The House on Mango Street

Fiction | Novella | YA | Published in 1984

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-13

Chapters 14-21

Chapters 22-29

Chapters 30-38

Chapters 39-44

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The English Language

This novel explores the theme of language as power. Firstly, mastering the English language grants Esperanza power that her parents do not have. The vignette “No Speak English” captures the way people in her community suffer from not speaking English fluently. Her father spent a long time eating one type of food because he could only say “hamandeggs,” and her neighbor Mamacita feels despair as her baby learns to speak English instead of Spanish.

As an American child with an American education, Esperanza is automatically afforded opportunities that her parents can’t access. She struggles to assimilate into upper class American culture, so reading and writing in English becomes her primary means of managing that struggle. She dreams of escaping poverty with her writing, again emphasizing the importance of language. Through her writing, she can explore what it means to come from two places at once; to carry a Mexican identity simultaneously with an American identity. For example, she discusses the differences between her name in Spanish and English: “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters” (10). The English language gives Esperanza a means to communicate and form an identity independent of her family history. She uses English to rewrite her experiences, to talk about what pains and scares her, and to dream.

Esperanza reads poetry as a child, opening her world up to creative expression. She is often shown reading poetry and books to older women, exchanging poems with friends, and receding into her own poetry when she needs to escape reality, as when she is sexually assaulted. As the author mentions in the foreword, Esperanza must model herself after English-speaking authors because she lives in a time before Chicana literature or Mexican American authorship was widely available to her. Sandra Cisneros is one of the forerunners of the genre, so it is doubly important that Esperanza shows how much speaking and writing in English informed her creatively and professionally.

Sexuality and Gender Roles

Common to the genre of bildungsroman is the theme of sexuality and sexual maturity. Esperanza develops from a child into a young woman who has her first sexual encounter. She details her exposure to sexuality and what it means to develop into a woman by describing her experiences first with older girls and then with boys and men. Her first exposure to sexuality comes from her neighbor, Marin. Marin teaches Esperanza and her friends how to use beauty to attract male attention:

She is older and knows lots of things. She is the one who told us how Davey the Baby’s sister got pregnant and what cream is best for taking off moustache hair and if you count the white flecks on your fingernails you can know how many boys are thinking of you… (27).

Marin introduces the girls to the fun side of growing up. She is an enchanting figure: “Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself” (27). In contrast, Esperanza is surrounded by women who have children at a young age and whose lives seem negatively impacted by their movement into womanhood. Although Esperanza does develop sexual feelings and wishes to explore her body with a man, she does not want to become trapped by marriage and babies. She is equally excited by her changing body as she is terrified. This tension is depicted in “The Family of Little Feet.” Here, Esperanza and her friends play the part of sexually mature women by walking around their neighborhood in high heels. They find the attention they receive titillating: “Down to the corner where the men can’t take their eyes off us. We must be Christmas” (40). Yet they quickly become aware of the danger their “long long” legs (40) place them in when a homeless man offers to pay them for kisses. Esperanza is relieved that she is still young enough to slip back into being a child when she takes the high heels off because “we are tired of being beautiful” (42).

Esperanza’s uncomfortable relationship with becoming a woman is again highlighted in “Beautiful & Cruel.” She both laments being “an ugly daughter […] the one nobody comes for” (88) and declares that she will “not grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain” (88). Esperanza wants to experience the power that beauty can hold over a man, but she does not want to be overpowered by any man. The examples she sees in her community are negative, largely consisting of domestic abuse and unwanted or unplanned pregnancies which limit the lives and choices of women. Esperanza sees that men have more freedom, even when they become sexual or become husbands and fathers. Esperanza rejects sexuality as much as she rejects Mango Street because she sees femininity and domesticity as traps which would keep her stuck at home, like so many of the women in her community are.

When her friend Sally matures more quickly than her, Esperanza experiences great sadness and shame. She sees Sally playing sexual games with two boys in the community garden, and she feels the need to protect Sally. Sally is embarrassed by Esperanza’s immaturity, which shames her deeply. Sadly, Esperanza’s discomfort with sex is reinforced when she attends a carnival with Sally and ends up getting sexually assaulted in “Red Clowns.” This is the last mention of sex or sexuality in the novel, leaving the reader with the impression that Esperanza’s journey from innocence to sexual maturity was traumatic and negative.

The Mexican American Experience

The theme of Mexican American identity runs through the vignettes. Esperanza describes the differences between her name in English and Spanish in “My Name.” She analyzes the way her identity shifts when she focuses on being American (symbolically represented by the English language) and being Mexican: “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters […] it is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing” (10). Esperanza goes on to say that she is proud to carry her grandmother’s name, “but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window” (11). Esperanza rejects her family tradition of marrying young as well as what she describes as the Mexican patriarchy: “Mexicans don’t like their women strong” (10).

Esperanza is deeply critical of her Mexican heritage, all while paying beautiful homage to every intricate detail of her Mexican family and community. She describes her neighbor “Elenita, witch woman” (62) who tells fortunes out of her kitchen: “the top of the refrigerator busy with holy candles, some lit, some not, red and green and blue, a plaster saint and a dusty Palm Sunday cross, and a picture of the voodoo hand taped to the wall” (63). She also addresses the experience of Mexican immigrants in “Geraldo No Name.” Geraldo is a man who immigrated from Mexico and ekes out a life in Chicago. When he is killed by a hit and run driver, his death highlights the fragility of his existence in America. Because he has no identification and was alone in the community, his death is anonymous. Only his first name is known by Marin, who met him in the restaurant where he worked. This vignette conveys the negative way outsiders view immigrants, particularly as Geraldo is left unattended in the hospital with no surgeon or any attempt to save his life: “Just another brazer who didn’t speak English. Just another wetback. You know the kind” (66). Esperanza’s simple words convey the cruelty immigrants experience as well as the true details of their lives.

Esperanza’s careful observations and detailed depictions of her community convey a deep love and respect for her Mexican culture, even as she struggles to forge a new identity as a Mexican American girl. Cisneros repeatedly represents this in her longing for a house of her own. It is not simply that she wants a nicer home like the white picket fenced houses stereotypical of the American suburbs; she wants independence and a break from Mexican traditions which would have her living at home or under a husband’s rule, rather than as a single, independent woman.