And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

this helped her achieve the way Sandra Cisneros taught. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza Cisneros wrote: "It's why I moved from Illinois to Texas. "
Cisneros says of this moment: "So to me it began there and that's when I intentionally started writing about all the things in my culture that were different from them — the poems that are these city voices — the first part of Wicked Wicked Ways - and the stories in House on Mango Street.

but not belonging to either culture. Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions working as a teacher a counselor a college recruiter a poet-in-the-schools and an arts administrator and has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities to the extent that The House on Mango Street has been translated worldwide and is taught in American classrooms as a coming-of-age novel.