Furthermore, it has represented an important position in debates over multiculturalism-the ability to speak to specific cultural experiences and yet claim literary, even canonical, value. Ironically, this anti-academic novel has become widely acclaimed as a 'literary masterpiece,' beginning in 1985 when it won the Before Columbus Book Award.

In an attempt to establish the difference of this kind of home from the one her fellow students remembered, Cisneros sought what she calls an 'anti-academic voice-a child's voice, a girl's voice, a poor girl's voice, a spoken voice, the voice of an American-Mexican' (xv). Cisneros' alienation gave rise to anger, which in turn prompted the writing of House on Mango Street the lyrical novel describing the life of a young Mexican-American girl growing up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, much as Cisneros herself did. She says, 'What was this guy talking about when he mentioned the familiar and comforting 'house of memory'? It was obvious he never had to clean one or pay the landlord rent for one like ours' (xiii-xiv). As a graduate student in the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, Cisneros felt alienated by discussion of Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. Knopf's 1994, ten-year anniversary reprinting of her House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros recalls what initially inspired the now internationally acclaimed novel.

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