SOURCE: "Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street: Community Oriented Introspection and the Demystification of Patriarchal Violence," in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, edited by Asuncion Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, et. al., University of Massachusetts Press, 1989, pp. 62-71.

In the following essay, McCracken asserts that The House on Mango Street is marginalized by four factors: its ideology, its language, its writer's ethnicity, and her gender. She argues that the book's treatment of patriarchal violence should move it, and others like it, toward being accepted as part of the canon.

Introspection has achieved a privileged status in bourgeois literary production, corresponding to the ideological emphasis on individualism under capitalism, precisely as the personal and political power of many real individuals has steadily deteriorated. In forms as diverse as European Romantic poetry, late nineteenth-century Modernismo in Latin America, the poetry of the Mexican Contemporáneos of the 1930s, the...