SOURCE: Rangil, Viviana. “Pro-Claiming a Space: The Poetry of Sandra Cisneros and Judith Ortiz Cofer.” MultiCultural Review 9, no. 3 (September 2000): 48-55.

In the following essay, Rangil argues that Cisneros's writing provides new roles and affirming definitions for Latinas.

When ethnic or minority literatures first appeared in the United States during the 1960s, writers may have felt it necessary, even essential, to validate the existence of their works. Through the demarcation of specific characteristics they legitimated a new kind of writing, making it more accessible and perhaps even more palatable to an uninitiated, “foreign” (Anglo-American) audience. Their minority category dictated very rigid parameters that for Chicanos and Latinos were mostly determined by content (political-didactic) and heritage (Mexican American and Puerto Rican). Because of the need to claim “the right of formerly un- or misrepresented human groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined politically and intellectually as normally...