Please feel free to write about anything that interested you in The House on Mango Street. Here are some prompts to get you started thinking:
- In the vignette “My Name,” Esperanza talks about her name. What do you think about her name and its multiple meanings? Why are they important in the book? What about names of other characters? How are identities tied to names in the book? How do names affect characters?
- Talk about homes and houses and living spaces as they’re represented in the book. Why do you think Cisneros chose the title she did? Are homes liberating or constraining?
- Discuss Cisneros’ use of language and/or structure in the book. You might pick a metaphor (for example, in the story “Laughter,” Esperanza writes that ice cream bells “giggle” and that some kinds of laughter are “like a pile of dishes breaking”) or other piece of figurative language that seems unusual or appealing to you and talk about how it works. Or perhaps discuss Cisneros’ claim that the rhythms and cadences of Spanish are everywhere in the book, even in places where’s there’s not one word of Spanish. Do you see evidence of this? Or maybe discuss her decision to use so many short vignettes and how this stylistic choice affects the reader.
- Talk about different models of women presented in the book. What kinds of women do you see? What does Esperanza think of her own gender, her sexuality? Do you see her change as the book progresses?
- How do you think this novel compares with Viramontes’ collection of stories? What similarities do you see? Do you notice any significant differences?
In Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, we as readers are given insight to how growing up in certain environments affects our perceptions of the world and people around us. Conflicts and comforts that can be found in homes, houses, and living spaces are all examples of interesting concepts of liminality. To what extent does the home or living space one grows up in change the course of their life, or how does one perceive liberation or constrainment in correlation to where you reside. These are all questions that I pondered while reading. These questions were particularly important to me once I was into the later chapters of the book. For example, in “Bums in the Attic,” she writes: “People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth” (144). This line was important to me because it showcases the direct effect where one lives has on our narrator. With the idea of living in a nice house on the hill, she will be freed and liberated of all of the negativity that is accompanied by living “too much on earth.” She will be even further liberated from her past life by being able to have the freedom to give a home to the other because she knows the sense of constrainment. This entire chapter showcases what a difference it makes to live elsewhere. Homes and living spaces represent the ability to have more and realize what else there is to be had, as well as notice all that one lacks or wishes for.
I have a terrible habit of reading the last page of a book right after the first page, so I might have interpreted the themes differently than most, but I was pleasantly surprised at how the author and the narrator treated the idea of homes. At the very beginning of the book, the house on Mango Street feels like this space that makes Esperanza feel dejected or outcast— “Temporary, says Papa. But I know how these things go,” and the fact that the landlord moves “a little farther away every time people like us move in.” Even at her age she’s mature enough (probably because of the struggles she’s had to go through already) to realize that her family is not financially well-off, and that people can look down on them because of this. She describes her neighbors in what I though was a very fair way: she has some that she likes, like the “Queen of Cats,” some that she doesn’t like, like the man who is a “baby-grabber,” and some she has mixed feelings about, like Cathy who is her friend but who’s leaving soon. Even though Esperanza knows factually that there are some negative aspects of her neighborhood, she’s so wonderfully unbiased and doesn’t linger on the bad anymore than she does on the good, probably less on the bad, even. Her narration style is so beautifully and clearly a child— she doesn’t elaborate on much for long, our chapters are in short bursts of observation, and yet the emotions are strong and precise. From of this style I got such a feeling of nostalgia from her playing with kids on the street, swapping bikes, wandering to talk to the neighbors with that child-like curiosity. It’s what led me to realize that she really does value her home— I think we all have a place or a period of childhood that maybe we wouldn’t want to go back to, but nonetheless it evokes a strong feeling of nostalgia. Even though her childhood is filled with events that we’d typically look back on in sadness— Sally getting married when she wasn’t ready, Esperanza thinking of herself as an ugly daughter, Lucy and Rachel’s baby sister dying— our narrator can’t seem to shake the nostalgia and deep connections to her community and home when she says, “I have gone away to come back.” She’s not just leaving and planning to visit, she’s actively carrying her memories and experiences with her so that she can return to help and to heal. Even in all these negative events she keeps an optimism that comes through so often and in my opinion is even visible from the beginning of the book.
In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, we read a collection of stories narrated by a young girl, Esperanza. She described the many different people who live on Mango Street, and their stories. Of these characters, it is a collection of many different women and young women. Men aren’t even really talked about much in these collections. The only time a man is really focused on and described is when he either is closely related to a woman in the story, or is sexualizing a woman. For example, there is a story titled ‘Louie, His Cousin, and His Other Cousin’, which briefly describes who Louie is, and then goes in further detail about his older female cousin that lives with his family, Marin. His other cousin is an unimportant young man to the people on mango street, with the only exceptional moment being when he took the neighborhood kids on a joyride, crashed it, and got arrested. Marin, however, is one of the many female characters in this collection. She is a bit older than Esperanza, and gets sent home for causing too much trouble (the trouble being that she likes to dance, smokes cigarettes, and lets boys look at her). Other female characters include Ezperanza’s two close friends, Rachel and Lucy, and the three of them plus Ezperanzas sister, Nenny, often hangout together. As they get older, they share intimate moments like discussing what it means to become older and obtain hips, as well as a moment where they make fun of an Auntie, who later dies. That same Aunt is characterized to have once been beautiful, and strong, but was unlucky and is now blind, ill, and (I think) paralyzed. The four central girls also share a coming-of-age moment when they buy high-heels together. As they walk with them, they are warned that they shouldn’t be wearing them so young. Later on the same walk, Rachel is solicited by an old drunk man, who bothers her for a kiss. The girls run away and never wear the shoes again. Throughout the collection of stories, we are introduced to many women who have had different walks of life, and we interpret them with the young Esperanaza, who observes them a lot to better understand the world and more specifically, a woman’s world
In the vignette “My Name,” Esperanza says her name means sadness in Spanish but hope in English which is no coincidence. Within the first few lines, the author is hinting to us the duality of Chicano life where this young Mexican American girl holds both sorrow and hope simultaneously. I really appreciated the layers to Esperanza’s name because of its legacy within her family. She is named after her great-grandmother because they were both born in the Chinese year of the horse. However, even though she is only twelve, she empathizes with her deceased great grandmother because she also wants to be ‘wild’ and free. Her emphasis on not wanting to inherit the place of her grandmother by the window reminded me of the main character in Viramontes’ Snapshot story. I felt that her great grandmother lost not only her autonomy but also her identity and energy slowly dying inside ‘sitting on the elbow of her sadness’. I think that is why Cisneros introduced the English meaning of Esperanza’s name first because instead of sadness and waiting perhaps to be saved or for life to be decided for her she wants the reader to see Esperanza’s imagination as hope itself. This is also why the story ends with Esperanza naming herself though it still feels temporary as she says “Zeze the X will do.” This also helps us to see the character as dynamic because she is wild in the way she thinks and wants more for herself enough to change things past contemplation. I think this story is actually one of the foundational pieces of the book because it introduces us to both the character and her core belief system. This story is also foundational and strategic because outside of her family no other characters are introduced until after this story. This made me pay attention to the names and perspectives of the later characters. There were a lot of characters introduced throughout the book but Meme Ortiz piqued my interest the most because his real name is Juan and his dog also has two names one English and the other Spanish. This reminded me of Esperanza and made me question why the author chose two separate names. I think this technique in naming the characters was strategic to get the audience to think about double consciousness and assimilation. Esperanza is still rooted in the ancestry of her name even though she wants to live a different life she is also aware that there is no healthy benefit in the complete severance of her identity. She imagines a future where her name can contain a radical X bypassing gender norms. Whereas Meme Ortiz can sort of codeswitch between names wherever and whenever he pleases. In his winning the tree climbing competition he ultimately loses in this segment of life as he breaks both arms on the way down symbolizing the struggle of his bi-cultural position and identity.
The House on Mango Street is a coming of age story and depicts the trials and tribulations of womanhood. Esperanza is a young woman surrounded by other women who she looks up to. Esperanza can be unsure of herself, and wants to grow to be smart and beautiful like the other women in her life, although some are better role models than others. She sees herself in these other women and projects her own aspirations into them. For example, in Sally, Esperanza does not know Sally, yet admires her beauty. Esperanza observes Sally, and surmises she wants to run away to a place where she can be herself, free of judgmental men in her life, though later in the story Esperanza is proven to be wrong. Esperanza strives for independence. As she grows into herself, she discovers her own beauty and the implications that come with it in such a patriarchal society.