The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: 9780679433354
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As the novel ends, Esperanza vows that after she leaves, she will return to help the people she has left behind. The most popular novel of its time, The House on Mango Street, by Mexican American writer, Sandra Cisneros published in the United States in 1984 and created a trend in new techniques in the fiction writing arena. It comprises vignettes, which tell the story of a young girl, Esperanza Cordero, a Chicana girl of just 12, living in the Latino quarters in the city of Chicago. It also has fetched American Book Award for Cisneros and was later adapted into a play staged in 2009 in Chicago under the name Tanya Saracho.
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It’s a coming-of-age novel including Esperanza’s zeal to leave the neighborhood and lead a better life. Living in the poor neighborhood in the apartment has had adverse impacts on her young mind. She states that she has been living with her three brothers and sisters, and parents where she experiences a sense of inferiority on account of their shabby apartment.
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When Esperanza finds herself emotionally ready to leave her neighborhood, however, she discovers that she will never fully be able to leave Mango Street behind, and that after she leaves she’ll have to return to help the women she has left. At the end of the year, Esperanza remains on Mango Street, but she has matured extensively. She has a stronger desire to leave and understands that writing will help her put distance between herself and her situation. Though for now writing helps her escape only emotionally, in the future it may help her to escape physically as well.
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Esperanza highlights significant or telling moments both in her own life and those in her community, mostly explaining the hardships they face, such as her neighbor being arrested for stealing a car or the death of her Aunt Lupe. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become.
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She is utterly desperate to find a man to marry her, to escape the beatings and maltreatment she gets from her father at home. This ‘vicious cycle’ is seen when Esperanza goes and tells Sally's mother that her daughter is in a garden with three boys and the mother completely disregards this, her mother doesn't seem surprised or worried. Her mother cares for her cuts and bruises allowing for the violence to perpetuate,[21] both mother and daughter give excuses to the father.
By Sandra CisnerosIntroduction by John Phillip Santos
The bare fact that Sally marries at such a young age to a man that ends up treating her just like her father, shows how this cycle is so ingrained in the way of life of many women, and passed from generation to generation. The author pities this character, not blaming her for what happened to her, Sally was very young and immature to fully understand her surroundings, to find a way out. In these short, poetic installments, Sandra Cisneros captures the sadness and desperation Esperanza sees among her neighbors, especially the women. There's also the confusion that comes with growing up, and the beauty in small moments, like riding a bike with friends.
The book is told in small vignettes which act as both chapters of a novel and independent short stories or prose poems. The story encompasses a year in Esperanza’s life, as she moves to a house on Mango Street in a barrio (Latino neighborhood) of Chicago, Illinois. The house on Mango Street is an improvement over Esperanza’s previous residences, but it is still not the house she or her family dreams of, and throughout the book Esperanza feels that she doesn’t belong there. Esperanza does not introduce herself by name, while other novels that depend on a first person voice, such as Moby-Dick or David Copperfield, have narrators who introduce themselves immediately. When the narrators of Moby-Dick or David Copperfield name themselves, they are announcing that they have a sense of identity and that they will reveal, in retrospect, the story of how they came to be who they are.
The House on Mango Street Study Guide
Esperanza goes through puberty and matures sexually during the book, beginning with an adventure walking around in high-heeled shoes with the other neighborhood girls. She decides that she wants to be “beautiful and cruel” like a woman in the movies, one who is attractive to men but also retains all her own power. Esperanza befriends a girl named Sally, who is beautiful and more sexually mature than the other girls, but has an abusive father. Esperanza experiences a “loss of innocence” moment in the neighborhood “monkey garden” when a group of boys steals Sally’s keys and makes her kiss all of them to get the keys back. Esperanza’s friendship with Sally also leads to her most traumatic experience of the novel, as Sally leaves her alone at a carnival and Esperanza is raped. The story of the novel comprises a year in the life of a young girl named Esperanza Cordero who belongs to the Chicana community.
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Category: Fiction
In a series of vignettes, The House on Mango Street covers a year in the life of Esperanza, a Chicana (Mexican-American girl), who is about twelve years old when the novel begins. The house is a huge improvement from the family’s previous apartment, and it is the first home her parents actually own. However, the house is not what Esperanza has dreamed of, because it is run-down and small. The house is in the center of a crowded Latino neighborhood in Chicago, a city where many of the poor areas are racially segregated.
The girl gives a full account of her how they used to live before moving into this house. The reason is that they have been living from one apartment to another apartment as they did not have their own home. The house in this street is the last one on the list of the rented houses though it is not yet as the promised one as they used to think. At school, she was made fun of because of her poverty and frustrated because people couldn’t pronounce her name properly. The House on Mango Street covers the formative years of Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl living in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood with her parents and three siblings.
She puts aside her newfound sexual awareness, rejoins Lucy and Rachel, her less sexually mature friends, and spends her time concentrating on writing instead of on boys. She chooses, for the present, autonomy over sexuality, which gives her the best chance of escape. Esperanza’s newfound sexual maturity, combined with the death of two of her family members, her grandfather and her Aunt Lupe, bring her closer to the world of adults. This second half of The House on Mango Street presents a string of stories about older women in the neighborhood, all of whom are even more stuck in their situations and, quite literally, in their houses, than Esperanza is.
She, soon, becomes the friend of a highly beautiful girl, Sally, whose proactive dressing impresses her much. Once, her family was having a party in the monkey garden where Sally dances with the boy she like by showing off her expensive and elegant shoes by lowballing Esperanza of her poverty who couldn’t dance with the other boys because of her torn shoes. From the start of the book Esperanza realizes that men and women live in “separate worlds,” and that women are nearly powerless in her society. There is a constant conflict between being a sexual being and keeping one’s freedom, as most of the book’s female characters are trapped both by abusive husbands and needy children. Esperanza comes to recognize this dichotomy as she is caught between her own budding sexuality and her desire for freedom. Esperanza’s traumatic experiences as Sally’s friend, in conjunction with her detailed observations of the older women in her neighborhood, cement her desire to escape Mango Street and to have her own house.
In the final vignette, “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes,” she says she likes to tell stories, which indicates that she is beginning to identify herself as a writer. Ultimately, she moves toward an understanding of how her experiences have affected her and how they will continue to influence her as she gets older. Over the course of the year Esperanza grows emotionally, artistically, and sexually, and the novel meanders through her experiences with her neighbors and classmates. Esperanza makes friends with two other Chicana girls of Mango Street, Rachel and Lucy.
Meanwhile, she takes to poetry to find expression of her feelings and starts explaining the nature of her family members especially Nenny, her younger sister, who imitates her and her neighboring friends with whom she plays such as Lucy and Rachel. Specifically, Mamacita, an elderly woman who refuses to go out of the house due to a lack of her English speaking skills. Told in a series of vignettes stunning for their eloquence, The House on Mango Street is Sandra Cisneros's greatly admired novel of a Latina girl growing up in Chicago. Acclaimed by critics, beloved by children, their parents and grandparents, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, it has entered the canon of coming-of-age classics.
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, published in 1984, is a coming-of-age novel written in short vignettes. The story centers around a young Latina girl named Esperanza Cordero, who grows up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. The novel is structured as a series of short, interconnected stories that collectively depict Esperanza’s experiences, dreams, and observations about her family, friends, and the community around her. These experiences of male oppression, Esperanza’s growing creativity and desire to write, and her dream of a house of her own all cause Esperanza to want to escape Mango Street.
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