The House on Mango Street is a 1984 novel by Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros. Structured as a series of vignettes, it tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicana girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. Based, in part, on Cisneros's own experience, the novel follows Esperanza, over the span of one year in her life, as she enters adolescence and begins to face the realities of life as a young woman in a poor and patriarchal community. Elements of the Mexican-American culture and themes of social class, race, sexuality, identity, and gender are interwoven throughout the novel.
The House on Mango Street is considered a modern classic of Chicano literature and has been the subject of numerous academic publications in Chicano studies and feminist theory. The book has sold more than 6 million copies, has been translated into over 20 languages, and is required reading in many schools and universities across the United States.
It was on The New York Times Best Seller list and is the recipient of several major literary awards, including the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. It was adapted into a stage play by Tanya Saracho, which was staged in Chicago in 2009.
Because the novel deals with sensitive subject matters, such as domestic violence, puberty, sexual harassment, and racism, it has faced challenges and threats of censorship. In spite of this, it remains an influential coming-of-age novel and is a staple piece of literature for many young adults.
Background Cisneros has discussed the relationship between her own personal experiences and Esperanza's life, as depicted in The House on Mango Street.Such as in Like her protagonist, Esperanza, Cisneros is Mexican-American and was born and raised in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago, yet, there are differences. For instance, where Esperanza has two brothers and a sister, Cisneros was "the only daughter in a family of seven children". Earlier, Cisneros suggested that as the only girl in a family of boys, she often felt isolated. Cisneros attributes "her impulse to create stories" to "the loneliness of those formative years".
While completing an MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Cisneros first discovered a sense of her own ethnic "otherness,” and at this time, she felt marginalized "as a person of color, as a woman, and as a person from working-class background". In an interview, Cisneros stated that during her graduate studies, when she began writing The House on Mango Street, she found the academic atmosphere highly discouraging. She remembered finding her classmates' backgrounds very different than her own and realized she had little in common with them: "I was so angry, so intimidated by my classmates that I wanted to quit. But ... I found a way to write … in reaction to being there, I started to have some Mango Street, almost as a way of claiming this is who I am. It became my flag". Cisneros created Esperanza from these personal feelings of displacement.
Synopsis The House on Mango Street covers the formative years of Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl living in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood with her parents and three siblings. Before settling into their new home, a small and run-down building with crumbling red bricks, the family moved, frequently, always dreaming of having a house of their own. When they finally arrive at the house on Mango Street, it is not the promised land of their dreams, but Esperanza's parents claim that Mango Street is only a temporary stop, before they reach the promised house. While a significant improvement from her family's previous dwellings, Esperanza expresses disdain towards her new home, because it is not a "real" house like the ones she has seen on TV. Pining for a white, wooden house with a big yard and many trees, Esperanza finds her life on Mango Street suffocating and yearns to escape. She begins to write poetry, to express these feelings. Esperanza begins the novel, with detailed descriptions of the minute behaviors and characteristics of her family members and unusual neighbors, providing a picture of the neighborhood and examples of the many influential people surrounding her. She describes time spent with her younger sister, Nenny, and two older girls she befriends in the neighborhood, including Alicia, a promising young college student with a dead mother, and Marin, who spends her days babysitting her younger cousins. Esperanza highlights significant or telling moments, both in her own life and those in her community, mostly explaining the hardships they face, such as her neighbor being arrested for stealing a car or the death of her Aunt Lupe.
As the vignettes progress, Esperanza matures and develops her own perspective of the world around her. Esperanza, eventually, enters puberty and changes sexually, physically, and emotionally, beginning to notice and enjoy male attention. She befriends Sally, an attractive girl who wears heavy makeup and provocative clothing and who is physically abused and forbidden from leaving her home by her strongly religious father. Sally's and Esperanza's friendship is compromised, when Sally ditches Esperanza for a boy at a carnival, leaving Esperanza to be sexually assaulted by a group of men. She recounts other instances of assault she has faced, like an older man forcibly kissing her at her first job. Esperanza's traumatic experiences and observations of the women in her neighborhood, many of whom are controlled by the men in their lives, only further cement her desire to leave Mango Street. It is only when she meets Rachel and Lucy's aunts, who tell her fortune, that she realizes her experiences on Mango Street have shaped her identity and will remain with her, even if she leaves. As the novel ends, Esperanza vows that after she leaves, she will return, to help the people she has left behind.
Structure The novel is composed of 44 interconnected vignettes, of varying lengths, ranging from one or two paragraphs to several pages. The protagonist, Esperanza, narrates these vignettes in first-person present tense.
In the afterword, for the 25th-anniversary publication of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros commented on the style she developed for writing it: "She experiments, creating a text that is as succinct and flexible as poetry, snapping sentences into fragments so that the reader pauses, making each sentence serve her and not the other way round, abandoning quotation marks to streamline the typography and make the page as simple and readable as possible." Cisneros wanted the text to be easily read by people like those she remembered from her youth, particularly people who spent all day working, with little time to devote to reading. In her words: "I wanted something that was accessible to ... someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father."
In 2009, Cisneros wrote a new introduction to the novel. Here, she includes a few remarks on the process of writing the book. She had first come up with the title "The House on Mango Street;” under it, she included several stories, poems, and vignettes that she had already written or was in the process of writing. She adds that she does not consider the book a novel but a "jar of buttons," a group of mismatched stories. These stories were written over different periods; the first three were written in Iowa, as a side project, while Cisneros was studying for a MFA. When orchestrating this book, Cisneros wanted it to be "a book that can be opened at any page and will still make sense to the reader who doesn't know what came before or comes after." She says the people she wrote about were real, amalgamations of persons she met over the years. She tailored together events of the past and the present, so that the story being told could have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that all the emotions felt are hers.
Characters
Esperanza Cordero – The House on Mango Street is written through the eyes of Esperanza Cordero, who is an adolescent girl living in a working-class Latino neighbourhood in Chicago. Esperanza is intrigued by the idea of being a Mexican American woman in Chicago, which reflects the author, herself, just 15 years prior to publishing this book. We follow this young woman coming into her sexual maturity and observe her undying struggle to make new possibilities for herself. The reader also encounters Esperanza living between two cultures, including the Mexican one, which she encounters through her parents, and the American culture, which she finds herself living. Throughout the book, we see Esperanza reject her Chicana community, as a means to forge and establish her own identity.
As her name suggests, Esperanza is a "figure of hope, a 'fierce woman,' on a complex pursuit for personal and community transformation." Esperanza uses her house in Chicago to question her society and the cultural customs that weigh on her, due to her identity as a young Chicana woman. She observes the women of her community, to find a role model of her own, and she looks at both their negative and positive aspects and uses what she has learned from her observations, to form an identity for herself.
Magdalena "Nenny" Cordero – She is Esperanza's youngest sister. The protagonist mentions that they are both very different from one another.
Rachel and Lucy Guerrero – They are sisters, around the same age as Esperanza and Nenny. They are originally from Texas, but now, they are living on Mango street. They buy an old bike, together, and share it, between them. They are described, in the novella, as having "fat popsicle lips" like the rest of their family. They all share a moment, in the book, where they are trying out high heels together. It isn’t until a man tries to convince Rachel to give him a kiss that they give up "being beautiful."
Sally – She is one of Esperanza's closest friends, and she is mentioned in several of the vignettes, in the novel. There is one full vignette dedicated to this character. The author describes her as "the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke." This is the first phrase in the chapter, and it seems to embody the type of dreams Sally holds for herself. The protagonist is attracted to Sally's way of being and considers her to be a true friend. She likes being around her.
Sally seems to represent the vicious cycle of domestic violence and repression felt by women on Mango Street. She is utterly desperate to find a man to marry her, to escape the beatings and maltreatment she gets from her father at home. Her mother cares for her cuts and bruises, allowing for the violence to perpetuate, and both mother and daughter give excuses to the father. The bare fact that Sally marries at such a young age to a man that ends up treating her just like her father, shows how this cycle is so ingrained in the way of life of many women, and passed l, from generation to generation. The author pities this character, not blaming her for what happened to her, as Sally was very young and too immature to fully understand her surroundings or to find a way out.
Marin – She is a cousin of the Louie's family, neighbors of Esperanza's family, and she has come, from Puerto Rico, to stay. She is older than Esperanza, and she wears dark nylons and a lot of makeup. She has a boyfriend, back in Puerto Rico, and she shows off her mementos from him to the younger girls, sharing that he promised they would get married, soon. Esperanza looks up to her, as a figure of wisdom and of knowing many things. Marin imparted a lot of advice to the younger girls. She wore shorter skirts, she had pretty eyes, and she received a lot of attention, yet the protagonist will always remember her as someone who was always waiting for something to change, something that never came. This character represents many of the young women in the neighborhood.