The House On Mango Street, By Sandra Cisneros

The House on Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros, is a novel about a young girl growing up in the Latino area of Chicago. It is highly admired and taught in a plethora of grade schools and universities. The House on Mango Street expresses the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is full of harsh realities and jarring beauty. Esperanza doesn’t desire to belong- not to her degenerate neighborhood, and not to the minimum expectations of the world. Esperanza’s story is about her coming into power, and inventing what she’ll independently become. While Esperanza and the other women possess many adversities, as in the way Esperanza’s fortunate to evade the pitfalls of her surroundings and others are not, there are an equal amount

In her youth she states remembering moving numerous times, before settling in a place to call her own. Unlike the other women, Esperanza is ashamed of where she lives and feels she doesn’t belonging to Mango. Though Esperanza differs from the other ladies in that sense, most of them dreamed of leaving and never returning to Mango as well. When asked where Esperanza lived, Cisneros wrote, “I had to look to where she pointed-the third floor… You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there. I nodded…. I knew then I had to have a house. A real house” (Cisneros, 6). Esperanza creates this goal while youthful and it expresses her pride, determination and hardworking

Without knowledge and preparation for reality, children are often led astray and found in hazardous situations. Several were coddled, unable to step foot out of their homes and view the world may have also contributed to their downfalls. An example of this is when Cisneros writes “Rafaela… gets locked indoors because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at (99)”, and when she writes Sally cannot go out. Esperanza, unknowingly, had more freedom than any of the other women, more opportunity for