Monkey Garden In The House On Mango Street

Esperanza faces a large amount of adversity, which she must overcome, living on Mango Street. Esperanza knows that overcoming her situation on Mango Street will prove to be a challenge for her. “[The four skinny trees] strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath ground. They grow up and down and grab the earth between hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep.” (Cisneros 74) This quote describes that Esperanza can overcome her situation of being on Mango Street just like the skinny trees can grow up through the concrete. Esperanza feels that she must eventually come back to Mango Street because it was her first home. “They will not know I have gone away and come back.” (Cisneros 110) This quote symbolizes that even though Esperanza believes she does not belong on Mango Street that she is a part of it and she cannot change that. Esperanza copes with daily life by telling stories, stories of Mango Street and all those who lived on it. Esperanza’s ability to overcome the adversity in her neighborhood makes her a great choice for the show.

Esperanza’s friend Sally is one of the reasons that Esperanza really questions what it is to grow up. Sally wears make-up and appears to challenge the men in her life until they retaliate, like her father who beats and rapes her. In the chapter “The Monkey Garden” Sally is flirting with a group of boys and Esperanza can not understand why Sally will not play with her and the other girls. Then Esperanza thinks that Sally needs recusing from Tito and the other boys when they demand a kiss for the keys they took from her. Sally tells Esperanza to go away and she finally understands that Sally wanted to be with the boys. After meeting Sally and becoming more aware of her own sexuality Esperanza “decided to not grow up tame.”(88). She knows that

Connection: In the House on Mango Street, Esperanza visits the Monkey Garden. To her the garden is a safe,

The neighborhood is not exactly a pretty place as Esperanza describes it. She says, “here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful” (39). In the one year of Esperanza’s life that this book covers, she is raped, abused, and sees the death of the only person who would listen to her poetry- “Her name was Aunt Lupe and she was beautiful like [her] mother” (70). Her discontent with the neighborhood surrounding the house on Mango Street and the rough times that she experienced caused her to want to move away from

In all aspects of life, women are pressured to be someone they are not. They are put in situations that force them to chose a path of life. In “The House on Mango Street”, Esperanza is forced to think about leaving Mango Street in the future, because she is surrounded by women who are pushing her to become an adult.

The Vargas house is a house which contains countless children with only a single mother to care for them. The Vargas children are known for being savage, vulgar, and impolite. They do not care about anyone or anything including themselves. It is almost an everyday occurrence that these children get into great danger or trouble. Esperanza does not want to be mixed in with these type of people and deal with all this commotion. She makes a mature decision of not associating herself with them and finding other friends. When Esperanza is new to Mango Street she tells her younger sister, Nenny, not to make friends with the Vargas’. As Esperanza grows and matures, she is realizing who she wants her friends to be. Her Ideal friends were perhaps not

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

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

The Monkey Garden by Sandra Cisneros tells the story of a young girl’s loss of childhood innocence. The story is narrated by a mature woman remembering her initiation into adolescence through the images and events that occurred in an unused neighborhood lot. She is not ready to mature into adolescence and uses her imagination to transform the lot into a fantasy garden--a place where she can hide from the adult world.

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.

The roots of the trees act as a metaphor for the community on Mango Street, which supports Esperanza’s development. Because the roots of the community on Mango Street are tangled in cycles of tragic abuse, Esperanza is deprived of the essential social and ethical requirements she needs to grow. When Esperanza explains that the trees “send ferocious roots beneath the ground”, she is implying that the trees are trying to dig deeper in order to find an essential element for their growth (Cisneros 74). New visitors to her neighborhood roll their windows up tightly, which shows it is not an environment that allows children to develop properly (Cisneros 28). Because of the deficit her community is causing her, she is unable to grow to her full potential, and resorts to digging deeper within herself just as the roots of the trees do. A problem arises when trees try to do this because the roots are more susceptible to disease. Keeping with the metaphor, Esperanza shows symptoms similar to a tree that has attracted the heart rot disease. This disease is characterized by external problems seeping through the roots, which lead to the decay of the heartwood of a tree, and eventually its overall health. Esperanza is obviously being fed infectious ideas from her misshapen community, and has begun to let it eat away at her heart. This cycle is started by the roots

Dreadful events can happen to anyone. It depends on who you are, what you do, and where you’re at. In this case Esperanza is a mature little girl in her pre-teens but struggles through dreadful events that she doesn’t deserve. In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros utilizes young characters to remind us about the things we take for granted and how some people aren’t so fortunate to live in a nice neighborhood opposed to a dangerous one where dreadful events happen to innocent people.

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

Cisneros uses simple syntax and tells the story in vignettes to present the story as if it were told in Esperanza’s eyes. Vignettes are short little descriptions of an event or idea. The House on Mango Street is strictly told in vignettes which makes sense as it is told in a child's eyes. These vignettes tend to get larger as the story progresses and as Esperanza becomes more aware of her surroundings. As a result of this, the vignettes not only become more complex, but more mature as well. In vignettes such as “Hairs” and “My Name”, Esperanza writes about simple innocent ideas like what she likes and does not like, but later in the story vignettes such as “The Monkey Garden” and “No Speak English” cover much more mature situations such as the patriarchy and rape in the near-poverty-line Latino neighborhood of Chicago. Esperanza finds herself in these situations because of how she begins to mature and become an independent sexual being. With all of this information in mind, Cisneros uses the power of the vignette convey the fact that Esperanza is becoming an individual sexual being.

In Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, the chapter “The Monkey Garden” is used to show the loss of innocence. The monkey garden is the place where Esperanza loses a large measure of her innocence, and losing this innocence disables her from returning to the garden. For Esperanza and other young people, the monkey garden is a place for games and childish behavior, but Sally and the boys use it for more mature and grown-up purposes. Tito and his friends take Sally’s keys and one boy says, “…you can’t get the keys back unless you kiss us…” (96). The boys are playing a game with Sally – a game that only they can win, and as a result, Esperanza sees their actions as sexual manipulation. When Esperanza, desperate for help, tells Tito’s mother