These days, Sandra Cisneros is relaxed when she walks through Breckenridge Park in San Antonio, her dog Violeta on a leash. She can talk at length about her new way of eating healthy, about the exercise program that has helped her get in the best shape since high school, and about her battles to convince town officials to let her keep her Victorian house in the King William section of this city a whimsical purple color.

A few years ago, she wouldn’t have sounded so relaxed. Alfred A. Knopf has just published her second novel, Caramelo, an ambitious book about her father and the generations before him and after him, a book that took almost a decade to write. But it is not only the story of a family. It is also a 450-page history of Mexico-U.S. relations and pop culture and how the histories of the two countries formed the lives of one family—and thousands of others—who moved fluidly back and forth between two worlds.

While nine years may not be unusual for a book of this scale, sometimes even Cisneros wondered where the project was going. “There were times during the process of writing this book that I really was lost,’’ she said. “In the fifth year and sixth year I was in deep despair. I was very blocked and frightened by the deadline and the enormity of what I had created. I was just trying to tell a simple tale and it had just gotten all out of hand.’’

But she persevered, and the result is a book of great depth that is the sum of the wisdom and maturity as a writer that Cisneros seems to have acquired since 1984, when her first novel, The House on Mango Street, was published. In Caramelo, she empties her notebook and her heart on issues that she has been musing on all of her life: love, her father, the relationship between fathers and daughters, the relationship of a Mexican man with his wife and mother, and the spider’s web of memory and remembrance and the music that accompanied them.

While House on Mango Street, a story of the coming of age of a young Mexican American girl growing up in Chicago, was inspired by the stories of her students when she was teaching, Caramelo is more about her own life. Cisneros is one of seven children born to a Mexican father, an upholsterer, and Mexican-American mother who raised their children in Chicago but traveled to Mexico City often to visit her father’s mother. The family in Caramelo fits that description. But the similarities end more or less there.

“This is not a family memoir,’’ she said in a telephone interview. “A lot of people are going to take it as that. They always take all my writing as factual. It’s fact-based, but I just use it as a springboard.’’

Much has happened to Cisneros since Mango Street was published. Trained as a poet, Cisneros worked as a teacher and college recruiter and spent her nights writing Mango Street. She never imagined the success the book would have. It has sold more than 2 million copies, making her the most widely read Latina author. Her book is frequently on the assigned reading lists for high school and college literature and other courses, and well read by young Latinos and others who hungered for stories they could relate to. The seminal work turned her, almost overnight, into someone everyone wanted to hear from, on all sorts of topics, from immigration to literature. She won a McArthur grant for geniuses. In 1991 she published Woman Hollering Creek, a book of short stories. But with the newfound success, her life came under more scrutiny.

When she painted her house in San Antonio’s historic King Williams section Sherwin-Williams’ Corsican purple a few years ago, the city’s Historic Design and Review Commission ruled the color historically inappropriate. She eventually prevailed, but Cisneros tires of the attention to her every move.

In 1997, her father died of cancer and other complications.

Much has changed in the world of publishing for Latino authors since 1984, when Arte Público Press in Houston.

published The House on Mango Street. Nicolás Kanellos, director of Arte Público, the largest publisher of Latino literature in the United States, said more mainstream houses are “discovering” Latino writers. There are now Latino imprints in major publishing houses, including Rayo, started last year by HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster, and some of them have added Latino editors who understand the books written by ethnic writers that sprinkle Spanish in with English.

“The number of Latinos published in the United States today are super underrepresented,” Kanellos said. “The mainstream houses are publishing just a couple a year, maybe five to six. Arte Público publishes about 30 a year. Maybe five to six is not a lot, but it’s greatly changed from zero.”

Kanellos said Cisneros’ first book was published around the time when more universities were revising their core curriculums and were looking for ethnic writers to represent cultures that had been ignored. That’s the niche many Latino writers have filled. But that has not yet translated into acceptance by the big chain of bookstores, who do not find books by Latino writers as big enough draws to make it to their profit-line focused shelves.

Rene Alegría, of Rayo, said that with the latest Census showing the Latino population at 35.5 million was growing by leaps and bounds, and more Latinos clamoring for books about them, the mainstream houses can’t help but react. He said even the chain bookstores are hiring more Latinos at their executive level.

“There is an explosion of Latino authors right now, and they’re writing unabashedly about their multicultural existence and making no apologies about it, but instead celebrating it, and I find it exciting,” Alegría said.

Writer Julia Alvarez said she sometimes feels as if she and Cisneros are among the viejitas of this genre of writing because in 1984 when House came out and her first book of poetry was published, “you had to go in search of this kind of literature because only the small presses were paying attention.”

“It’s sort of like Columbus discove-ring America. We were already there,” she said. “But of course there’s nothing like the mainstream publishing world announcing that this is part of the literature, part of the American canon, and not just a little minority blip over here that is not to be paid attention to.”

It hasn’t hurt the genre that Cisneros and Alvarez remain best sellers for their publishing houses. Anne Messitte, vice president and publisher of Vintage Books, said The House on Mango Street has been her company’s bestseller for many years. This is why there is so much interest in Caramelo.

Cisneros’ new book, which began with a short story meant for Woman Hollering Creek, was to be a story about her father.

“I knew he was going to die when I was writing the book,’’ she said. “It was kind of a way to carry me through that rite of passage.’’

Cisneros, who said she loved her father dearly, acknowledged that they had many conflicts, mostly stemming from his traditional view of how his only daughter should live: namely, to live at home with her parents until she married. It took him years to understand that her writing was a serious undertaking.

“This book was for my father,’’ she said. “I didn’t know what it was about when I began it. I was just trying to write about a memory I had of a trip to Acapulco. Everything else kind of mushroomed. I was interested in asking questions that so many of us ask as daughters that we aren’t allowed to ask. I created this story to fill in gaps so that I could understand my father and to write his history.’’

And so the book became more than the story of one family. It is also a tome of Mexican and American history, loaded with footnotes and a chronology at the end. It is meatier than House with a more complicated tale.

“When I wrote House, I was a very inexperienced fiction writer because I was trained as a poet,’’ she said. “This book is more crafted and more ambitious.

“With this book I wanted to expand and grow and do something that I hadn’t done before and handle all the people that I knew growing up, all the cousins and uncles, the family that I could recall that I hadn’t written about in House because that was not my focus.’’

Indeed, many of her family members will see themselves in the book, but not exactly the real them. Her mother has read the book only in dribs and drabs, “like arsenic,’’ Cisneros said, perhaps because she is afraid of how the mother in the book is depicted, even though it is not really her.

“It’s as if I took real people and made little puppets out of them and made them do things that maybe they never did in real life, but they probably are in character,’’ she said.

The tale is very much about a family that, like thousands in this polyglot country, live in two places, two countries. While she was writing, many news stories depicted the heartbreak of immigration, such as Cubans leaving their country on homemade rafts, some of them perishing at sea, or Mexican immigrants suffocating to death in hot railroad freight trains.

“There was also so much anti-immigrant sentiment in this time,’’ she said. “People wanted me to speak out and be there for lots of events and it was very hard to be withdrawn and be quiet and work on the book.’’

Cisneros battled her way out of her writer’s block through meditation, and by talking to writers of long works, such as Eduardo Galeano and Dorothy Alison.

And she relied on her faith. She is a Buddhist, she says, but with a sprinkling of Latino spiritual beliefs, including a loyalty to the Virgen de Guadalupe. “I guess you could say I’m a Buddhalupist,’’ she said, laughing.

But she also made it through to the end of the book by returning to that unfinished short story, about a girl named Candelaria with skin the color of caramelo. That section became central to the novel, and it was based on a brief memory Cisneros had of seeing such a girl in real life, in a family trip to Acapulco.

“She was a mulatto, with this incredible colored skin that I’d never seen before,’’ she said. “I saw her for a couple of seconds in my life, and I wondered all these years why she stayed with me. The title really belongs to that little girl.’’ [* Hispanic Magazine]