The House on Mango Street was written by Chicana author Sandra Cisneros and published in 1984. The novel became an instant classic of Chicano fiction and is still taught in schools and universities across the country.
The novel is written in a series of vignettes or loosely connected short stories and sketches narrated by Esperanza Cordero, a Chicana girl of approximately twelve who lives in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago.
Esperanza's vignettes explore her own life over a year as she matures and enters puberty, as well as the lives of her friends and neighbors. She paints a picture of a neighborhood marred by poverty and filled with women whose opportunities are limited to those of wife and mother. Young Esperanza dreams of a way out, of a life of writing in a home of her very own.
Chicano literature began along with Chicano culture following the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. In 1848, Mexico and the United States signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago, giving the United States ownership of a large portion of what was formerly Mexico, including present-day California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and more.
The Mexican people residing in these areas became US citizens and began to create a culture that was distinct from both Mexican and American cultures. In the 1960s and 70s, young Mexican-American activists began to reclaim the term Chicano, which was often considered derogatory. This period also coincided with a rise in Chicano literary production.
Sandra Cisneros is a key figure in the Chicano literary movement. Her book of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), made her the first Chicana author to be represented by a major publishing house. Other important Chicano authors include Luis Alberto Urrea, Helena María Viramontes, and Tomas Rivera.
The House on Mango Street: A Summary
The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a Chicana girl on the cusp of adolescence. Esperanza lives in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago with her parents and three siblings. The novel takes place over the course of a year as Esperanza begins puberty.
Throughout her childhood, Esperanza's family has always moved from place to place while her parents repeatedly promised the family would one day have a home of their own. The house on Mango Street is just that, the first home the Cordero family actually owns. However, it is old, rundown, and overcrowded by Esperanza's family. It doesn't meet the girl's expectations, and she continues dreaming of having a "real" (Chapter One) house.
Esperanza is often ashamed of the shabby house on Mango Street. Pixabay.Upon moving in, Esperanza befriends two neighboring girls, sisters Lucy and Rachel. The three girls, and Esperanza's little sister, Nenny, spend the first half of the year exploring the neighborhood, having adventures, and meeting the other residents. They ride bicycles, explore a junk store, and also begin experimenting with makeup and high heels.
Esperanza's vignettes introduce the reader to the colorful cast of characters on Mango Street, individuals struggling with the effects of poverty, racism, and oppressive gender roles.
The vignettes particularly explore the lives of the women in the neighborhood, many of whom suffer in relationships with abusive husbands or fathers. They are often confined to their houses and must focus all their energy on caring for their families.
Esperanza knows that this is not the life she wants for herself, but she also begins enjoying male attention as she enters puberty. When the new school year begins, she makes friends with another girl, Sally, who is more sexually mature than Esperanza or her other friends. Sally's father is abusive, and she uses her beauty and relationships with other men to escape him.
Esperanza is sometimes intimidated by Sally's experience and maturity. Their friendship ends in tragedy when her friend leaves her alone at a carnival and a group of men rapes Esperanza.
After this trauma, Esperanza resolves to escape Mango Street and have a house of her own one day. She does not want to be trapped like the other women she sees around her, and she believes that writing can be a way out. However, Esperanza also comes to understand that Mango Street will always be a part of her. She meets the elder sisters of Rachel and Lucy, who tell her that she will leave Mango Street but make her promise to return later to help the women remaining there.
While The House on Mango Street is a work of fiction, it was inspired by the author's own childhood, and some autobiographical elements are in the novel. Like Esperanza, author Sandra Cisneros grew up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood with a Mexican father and Latina mother, dreaming of her own home and a career in writing. As a young girl, Cisneros also saw writing as a way to break out of traditional gender roles that she found oppressive and forage her own identity.
Characters from The House on Mango Street
- Esperanza Cordero is the protagonist and narrator of The House on Mango Street. She is around twelve years old when the novel begins, and she lives in Chicago with her parents and three siblings. Over the course of the novel, she matures physically, mentally, and emotionally, embarking on a quest to establish her own identity.
Esperanza means "hope" in Spanish.
- Nenny Cordero is Esperanza’s younger sister. Esperanza is often in charge of caring for Nenny. She usually finds her annoying and childlike, but the two become closer throughout the novel.
- Carlos and Keeky Cordero are Esperanza's younger brothers. She says little about them in the novel, only that they won't speak to girls outside of the house, and they make a show of playing tough at school.
- Mama and Papa Cordero are Esperanza's parents. Papa is a gardener, and Mama is an intelligent woman who dropped out of school because she was ashamed of her shabby clothes. She repeatedly encourages Esperanza to keep studying and do well in school.
- Lucy and Rachel are sisters and Esperanza's neighbors and friends.
- Sally becomes Esperanza's friend later in the novel. She is a stunningly beautiful girl who wears heavy makeup and dresses provocatively. Her beauty, however, often causes her abusive father to beat her if he suspects her of even looking at a man.
The House on Mango Street: Key Themes
The House on Mango Street explores many interesting themes, including coming of age, gender roles, and identity and belonging.
Coming of Age
The House on Mango Street is Esperanza's coming-of-age story.
Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. -Chapter Twenty-eight
Over the course of the novel, she enters puberty, moving from childhood into life as a young adult. She matures physically, sexually, mentally, and emotionally. Esperanza and her friends begin experimenting with makeup and high-heels; they develop crushes on boys and receive advice from older women.
Esperanza also experiences trauma that forces her into maturity. She is forcibly kissed by an older man at her first job, and she is raped by a group of men when her friend Sally leaves her alone at a carnival.
Gender Roles
Esperanza's observation that boys and girls live in different worlds is exemplified time and time again in The House on Mango Street.
The boys and girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They've got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can't be seen talking to girls. -Chapter Three
Throughout the novel, men and women are often literally in different worlds, the women confined to the world of the home and the men living in the world outside. Nearly all of the characters in the novel conform to traditional gender roles. Women are expected to stay at home, care for their families, and obey their husbands. Men often use violence to ensure their wives and daughters' compliance.
As Esperanza grows and matures throughout the novel, she sees the limits of these gender roles more clearly. She knows she wants to be more than someone's wife or mother, which urges her to look for a life outside of Mango Street.
Identity and Belonging
Throughout The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is looking for the place where she belongs.
I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. -Chapter Four
She feels out of place everywhere, in her family, neighborhood, and school; even her name doesn't seem to suit her. Esperanza wants a different life from those she sees around her, but she has no model for what that might be. She is left to make her own way and construct her own identity.
Symbols in The House on Mango Street
Some key symbols in The House on Mango Street are houses, windows, and shoes.
Houses
In The House on Mango Street, houses are an important symbol of Esperanza's life and aspirations.
You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there. I nodded. -Chapter One
The family's Mango Street home embodies everything Esperanza wishes were different about her life. It is "sad and red and crumbly in places" (Chapter Five) and a far cry from the "real house" (Chapter One) that Esperanza imagines living in one day.
For Esperanza, a real house symbolizes belonging, a place she can call her own with pride.
Traditionally, the home is seen as the woman's place, the domestic domain where she cares for her family. How does Esperanza subvert traditional gender roles in her desire for a home of her own?
Windows
Windows repeatedly symbolize the trapped nature of the women in The House on Mango Street.
She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. -Chapter Four
In the above quote, Esperanza describes her great-grandmother, a woman who was reportedly forced into marrying her husband when he "threw a sack over her head and carried her off" (Chapter Four). There are many women in The House on Mango Street for who the window is their only view of the outside world as they live trapped in the domestic world of their home.
Many women in The House on Mango Street spend their lives looking wistfully out of windows. Pixabay.Shoes
The image of shoes repeatedly appears in The House on Mango Street and is particularly related to feminity, maturity, and Esperanza's budding sexuality.
I looked at my feet in their white socks and ugly round shoes. They seemed far away. They didn't seem to be my feet anymore. -Chapter Thirty-eight
The shoes that various women wear, be they sturdy, elegant, dirty, or so on, speak to the characters' personalities. Shoes are also an important symbol of maturity. In one vignette, Esperanza, Lucy, and Rachel acquire three pairs of high-heels and walk up and down the street in them. They are harassed by some men and take their shoes off when they become "tired of being beautiful" (Chapter Seventeen). Removing the shoes allows them to return to childhood for a bit longer.
Shoes symbolize feminity, maturity, and sexuality in The House on Mango Street. Pixabay.The House on Mango Street: An Analysis of the Novel's Structure and Style
The House on Mango Street is a structurally and stylistically interesting novel. It is composed of forty-four vignettes ranging in length from just a paragraph or two to a couple of pages. Some of the vignettes have a clear narrative, while others read almost like poetry.
A vignette is a short piece of writing that focuses on specific details or a certain period of time. A vignette does not tell a whole story by itself. A story might be made up of a collection of vignettes, or an author might use a vignette to explore a theme or idea more closely.
In her introduction to the 25th-anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros describes wanting to write a book that ignored the normal boundaries of literature, something that blurred the lines between poetry and prose and defied genre.
She also imagined the book as something anyone could read, including working-class people like those she grew up with, and those that populate the novel. With the novel's structure, each vignette can be enjoyed independently; the reader could open the book at random and start reading wherever they would like.
The House on Mango Street - Key takeaways
- The House on Mango Street was written by Chicana author Sandra Cisneros and published in 1984.
- The House on Mango Street is a novel made up of forty-four interconnected vignettes.
- It tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a Chicana girl on the cusp of adolescence living in a Hispanic neighborhood of Chicago.
- Some key themes in The House on Mango Street are coming of age, gender roles, and identity and belonging.
- Some key symbols in The House on Mango Street are houses, windows, and shoes.
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