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she want to be trapped into motherhood in order
to have one? Does she want to be afraid of her own
shadow? She knows she does not want the Mango
Street that she grew up on, but she cannot discard
who and what it has made of her. The house she
wants is clear and detailed in her mind.
Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not
a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all
my own. With my porch and my pillow, my
pretty purple petunias. My books and my
stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed.
Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage
to pick up after. Only a house quiet as snow,
a space for myself to go, clean as paper before
the poem.Esperanza wants a house of her own, a place of
serenity and order, one that will be for her a “home
in the heart.” She wants only a small part of the
American dream, and then only as a support for her
freedom.
Elizabeth Malia
identity in The House on Mango Street
All children form their characters within the world
of family and social concepts. Esperanza is a young
girl growing first into a teenager and then a woman
having to cope with more than the usual problems.
She is a poor Hispanic child who lives in the slums
of Chicago amid several cultures mixing together.
She wants to know who she is and who she will
become. Sandra Cisneros’s vignette format allows
the reader to travel through Esperanza’s developing
life and personality as she finds her identity.
As a girl, Esperanza learns that there are cultural
expectations, religious expectations, peer expecta-
tions, and a paradigm shift from a traditional female
role to a new concept of women as equals. She is
Hispanic, but not all of her neighbors are. She is
poor but not bad. She also decides to seek personal
freedom when most of her contemporaries make
choices that limit their freedom and maintain the
status quo, and she explores her own sexuality.
“Those who do not know any better come into
our neighborhood scared,” Esperanza says as she
first articulates her experiences of racism. She con-
tinues, “All brown, all around, we are safe. But watch
us drive into a neighborhood of another color and
our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows
get rolled up tight.” Familiar as the Hispanic neigh-
borhood is, Esperanza knows that courtship rituals
are not always happy. She wonders if her namesake
great-grandmother ever forgave her great-grandfa-
ther for essentially kidnapping her. She thinks, “My
great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and
carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy
chandelier. That’s the way he did it.” She envisions
her great-grandmother looking “out the window her
whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness
on an elbow.” Esperanza vows this will not be her
own fate. Seeing this through Esperanza’s eyes is the
secret to this novel, as she is aware that she does not
want to fit any mold.
The most prominent issue Esperanza faces has
to do with sex and sexuality. At first she has little
sense of such things. Marin, her older friend, wears
short skirts and spends the evenings leaning on the
fence waiting for boys to walk by: “What matters,
Marin says, is for the boys to see us and for us to
see them.”
Esperanza begins to understand that boys are
not all noisy little brothers, and she knows that she
is drawing boys’ attention, thinking, “I don’t remem-
ber when I first noticed him looking at me—Sire.
But I knew he was looking.” She is intrigued but
also frightened, and her family disapproves. “He is a
punk,” says her father. Esperanza feels that “Every-
thing is holding its breath inside me. Everything is
waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all
new and shiny.”
As she matures, Esperanza begins to recognize
that her fate is all but predestined. Aunt Lupe,
crippled by probable polio, has told her, “You just
remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must
keep writing. It will keep you free.” A few years later,
she decides to begin “my own quiet war,” meaning
that she “will not grow up tame like the others who
lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball
and chain.” She wants no children, no husband, and
no ties that will keep her down. She wants to escape
the tragedy of her great-grandmother and her own
mother, who waxes nostalgic for her own youth—“I
could’ve been somebody, you know?”—but she quit