Volume 19 1391993 interview, “You had to be fast and you had
to be funny—you had to be a storyteller.” Since
her Mexican father missed his homeland and would
frequently sojourn there for periods of time, the
family was often disrupted and moved from one
ghetto neighborhood to another many times during
her childhood. In 1969 her parents managed to buy
a cramped two-story bungalow in a Puerto Rican
neighborhood on the city’s North Side, an ugly red
house similar to the one Cisneros portrays in The
House on Mango Street.
Responding to questions concerning the auto-
biographical nature of The House on Mango Street,
Cisneros in the spring 1991 Americas Reviewob-
served, “All fiction is non-fiction. Every piece of
fiction is based on something that really hap-
pened.... They’re all stories I lived, or witnessed,
or heard.” Nevertheless, the central idea of her novel
had a specific literary inspiration. In a seminar at
the Iowa Writers Program, Cisneros participated in
a discussion of Gaston Bachelard’s La Poétique de
l’éspace(1958; translated as The Poetics of Space,
1964) and realized that her unique experience of the
intersection of race, ethnicity, class, and gender sep-
arated her from the other students.
The House on Mango Streettells the story of
a child named Esperanza (Hope) and her gradual
realization of her own separate being. The tale of
maturation is supported by Cisneros’s use of the
house as a symbol of familial consciousness, and
the novel also depicts the lives, struggles, and con-
cerns of Esperanza’s immediate family, neighbors,
and friends. As Erlinda González-Berry and Tey
Diana Rebolledo point out, “we see the world
through this child’s eyes and we also see the child
as she comes to an understanding of herself, her
world, and her culture.”
In a manner somewhat comparable to that of
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio(1919) and
Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Cisneros’s work
mixes genres, for while each section achieves, in
Ellen McCracken’s words, “the intensity of the
short story,” the forty-four interrelated stories al-
low for a development of character and plot typi-
cal of the novel. Julián Olivares quotes Cisneros on
her intent: “I wanted to write stories that were a
cross between poetry and fiction.... Except I
wanted to write a collection which could be read
at any random point without having any knowledge
of what came before or after. Or that could be read
in a series to tell one big story. I wanted stories like
poems, compact and lyrical and ending with a re-
verberation.”The image of the house, as McCracken points
out, is symbolic in three distinctive ways, first as it
suggests a positive objectification of the self for Es-
peranza. Before her family moved into the house on
Mango Street, Esperanza’s teachers had made den-
igrating remarks about their living conditions.
“ ‘You live there?’... I had to look where she
pointed—the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden
bars Papa had nailed on the windows so we would-
n’t fall out.... The way she said it made me feel
like nothing.” Sister Superior reveals her prejudices
by suggesting that as a Mexican, Esperanza must
live in “a row of ugly 3-flats, the ones even the
raggedy men are ashamed to go into.” Thus, though
far from perfect, the family’s new home, according
to McCracken, “represents a positive objectification
of the self, the chance to redress humiliation and es-
tablish a dignified sense of her own personhood.”
Cisneros also successfully dramatizes both the
individual and the communal significance of own-
ing a house. Such a basic human desire and need
is especially crucial for economically oppressed
minorities. The house Esperanza dreams of beyond
her family home will still have a communal func-
tion. She vows that “one day I’ll own my own
house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I came
from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I’ll
offer them the attic, ask them to stay.” In a third
distinctive motif Cisneros establishes a link be-
tween the image of the house and creativity, not
only in the bedtime stories Esperanza’s mother
tells, but also in the daughter’s wish for “a house
quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as
paper before the poem.”
Despite the generally positive symbolism of
the house, Cisneros does explore issues of patriar-
chal and sexual violence. During the course of theOnce Again I Prove the Theory of RelativityPerhaps most
important, Cisneros grounds
her revisionist feminist
perspective in everyday
experience by highlighting
the stamina of the women
she has known in real life.”67082 _PFS_V19oncea 129 - 152 .qxd 9/16/2003 9:49 M Page 139