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103 Q In summer 1997, the now well-known “purple house” controversy ignited in the King William District in San Antonio, quickly spreading throughout the city and the nation. At issue was acclaimed author Sandra Cisneros’s choice to have her late-Victorian cottage, built circa 1903, painted purple, or more precisely Sherwin Williams Corsican Purple, in 1997. With headlines such as the “King William ‘Color Flap,’”“The Color Purple,” and “Purple Politics,” the story dominated the local and state press that summer, eventually obtaining national status with a story in the New York Times. While the city’s Historic Design and Review Commission , along with the King William Association, decried the author’s choice of purple as historically “inappropriate” and “incorrect” for the neighborhood, Cisneros explained that purple was a color “I consider Mexican and beautiful” (qtd. in Satz 1997). For the author and many of her supporters, the outcry against Cisneros’s purple was not about the color itself but about the racial-economic segregation and exclusion of Mexicanos in San Antonio’s history and built environment : “My history is made up of a community whose homes were so poor and unimportant to be considered worthy of historic preservation. No famous architect designed the houses of the Tejanos, and there are no books in the San Antonio Conservation Society (SACS) library about houses of the working-class community, no photos romanticizing their poverty, no ladies’ auxiliary working toward preserving their presence. Their homes are gone; their history is invisible. The few historic homes that have survived have access cut off by freeways because city planners did not judge them important” (1997). As Cisneros’s remarks elucidate , efforts at preserving and documenting the neighborhoods of San Antonio have worked to eliminate the presence of working-class Mexicanos in the city’s historic records. c h a p t e r 4 Postnationalist and Domesticana Strategies sandra cisneros’s the house on mango street and carmen lomas garza’s familias 104 Domesticana Two years prior to the purple house uproar in 1997, Cisneros won a MacArthur “genius” grant, having already established her reputation as an acclaimed author with her highly praised The House on Mango Street (1984, with subsequent reprints, and a 2009 twenty-fifth anniversary edition).1 The text, a collection of vignettes set in Chicago’s lower West Side, follows Esperanza Cordero’s desire for a “house of one’s own”: “A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias” (1991a, 108). The book represents both the young protagonist Esperanza’s challenge to patriarchy and the exclusion of Esperanza, a Mexicana, and the others of her Latina/o community, due to racial-economic segregation.By 1996,the book had sold over half a million copies,quickly becoming required reading in primary and secondary school curricula in the United States. Today, the text has sold over four million copies, has been translated into seventeen languages, been adapted into a play by several theater companies, and continues to be requisite school reading, although the text is still “much better known in minoritized US Latino/a literature circles than in mainline American, Latin American, and comparative literature seminars and institutions” (Saldívar 2012). The irony, of course, is that in 1997, while The House on Mango Street—a story about a young Chicana’s desire for space in the nation, signaled through the space of the domestic and the metaphor of “purple petunias”—received critical acclaim and overwhelming praise in 1997, Cisneros herself found it difficult to create a space of her own through the visual language of Mexican culture and identity in San Antonio.2 The widespread celebration of The House on Mango Street and the local exclusion of Cisneros’s purple color palette—representing Mexican presence, space, culture, and identity in the nation—illuminates a tension that has surrounded the text since its initial publication in 1984: Much of the discourse and curriculum related to the text have celebrated Esperanza’s desire for a “house of one’s own” with a universalizing and celebratory rhetoric that continues to exist alongside the material and structural exclusion of Latina/os and Latina/o culture in the United States. Cisneros wrote and published The House on Mango Street during the 1980s and 1990s, decades characterized by a resurgence of immigrant backlash through English-language-only policies; “Save Our State” initiatives ; and ballot proposals such as Proposition 187 in California, which sought to deny healthcare and education...

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