The House On Mango Street By Sandra Cisneros

Students can face a daily struggle in school, as each one has to study for specific classes to reach a certain goal. Each potential student would then have to choose a goal where he or she would want to reach and, because of that, he or she would push on to escape some item or idea of his or her choosing such as poverty, family or home. Over thirty years ago, Sandra Cisneros published The House On Mango Street, which is a novel made up of vignettes about a little girl named Esperanza and her journey throughout a year’s worth of hardships as a Mexican female. Unlike her mother, she is able to go to school and has the ability to decide what she wants to be and where she wants to go. In the novel, school can be a source of new opportunities through

In the vignette, Minerva Writes Poems, Minerva is a teenager who has to take care of her two children and deals with her husband who constantly argues and leaves. Esperanza describes Minerva with pity, knowing that she is “only a little bit older than me [Esperanza]...Minerva cries because her luck is unlucky” ( Cisneros 84). Minerva’s young age is an important part of the statement, since she should be in school and not being a mother. Because of this, she may have dropped out to join in marriage for more income and lead herself to a dreadful future of beatings and a harsh lifestyle, which is taking care of multiple children as a young teenager and her husband’s insults. Minerva herself does not like living with her husband, as seen in the text. She is constantly in tears due to her unhappy life and no longer wants to go through this anymore, which can occur when one quits school for an easy life with a man with more cash. Throughout this, Minerva has to be able to vent out her feelings, so she trusts Esperanza and “lets me [Esperanza] read her poems…[and] She is always sad like a house on fire-- always something wrong” (84). Esperanza gets to read poems about how Minerva feels, living in a situation that cannot be fixed due to her position in the household. On the other hand, she knows that Minerva

A Smart Cookie is a vignette focusing on a moment where Esperanza’s mother is cooking and looks back on her past. She realizes that “I [she] could’ve been somebody, you know” (90)? This quote is significant as she had many distinguishable traits back then, but had never put them into use. Esperanza’s mother uses the word “somebody,” which may be degrading herself as she believes that she could have been a better person. By “better person,” this could mean she could be living a quiet life and not taking care of four children in a broken down home. The statement itself is short and simply strikes the reader in surprise, by how much Esperanza’s nameless mother gone through and come to realize this. She then points out the fact that Esperanza goes to school and instructs her to study hard, using examples of her godmothers who are both alone and cannot take care of themselves. Then, Esperanza’s mother finally gave her reason to why she had quit school which was because she did not “have nice clothes. No clothes, but I [her mother] had brains” (91). Her reason to stopping her education, altogether, was what stuck with her for the rest of her life. Because of this, Esperanza’s mother did not take any action to continue working, because she felt shame for being poor. This is ironic as this is pointing out her