House On Mango Street Mamacita Character Analysis

In Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, the character of Mamacita has the strongest ties to her home she left, and perhaps the strongest desire to escape from Mango Street and return home. Mamacita is a woman with a husband and child, who moved to Chicago from a latin american country. She is somewhat overweight, doesn’t know much English, and stays mostly in her apartment for unknown reasons, singing songs from her native country and crying. Her husband fights with Mamacita, often over her desire to return, and her child is becoming assimilated into American society against her will. Because Mamacita has such strong ties to her heritage and origin, she clings to it tightly, resisting assimilation in any way possible, and highlights

Her opposition to american incorporation can be seen as noble and brave, facing up to her husband and reality alike, but it holds her back to where she can never truly make progress. She goes as far as to have her husband paint her apartment pink: “but it’s not the same, you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries”(77). Mamacita’s very dreams are what hold her back, and the vain desire to go and see home again keep her from accepting her new life. Escape is a common theme throughout the female characters of The House on Mango Street, but it is probably Mamacita whose desire to escape is the most prominent, to the point where it is what unfortunately keeps her ‘trapped’ there. She shows promise, but only if she can let go of her previous life and move on to where she can flourish in Chicago, and to find a ‘home in the heart’. For Mamacita to release her tragic desire to escape Mango Street and to undertake her new responsibilities in Chicago is ironically enough the only way to escape from the prison she has constructed around herself, and from there she can truly be