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  • Writer's picturemorgan cavanaugh

THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET.

The House on Mango Street written by Sandra Cisneros is a book told through various vignettes about a teenage girl named Esperanza, a Puerto Rican, living in Chicago with five other people in a small house. This story touches on the aspect of being a 13-14 year old teenage girl and the experiences that come along with it.

A tiny, red house with small steps, no front yard, one bedroom, one bathroom, and a regular set of hallway steps is not what Esperanza had in mind. The promise her parents had made of them getting a house had a white picketed fence, a backyard, MULTIPLE bedrooms, MULTIPLE bathrooms, a basement just the whole works. Little did she know what kind of adventure she was about to experience.

This book was one of the best coming-of-age stories I’ve read in a long time. Cisneros did an amazing job with showcasing the sweet, innocent girl at the beginning of the story. Esperanza is introduced as this little girl – in all honesty she comes off much older than is described in the book – who is maybe 12-14 years old within the telling of the book. As the story goes on I realized Esperanza’s brothers were barely spoken of after the first couple of vignettes and I wondered as her and her brothers grew up did they just grow apart and wasn’t a big influence into Esperanza’s life? The different vignettes engages the reader on this new journey Esperanza is getting ready to go through in her life after moving with her family. Most adolescent stories begin with a move for new beginning and fresh start.


The House on Mango Street was also very explicit in letting the readers know about the culture in which Esperanza was coming from but also living in. She’s from a Puerto Rican lineage that is now living in Chicago, which doesn’t seem to be the suburbs from the different responses Esperanza would receive when she would disclose that her family lived there. It got to the point she got so embarrassed of where she was now living that she would deny it, which could play into the factor of being a young girl and being insecure about yourself and what is associated to you. Throughout the book Esperanza has been embarrassed or wanting to change something about herself like any adolescent girl went through. It started off with her name, after the kids at school making fun of her name she wanted to ‘baptize herself under a new name.’ Secondly came the chanclas which is translated to ‘flip flops’ or ‘a disciplining technique’ in this vignette Esperanza is pissed at her mother for not buying her proper shoes to wear to her cousin’s baptism which resulted in her having to wear her school shoes. (I mean what adolescent girl doesn’t bump heads with their mom especially after asking over and over for one thing that you swear you need to complete this look and now you have to go be pretty with ugly shoes on, it’s the worst!).


With Esperanza’s time longing on Mango Street she starts to blossom into a young girl as well, growing out into her hips and having her first male crush (how cute!). Sire. He was that guy that girls would notice looking at them, and would swear the whole world just stopped. With blossoming also comes wondering eyes outside of Sire, there was the old creep at her first job. Within seconds of reading the incident I had never been so ready to fight a character before. I was stunned to believe that Esperanza didn’t even think twice about telling someone but then it dawned on me that it could’ve been because she was scared to lose her job which I get as a young girl those kind of allegations to bring to the forefront could be scary. However then I realized that Esperanza could’ve seen nothing wrong with what the man did because of her culture. After some research I came across an article that shows non-verbal signs of greeting in the Puerto Rican culture. ("Non verbals in the Puerto Rican culture")

I love that as Esperanza matured (which we did see start to happen towards the second half of the book) that Esperanza got deeper invested into her writing. Majority of me wants to believe that Esperanza was able to get out of Mango Street due to her writing which is talked about a lot in the story. In regards to Esperanza’s aunt and the witches at the end of the story tell her to stay grounded in her writing because it would do nothing but help her as she grows as an individual. My fingers were/are crossed for Esperanza that she got out through her writing and was able to make something out of herself. I hope she was able to get the house that she wanted and have all the bums she wanted living in the attic. I saw her maturity develop as she began to stop cracking jokes at her neighbors with her friends. As her friends were judging Mamacita for not coming outside because she was too fat, Esperanza thought deeper than the woman’s looks and believed it was because she didn’t know English. It was kind of sad to see her innocence taken advantage of by Sally, whom I did feel bad for in regards to being abused by her father, but to me I think Sally could’ve been a better friend. In my opinion, Sally could’ve stopped Esperanza from getting forced onto just because Sally wanted to go and hang out with some boy. It just amazes me that Esperanza looked up to Sally, especially being the older one, that Esperanza was led astray by who Sally really was.


Once again Cisneros did amazing writing this story, as stated above this is one of my favorite narratives of the ‘coming-of-age’ genre. I loved seeing Esperanza grow as a person and a character from the year of living on Mango Street. I see nothing but growth of Esperanza from here on out, hopefully there’s a second part to this story or maybe somewhere down the road. However, in my mind Esperanza is living her best life and is one of the best writers wherever she is living her life now.

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