Esperanza's The House On Mango Street

Have you ever felt like the place you belonged to didn’t belong to you? In The House on Mango Street, this is how the main character, Esperanza, felt. The author, Sandra Cisneros, did a good job in portraying a girl who couldn’t find her place. She had a problem accepting where she was from, The House on Mango Street is heartfelt novel and is great to pass the time. In this story, you will be shown the lives of Esperanza, her sister Nenny, their two best friends Rachel and Lucy, and the many people who lived on Mango Street. This book is about a girl who went from denying her place to accepting it.

A boy comes up to ask her to dance and she declines, still focusing on how her feet don’t fit her shoes. Later, however, she is forced to dance with her Uncle Nacho and she notices that, “All night the boy who is a man watches me dance. He watched me dance” (48). The boy she declined watched her dance gracefully with her uncle and this made her feel unconformable. It seems she is just understanding what girls, or women, represent to boys, or men. She doesn’t need to be told because she is now more aware. There is a feeling that she doesn’t like it and it makes her more self conscious of how she looks, but that comes with growing up. In the last vignette, “Hips,” Esperanza is connecting the information she has been told by Alicia to her new experiences. Esperanza continues to inform everyone else what she has learned, saying, “They bloom like roses. They just one day open. Just like that. One day you might decide to have kids, and then where are you going to put them? Got to have room. Bones got to give”

Esperanza is new to the neighborhood, and was never proud of her previous houses, but the negative intonation that the nun uses on her makes her feel like she is being judged, not on who she is, but what her family can afford. There is the place Esperanza now has to call home and the degrading presumption that the neighborhood already has causes her to accept that she can’t change her image without money and let her personality shine through. She seems to accept her label as poor in the story, “A Rice Sandwich”, where she believes the special, also known as rich, kids get to eat in the canteen and she wants to be part of that narrative, so she begs her mother for three days, to write her a note to allow her eat in the canteen. When she couldn’t endure her daughter’s nagging anymore, she complied. Thinking this would be enough affirmation, Esperanza went to school the next with the note and stood in the line with the other kids. She wasn’t recognized by the nun who checks the list, and has to face Sister Superior, who claims that she doesn’t live far enough to stay at school and asks Esperanza to show where her house is. “That one? She said, pointing to a row of ugly three -flats, the ones even the raggedy men are ashamed to go into. Yes, I nodded even though I knew that wasn’t my house,”(45). Esperanza was compared to the most raggedy men, and had to accept

Another factor in achieving maturity is through one’s experience with life. Esperanza 's experience shows the transformation of her ignorance to the understanding of what many men perceive women as. A woman from the wealthier side of the neighborhood gave Lucy, Rachel, and Esperanza a pair of high heels, which they wear it down the street when Mr. Benny says "[t]hem are dangerous... You girls too

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.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, portrays the life of a teenage girl named Esperanza living on Mango Street. Though Esperanza lives in a diverse city, pre-existing stereotypes are affecting how others(women?) are perceived and treated. Esperanza starts to see how to change her community and the negative view of herself by taking the wrong actions of other women and connecting them to her own life experiences.

As a young girl Esperanza is asked one day where she lived by a nun from her school who happened to be walking by. Now before this moment Esperanza never really notice her living situation, all she knew is that her parents loved her and wanted her to go to school. When the nun rudely said “You live there” (Cinceros 5) and pointed at the shoddy apartment building, it is then Esperanza started to build a dream inside of her head because of the look on the nun’s face, unsatisfactory.

“Please, Miguel, no teasing. I need help. I need to work so I can bring Abuelita to Mama.”(pg 165) “Esperanza copied everything that Hortensia and Josefina did.” (pg 169)Esperanza was also depressed and worried about her mama. “She

This proves Esperanzas arrogance when she was unwilling to let the peasant girl see her doll because she didn’t want to share when it would have been a nice and simple thing to do.

She knows that the house on Mango Street is not that house. The first time you step into your home, do you embrace the feeling of moving into a new home, or do you, as Esperanza did, criticize the house and point out all its flaws. Esperanza knows right away that the house on Mango Street is not the right house for her. She is ungrateful for having a place to live and immediately started complaining.

In the novel The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros tells the story of Esperanza, a young girl who lives in poverty. Esperanza experiences connections with others to help her become more accepting to living on Mango Street, regardless of her initial thoughts of the house. Throughout the novel, Esperanza accepts her life on Mango Street due to new friends and good experiences.

There is a girl, who got everything she wants. A huge house, horses, amazing dresses, and, her birthday is right around the corner. Throughout the novel Esperanza learns to not be afraid to start over as she shows personal growth in the face of her father's death, their house burning down and Tio Luis proposing to mama, and her mother getting sick. Her father dies unexpectedly one night, and they faced with grief and disbelief. Shortly after Esperanza's uncles, Tio Luis and Tio Marco come and apologize for their loss. After, the uncles come back to talk about “family business”. The lawyer tells Mama that Tio Luis is the owner of the land and their house and their grapes are on his land too. Tio Luis then proposes to Mama and says that they will be very happy and they can continue life as the way it was. Of course, Mama refuses and Tio Luis says he will make life very hard for them. That night Esperanza woke up to her mother screaming “Esperanza!” he mother told her that the house was on fire and they need to get out.

Esperanza grows up in a Hispanic environment, herself being Mexican. Many Hispanic cultures have the same view on life when it comes to women. These cultures believe women should stay home and take care of the house, kids, and husband. These standards determine how women live their daily lives and does not allow for independence. Additionally, these standards are a challenge for women who dream big and want to achieve more in life than staying in the kitchen. The women on Mango Street are portrayed as lacking independence and are trapped in their houses, due to their husbands following society’s cruel expectations on these Hispanic women. In The House on Mango Street, the reader meets a young woman who is different than the majority of the women on Mango Street. Esperanza introduces Alicia, a young lady who is a victim of cultural expectations, “Alicia, whose mama died, is sorry there is no one older to rise and make the lunchbox tortillas. Alicia, who inherited her mama’s rolling pin and sleepiness, is young and smart and studies for the first time at the university. Two trains and a bus, because she doesn’t want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin.”

Esperanza is led by the dream to leave Mango Street at once, nevertheless she knows that she will have to return one day to help and encourage all those who will fallen in the big hole of hopelessness. She can leave Mango Street but she can not escape

     Esperanza forms her identity on Mango Street, but will never forget her true self and home. At the end of the book she says, “One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I came from” (87). She knows that she can and will get out of the neighborhood she is in at that current moment in time because she has the determination to lead a better life than the one she lives now. Nothing can alter the true identity she formed while growing up on Mango Street.