Identity In The House On Mango Street

How Identity shapes your life.
To become yourself you must encounter hardships, challenges, and doubt. In the house on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros identity has developed drastically from beginning to end with home. In the beginning, she hated where she lived and did not want it to be a part of her identity. In the end, she embraced where she came from, and her concept of home was home in a heart and not a physical place.
Esperanza in the beginning of the book did not want her home to be linked to her identity. She did not want people to know she lived in the house on Mango Street. To begin with, Esperanza was living in poor conditions by her having to share bedrooms and bricks crumbling in places. Then, a person bullied her because she

Lucy, Rachel, and Esperanza pray for everyone including themselves because of what they did to Aunt Lupe. They played a game every day where they would intimidate someone and someone else had to guess it. Aunt Lupe was extremely sick and was once a good swimmer. Aunt Lupe always listened to Esperanza’s story and Esperanza finally told her one of her own. Aunt Lupe told her to just keep writing. This is shown in “Bord Bad.” It says, “I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I’m me. One day I’ll jump out of my skin. I’ll shake the sky like a hundred violins.” (Cisneros 60-61) This quote shows she was determined to succeed in the world and become a better version of herself. This is when she realizes that she has control of what she wants her life to be like in the future and must be strong to fight through the obstacles. This is a correlation to the trees having to fight to live their way through the concrete later in the book. This was when Esperanza started to realize that her home is in her heart and a mirroring of her identity. This is important because this shows Esperanza was in the transitioning phrase to become a better person for