The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is about
a year in the life of a young Mexican American girl, Esperanza Cordero. The
book begins when her family has moved to a house on Mango Street. Although, it is the first house her
family has owned, it isn’t Esperanza’s dream house. It’s in the middle of a
crowded, poor, noisy Latino neighborhood.
Esperanza doesn’t like Mango Street or her house and can’t wait to get
out.
In the first half of the book Esperanza is a child. She talks and plays with her friends in
the neighborhood. She makes two new friends and they share a bike “3 ways” (p. 15). She loves going to the junk store with her baby sister Nenny
and looking at things she wants but can’t have (pp. 19-20). She gets in silly fights with her
friends Rachel and Lucy over nothing (pp. 37-38). One day, Esperanza and her friends walk around the
neighborhood in high-heeled shoes and attract unwanted attention and end up
having to run home. Esperanza has no
idea about boys and thinks “the boys and the girls live in separate worlds” (p.
8). Esperanza looks up to the
older girls in her neighborhood with their “dark nylons and lots of makeup” (pp.
23, 27). All this shows how young
Esperanza acts in the beginning part of the book.
In the beginning of the book, Esperanza is embarrassed of
who she is and where she comes from.
She doesn’t like her name that she inherited from her great
grandmother. She doesn’t want to
be like her great grandmother who she describes as sad and waiting (pp. 10-11). She wants to separate herself from her
Mexican family and background.
She’s ashamed of her house which is small and crumbling (p. 4). She hates her neighborhood that others think is bad and
dangerous (pp. 13, 28). She has
very little understanding of the less fortunate people that live in her
neighborhood like the Vargases with their too many kids and too many problems (pp.
29-30). Esperanza doesn’t want to
belong to this sad, poor, run down community.
At this point of the book, Esperanza is a child who wants to
escape her life. She has no
empathy for the disadvantaged people around her. She doesn’t realize that this is all part of who she is and
that she has responsibilities to her community.
