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House On Mango Street Culture

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The House on Mango Street is set in a poor, primarily Hispanic neighborhood. Author Sandra Cisneros creates an atypical, yet easily digestible world for the reader to experience while learning about Esperanza’s childhood. The culture of her environment influences Esperanza’s development as she becomes a young woman, and contributes to the book’s driving theme of self-empowerment. Mango Street is the source of Esperanza’s growth through her childhood, and it hides sadness and longing underneath stereotypes of Hispanic people. The characters that live in the broken-down neighborhood all seem to represent pigeonholed views of Latino individuals. The cliche that people of this culture have too many unruly children is represented through the bit …show more content…

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. Esperanza shifts from a follower into a confused individual, allowing her to begin her life as a woman outside of the oppressive nature of Mango Street. The suffocating stereotypes and sad, gloomy traits of the culture surrounding Esperanza contribute to the cultivation of her strong will and ardor. Mango Street opens her eyes to the abusive nature of her environment, and aids her in breaking the chain of corruption by defining and terminating the situation for herself. The neighborhood itself allows Esperanza to

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335 Words | 2 Pages

The House On Mango Street is written in a series of vignettes to emphasize essential events in Esperanza's life. Each of these contain important literary choices made by Cisneros to emphasize different things of importance in the book. The vignette “Four Skinny Trees” is extremely prominent in the book. Here, the use of symbolism, personification, and diction illustrates Esperanza's growth from a child to a young women, and the strength she has.

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229 Words | 1 Pages

Esperanza’s Achievement of Cultural Identity and Autonomy In the coming of age story of Sandra Cisnero’s novel The House on Mango Street, the author uses simple but profound language to express the young girl and main character, Esperanza’s, goal is to become an autonomous individual who controls her own choices. She is driven by her observations of the many trapped and powerless people of Mango Street. This desire is physically represented by her dream of a new house in a different place—at first it is a house for her family, but at the story’s end, it is a house she owns alone, where she can write. It not only symbolizes her dream of agency of trying to change her name to something that shows the “real” her.

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568 Words | 3 Pages

The House on Mango Street is a widely recognized Bildungsroman novel written by Sandra Cisneros. The story is based on a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, named Esperanza. Her tribulations are told through a series of vignettes with fluctuating emotions, from joyous celebrations of friendships to heartbreaking tragedies. Each vignette is crucial to Esperanza’s development as a mature young woman. However, “Sally” is the most critical vignette in the novel The House on Mango Street because it significantly advances the plot and main character, through the use of figurative language and imagery to show Esperanza’s discovery of an idol she can pursue after.

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433 Words | 2 Pages

Esperanza finds out that she needs to become promiscuous in order to be popular like Sally and she’s not comfortable with that idea. Later on Sally and Esperanza go to the carnival, Sally leaves her alone to go with a boy. Esperanza is now by herself vulnerable and ends up getting raped. She realizes that boys are not what she thought they were, so she decides to focus on herself. Esperanza changes what she thought she wanted for the future.

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489 Words | 2 Pages

In the opening vignette of the novela “The House on Mango Street” a young girl and her family of six move into a small run-down house on Mango Street on the other side of town. After moving from apartment to apartment, Esperanza finally believed she would have

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681 Words | 3 Pages

However, inside of the neighborhood it's not bad what's so ever. Esperanza is a latina girl with big dreams to become a writer and to get a better house, and she wants to look up to her father. Knowing this Esperanza's identity as ambitious is greatly shaped by her poverty. One way Esperanza is ambitious is she wants

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481 Words | 2 Pages

The House on Mango Street Analysis “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros is a coming of age story about a young girl named Esperanza and her experiences living in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago. The author uses Mango Street as a symbol to affect the conflict. Throughout the story, the neighborhood is shown to be very poor and rundown. Places are shown to be old and small. Characters seem to move into the neighborhood, be the focus, and then never be mentioned again.

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1146 Words | 5 Pages

The negative and positive role models in The House on Mango Street had a big impact on Esperanza and the way she lived her

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276 Words | 2 Pages

In the book The House Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, the struggle to have a good life in the Latino community is a major problem. Living in the struggling inner city of Chicago has caused some to take the easy way out and get married. On the other hand, one has decided to go to school and inherit the place her mother had in the house before she died. She must must fight to overcome the social injustice of being forced to live in a ghetto along with other Hispanic families, which keeps her away from living closer to the university where other majorities are given a better opportunity for education and housing. Alicia struggles in the neighborhood of Mango Street due to her Hispanic culture.

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909 Words | 4 Pages

Esperanza's shame led her to want to die. Her shame was brought to herself by her actions as a child. By being ashamed for doing the right thing it allows her to have another reason the wrong path. In Esperanza’s community, everyone is ashamed and wants to “escape”, “escape” in the sense that no one would choose to be there. Girls are usually the main ones who have more troubling escaping because they are the minority.

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307 Words | 2 Pages

Sandra Cisneros does a great job of reflecting on, and showing the dangers of many different prevalent social issues in “The House on Mango Street”, and arguably the biggest is child abuse. This novel truly reflects upon and exposes real life issues. Esperanza’s friend, Sally, is a major victim of this abuse as her father beats her repeatedly and she often comes to school “black and blue”. In “What Sally Said” Esperanza reveals “when the dark came her father, whose eyes were little from crying, knocked on the door and said please come back, this is the last time. And she said Daddy and went home.

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773 Words | 4 Pages

The book, The House on Mango Street, allowed readers to take a glimpse at life on Mango Street through Esperanza’s eyes. Esperanza described the neighborhood, providing insights on each of her neighbors and their families. She knew the street backwards and forwards; she grew up on the street. Despite it becoming a part of Esperanza’s childhood, she failed to truly belong to Mango Street.

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1115 Words | 5 Pages

Esperanza’s interest is writing poem, appears in many of the chapters where it explains a way of bonding with her community by sharing poems with one another. Because Esperanza has become a writer her observations strengthen throughout the novel. One example of how she matures through writing is in the beginning of the book she told stories that were obviously meant for a younger audiences but through the middle of the book she started to use more observation based upon what she saw which helped develop the story more for the reader. This change shows that she is becoming an artist, and also that she is starting to distance herself from her community, since she focuses more on capturing experiences than living through them, she starts to further her self from interaction and focuses more on observation of the people around her. By the end of The House on Mango Street, she knows that she underwent a huge transformation and her relationship with mango st is starting to weaken.

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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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494 Words | 2 Pages

Joey Feniello Hingano English Term 4 May 19 2016 Identity Crisis The House on Mango Street is based around one girl and her struggle to fit together the pieces of her identity together to find herself. This is apparent throughout the entire novel. Important things that contribute to her identity are Latin American Traditions, Esperanza's neighborhood, family relationships and dynamics, friendships, and encounters with others. Esperanza is Mexican-American.

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