Response To The House On Mango Street

Response Paper to The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

The book The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is in most ways a typical coming-of-age novel. It deals with the growing up of Esperanza, a young Latina girl. In this novel Cisneros lets the reader take part in the life of a girl not only struggling with poverty and identity, but with everyday problems like friends, school, and boys.

The first thing that impressed me was Cisneros’ ability to convincingly write from a teenager’s perspective. And I think it is quite different from other coming-of-age novels. Usually, you could sense that it was an adult who tries to think and write like a teenager. But with Cisneros’ Novel, you did not. It was so convincing that I had to look up how old she was when

And it’s not being seen as German. Or in Esperanza’s case American. At the beginning, in the Chapter Those Who Don’t she talks about what happens when strangers come into her neighbourhood. She says they’re scared and think they’re going to be attacked. She describes her neighbourhood as “all brown all around”. (Cisneros 28) So these “non-Mexican” people come there and have all these prejudices in their mind, even though they don’t know them personally. They classify them as Mexican and Mexican’s are dangerous. In a way, I can relate to that. My origin may not be as obvious as Esperanza’s is, but it does come out every now and then. When people ask where I was born, for example. And as soon as I say I was born in Russia, I somehow lose my German citizenship and become Russian. I lived in Russia for 1 and a half year, my mother tongue is German, I have a German ID, I am German. But still, I’m Russian to them. And that comes with a set of prejudices. In their view, Russian’s are rude, vodka-drinking yahoos. And even though they don’t know me, and if they did, they would know that these prejudices don’t apply to me, I’m still a Russian to