The Hockaday School is delighted to announce our chosen text for next year’s Interscholastic Colloquium, to be held on February 13, 2019. We invite students from grades nine through twelve to join us in reading and discussing Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.
As a Chicana writer growing up in Chicago and now living in San Antonio, Cisneros has spoken about how her own experiences of liminality have shaped her writing: “I guess I didn't realize I was gonna be crossing borders my whole life. Even in Chicago when I grew up — because I lived in the border zone between black and white communities. Usually in Chicago, it's so segregated, you have a brown corridor, to create a wall. And I didn't realize that growing up in Chicago, even then, I was living on the border lands. Maybe my job is to be an amphibian so that the water people and land people can understand each other. And I think, especially in this time, climate of fear, who better to travel between these two worlds than those of us who are mixed race, or mestizos. We're the diplomats, the ambassadors, so to speak, during the age of susto [fear].” (2015 Interview with NPR's Fresh Air) Through her writing, Cisneros travels with ease between worlds, not only in terms of geography and culture, but also across academic spaces. The House on Mango Street is deceptively simple. Constructed as a series of vignettes and told in the first-person voice of a young Chicana girl growing up in Chicago, the text continues to speak clearly and poignantly to a wide variety of audiences. For example, Cisneros speaks fondly of moments when she is asked to sign well-worn, dog-eared copies lovingly handed to her by folks who look like they might hail from her old neighborhood. At the same time, students in a variety of levels, from middle school through university and graduate study, pour over the rich, analytical potential of this small, but powerful text, one which, as Ramón Saldívar explains, engages in “the ongoing disruption of the absolute fusion of hegemonic ideologies and the status quo.” When the book premiered at the National Association for Chicano Studies in 1984, Alvina Quintana said of the book, “Only Mango Street defied the poetic form previously privileged by many Chicana writers. […] Cisneros defined a distinct Chicana literary space […], challenging, at the least, accepted literary form, gender inequalities, and the cultural and economic subordination of minorities.” At this year’s Interscholastic Colloquium, our goal will be to engage as a community in the vibrant potential of this text in an interdisciplinary way. We will participate in active, collaborative online discussions through our blog, which will include resources both for teaching and for writing. We hope to encourage submissions in the fields of literary analysis, Latin American & Chicana Studies, art, theater, and creative writing. We are looking forward to an exciting Colloquium! |