The House on Mango Street

Book Summary

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. During the year, she moves with her family into a house on Mango Street. 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. Esperanza does not have any privacy, and she resolves that she will someday leave Mango Street and have a house all her own.

Esperanza matures significantly during the year, both sexually and emotionally. The novel charts her life as she makes friends, grows hips, develops her first crush, endures sexual assault, and begins to write as a way of expressing herself and as a way to escape the neighborhood. The novel also includes the stories of many of Esperanza’s neighbors, giving a full picture of the neighborhood and showing the many possible paths Esperanza may follow in the future.

After moving to the house, Esperanza quickly befriends Lucy and Rachel, two Chicana girls who live across the street. Lucy, Rachel, Esperanza, and Esperanza’s little sister, Nenny, have many adventures in the small space of their neighborhood. They buy a bike, learn exciting stories about boys from a young woman named Marin, explore a junk shop, and have intimate conversations while playing Double Dutch (jumping rope). The girls are on the brink of puberty and sometimes find themselves sexually vulnerable, such as when they walk around their neighborhood in high-heeled shoes or when Esperanza is kissed by an older man at her first job. During the first half of the year, the girls are content to live and play in their child’s world. At school, Esperanza feels ashamed about her family’s poverty and her difficult-to-pronounce name. She secretly writes poems that she shares only with older women she trusts.

Over the summer, Esperanza slips into puberty. She suddenly likes it when boys watch her dance, and she enjoys dreaming about them. 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. She begins to closely watch the women in her neighborhood. 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. Meanwhile, during the beginning of the following school year, Esperanza befriends Sally, a girl her age who is more sexually mature than Lucy or Rachel. Sally, meanwhile, has her own agenda. She uses boys and men as an escape route from her abusive father. Esperanza is not completely comfortable with Sally’s sexual experience, and their friendship results in a crisis when Sally leaves Esperanza alone, and a group of boys sexually assaults Esperanza in her absence.

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. 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.

Book Analysis

In a series of vignettes, The House on Mango Street explores how patriarchy, gender roles, and sexual violence impact the lives of women. Sandra Cisneros, through her semi autobiographical protagonist Esperanza, demonstrates that patriarchal society cannot accommodate women seeking to develop independent identities. Esperanza's inner conflict, born out of living in a patriarchal world, is mirrored in the conflicts of women in the vignettes. She does not want to be a “woman in the window,” like women who conform. Instead, she craves independence, concluding that she must escape to achieve it.

The people in Esperanza’s Mango Street neighborhood are trapped in gender-defined roles. Esperanza, early in life, notices differences in these roles, observing how boys and girls interrelate. Her brothers talk to her and her sister at home, but they do not engage in public. Her culture, she realizes, has one set of expectations for boys and another, restricted set for girls. To illustrate this contrast, she tells the story of her great-grandmother Esperanza, which, in the structure of interlocking vignettes, serves as the inciting incident. The elder Esperanza, a strong and creative woman, had been forced into marriage. She then spent her days staring out a window, a symbolic gesture emphasizing her cultural confinement. Esperanza shares her name but longs to avoid her fate, a life without agency. 

The plot’s rising action develops through a series of vignettes describing women in the neighborhood. Their stories reveal limits to life in the domestic sphere; they are relegated to keeping house, raising children, and looking after men. Each story provides an insight into the effects of imposed gender roles. One such story is that of Rosa Vargas, a woman with many children whose father has abandoned them. Initially, neighbors pity and help Rosa, but the care they offer becomes tedious and tapers away. Even when one of Rosa’s children dies, no one comes to her aid. Rosa, like Esperanza’s grandmother, is trapped in a domestic role, without agency over her existence. Even the number of children she has hints at a denial of contraception and control. In the patriarchal world, Rosa’s identity is circumscribed: she is simply a woman with children whose husband has abandoned her.

While Rosa is trapped in this imposed maternal identity, Alicia, another woman in Esperanza’s neighborhood, is oppressed by her role as caregiver. Esperanza relates to Alicia; both are strong women who want independence. Alicia tries to achieve this freedom by attending college. However, her father tries to return her to the patriarchal fold, explaining that a woman should tend the house and prepare food. Esperanza witnesses Alicia’s struggles and becomes aware that when the mother of a family passes away, all caregiving falls to the eldest daughter. Alicia’s condition, Esperanza recognizes, may one day become her own.

These, and similar incidents drive the vignettes forward, revealing that men continually assert control over women and girls, propelling Esperanza’s character development. Husbands lock wives in their homes; fathers abuse daughters and force them to lie about it; and men use women for pleasure and little more. Esperanza’s intentions to escape to a life of dignity and agency are spurred by what she witnesses.

From the rising action to the climax, Esperanza grows to understand violence at the hands of men. Sally’s father abuses her, contrasting with Esperanza’s experience, and Esperanza’s two sexual encounters, the first in the garden, where boys force Sally to kiss them, and later at the carnival, where Esperanza is assaulted, traumatize her. At the novella’s climax, the assault, Esperanza misdirects her anger toward Sally and other women: she blames Sally for leaving her with the boys, and she blames other women for failing to tell her the truth about sex. Cisneros uses Esperanza’s misdirected anger symbolically, demonstrating that women in a patriarchal world bear the blame for assaults against them. Men, she suggests, are free to behave as they wish, while women are left with little authority, save to show each other how to remain safe in male-dominated society. Their proscribed sense of identity includes a responsibility to warn each other and to avoid circumstances in which they might be victimized.

After the assault, in the novella’s falling action, Sally marries a much older man and runs away; like the other women on Mango Street, she becomes identified only by her association with a man. Esperanza returns to her younger friends, Lucy and Rachel, whose innocence and lack of sexual knowledge comfort her. As the novella reaches its resolution, Esperanza realizes that to make her life her own, she must leave Mango Street. She will return to help and support the women in her neighborhood, but she understands that she must forge her own identity, knowing that her Mango Street experiences will always remain a part of who she is.

Key Facts About This Book

Narrator: Esperanza Cordero

Point of view: Esperanza narrates in the first-person present tense. She focuses on her day-to-day activities but sometimes narrates sections that are just a series of observations. In later vignettes Esperanza talks less about herself and more about the people around her. In these sections she is never fully omniscient, but she sometimes stretches her imagination to speculate on the characters’ feelings and futures.

Tone: Earnest, hopeful, intimate, with very little distance between the implied author and the narrator

Tense: Mostly present tense, with intermittent incidents told in the future and past tenses

Setting (time): A period of one year

Setting (place): A poor Latino neighborhood in Chicago

Protagonist: Esperanza

Major conflict: Esperanza struggles to find her place in her neighborhood and in the world.

Rising action: Esperanza desires to leave her neighborhood, observes other women, and finds newfound sexual awareness in her friendship with the sexually adventurous Sally.

Climax: Esperanza’s tumultuous friendship with Sally leads to her emotional and sexual humiliation.

Falling action: Esperanza returns to her less mature friends, understands that she does in fact belong on Mango Street, and settles on writing as her way of both escaping and accepting her neighborhood.

Themes: The power of language; the struggle for self-definition; sexuality vs. autonomy; women’s unfulfilled responsibilities to each other

Motifs: Names; falling; women by windows

Symbols: Shoes; trees; poetry

Foreshadowing: The bum’s request for a kiss; the boys’ demand that Sally kiss each of them in exchange for her keys; the description of Esperanza’s great-grandmother’s life of sitting at the window; Esperanza’s preoccupation with names and naming.

Characters

Esperanza

The novel’s heroine and narrator, an approximately twelve-year-old Chicana (Mexican-American girl). Esperanza is a budding writer who wishes for a home of her own. The House on Mango Street chronicles a year in her life as she matures emotionally and sexually. The name Esperanza means “hope” in Spanish.

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Rachel and Lucy

Esperanza’s best friends. Rachel and Lucy are Mexican-American sisters who live across the street from Esperanza. Lucy, the older sister, was born in Texas, while Rachel, the younger, was born in Chicago. Esperanza eventually chooses a more sexually mature friend, Sally.

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Sally

A young girl Esperanza befriends the same year she moves to Mango Street. Sally is the same age as Esperanza but is sexually bold and seems quite glamorous to Esperanza. She is not a good friend to Esperanza, abandoning her time and again to go off with boys. She has a physically abusive father and runs off before eighth grade to marry a man who won’t let her see her friends or leave the house. Esperanza feels protective of Sally.

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Nenny

Esperanza’s little sister. Nenny, whose real name is Magdalena, is a pretty, dreamy little girl for whom Esperanza is often responsible. Since Nenny is immature, she is often a source of embarrassment for Esperanza when the two of them play with Rachel and Lucy.

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Marin

A young woman from Puerto Rico who lives with her cousin’s family. Marin spends most of her time baby-sitting and so cannot leave the house. She sells makeup for Avon and teaches Esperanza and her friends about the world of boys. Although she has a fiancé back in Puerto Rico, she also dreams about American men taking her away from Mango Street to the suburbs. At the end of the year, her cousins send her back to Puerto Rico.

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Papa

Esperanza’s father. Originally from Mexico, Papa is less domineering than the other father figures in the neighborhood. He works most of the time and is rarely home.

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Mama

Esperanza’s mother. Mama grew up in the United States. She is one of the strongest-willed and smartest women in the novel, yet she seems to influence Esperanza very little. She is sometimes a source of comfort for Esperanza. All of her admirable attributes are lost on Esperanza because Mama has not escaped Mango Street to live somewhere nicer.

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Alicia

Esperanza’s friend who attends a local university. Since Alicia’s mother died, her father forces her to take over the family’s domestic chores. Alicia is a rare example of a neighborhood girl who has not tried to escape the neighborhood through marriage, but instead works hard and hopes to change her life from within.

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Cathy

Esperanza’s first friend in the neighborhood. Cathy’s family moves out the week after Esperanza’s family moves in. She discourages Esperanza from becoming friends with Rachel and Lucy. She is one of the few characters who is not from Mexico or Latin America.

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Carlos and Kiki

Esperanza’s younger brothers. Carlos and Kiki appear infrequently, and Esperanza explains that they live in a different, male world.

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Meme Ortiz

The new resident of Cathy’s house. Meme’s real name is Juan, and he has a dog with two names.

Louie

The eldest sibling in a Puerto Rican family that lives in the basement of the Ortiz house. Louie is friends with Esperanza’s brothers, while Esperanza is friends with Louie’s cousin Marin. Louie’s other cousin appears once with a stolen car, only to get arrested later that afternoon.

The Vargas Kids

An unspecified number of poorly raised, vagrant siblings whose father has abandoned them. One of the Vargas kids, Angel Vargas, dies by falling from a great height.

Uncle Nacho

Esperanza’s friendly uncle, who gets her to dance at her cousin’s baptism in “Chanclas.”

Aunt Lupe

Esperanza’s aunt. In her youth, Lupe was a vibrant, beautiful swimmer, but now she is old, blind, and bed-ridden. She listens to Esperanza’s poems and encourages her to keep writing, but Esperanza and her friends mock Lupe behind her back.

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Elenita

A witch woman Esperanza visits to have her fortune told. Elenita reads Tarot cards and tells Esperanza that she will have “a home in the heart.”

Ruthie

A childish grown-up neighbor who enjoys playing with Esperanza and her friends. Ruthie’s mother, Edna, is a landlady for the large building next door and ignores Ruthie.

Geraldo

A Mexican man Marin meets at a dance. Geraldo dies in a car accident the evening she meets him. Nobody, including Marin, knows anything about him, including his last name.

Mamacita

The overweight Mexican wife of another neighbor. Mamacita comes to America at great expense to her husband, but she is wildly unhappy. She never learns English and never leaves her third-floor apartment.

Rafaela

A neighborhood woman whose husband locks her in their apartment because he is afraid she’ll run off. Rafaela sends money down on a clothesline to Esperanza and her friends so they can buy her sweet juices from the convenience store.

Minerva

The married woman in the neighborhood who is most similar to Esperanza. Minerva and Esperanza share their poems with each other. She is only two years older than Esperanza but already has a husband and two children. Her husband leaves for long periods, only to return in a violent rage.

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Tito

A neighborhood boy who relates to girls in violent and sexual ways. Tito flirts with Esperanza by pushing her in front of an open fire hydrant, and later he steals Sally’s keys in order to get her to kiss him and his friends.

Sire

Esperanza’s first crush. Sire sometimes stares at Esperanza, and though she is afraid, she tries sometimes to look back at him. Sire and his girlfriend Lois hang around outside late at night. Esperanza’s father tells her Sire is a punk, and Esperanza’s mother tells her Lois is the kind of girl who will go with a boy into an alley.

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Earl

A neighbor who works nights and tries to sleep during the day. Earl sometimes brings women home with him for short periods. The neighbors see these women at different times, and each thinks a different woman is his wife, but the women are probably prostitutes.

The Three Sisters

Old ladies Esperanza meets at Lucy and Rachel’s baby sister’s wake. The three sisters are mysterious and guess Esperanza’s hopes and dreams. They advise Esperanza always to return to Mango Street after she leaves it.