Just as her character Esperanza, of The House on Mango Street, is the result of energies of her barrio and its evolving dynamics, the work of Sandra Cisneros can only be understood within the history of the feminist movement, of the Black feminist movement, and of the Chicana movement. Furthermore, it is impossible to understand the existence of a Chicana movement if one does not take into consideration the Chicano movement in the United States, and what it has represented in the struggle for human rights that gained urgency in the 1960s. As Marc Zimmerman writes in U.S. Latino Literature:

The process of creation and recognition of this literature was gradual. From these laboratories of Latino consciousness that accelerated in the 1960s, ‘it took the first relatively large scale wave of Latino students in US universities, in the context of the overall civil rights movement and the emergence of an antiestablishment, anti-Vietnam War counter-culture, to produce both the writers and readers of these new literatures’ (Zimmerman, 10). Zimmerman asks, how can a ‘marginal, subcultural enterprise’ (10) achieve national recognition when the literary production of its members only finds publishing outlets in small publications and small ethnic studies programs?

The recognition of this body of work, we believe, comes not just from the growing number of potential readers, but from the increasing presence of literate and politically active Latinos in several sectors of society. The ‘demands for multi-cultural curriculum’ did not spring from the wider society, but rather from the increasing demands of the Latinos themselves, who were at once attending university in large numbers, and also in search of a literature that reflected their own reality, struggles, and needs. As Paul Guajardo writes in Chicano Controversy, ‘much of the early literature was a form of social protest’ (4).