The House On Mango Street Coming Of Age Quotes

In the book The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, the author gives us a lovely representation of a coming of age novel. The book was released in 1984 in Chicago, where the author spent most of her time writing this in her apartment in Illinois. This novel is about a girl named Esperanza and tells us a story about a girl going through her teenage years and tackling lots of different challenges that all teenage girls have to face such as, segregation and sexual assault in the harmful environment. One of the things that we see in this coming of age book is how her outlook on life changes from an innocent little girl to a mature grown woman. Sandra Cisneros, the author of the book, shows us how she navigates her teenage years using many

She doesn't have many friends, but over time she integrates more into the community. Her friendships start off rocky with her being approached by a group of girls and asked to pay for their friendship. She tells us that a small girl approaches her and says, “if you give me 5 dollars I'll be your friend forever”(cisneros 12), which foreshadows their later friendship where these girls stand by her as she goes through the struggles of being a teenage girl. The diction Cisneros uses tells us a lot about the character's age. In the quote I have used you can see how she has said “forever” from this we can infer that they are very young and don’t have any concept of time, this dialogue that is used is subtext making us understand their age range without directly addressing a number. When you read this you can see her youth and how this is the start of her relationship with these girls. You see here that this is her first piece of integration into the community and already therefore shaping her into the woman she grew up to be. Everyone knows that the people around you make you who you are and by using dialogue to show us how young they are you get to understand that these girls she became friends with will have a life long effect on her as when you are young you are the most susceptible to

As the girls grow up, they start to see changes in their body, one of which is that Esperanza sees she has developed hips. The girls talk as they play skip rope, and when they discuss this they go to tell each other different things. One girl says that developing hips is for the use of when you are carrying a baby and another says that developing hips is so that you can dance and if you don't get them you can turn into a man when the reader reads this it makes you chuckle as you can see how humor is used to display the different ages in the girls that play together. You can see at this part of their childhood they are very young and mature and wholesome. Cisneros writes it in a way where you can imagine the girls playing outside giggling about growing up, this type of humor between the girls lets you see that Esperanza is comfortable with her friends and will lead her to grow up a woman who feels stable in her