Author Sandra Cisneros is considered one of the pioneers of novels written about Latina culture from a young female perspective.

Sandra Cisneros had not yet been introduced to the writings of Virginia Woolf when she began her remarkable novel “A House on Mango Street,” but she instinctively understood that desperate longing for a space, a place, a room of one’s own.

“Not a flat. Not an apartment. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own.” Cisneros wrote. “With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after. Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.”

“Of course,” says Cisneros, now 54 and chuckling at such youthful audacity. “I didn’t want a room of my own. I wanted a whole house.”

The dissatisfied, fearful and, yes, angry young woman who wrote “Mango Street” — just released in a 25th-anniversary Vintage paperback — is a slightly strange but not unpleasant memory to Cisneros.

“I began the book at 21 and finished it in my 28th year,” she says from a Minneapolis hotel room while she searches for an outlet to plug in an iron. (“This is what you do on tour — look for outlets.”)

“Imagine if you looked at the yearbook of your 20s. Imagine the things you’re thinking. But for me the book has aged well. I do see a lot of wisdom. I see myself asking the right questions. I’m pleased I asked those questions in my 20s.”

Back then, the Chicago-born Cisneros had doubts about “the expectations society and Latino fathers had for women.” Her father, she writes in a new introduction, didn’t understand why she wanted her own apartment or wanted to be a writer: “The father wants his daughter to be a weather girl on television, or to marry and have babies.”

Teaching impoverished students caused her to ponder art’s role in social change — “I felt a sense of impotency at being an educator with a whole class of girls who couldn’t live my life. I was privileged compared to them, and I just felt overwhelmed by my sense of powerlessness to change their lives.”

And, privately, her fury was growing over entitled, would-be writers she met — “privileged with trust funds — I didn’t even know what a trust fund was ’til I was in grad school!” — who could casually call themselves artists and presume to decide what counted as literature.

Colorful characters

From these roiling thoughts and emotions emerged bright, observant Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana who lives with her family in a series of rented houses and apartments in Chicago. She longs for a real house, away from her neighborhood and her school where “they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth.”

Readers responded enthusiastically to Esperanza and the colorful neighborhood figures to whom she introduced them: Cathy Queen of Cats, Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays, and Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin. A slim novel in 45 evocative vignettes,” The House on Mango Street” has sold more than four million copies in the United States and been translated into more than a dozen languages, most recently Greek, Thai and Serbo-Croatian. It is often the focus of community-reading initiatives in such places as Miami, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Fort Worth and El Paso, and this spring in Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City.

“It’s such an important book, because it’s the first encounter many non-Latinos had with Latino culture,” says Cristina Garcia, author of “Dreaming in Cuban” and “The Handbook for Luck.” “This is one of those books that’s a bridge to the culture, and there’s a Latina girl at the heart of it, the most forgotten of characters. No one put them center stage literarily or otherwise. For Esperanza to be front and center of our consciousness, a tiny ambassador to the Latino world, with her wonderful humorous and very specific observations, is a great gift.”

But the book has a universal appeal as well, says Cisneros’ friend, author and playwright Denise Chavez.

“Sandra captured the essence of young womanhood,” Chavez says. “The book is based in the tradition of Latina culture but also has become a universal coming-of-age story. The writing is beautiful, the images profound … Sandra was able to tap into the lushness and fecundity and grace and beauty of being a young woman. I told her I wish I’d written the book!”

Emotional rescue

Cisneros had viewed herself mostly as a poet when she started work on “Mango Street,” and her exquisite mastery of language is apparent in Esperanza’s budding feminist voice. She is now author of the poetry collections “Bad Boys,” “My Wicked Wicked Ways” and “Loose Woman”; a story collection, “Woman Hollering Creek”; and the hefty novel “Caramelo,” about a Mexican-American family much like hers. But as a young woman at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — she had previously earned an English degree at Loyola University — Cisneros at times foundered.

“I was stumbling and bumbling around,” she says. “I didn’t know about feminist Latina authors. I was hacking my way through thickets, thinking, ‘I know there’s a path here somewhere.’ What helped is when I realized there were no other working-class people, especially Latina or Americans of color, telling the story I needed. Emotion got me through. I was depressed. I got angry … We saw a flood of viewpoints from people with power, and people who wrote other kinds of stories were made to feel as if they didn’t count and made to feel inferior. So I wrote the book I wanted to read.”

These days Cisneros, who lives in San Antonio with (at last count) six rescued dogs — you can see them on her Web site, www.sandracisneros.com — finds that assisting fledgling writers is paramount. She’s writer in residence at Our Lady of the Lake University and president and founder of the Macondo Foundation, a group of writers, journalists and artists with an eye toward community-building and social change.

Cisneros’ attention may be drawn to new voices — “I want to use my energies now that I’m older to work with writers who are engaged in community building and activism” — but circumstances indicate readers will remain enchanted with “Mango Street” for years to come.