What Is Esperanza Cordero In The House On Mango Street

“In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing” (Cisneros ,1984). Esperanza Cordero is the most important character in the novel “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros. Esperanza is smart, joyful, and kind of awkward in a charming way. She is just like you. Ok, you probably weren’t born and raised in a humble “barrio” in Chicago but who has never feel embarrassed in a way about their identity? Maybe because how wealthy your family is, the house you live in or at least for being different from the other kids in school? That’s Esperanza,

Is a young girl that battles with the loneliness and shame of being poor. She is also a writer, and that’s the tool she uses to find who she really is. A tool powerful enough to reconcile with her pass, her community and it helps her to persevere when she goes to painful situations like the death of her parents and sexual abuse. In one line of the story Esperanza says: “I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes. I say, "And so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked." (Cisneros,1984). The ability of Esperanza to make her life a story is the reason she can bare everything she goes through and a way to find maturity and her identity. We can see how Esperanza tries to become more independent and how she is able to identify the barriers that most of their family members have. She tells us about how her great-grand mother (whose name is Esperanza) have lived contemplating the view from the window like looking for some escape. “She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window”

She talks about her perfect house, a place where she can go alone and feel free. She describes it by saying: “Not a flat. Not an apartment in black. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after. Only a house quit as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem” (Cisneros,1984). She has finally found her identity and she knows that even if she leaves Mango Street, that’s where she belongs. Not because she doesn’t have a choice but because Mango Street is where she was molded to become the confident women she is today. She finishes saying that many of her friends and neighbors will be asking, where did Esperanza go? What happened to her books and papers? and Espereranza answers to herself: “They will not Know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out”