SOURCE: Estill, Adriana. “Building the Chicana Body in Sandra Cisneros' My Wicked Wicked Ways.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 56, no. 2 (fall 2002): 25-43.

In the following essay, Estill examines the collection My Wicked Wicked Ways alongside Cisneros's novel The House on Mango Street, tracing the narrators' barrio childhoods, their struggles to gain independence of their families, their travels of personal discovery, and their transformations through celebrating control of their bodies and identifying with women of the third world.

Sandra Cisneros' poetry has been long overshadowed by her novel, House on Mango Street (1991), which has received a great deal of critical attention, and by her collection of short stories, Women Hollering Creek (1991), which won her a MacArthur “genius” award. The general oversight of Cisneros' poetic corpus—Bad Boys (1980), My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987), Loose Woman (1994)—is perplexing since Cisneros is arguably one of the foremost Chicana poets and a...