The House On Mango Street Chapter Summaries

Everyone who matures has a family and that family shapes that person into who they come to be. The main character, Esperanza from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, is an excellent example of that; Esperanza is an insecure young Latina girl who is shaped by her family as she grows up. In the novel, Esperanza has the perspective of life from the experience of living in poverty. Esperanza dreams of a perfect home with amazing flowers and enough rooms that everyone in her family would each have one. However, she moves to the house on Mango Street, and reality is so different from what she has dreamt of. She receives a tiny run-down house with bricks that are broken down in numerous places around the house. Throughout the

At the age of five she abandon him and his sister in search of the American Dream. Enrique begins his voyage young, motivated and optimistic, when in reality travelling to America was more dangerous than he had ever anticipated. With several failed attempts, finding his mother became a nearly impossible challenge he was ready to accept. With many setbacks like drugs, love, violence, and uncertainty, his travels prolonged. Finally, in the end Enrique and his family made it to America; however their dream turned into a harsh

Although the book’s titular character is Oscar de Leon, he shares chapters with his sister, his mother, his college roommate, Yunior (revealed to be the book’s narrator), and his mother’s parents, the Cabrals. By representing a family with different personalities—Oscar is overweight, and nerdy while Lola is powerful and independent, for example—Díaz creates a microcosm for all Dominican immigrants. Each chapter (and character) in the past is melded into the story in the present, and in this way, the momentum and excitement is never lost until the very last

This story revolves around an undocumented family with the hopes that they will be able to live the "American Dream." The second oldest child, Francisco, otherwise known as Panchito who is also our narrator, is the main character of the novel. Panchito exposes a flurry of emotions with his roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, expectations and disappointments. He and his family expressed hope from the start of the story, dreaming of how life would be considerably better once they reached California, somewhere they thought to be a place where they could escape impoverishment. Panchito is shown as a very hopeful character; in fact, there are many times where he hopes for something to the point where he convinces himself it will happen, resulting in the numerous occasions of disappointment and discouragement. Yet, even with the frequent occurrence of disheartenment, Francisco pulls himself back up and perseveres. The author depicts Panchito as a determined character who always manages to push through rough times despite the circumstances around him telling him that he can't.

In his first novel, the story takes place in an under privileged and impoverished neighborhood of East Harlem New York. The main character, Julio Mercado who is called by his nickname “chino” is an Ecuadorian/Puerto Rican husband and father to be who is working part time at a local grocery store while attending community college. He dreams of somehow making something of himself, owning a home and escaping the grasp of the neighborhood and hardships associated with it. Throughout the novel Chino struggles with where his loyalty should lie, with his wife and unborn child or with the streets he had grown up in and his friend “Sapo” who was his friend since childhood. He in some way feels guilty about dreaming of getting out of El Barrio and making a better life for himself and his family because everything he loved and learned in his life came from there. His best friend Sapo who he loved and respected was a high school dropout who turned out to be a drug dealing street hustler who aligned himself with who Chino referred to as the slumlord of the neighborhood, Willie Bodega. Sapo introduces Chino to Bodega, who has a love interest in Chino’s wife Blanca’s Aunt Vera. He wonders if he could upgrade his lifestyle

Their parents found out what had happened and they were in utter disbelief. At first, Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez decided to go back to the school and tried discussing the situation with the school’s administration, but they weren't able to reach an agreement. Dissatisfied with the outcome, Gonzalo devoted the next year to

He did make it to have a college life for a while, had a gorgeous girlfriend, everything seemed on track for him, that is until he hit another bump in the road trying to help a lady that was being put under arrest. He received charges, of course that were not true, but he had no say in this. While this happened, his book ended up being tossed to the curve from problems that occurred with the editors. From this, he later served his time, and promised the lady, whose name is later told to be Licha Rubalcava, that they would wait for each other when they were out, but in the end it didn’t work out for them. He couldn’t go back to school after everything that happened; he was gone for too long and he was way behind. He found work for full-time graveyard shift at a paper factory, and heard news about all the continuous violence back home. He wished he could have done something, it’s where he grew up, but he knew better than to end up back in that mess again. He decided to leave and head for San Pedro, and later traveled to Chicago and was gone for 12 years. When Grillo returned to Los Angeles, he moved into the valley finding work at construction sites, steel mills, refineries, and foundries for seven years. He worked with protester and movements for equality, and later asked a woman named Camila Martinez to marry him. His life finally began to settle down, and everything seemed right. At

The Riveras struggle with both emotional and financial difficulties after immigrating to America. When the Riveras arrive to America they are faced with many financial difficulties. When Alma first arrives to Redwood Apartments she realizes that it is nothing like how she expected American housing to be. She says “ I had expected it to be nicer. Something with white shutters and red bricks with manicured shrubs and flower boxes in the windows. The way American houses looked in movies.” (Henrique 12) Even though the Riveras housing was not as they had hoped for it was the best they were able to do because of Arturos low pay at his new job in a mushroom factory which is keeping the Riveras visas active. Arturo undergoes harsh conditions working

Throughout his life with him, he cries some, but the man plays his radio every night, so the boy is quiet at night. One day, since the river hurt the boy to almost being blind, he has no friends, so Papy decides to get him into guitar lessons so he will have something to do besides sit at home. They both find a blind guitarist. He is very snotty and thick skinned. He teaches the boy everything from guitar to how to cook. After many years of them working hard, him learning how to play guitar, the civil war reaches him. He is very frightened, so he runs out into the forest. He finds a girl overlooking soldiers putting bodies into a burn pit. Both girl and boy fell in love that day. After Francisco played his guitar for her, he went back to where Papy worked, and he finds out that the soldiers took him, and were wanting to find his family, due to his anti-government attitude. Francisco goes to his teacher's house, but they have killed him also. He goes to his house, and is sent to America by strangers, which is later revealed as Francisco’s biological mothers friends and

After Juana’s father is forced to leave Mexico for more economic opportunity, the family is faced with numerous obstacles as they wait to hear word from him. Thinking they were abandoned, the family starts to fall apart as they deal with the psychological struggles of not knowing the truth. This theme extends throughout the novel as Lupe Garcia ends up in prison for committing murder, later spiraling into a depression and eventually losing her sanity as she continues to wait for her husband and children to return.

The narrator states that “it was [Maria] who did away with my generation’s virginity” (65). Garcia Marquez uses a hyperbole to portray how crucial Maria Cervantes’s contradictory role is in the men’s lives. She embraces her sexuality and is very open. In addition she also “taught [the men] much more than [they] should have learned, but she taught us above all that there’s no place in life sadder than an empty bed” (65). She reinforces the idea that sexuality should not be repressed because that would only bring on loneliness and despair. She recognizes the “disorder of love” that the townspeople live with because of repressed sexuality. The narrator describes Santiago Nasar’s passionate relationship with Maria Cervantes. He describes their relationship like “a falcon who chases a warlike crane” and that the falcon can only “hope for a life of pain” (65). The author uses a metaphor to compare Maria to a warlike crane in order to show her power and grace. The crane is a bird that stands tall and may look elegant and enticing but because Maria is “a warlike crane” she is able to stand up and fight for herself while still maintaining her grace. Another aspect of her independence would be that she stands alone in her battle against society. Garcia Marquez gives her these headstrong qualities to show how she follows her own path and goes against the town’s beliefs without showing any signs of stopping and to show that

“Chico is lit, but I caught a ride with some people to the city (San Francisco) and how people be living off the land there is wicked. There are some parts there where we take

In the book The House on Mango Street the vignettes are written in an impressionistic style. A characteristic of impressionism that is very prevalent in this book is that if the reader was to look at each vignette in a lot of detail, and very separately, the whole book would not make sense, however if they were to take a step back and think of the book as a whole, the bigger picture is more clear. In the impressionistic art, the painters would paint in such a way that looking closely was very confusing and nobody could tell what the scene was, but when they were to look at it from farther away they could make out a bigger picture. Cisneros does this in The House on Mango Street by making each vignette very separate. None of them seem to have anything to do with the

The same day after talking about being hidden behind a mask Francisco writes “if I was to die today, and you tell people about me, just tell them that I’m finally free, because I don’t have to be nobody that I don’t want to be.” (p. 65) I found this particular quote that he said powerful in the first eight chapters of the book. I felt that he was trapped and asking for help but at the same time he knew he put himself in the trap that he is. And the only way out for him was to associate it with death which would lead him to the freedom that he maybe yearning for. Death would mean that Francisco was free from being a gang member, being locked up, hiding behind a mask for so long and finally getting to be his real self again. Death would mean

Francisco is seen as all things wise and holy during the novel and the many little things continually prove that his is true. When we first are introduced to Francisco, he is traveling to pick up Abel at the bus stop. We see his dedication to