I have to say that the traditional role is kind of a myth. I think the traditional Mexican woman is a fierce woman.
Sandra CisnerosI never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre.
Sandra CisnerosFriends started saying, "Oh, don't come. No vengas. It's dangerous for us, and we live here." Then there's also the issue, if you go back, and you happen to be Mexican-American, you get treated very differently [in Mexico] than if you're blond. If you say something wrong, they say, "Why don't you learn your mother tongue?"
Sandra CisnerosEvery book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.
Sandra CisnerosThis is the age of fear and so many of us feel afraid to speak out about what has happened to our lives in the wake of 9/11. Television promotes the world as a scary place for the United States and this justifies peeling away every element of privacy we had before. The media is monopolized so we don't even hear a lot of dissent about this new era.
Sandra Cisneros