A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

by Sandra Cisneros

I don’t know anything, but I know this: whatever is done with love, in the name of others, without self-gain, whatever is done with the heart on behalf of someone or something, be it a child, animal, vegetable, rock, person, cloud, whatever work we make with complete humility, will always come out beautifully, and something more valuable than fame or money will come. This I know.

At that moment with events quivering before and after me, and me in that nowhere and everywhere called my life, I was, as one would say in Spanish, “emotioned.”

I have a theory—one’s most charming trait is also one’s fatal flaw; the one thing you like about somebody is usually their worst defect as well. So too with communities. The comadre-ismo, as I’ve witnessed it, has kept other women out. On the other hand, the opposite extreme of this xenophobia is the over-nurturing among the women that creates the “That’s nice, mi’ja” syndrome, which doesn’t help anybody in the long run and fosters mediocrity.

I don’t want to quedar bien, be nice, with the men around me at the expense of my own dreams and happiness.

I want to be bad if bad means I must go against society—el Papá, el Pápa, the boyfriend, lover, husband, girlfriends, comadres—and listen to my own heart, that incredible witch’s broom that will take me where I need to go.

Rage is a place to begin, but not end.

Nobody’s going to do the work for you. If you’re serving others other than your art, then it just takes longer.

And frankly I don’t want to hear about your kids.

We either feel beauty or we don’t.”

I think this is why artists live the way they do. Arranging and rearranging the little objects of every day until there is a beauty that heals.

How come nobody told me an aria, a piece of stained glass, a painting, a sunset can be God too?

As always I’m fascinated with how those of us who live in multiple cultures and the regions in between are held under the spell of words spoken in the language of our childhood.

Back then I made the mistake, as only the naive can, of confusing the books with the author. When I met you again this year, I’m happy to report I was wiser. The book is the sum of our highest potential. Writers, alas, are the rough drafts.

I’ve since been filled with a desire to travel somewhere that might explain and answer the question “Where are you from?” and, in turn, “Who are you?” Isn’t this why all writers write, or is it just those of us who live on borders?

Is home something you move toward instead of going back? Homesickness, then, would be a malaise not for a place left behind in memory, but one remembered in the future.

What I’ve longed for is a refuge as spiritual as a monastery, as private as a cloistered convent, a sanctuary all my own to share with animals and trees, not one to satisfy the needs of others as my previous homes have done, but a house as solid as the Little House, a fortress for the creative self.

In the First World, Mexico is considered a Third World nation. But in order to create that hierarchy, certain values were put into place. Money. It appears to me the countries with money created this hierarchy where they would come first. Are communities who have suffered the most, the cultures with the most spiritual wealth?