Chicano Literature

The House on Mango Street

Author: Sandra Cisneros
Date: 31/05/19
Event: Poverty, Childhood, Womanhood
Characters: Esperanza Cordero, Mama, Papa, Magdalena “Nenny” Cordero, Lucy, Rachel, Minerva, and others.
Memorable Quote: "I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I'm me. One day I'll jump out of my skin. I'll shake the sky like a hundred violins."

Esperanza is a girl who is part Mexican and lives on Mango Street with her family. She tells several mini stories about herself and different people that are part of her life throughout the book, and all the stories are written in order as she grows up and starts discovering the world.

This book, talks about many situations that one can relate to. In my case, I could relate with the parts in which Esperanza is becoming a woman and faces different situations that are part of this process. Nonetheless, some vignettes treat serious topics such as the one of Alice. Indeed, these are situations that many people live day by day, and they have to put up with them in order to have a better life, but some cannot achieve that. Many mini stories do not show a happy ending or a better outcome for the characters. They are just stories that anybody could live in real life, and in the real world, we do not necessarily have happy endings. In the case of Esperanza, her stigma is that her family does not have much money, and she does not like her way of living. She wants to become more, she wants to be better, and it is not like she is an ungrateful girl. It is only that she believes that there has to be something more than spending the rest of her life in a place in which people are not allowed to dream, and I believe everybody should strive for that.