1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
When Cisneros was eleven, her family bought a small house, their first per-
manent home, in Humboldt Park, a Puerto Rican neighborhood on the north
side of Chicago. Later, while working at the Latino Youth Alternative High
School in Chicago, Cisneros discovered students whose lives made hers feel
“comfortable and privileged,” for she never had to worry about being beaten by a
father or boyfriend, or avoiding gangs in the hall of her school, or being asked to
drop out of school to help support her family. Feeling emotionally overwhelmed
at times and, she says, not knowing what else to do with her students’ stories but
needing to do something, she combined them with her own childhood experi-
ences in Humboldt Park into The House on Mango Street. While Esperanza, the
narrator, lives in a supportive family that cares very much about education, in the
neighborhood around her she sees poverty, neglected children, domestic abuse,
and young girls using their sexuality to try to break out of the prisons created by
their environments. Consisting of a series of vignettes, most one to three pages
long, it has been translated around the world and is widely taught in middle
schools, high schools, and universities.
Highly recommended for any of the following topics on The House on Mango
Street is Cisneros’s introduction to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the
novel. She maintains a useful website at http://www.sandracisneros.com. The
chapter by Alvina E. Quintana would also be useful for any of these topics.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- The House on Mango Street is both a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story,
and a künstlerroman, a more specific type of coming-of-age story, in which
the protagonist grows into an awareness of him- or herself as an artist or
writer. Students interested in coming-of-age stories or comparative analysis
might wish to research definitions of these types of stories and consider how
Cisneros revises or expands the tradition. Another avenue of research would
be to compare the coming-of-age elements in The House on Mango Street to
those in other examples, such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1884), Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, J. D. Salinger’s The
Catcher in the Rye (1951), or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). For an
example of another bildungsroman from a Latino writer, students could read
and compare Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972). For the latter, consult
Dianne Klein’s “Coming of Age in Novels by Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cis-
neros,” English Journal, 81 (September 1992): 21–26. - In a 1990 interview Cisneros says of The House on Mango Street, “I wrote it as
a reaction against those people who want to make our barrios look like Sesame
Street, or some place really warm and beautiful. Poor neighborhoods lose their
charm after dark, they really do. It’s nice to go visit a poor neighborhood, but if
you’ve got to live there every day, and deal with garbage that doesn’t get picked
up, and kids getting shot in your backyard, and people running through your
gangway at night, and rats, and poor housing.... It loses its charm real quick!”
(Rodríguez Aranda interview). While Esperanza’s family is loving and sup-
portive, her surroundings do not offer her a secure environment. From being