16 pages • 32 minutes read
Abuelito Who
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
"We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks (1959)
One of Gwendolyn Brooks’s most famous poems, “We Real Cool” utilizes parallelism and simple syntax. First published in her poetry collection entitled The Bean Eaters, “We Real Cool” describes a group of teenagers who hang out at the pool hall, drinking and skipping school with the prophetic warning that the teenagers will die soon. The poem is both a celebration of rebellion and a challenge to authority. It is a cautionary tale about getting into trouble.
"Emplumada" by Lorna Dee Cervantes (1981)
Lorna Dee Cervantes is considered one of the major voices of the Chicana literary movement and is a contemporary of Sandra Cisneros. Her work explores the cultural differences between Mexican, white, and Indigenous communities in the Americas. In addition, her work tackles the issues of border identities and colonial oppression. The title poem of her collection, “Emplumada,” describes withering flowers and the hummingbirds that fight over access to them.
"A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass" by Gertrude Stein (1914)
Gertrude Stein is a renowned figure in literature and art for her contributions to Modernism. Her personal art collection and her close relationship with painters like Picasso and Matisse situate her as an essential contributor to the development of Modernism as a genre. Her controversially opaque poetry reflects the profound influence Modernist painting had on her writing and is characterized by associations between words, objects, and feelings. This seemingly—but not necessarily—random stream of consciousness writing leads to Stein’s somewhat confusing, open-ended, and disjointed poetic style.
Further Literary Resources
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1983)
Sandra Cisneros’s most famous novel, The House on Mango Street, is told from the perspective of a young girl named Esperanza as she enters her teens. The book explores Esperanza’s various friendships and relationships within her Mexican American neighborhood in Chicago. Told in the form of vignettes, the novella directly confronts sexism, sexual violence, classism, bi-cultural identity, and racism through the characteristically simple syntax and diction that has come to define Cisneros’s writing style.
"A Room of One’s Own" by Virginia Woolf (1929)
A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay by Modernist writer Virginia Woolf based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College in 1928. Throughout the essay, Woolf employs metaphors and analogies to explore historical gender discrimination against women. The essay’s essential position is that all that women truly require to become writers is money and a room of their own. The essay greatly inspired Cisneros’s 1983 novel The House on Mango Street.
Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987)
This semi-autobiographical work by Gloria Anzaldúa is considered a pioneering piece of Chicana literature. It examines the Chicano and Latino experience through the lens of gender, race, colonialism, and identity. Throughout the text, Anzaldúa alternates between English and Spanish, demonstrating her idea of “The New Mestiza Consciousness,” a bi-cultural, bi-racial, pre-and post-colonial identity that situates itself in the middle, straddling all disparate and opposing identities.
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A schoolteacher reads aloud Sandra Cisneros’s 1987 poem “Abuelito Who.”
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By Sandra Cisneros
