The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

First published: 1984

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Bildungsroman

Time of plot: Mid-1960’s

Locale: Chicago

The Story:

In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Esperanza Cordero and her family had not always lived on Mango Street. The family of six lived in a series of run-down apartments before finally buying a small house with crumbling brick. Esperanza is disappointed. It is not a real house, not the house she imagined they would someday live in. They say this house is only temporary, but Esperanza knows better.

Esperanza loves her family but resents having to look after her little sister, Nenny. She hopes someday to have a best friend to play with instead. She also wants a new name, because her Spanish name means “sadness” to her. She makes up Zeze the X. She meets Cathy, who gossips about the neighbors and says that her father wants to move because people like the Corderos keep moving in. Esperanza and Nenny meet Lucy and Rachel, newly arrived from Texas. They pool their savings to buy a bike for ten dollars and take turns riding it. They visit the black man’s junk store and hear his music box play. Esperanza knows that some people are afraid of her neighborhood and call them “Those Who Don’t.” She explains, “They think we’re dangerous.” She herself feels safe and secure in her neighborhood of brown-skinned people.

Esperanza’s friend Alicia, the college student, gets up one morning and sees a mouse behind the sink. Her father says there is no mouse. Alicia is afraid of two things in life—her father and mice. She studies at night and, ever since her mother died, gets up with the “tortilla star” every morning to make the lunches for her brothers and sisters.

Esperanza passes the days out in the street playing jump rope with Nenny, Lucy, and Rachel and singing rhymes about their neighbors. One day, the woman in the family of little feet gives them some old high heels, and they wear them through the neighborhood. The grocery man says they are too young to be wearing such shoes, but they do not take them off until a whiskey bum offers Rachel a dollar for a kiss. Then they all run away and hide the shoes under a bushel basket on Lucy’s back porch.

Esperanza often thinks she does not fit in. She would like to eat in the school’s canteen with the kids who bring lunch instead of walking home for lunch, but the Mother Superior yells at her. She is also embarrassed about her rice sandwich. At her little cousin’s baptism, she hates wearing scuffed brown shoes with her pretty new dress, but her Uncle Nacho makes her feel great by saying she is the prettiest girl there and dancing with her until everyone claps.

Esperanza is growing up. The girls gossip about becoming physically mature. Esperanza gets her first job. It does not go well because an Asian man tricks her by pretending to be friendly in the lunchroom, then grabbing and kissing her hard. Her abuelito (grandfather) dies, and she feels sorrow for her grieving father. Her Aunt Lupe is dying from an incurable bone disease. The girls make fun of Lupe one day, but Esperanza feels so bad she begins to bring her aunt books and poems, which she reads to her. Aunt Lupe is the first person to hear Esperanza recite one of her own poems. She is also the first to encourage Esperanza to be a writer. Soon after, she dies.

Esperanza goes to see Elenita, the witch woman, to have her future read in the cards. She is disappointed because Elenita tells her she will have “a home in the heart” when what she wants is a real house of her own. She hears stories about her neighbors and friends. Just arrived from Mexico, Geraldo is killed in a hit-and-run accident. No one is notified. Edna’s grown daughter Ruthie keeps saying her husband will come to take her home, but he never does. Earl, the jukebox repairman who lives in Edna’s basement, brings his wife home occasionally, but no one can agree about what she looks like. Sire, the boy Esperanza falls in love with, is older; she spies on him and Lois walking together and dreams of feeling the weight of a boy’s arm around her.

Sally is the girl the schoolboys call beautiful. Her father beats her for going with boys, but Esperanza does not believe the stories the boys tell about Sally. Another girl, Minerva, already has two children, although she is not much older than Esperanza. She reads her sad poems to Esperanza.

Esperanza continues to daydream about the house she will own one day, in which she will let bums live in the attic. She believes she is the ugly daughter in whom no man will be interested. Her mother, on the other hand, is beautiful, smart, and could have been somebody.

Esperanza and the girls have a secret place they called The Monkey Garden, where they go to escape their mothers. One day Esperanza finds Sally there with Tito and his friends, holding Sally’s keys in exchange for a kiss. Esperanza tells on them, but neither Sally nor Tito’s mother cares, so Esperanza feels stupid that she tried to rescue her friend. One night, Sally lies to Esperanza and leaves her alone at the circus with a boy who then rapes her. Sally later gets married to a door-to-door salesman.

The three sisters convince Esperanza that if she ever leaves Mango Street, as she threatens to, she must promise to come back. Alicia tells her “you are Mango Street.” Esperanza compares her imagined house to a space “quiet as snow” and clean as paper. She calls Mango the house to which she both belongs and does not belong. She promises herself that one day she will pack her books and papers and go away, but that she will come back for the ones she left behind.

Principal characters

• Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in a Latino quarter of Chicago
• Alicia, her friend and a struggling college student
• Sally, a beautiful neighborhood girl
• Magdelena (Nenny), Esperanza’s younger sister
• Lucy, Esperanza’s quiet friend from Texas
• Rachel, Lucy’s little sister

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Sandra Cisernos’s “The House on Mango Street.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Collection of essays analyzing various aspects of the novel.

Cisneros, Sandra. Interview by Reed Way Dasenbrock. In Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Dasenbrock. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Cisneros discusses the genesis of her first novel, her use of voices, the effect that bilingualism has on her writing, her life in Texas, her parents’ lives, feminism, her favorite writers, and her novel in progress.

Eysturoy, Annie O. “The House on Mango Street: A Space of Her Own.” In Daughters of Self-Creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Views the novel as a coming-of-age story, in which the protagonist searches for life’s meaning within the context of gender and racial awareness.

Giles, James R. “Nature Despoiled and Artificial: Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.” In Violence in the Contemporary American Novel: An End to Innocence. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Examines Cisneros’s book and seven other novels written between 1968 and 1994 that convey a sense of violence as a “modern plague” threatening to destroy the hopes and lives of America’s urban residents.

Kevane, Bridget. “The Fiction of Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1984) and Woman Hollering Creek(1991).” In Latino Literature in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Cisneros’s two novels are included in this overview of works written by Latinos. The chapter on Cisneros provides biographical background, plot summaries, and analyses of the novels and discusses their treatment of cultural identity.

McCracken, Ellen. “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street: Community-Oriented Introspection and the Demystification of Patriarchal Violence.” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, edited by Asunción Horno-Delgado et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. McCracken considers the novel from a feminist perspective, finding that it criticizes capitalistic and patriarchal social structures that oppress Latin women.

Nagel, James. “Sandra Cisneros’s Cuentitos Latinos: The House on Mango Street.” In The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Nagel maintains that The House on Mango Street is a short-story cycle, not a novel. He argues that the short-story cycle, with its concentric rather than linear plot development, lends itself particularly well to themes of ethnic assimilation.

Olivares, Julián. “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and the Poetics of Space.” In Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, edited by Maria Herrera-Sobek and Helena Marîa Viramontes. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1988. Olivares argues that the house motif represents Cisneros’s “house of story-telling” and the narrative charts a young writer coming into her own. Whereas her real house represents confinement, the imaginary one represents her ability to transcend the conditions of her life by writing stories about them.