Jimmy Santiago Baca

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While Kenneth Hartman found a substantive genre through the reiteration of pre-existing texts, Jimmy Santiago Baca is finding significance through the study of his own culture. In terms of establishing one’s authorial credibility, Hartman did not have the duty to examine himself as a gendered or racialized being, whereas Baca is responsible for the latter. While A Place to Stand certainly utilizes its literary allusions to a lesser degree than Mother California and The House on Mango Street, Baca still manages to establish how cultural texts have aided him in developing a legitimate sense of self. “The more I read about my ancestors, the more significant I felt,” Baca confesses, speaking to the mutually reinforcing power of reading about one’s …show more content…
Even so, Baca’s filtered experiences are no match for Sandra Cisneros’s reality as an individual living between the intersections of gender and race.
Unlike the two aforementioned authors, Sandra Cisneros has not been subject to any known interval of physical incarceration; that being said, being a Mexican-American woman in a predominantly white, patriarchal setting, it can very well be assumed that she has experienced forms of psychological and societal confinement in ways which Hartman and Baca have not. In the introduction to her novel, The House on Mango Street, Cisneros speaks frankly about her upbringing, highlighting the tension between her own dreams to be an author and her father’s wishes for domesticity. “Where she gets these ideas about living like a writer, [Cisneros] has no clue,” not yet being subject to the vast amount of writers who would influence her in her later years (xv). The younger self that Cisneros is projecting in the …show more content…
Regardless of what kinds of texts were mentioned in these books, though, each one presented a set of writings which could be bound together by genre, culture, gender, or groups of as much, ultimately acting as a legitimizing force for the authors. As depicted by analysis above, the more marginalized the author, the more they had to actively seek out unique, subject-specific texts, as well as a baseline sense of self-worth. Nevertheless, Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Kenneth Hartman are all bound together by their ability to write their way out of obscurity and past the nearly impassable boundaries of the sphere of white, male academia. By embracing certain communities and paying homage to them in their texts, Cisneros, Baca, and Hartman are able to use citations as a way to achieve credibility as authors outside of the
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