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Female Role Models In Mango Street

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Growing up as a young female teen came be hard due to the stress and peer pressure of appearance. For teenage girls from immigrant families, it came be very challenging to fit in with the “American way”. Esperanza struggles throughout the book with finding her place in society. She looks to other female role models in her community for guidance, where she finds different results. Most of Esperanza’s female role models on Mango Street have unique stories to tell of their experiences with men on Mango Street. However, they all have the central theme of mistreatment by men and they each have their own way of dealing with it. The divergent responses Esperanza receives from all these females she views as a role model cause her to dream big, not …show more content…

When we are first introduced to the topic of boys and girl Esperanza puts it as “The boys and girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours.” (Cisneros 8). Esperanza doesn't see the need for boys at the moment be the need of a friend. These views change once she meets Marin, who is much older and can grab any boys attention with her beauty. Esperanza experiences a sense of beauty and attention when she is strolling through the streets in high heels with Lucy and Rachel receiving comments such as “ ladies, lead me to heaven” (Cisneros 41) from a boy and jealousy from six girls who watch as they walk by. Later, Esperanza meets Rafaela who happened to be trapped in her house because of her husband and this probably has Esperanza thinking of what her future could be like with a husband. A short while after Esperanza befriends a girl named Sally who happens to be the prettiest girl her age at school. Sally receives all the attention from the boys but is beaten by her father at home because of her beauty. All of these experiences beginning with Esperanza not worried about boys to getting attention from boys is a key and then learning that your beauty can get you in trouble ultimately confuses Esperanza’s views on what to believe about

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The women that surround her are silent, and many of them cannot leave the house. She watches girls have children and marry just to escape their home because that is the only thing they know in life. Esperanza already knows she wants to be more than what is expected of her as a poor, Latina girl, and will fight the expectations placed on her in the subtlest of ways. “I have begun my own quiet war. Simple.

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1445 Words | 6 Pages

Still Esperanza does not get what is going on at this point. She is still so naïve and innocent. Sometimes the reader forgets how young she actually is because of the things she is going through at such a young age. Her mind and her decisions are moving at a faster pace, but she is still so blind to the world.

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510 Words | 3 Pages

In House On Mango Street, Esperanza is surrounded by many characters. Her family, her friends, and the other residents of Mango Street (and beyond). She learns a little bit about life from each of them and she matures quickly in this new neighborhood. The majority of lessons she learns aren’t from her mother or father, or really anybody in her family, she learns her most valuable lessons from people she meets in Mango Street.

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1204 Words | 5 Pages

These problems coming to light through the many women Esperanza looks up to, drive her to rise above her obstacles, and become more than just another poorly treated woman. Despite the variety of girls in the neighborhood, one of Esperanza’s closest friends ends up being Sally, who has moved from one abusive home to the next. Sally’s father was a very strict man and she constantly disobeyed him once out of his sight. Whenever Sally is caught dressing “provocative” or acting “too old” her father decides to teach her a lesson.

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876 Words | 4 Pages

Esperanza cares a lot about what her environment tells her about herself in order to be accepted. During one’s teen years, people are typically very self conscious about how they look or how they are labeled in front of their friends. They are willing to do almost anything to fit in. This quality that a child obtains matches the process in which Esperanza judges herself from what those around her think. She wants to change her identity to fit in with the environment that she has been put into.

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437 Words | 2 Pages

The male-dominated society that Esperanza grows up in forces the idea that women are weak and should stay locked in their houses while men go off to work. The men are immoral and seedy, as expressed in the chapter in which a homeless man leers and asks for a kiss from the little girls. Esperanza experiences the evil of her community when she is sexually assaulted, causing her to lose her previous desire to explore her sexuality. Before being assaulted, she wanted to be “beautiful and cruel” like her friend Sally, because Sally was what she understood to be a perfect woman. However, after her rape she decides that she needs to discover her own identity for herself.

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478 Words | 2 Pages

Esperanza is the ideal example of impotent female 's and their gender role in human society in the days before the Chicano Movement. Throughout the book, we come to read about vulnerable females that never had the chance to become someone of great importance or value. Esperanza wants to break that cycle and vouches to one day leave the neighborhood that deprived her of so many things that little girls her age only dream of. Esperanza goes through the troubles and tribulations of living in the barrio, surrounded by poverty, teen mom 's and the shattered dreams of females before the Chicano Movement of the 1960s. A movement were a large number of women gained power by finding their voice and speaking out.

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1134 Words | 5 Pages

Esperanza acquires a sense of who she is as a young woman. These characters aid in her decided stance on gender roles and how she wants to evade them as she starts to build her own life. Through Esperanza’s narration, the darkness that correlates with the roles of women is brought into light. The gender roles found in the book are still issues today. Such ideas ruin much of society because people have yet to question and altar them.

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1117 Words | 5 Pages

Esperanza is often humiliated not only by where she lives, but also by her physical appearance, hence causing a restriction in her climb to a higher social class. Esperanza is frequently ashamed of her family’s broken-down house in an urban, poor

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772 Words | 4 Pages

Sandra Cisneros, the author of the book The House on the Mango Street, conveys that girls or women do not have as much freedom as guys do, the girls or women are always ruled or controlled by someone mostly male, and they always have to be the one to follow the rules. As Esperanza grows up she observes many girls who are in the conditions that they are not supposed to be in. The girls have no freedom and they are always supposed to listen to the guy in the family. One observation Esperanza observes is that girls are controlled by men all the time and because of listening to men those girls are locked inside. For example as Esperanza says, “And then Rafaela, who is still young but getting old from leaning out the window so much, gets locked indoors because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at” ( Cisneros # 79 ).

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1348 Words | 6 Pages

The main protagonist Esperanza, matures from a childish girl to a young confident woman through many critical and life changing events in the story. Ultimately, the author, Sandra Cisneros implements the symbols of confidence, the house on mango street and the metaphor of shoes to show how Esperanza develops into a more mature state. Sandra Cisneros

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450 Words | 2 Pages

Interestingly, she seems to lose this confidence when speaking to adults outside of her immediate family. Perhaps this points to some traumatic incident with a stranger? But I digress. Esperanza pesters her mother for three days, asking for a note to eat in the canteen. She tells her mother “You will see me less, and like me more.”

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1476 Words | 6 Pages

In Mexican American society , women are deemed inferior to men, evident in traditional family roles, the male is the head of the family who provides for the family , while the woman stays at home to look after the children she is expected to provide for her husband . In the third vignette of ‘The House on Mango Street’ titled ‘Boys and Girls’ the reader is informed of the division between men and women when Esperanza refers to herself and her sister Nenny , and her brothers, “They’ve got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can’t be seen talking to girls”. The male dominance begins at a very young age.

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1212 Words | 5 Pages

She wants to overcome her childish tendencies and transition into womanhood. When Esperanza sees Sire’s girlfriend her interest in Sire and his relationship increases. She even begins to imagine what it would feel like to have a boyfriend. “I want to sit bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt” (73). This represents the arrival of puberty, which is demonstrated by Esperanza’s desire to behave in a grown-up way.

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1095 Words | 5 Pages

The House on Mango Street is a touching and timeless tale told in short vignettes. It tells the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago. Her life, and the lives of the people around her, are laid bare to the readers in this touching novella. In the beginning, Esperanza is not accepting of herself. Her family’s poor financial situation, the sadness of the people around her, and the problems she faces in her daily life make her very cynical.

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