Character Of Esperanza In The House On Mango Street

All the people on Mango Street were struggling to get by, but they seemed satisfied with just making it. Esperanza was not. There were characters like Esperanza’s mother who was a “smart cookie,” and could’ve been anything, but she let shame get the best of her and dropped out of school. There was also Rafaela who got married before the 8th grade just so she could move into her own house, but her husband never let her leave the house afterward. He never let her see her friends, and the highlight of her week was getting coconut or papaya juice from someone who would send it up in a paper bag attached to a clothespin since she couldn’t leave the house. Lastly, there was the time when she was left stranded by the tilt-a- whirl waiting for a friend that never came back and got molested by a group of boys. The only witnesses were the red clown statues that seemed to be laughing at her. Nevertheless, she let none of this stopped her from going forward and perusing her dream. She still seemed to be struggling with a sense of belonging, but maybe that’s because she didn’t.

As a young girl, Esperanza is a young girl who looks at life from experience of living in poverty, where many do not question their experience. She is a shy, but very bright girl. She dreams of the perfect home, with beautiful flowers and a room for everyone. When she moves to the house of Mango Street, reality is so different than the dream. In this story, hope (Esperanza) sustains tragedy. The house she dreamed of was another on. It was one of her own. One where she did not have to share a bedroom with everyone. That included her mother, father and two siblings. The run down tiny house has "bricks crumbling in places". The one she dreamed of had a great big yard, trees and 'grass growing without a fence'. She did not want to abandon

When passing through a poor neighborhood, have you ever thought, “this place is dangerous.” even though you just see what’s on the surface? The dirty buildings, run down stores, and unkempt roads persuade us to perceive that neighborhood in a negative light, but you might do this unconsciously because ever since we were young, socioeconomic status is what separates the “good”, from the “bad”. Sandra Cisneros’, House on Mango Street, shows us how harmful having a previous notion of a place or person can be. In the novel, we meet Esperanza Cordero, a girl whose parents never strived above the working class. Because of their low income, they are forced to move into neglected homes on the verge of crumbling, their final stop being Mango

Ever since that faithful day they moved onto Mango Street, Esperanza has always wanted more. At a young age, she recalls moving quite a bit, and never finding a place that screams home. Her new house on Mango Street is an improvement, yet it doesn’t satisfy her. It is small and red, with tiny windows, crumbling bricks, and everyone in her family has to share a bedroom. Esperanza remembers when a nun drove by her old home on Loomis and said “You live there”, in a quite disgusted manner. She recalls feeling sheepish, as she looked up at her raggedy house and longed for it to just vanish. At this point, Esperanza wrote

In the collection of vignettes, The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops the theme that people should not be devalued because of their financial circumstances through metaphors of classism, the motif of shame, and the contrast between minor characters Alicia and Esperanza’s mother. Esperanza, the protagonist, is a Mexican-American adolescent living in the rural Chicago region. She occupies a house on Mango Street with her father, mother, two brothers, Carlos and Kiki, and little sister, Nenny. Mango Street is filled with low-income families, like Esperanza’s, trying to adapt to their difficult circumstances. Esperanza realizes it is difficult, but she dreams of leaving her house and Mango Street altogether.

Esperanza, a strong- willed girl who dreams big despite her surroundings and restrictions, is the main character in The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Esperanza represents the females of her poor and impoverished neighborhood who wish to change and better themselves. She desires both sexuality and autonomy of marriage, hoping to break the typical life cycle of woman in her family and neighborhood. Throughout the novel, she goes through many different changes in search of identity and maturity, seeking self-reliance and interdependence, through insecure ideas such as owning her own house, instead of seeking comfort and in one’s self. Esperanza matures as she begins to see the difference. She evolves from an insecure girl to a

Throughout the course of Mango Street, Esperanza’s relationship towards her house change. As time passes her feelings about the house itself change and the emotional impact of the house of her changes as well. Esperanza’s house on Mango Street symbolizes her Mexican culture. For so long she has wanted to leave it. She envisions a different type of life than what she is used to - moving from house to house. “this house is going to be different / my life is going to be different”. One can look at all the things she envisions - the "trappings of the good life" such as the running water, the garden etc. as symbols for the new life.

Esperanza’s insecurity about where she lives and how she lives is the conflict of the story. A tradition her father, Nenny, and herself has is going to the houses on the hills, she believes she looks like the hungry asking for food so she no longer goes. Esperanza is so ashamed of her house that when someone ask which house she lives in she denies living in those flats. She becomes aware of how poor her family is when she must go to work to help pay for private school, this encourages her to get out of the flats. Esperanza sets out to be able to support herself on her own and buy the house she has been dreaming of since she was little.

In conclusion, we know that Esperanza’s negativity of herself begins to slowly change as she slowly experience what accepting means and how she began to accept where she was from . Throughout this book, Cisnero showed us accepting is an important part of growing in life as well as determining the true you. In the beginning she hated her life always wanted to escape out of Mango Street versus the end she says she is going to come back. From the beginning to the end, Esperanza finally accepted where she was from and how Mango Street has developed who she became

This relates to the theme of the struggle for self definition, because at first Esperanza was under the impression she could change a man, but as she’s exposed to these horrible encounters she comes to the conclusion that boys and girls live in different worlds.

In Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Esperanza’s main goal is to one day have a house of her own that she can be proud of. Of course this is many people’s dream, but for Esperanza it means everything. It’s such a big deal to her because she’s ashamed of where she lives now, so she wants something better for herself in the future. While shame plays such a major role in the novel, this theme has received little attention from critics. Many critics focus mainly on how literacy and writing help Esperanza to find herself and to help her with her problems. In fact,

The House on Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros, is a novel about a young girl growing up in the Latino area of Chicago. It is highly admired and is taught in a plethora of grade schools and universities. The House on Mango Street expresses the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is full of harsh realities and jarring beauty. Esperanza doesn’t want to belong- not to her run-down neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza’s story is of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing what she will become for herself. While Esperanza and the other women have many differences, as in the way she is fortunate to avoid the pitfalls of her environment and others are not, there are just as many

She is just to use that identity to prove to others who her right self is, rather than the self that does not convey who she is. Near the end of the novel, Esperanza has come to the conclusion that she will not be someone who society had plan out for her, “... but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain… in the movies there is always one with red red lips who is beautiful and cruel… I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.” (Cisneros 88,89) Esperanza will not grow up to be ordered around like the other women in her neighborhood. She will be a woman that is beautiful, yet cruel and in the eyes of men, she will be the man. She decides that she will not follow the rules of society like the fact that all a woman can do to escape, is to wait for a man to sweep them off the street. Instead, she will be a “man” of her own self where she will be “beautiful and cruel.” Esperanza will be cruel as she will not “grow up tame” like the women who does so by being scared, afraid, and controlled by their husbands. She is to be beautiful as she will be the one who holds power, and independence where she will depend on her own self. Esperanza changes the use of her identity, from having an identity to only represent her true inner self, to an identity that will change both the rules and paths that society. With the

Esperanza is a shy but a very bright girl. She dreams of the perfect home now, with beautiful flowers in their luscious garden and a room for everyone to live in comfortably all because of the unsatisfied face the nun made that one afternoon--when she moves to the house of Mango Street. She thinks it’s going to be a “grand house on a hill that will have a bedroom for everyone and at least three washrooms so when they took a bath they would not have to tell everybody.” (Cinceros 4) Reality is so different for her when her dream is shot down in a heartbeat when she

In a series of vignettes, The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, covers a year in the life of Esperanza, who is about twelve years old. During the year, she moves into a house on Mango Street. It is the first home her parents actually own, however she has had a plethora apartments in her life. However, the house is not what Esperanza has dreamed of, for the reason that it is run-down and cramped. For the duration of the vignettes, the readers watch Esperanza struggle but overall mature. In the rest of the vignettes, the readers receive a glimpse of the lives of the women on Mango Street. When reading the readers get to learn and understand these women. They are extremely important because they act as character foils to help the readers better understand Esperanza. During the novel, the women on Mango Street are confined and go through many struggles. The reader also learns about Esperanza's identity.