds of voices, both world views."
It can promote understanding among different groups.
"As writers we have a spiritual obligation to do work of healing, to do work of transformation, to allow those people who can't move as easily as we can to be transformed by the words we report. It's what I try to teach [young] writers."
She would like Mexicans and Americans to understand how much both stand to benefit by eliminating their mutually lucrative relationship with illegal drugs and the guns that accompany them.
"I think the most important thing the people in Mexico think the people in the United States need to hear is that Mexican people think the United States is a country of violence. And the violence in Mexico is being produced through a symbiotic relationship we have with the United States."
"This violence wouldn't occur if there weren't people making themselves rich from selling drugs that are consumed in the United States and from selling arms to these drug lords. It's a symbiotic relationship and if both countries wanted it to end, it could."
Cisneros moved two years ago to San Miguel, which attracts a significant population of retired Americans and Canadians whose money goes farther south of the border. She'd been invited to speak here four years ago and "liked it so much I came back a month later on my own. And I had a spiritual awakening … It was one of those moments called an epiphany where you wake up in the middle of the night. It just popped in my head. I don't know who spoke to me … but I know what it said was this: ‘You are not your house.' "
She was deeply invested in San Antonio, Tex., where she'd lived on and off for decades. She owned a house, started two foundations, raised money, built a library, brought in writers. "I was taking care of everybody and it was costing me a lot of energy and stressing me out."
This is Sandra Cisneros’ list of what she knows, compiled the day after she turned 60:
1. Fear, anger, resentment, shame, and ego block me from receiving guidance daily from my highest self. I am a channel for light. (By “light” I simply mean “love,” for lack of a better word.) When I let go of these distractions, then I write and live from a place of forgiveness, generosity, compassion, and humility.
2. Work I do on behalf of others with no personal agenda always rewards me in ways better than money or fame.
3. When in doubt, sleep on it. Ask and you’ll get an answer.
4. Divina Providencia always takes me to a better destination than I planned. I just need to remember to get out of my own way.
5. Err on the side of generosity.
6. Animals and trees are the wisest gurus I know.
7. Trust what comes from intuition; doubt what comes from my brain.
8. Love does not die.
9. Cultures that are spiritually advanced, like India and Mexico, know that the border between the living and the dead is porous. The United States is still a spiritually innocent country, wary of border-crossers.
10. Beauty is a curse. Youth is a liability.
11. Or to simplify it: “Animo, valor, y nunca miedo.” (Encouragement, courage, and fearlessness.) Something I overheard two construction workers say on Calle Santo Domingo today.
‘You are not your house,' she interpreted to mean she could simply fold up her Texas tent and leave.
"For somebody of her stature, I find her engaging, warm, humble; she really responded to humanitarian matters and issues that concern me," says Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in Toledo. Last July when she delivered a lecture in North Carolina, she spent a day visiting labor camps with him, lending an ear to the stories of migrant farm workers. "You can't find a more sympathetic, open person than Sandra anywhere," says Velasquez, also a MacArthur fellow.
Cisneros lives by herself in this sunny town, "if you call living with five dogs living alone," she chuckles. She reads voraciously, loves to walk, likes to sleep, is deeply spiritual, and appreciates indigenous culture.
In Mexico, boundaries that are rigid in the United States, such as between spiritual and physical realms, are often porous, she says. Explaining the epiphany that drew her to Mexico is likely to raise skeptical eyebrows among Americans but not with Mexicans.
"A wonderful thing about Mexico is that there isn't a separation between the dead and living, the past and the present. It's circular time, not linear time." A couple of kids might break dance next to a church built in the 1600s, and nearby a group in traditional garb may be doing an indigenous dance."
"We're very close to nature and the seasons. In some ways it's like a pre-conquest society; the entire year revolves around festivals that are connected to Mother Earth. I love that I'm connected to all these seasonal changes and to the land."
She hasn't written a novel since publishing Caramelo, a decade in the making, in 2002.
"I was so exhausted writing that one I thought I'd never write another one because it took too long. It was like being in a convent or being in jail and I said I'd much rather have my freedom to live and explore it through other art forms. But now I'm being tempted by the idea of a novella."
Some of her favorite reads include Lectures from the Argentine Master: Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges, The Time of the Dove by Merce Rodoreda, and the work of Jean Rhys.
Contact Tahree Lane at tlane@theblade.com and 419-724-6075.
First Published April 19, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
