‘Mango Street’ author Sandra Cisneros has long left Chicago, though Chicago won’t leave her: Case and point is her new book, ‘Martita, I Remember You’

Sandra Cisneros, at 66, firmly ensconced on Chicago’s literary Mount Rushmore, hasn’t lived in Chicago in ages. Not since she made a young, bold splash. If that doesn’t make you feel old, consider: “The House on Mango Street,” her signature, so routinely assigned to students now it’s practically a middle-school textbook, marks its 40th anniversary in a few years. What had once read like an urgent dispatch about a young Latina in a contemporary Chicago is now a period piece, about a Chicago long past and a Chicago that stubbornly remains. Which is not a bad way of describing “Martita, I Remember You,” her latest, so brief it’s barely a novella. It tells the story of a Chicago woman who finds a letter written years ago, when she was a different person, in a different Chicago.

She has a life Cisneros once had, and a life she escaped.

All this time later, Cisneros is still baking madeleines.

Six million copies of “Mango” later, one beloved millennium-era bestseller (“Carmelo”) later, several books of poetry and many short stories later, a secure place in the pantheon of American literature later, Cisneros still come across a little nostalgic. Though when I mention the Proustian compulsions in her writing, and that tendency to singe nostalgia with anger, I hear her flinch on the phone.

“I don’t see myself as nostalgic,” she says, “I see myself present, but with gratitude for the past, especially horrible mistakes. People hear about me in terms of success and awards but I dwell on failures. Life is how we respond when we fail. That’s what motivates. When I was a teacher, a working-class person being an academic, I felt like an invader. I was near suicide at 33. So, coming from a working-class home, you overachieve. It’s not nostalgia, it’s not a Proustian memory. I have files in my head — a street corner, something I ate once, something I should have said that one time, nothing important — but in a piece of fiction, you have validated holding on to that for so long.”

For a while, when she spoke to school children, she would present her fifth grade report card from St. Callistus on the West Side, which is entirely Cs and Ds, with a single B (for conduct, of all things). It was her worst report card, and the only one that she still owns.

She’s in Mexico now. She’s lived there most of the past decade, in a small town in Central Mexico with streets built of large stones. It played Rome in the eponymous HBO series, though Cisneros sees Tuscany. Or San Antonio with a bit of Boston. “Tourist town,” she says. High walls, gardens, a former mining village that made its wealth on the backs of slaves. She likes it there, prefers it there. As she once wrote, “I no longer make Chicago my home, but Chicago still makes its home in me.” Which, based on everything I had heard and read about her relationship to Chicago, sounded generous.

Which is why I was also surprised when Cisneros asked me to please, eat a Chicago hot dog for her — she so misses a good Chicago dog. With potatoes, she adds. You mean, like Gene & Judes, I say, where the dog is piled and pressed tightly with fries?

Yes, she shouts, so good!

Last time she was there with a cousin, who suddenly turned to a stranger in line and said that Sandra here is a very famous writer. Cisneros ended up taking pictures with the line. “It was so funny,” she says, “because, normally, being a writer, it never comes up with family.” You have to sympathize. Where would they start? With the National Medal of Arts in 2015, presented by President Obama? The McArthur “genius” grant? That she was one of the first Latinas to have a contract with a major publishing house?

“Sandra opened so many doors for people coming up behind her,” said Reggie Young, a Chicago writer and teacher who became friends with Cisneros in the early 1980s, “so many doors I think her presence kind of obscures her contributions. She never had the production of, say, Toni Morrison, but her influence on young people can’t be overstated. A lot of writers are intellectuals foremost and Sandra came out of the barrio and spoke loudest to those with no connection to literature before they had read Sandra Cisneros.”

And yet her comfort with Chicago is complicated.

At the moment, she sounds freshly in love with the city. Indeed, she sounds so surprised at her own reaction that, with regards to Chicago, she says she’s “healing.”

Her last trip helped.

She flew in last spring to visit family and get vaccinated. Her parents are gone but all six brothers live here — as well as an aunt, cousins, nephews, nieces, friends. “Chicago is frantic, every time I return the traffic is worse, my brother is swearing at drivers, we’re trying to calm him down — it gets scary! But this visit was so ... pleasant. I stayed in a hotel in Wicker Park, close to my old neighborhood, I saw all six brothers, which is a miracle. Saw friends. Maybe it was the pandemic, we are more appreciative, but I wasn’t a big author, I was in town for more than an afternoon. I’d knock on stranger’s doors and ask if I could pick some of their lilies of the valley, which my mother used to grow and it doesn’t grow where I live now. I went to my old apartment (in Bucktown) and even offered them a book. I don’t ever think of Chicago as calm, and this time was calm.”

Cisneros moved with her family around Chicago as a kid, though “The House on Mango Street” is based on their home on the 1500 block of North Campbell, near North Avenue. She recalls a dug-in, institutional neglect within neighborhoods she grew up around. Until she was a teenager, she didn’t know people could own books. She had never seen a bookstore. She says every book her mother brought into the house had a Chicago Public Library stamp. Her mother, a West Side native, was disappointed by motherhood — Cisneros once wrote she “felt duped by life and sighed for the life that wasn’t hers.” Her father, a native of Mexico City and World War II veteran, was formal, conservative and expected modest things of Sandra. “At some point I decided I would be a teacher, I would write on weekends and summer vacations, but I never said any of that out loud.”

“I remember our father kind of wanting Sandra to be a TV weather girl,” said Henry Cisneros, the second oldest of her brothers. “He would point at the TV while we were watching. Really, he wanted her to be comfortable. Things were changing then, women had more options, but he was a domineering Mexican father and it felt kind of normal.”

Sandra attended Loyola University, but primarily, she said, because her father thought she could “shop for a husband.” He would not let her live on campus, and so she commuted for years. “I don’t think he changed his mind about me just getting married and having kids until I got a MacArthur (genius grant, in 1995). When he saw “the amount of money and knew how many years he would have had to work to have earned that, he said, Mi’ja, don’t get married, they would just take your money. He lived to see me buy my first home, I had a gardener, a personal assistant, a handyman. And I was paying for it with my pen. So my father, he apologized at last, he said, Mi’ja, I’m sorry.”

Raul Nino, an Evanston-based poet and teacher, first met Cisneros in the early ‘80s, when she had been working on “Mango Street” for a few years. She became his school counselor at Loyola. “They had this equal-opportunity program for minorities and low-income students, and so I ended up there, and I remember meeting her in her office, she asked what I do for fun and I said I wrote poetry and she reached across the table and grabbed my hands and asked what I write, who I read, have you read this person, have you read that person. I walked out with her own books. She’s still like that, working off her principles and her feminism, her universality, always siding with the underdog.”

She wrote a chunk of “Mango Street” over a single weekend, as a graduate student at the University of Iowa. But after school, Cisneros moved back home, still chipping away at the book between jobs, taking years to finish the slender novel. She worked as a college recruiter, she taught drop outs at the Latino Youth High School near Douglass Park and, for a short time, she worked at Peoples Gas on Michigan Avenue, handling paper files as the permanent staff learned their way around computers. The main character in her new book “Martita, I Remember You” has this very job, “going to work with clothes that always give you away,” disappointed at the still-unrealized promise of her life. The book centers on Marita, who receives a letter that sends her back into memories of friendships and freedom in Paris. It was sparked by a real letter that Cisneros received long ago; indeed, she began work on the story 30 years ago, setting it aside for decades, only finishing last year when the pandemic freed up a lot of time.

She never became Martita, of course.

“The book reminds me of a Sandra I knew, one in love with Paris, still in her early days,” Young said, “but the main character, she has a life Sandra would never have settled for.”

Of the seven Cisneros kids, Sandra is the only one who left Chicago. Some are retired now, some run the family’s upholstery business, one is a telephone company engineer, one is a physician. “I think, to an extent, Chicago became not very endearing to her because she traveled,” Henry Cisneros said. “She lived in Greece, Provincetown, Texas — you learn how provincial Chicago actually feels.” When she moved to Mexico in 2013, “I detached myself of everything I used to own. I have a clay pot I made at Loyola, but not much else. It was like I had died and I was asked to act as my own estate executor.”

She said when she returns to Chicago now, she still mourns the decline of the marginalized communities she grew up in. But she’s warming to the place. If it’s not love, it’s a solid like. “I realize it would have been hard for me to be who I am without the city.” As a struggling young writer, in dicey apartments, she set improbable goals. She wanted national recognition before she turned 30; and she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts just four years out of college. She wanted to be blurbed by the famous writers she admired; she’s since been blurbed by Dorothy Allison, Edwidge Danticat, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gwendolyn Brooks. “For a while I had a selfish goal to have Studs Terkel live long enough to blurb me, and then he did.”

She transcended the gas company.

She became the rarest of writers — one who becomes an influence on other writers. When the Obama Administration awarded her the National Medal of Arts, she considered not attending the ceremony, she had mixed feelings about his immigration policies and “didn’t want to be a pawn to appease the Latino community.” She knows she is held as an example. Though next year she publishes her first book of poetry in decades, a “Mango Street” opera adaptation is nearly finished and a “Mango” TV series is now in development, her Instagram feed is almost entirely devoted to blurbing others.

I asked if she became the writer she imagined.

No, she said. “Every book I get closer, except the aims always go higher.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com