From the Barrio to the Brownstone : Literature: Chicana author and poet Sandra Cisneros has arrived as the toast of one of the country’s leading publishing houses as she maintains her cultural identity.

As a fresh, unfettered Chicana author read her stories last week, two images intruded persistently. One was a photograph dominating a Sunday New York Times business section: five women at the top of Turtle Bay Books, “Random House’s Glitzy New Imprint.” The quintet radiated optimism, unanimity and power. The second was the optimism, unanimity and power onstage at a UC Santa Barbara symposium last month, as five Chicana artists debated the danger of becoming the “unique other” of their community.

At 36, author and poet Sandra Cisneros is intimately connected to both worlds, about to break into one, not willing to leave the other. Somewhere between the two she will have to find her own balance; it may not be easy.

Rocking back on the heels of her black and white cowboy boots, Cisneros is a blast of energy as she reads delightedly from her new book, “Woman Hollering Creek,” to an audience of 600 Los Altos and Workman high school seniors, crammed onto gym bleachers.

She’s arrived as a star, no longer one of the “illegal aliens of American lit” but a writer on the brink of mainstream literary recognition, with the full machinery of Random House behind her. It’s just published “Woman Hollering Creek” and reissued “The House on Mango Street,” barrio glimpses that have made these kids jostle for a glimpse of their author.

Her new story is about Carmen. But Cisneros is fed to the teeth with strong women always dying at the end. Her Carmen is “La Fabulosa,” heroine of “A Texas Operetta,” who works for a San Antonio law firm.

As Carmen Berriozabal appears, Cisneros reads, in her light, confident voice, “Big chi chis. I mean big. Men couldn’t take their eyes off them. . . . Anytime they talked to her they never looked her in the eye. It was kind of sad.” And the gym explodes. Whistles, shouts of “Yeah!,” the girls crack up, the boys look at their shoes, grinning.

When she finishes the short, salutary story, and the roar dies a little, Cisneros talks to her audience--Latinos, blond surfer types, Koreans, a sprinkling of Chinese, a few African-Americans--intimately, as if dropping secrets: “You know some things growing up in your communities that heads of state are never going to see. And once you’ve seen it, you can’t un-know it: Who’s serving you. Who’s washing the dishes. Who’s sweeping the halls. What you know at a very early age gives you empathy and compassion.

“When I was 11 years old in Chicago, teachers thought if you were poor and Mexican you didn’t have anything to say. Now I think that what I was put on the planet for was to tell these stories. Because if I don’t write them, they’re not going to get the stories right. Use what you know to help heal the pain in your community.”

For the room’s writers she has nuts-and-bolts advice: Imagine yourself at your kitchen table, in your pajamas. Imagine one person you’d allow to see you that way, and write in the voice you’d use to that friend. And don’t ever think writing is easy. “My father couldn’t understand that I could go to college and still not support myself. My mother, my six brothers had to support me. Making a living from writing is something new to me.”

Two days later, Cisneros sits at breakfast over endless cups of black coffee, considering the pressures and balances of her life. Not for the first time she wonders, “What right do we have writing for a people when we’re not of them any more?” The sting of the question has been softened in the past by the dry words of her author-friend, Eduardo Galeano (“The Book of Embraces”): “Only intellectuals romanticize about poverty; poor people don’t want to be poor.”

Daughter of a Mexican father and a Chicana mother, Cisneros has been rat poor. To this day, even mice terrify her, a fear she now identifies “not as a female thing, but a class thing. To me mice are all my poverty, the whole neighborhood I grew up in, embodied in a little skittering creature that might come to get me at any moment. I don’t ever want to live like that again. It’s horrible.”

For her, the answer is to keep one foot in Academe where she loves her writing students and knows they need her, then to take a semester off, writing in the San Antonio “mixed barrio” that feels just right to her, with its houses with families and cars on the lawn next to rehab wooden mansions.

“Mango Street’s” bite-sized stories were a mosaic of a less comforting world where Cisneros grew up, about children who never knew they’d missed childhood. Alicia, who wakes up before dawn to make the lunch box tortillas, now that her mother is dead; Sally, who met a marshmallow salesman and married him in another state where it’s legal to get married before eighth grade.

Cisneros wrote them after a traumatic discovery at the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writer’s Workshop in the late ‘70s, that nothing in her painstakingly acquired education had given her what she needed, a sense that her voice was important. Somehow, though, she had resilience enough to look inside herself to see what she knew. “Mango Street,” was begun when she was 22, finished when she was 28, published two years later by Arte Publico Press.

“Woman Hollering Creek” is a leap forward for her as “Mango Street’s” seeming artlessness is replaced by a complex variety of voices and points of view.

Two more Chicana writers: Ana Castillo (“The Mixquiahuala Letters”) and Alma Luz Villanueva (“The Ultraviolet Sky”), will be published in spring, 1992 by Anchor Books. Clearly, the Chicana voice is rising, and the media are being alerted at every step.

Mirabella has just done a full page on Cisneros’ “spicy brand of text Mex,” may the caption gods forgive them. At the American Bookseller’s convention in June, Cisneros will be presented by publishing legend Joni Evans at a gala party inaugurating Turtle Bay Books’ new brownstone home.

Mice to turtles in less than 10 years? By telephone, her editor, Julie Grau, is confident. Cisneros is extremely conscious of the responsibility of being one of the first Chicana voices out. “Then, hopefully, in a few years we’re not going to have to rely on those labels so much,” Grau says. “This should just become another form of regional fiction.

“What’s nice is that this isn’t a 23-year-old first writer; this is a mature woman and the range of voices she’s able to capture is extraordinary. This is the work of a poet.” Or a securely grounded woman, hollering in ringing tones, for all the world to hear.