The House on Mango Street, a fictional book written by Sandra Cisneros is a book filled with many hidden messages. The book revolves around a young girl named Esperanza who feels out of place with the life she has. She sees that the things around her don’t really add up. The story is told from Esperanza’s perspective and the events she goes through to find herself. Through the strategy of fragmenting sentences, Cisneros establishes that the sense of not belonging, creates a person’s individuality that makes them who they are.
Sandra Cisneros born on December 20, 1954 grew up in Chicago settling with a neighborhood known with Hispanic immigrants. Until then her migrating with her six brothers, from different communities in Chicago, and visiting her grandmother in Mexico, she has never really make ones home in. Being the only girl with no sisters, Cisneros only way that would deprive her from loneliness, is by reading books where she found her talents in writing. Fast forwarding to college Sandra Cisneros worked on her master’s degree at University of Iowa Writers Workshop where found her interest as Mexican-American woman with a self-reliant passion and how being a Hispanic were different in the American culture.
Throughout the novel, we see various unique themes, conflicts and symbols. In the House on Mango Street, we realize that Esperanza's goals are clear, she wants to escape her bad neighborhood and live in a house of her own. These desires change over the course of the novel, and as she matures, we begin to notice her desire for men.
Esperanza builds her strength off the mishaps that occur while living on Mango Street. In the vignettes, Esperanza describes some very interesting things that take place on Mango Street. She recalls a time when Sally befriended her and told Esperanza to leave her alone with the boys. Esperanza felt out of place and was very uncomfortable and very ashamed to be in that situation. She wanted more from life than that, so she left the scene.
The plot of The House on Mango Street symbolizes an immigrant family moving to the United States in hope of a future with more opportunities. It is a story about a girl by the name of Esperanza and the retelling of the events in her childhood. Esperanza faces many challenges growing up in an underdeveloped neighborhood of inner city Chicago. Through her experiences at home, school, and with people she starts to blossom into the young woman she always wanted to be. Esperanza encounters many unjust acts as a result of living in an urban neighborhood. These encounters make her want to move to a different neighborhood because she feels like she does not belong on Mango Street. She feels trapped because she has a dream to attend college and become a writer. Her hope is that she will be able to live a prosperous American life and be able to come back to Mango Street to help those who cannot escape on their own. It is, most importantly, the story of a girl maturing into a woman an...
Esperanza lives in a Latino community in Chicago, where money is scarce and expectations of what she will become are low.Drowning in the negative experiences and role models all around her, Esperanza strives to make a life for herself that is better than her current reality. In Sandra Cisneros’ The House On Mango Street, Esperanza is surrounded by examples in society of what she is allowed to be. As she grows, she uses her situation to identify what she wants to be - a woman different from those around her; a woman with power that is her own.
“Someday, I will have a best friend all my own. One I can tell my secrets to. One who will understand my jokes without me having to explain them” (9). These are the longing words spoken by Esperanza. In the novel The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is young girl experiencing adolescence not only longing for a place to fit in but also wanting to be beautiful. This becomes complicated as Esperanza becomes more sexually aware. Throughout the novel, Cisneros argues the importance of beauty and how Esperanza deals with beauty as a part of her identity. When Esperanza meets Sally a new friend, Esperanza’s whole world is turned upside down. Esperanza’s views on beauty change from a positive outlook to a negative one by watching how beauty has damaged Sally’s life.
This novel is a story of a Chicano family. Sofi, her husband Domingo together with their four daughters – Esperanza, Fe, Caridad, and Loca live in the little town of Tome, New Mexico. The story focuses on the struggles of Sofi, the death of her daughters and the problems of their town. Sofi endures all the hardships and problems that come her way. Her marriage is deteriorating; her daughters are dying one by one. But, she endures it all and comes out stronger and more enlightened than ever. Sofi is a woman that never gives up no matter how poorly life treats her. The author- Ana Castillo mixes religion, super natural occurrences, sex, laughter and heartbreak in this novel. The novel is tragic, with no happy ending but at the same time funny and inspiring. It is full of the victory of the human spirit. The names of Sofi’s first three daughters denote the three major Christian ideals (Hope, Faith and Charity).
The House on Mango Street are a collection of vignettes written by Sandra Cisneros of her childhood. Cisneros vignettes shows the readers her childhood experiences of a young, inquisitive girl who then blossoms into a independent woman in Mango Street. They range from friendship and family values to scary experiences, but all of her vignettes convey a theme that she tries to express to her audience. One constant moral, Cisneros exhibits to her audience, is the entrapment of females in Mango Street. The author portrays many of the women in either abusive and submissive relationships, waiting for men to change their lives, and some very few wanting to change their life by themselves. The women in The House on Mango Street perceive beauty as
The most difficult part of chasing dreams is perhaps the strength to leave things behind. In The House of Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros introduces Esperanza, an ambitious character who lived in a sad red house on Mango Street. As she lived in this non-luxurious quarter of the world, Esperanza discovered the secrets of life in a destitute town. Desiring more than existence in a closed town, she escaped to a portal where she revealed her thoughts, emotions, and dreams through the stories and poems she wrote regarding anything and everything. This gave her hope and vision, a vision of her own life without Mango Street, without the bleak circumstances surrounding her. At the end of the book, Esperanza ambitiously declared that Mango Street will
Speaking through her memories as a child growing up in poverty, she tells stories of Esperanza and her friend’s problems at home, discrimination of Latinos and other colored people, along with the mistreatment of women. The book is so meaningful that after reading it, one should not expect to attain the same idealism as the next person. Cisneros does such a good job of making it a book for everyone that it appeals to each individual in its own special way. “The House on Mango Street” is not only the story of Esperanza Cordero, but anyone, who grew up without all the opportunities that one should be so fortunate to have, yet never stop fighting for what they believe in and continue to strive towards their
“Home is where the heart is.” In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops this famous statement to depict what a “home” really represents. What is a home? Is it a house with four walls and a roof, the neighborhood of kids while growing up, or a unique Cleaver household where everything is perfect and no problems arise? According to Cisneros, we all have our own home with which we identify; however, we cannot always go back to the environment we once considered our dwelling place. The home, which is characterized by who we are, and determined by how we view ourselves, is what makes every individual unique. A home is a personality, a depiction of who we are inside and how we grow through our life experiences. In her personal, Cisneros depicts Esperanza Cordero’s coming-of-age through a series of vignettes about her family, neighborhood, and personalized dreams. Although the novel does not follow a traditional chronological pattern, a story emerges, nevertheless, of Esperanza’s search to discover the meaning of her life and her personal identity. The novel begins when the Cordero family moves into a new house, the first they have ever owned, on Mango Street in the Latino section of Chicago. Esperanza is disappointed by the “small and red” house “with tight steps in front and bricks crumbling in places” (5). It is not at all the dream-house her parents had always talked about, nor is it the house on a hill that Esperanza vows to one day own for herself. Despite its location in a rough neighborhood and difficult lifestyle, Mango Street is the place with which she identifies at this time in her life.
The story of Esperanza in The House On Mango Street is similar to that of the evolution of a caterpillar to a butterfly. She goes from being a vain, proud, selfish, immature, arrogant yet still sympathetical, child to a selfless, kind, magnanimous young lady. The people, places and experiences that revolutionized her into that is clearly articulated throughout the novel, sometimes obviously, other times inconspicuously.
The House on Mango Street is a very interesting book about a young Latino girl and her daily life. It is a look through a child’s eyes of the world around her. The story is written in short chapters, explaining different aspects of life from a child’s point of view. The story confronts poverty, physical abuse, discrimination and other issues that we’d never want our children to deal with.
One mark of great storytelling is the portrayal of characters’ development or metamorphose throughout the plot. All great literary characters gradually transform, for better or for worse, as their journey progresses. Sandra Cisneros’ novella, The House on Mango Street, centers around Esperanza Cordero, a young girl living in a poverty stricken area of Chicago. The story follows Esperanza’s thoughts through several vignettes, showing her maturation from adolescence to early adulthood. Through the change in tone and juxtaposing vignettes, Cisneros shows how maturity is derived from the loss of innocence and the gaining of knowledge.