"The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros

Read: 6/16/09

5/5 stars

What does a woman want? Security is a common answer. What does a adolescent Latina woman growing up in America want? In this story, her own house.

The House on Mango Street is a short book--all of 110 pages. Yet it took me around three days to finish it from start to end. Why? You know when you have to put down a book at certain portions because you just have to stare off into the distance and take in or think about the beauty or the pain that you just read? This is why I couldn't breeze through this short book. It wasn't meant to be breezed through. It is sparse, beautiful, and powerful. And the emotion that grips you when you read it is not something that goes away after you've finished reading it. It will stay, and you will think about it and perhaps wonder how a few simple sentences can make you feel so much.

The narrative is broken into very short chapters, some comprising only 2-3 paragraphs. Actually, the book is a series of vignettes told from the point of view of Esperanza, the adolescent Latina, who starts out describing the house in Mango Street her family lives in.

The house is much less than what Esperanza or her family dreamed of, Esperanza knows. She knows her family were led to expect more; she knows others look down on her house. And so, the first chapter ends with this:

I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn't it. The house on Mango Street isn't it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how these things go.

Here is Sandra Cisneros' elegant prose, carried throughout the rest of the book's chapters. The vignettes told by Esperanza cover the cast of characters who live in her Latino community and are almost reminiscent in tone to the epitaphs of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. And no wonder, too, since Cisneros is a poetess herself. Her writing shows a poet's careful choice of words to achieve the maximum effect. A lot of passages are lyrical and even have internal rhymes.

However, I guess the beauty of language wouldn't really mean as much if there weren't any relevant emotion or experiences to back them up. The House on Mango Street provides a lot. Esperanza sees her family, neighbors, friends trapped within certain confines of their situation and society. Women look out of windows and wish for more, natives from Latin America wish to go home, children contend with the realities of poverty. And Esperanza? She wishes to leave, to not be trapped in Mango Street. She struggles with who she is and who she wants to be.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister's name--Magdalena--which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza.

I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees.

Esperanza, however, is not the only female in this book dealing with the disparity between what life has given her and what she actually wants from it.

There is Marin, who "is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life." Alicia, "whose mama died, [and] is sorry there is no one to rise and make the lunchbox tortillas," but who studies at the university because "she doesn't want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin." Aunt Lupe, who was sick and dying for a long time, but who encourages Esperanza to keep writing because "it will make [her] free."

And Sally, who merits this beautiful passage, which I really would like to share with you, despite the length:

Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn't have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a room is waiting for you. And if you opened the little window latch and gave it a shove, the windows would swing open, all the sky would come in. There'd be no nosy neighbors watching, no motorcycles and cars, no sheets and towels and laundry. Only trees and more trees and plenty of blue sky. And you could laugh, Sally. You could go to sleep and wake up and never have to think who likes you and doesn't like ou. You could close your eyes and you wouldn't have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you're strange because you like to dream and dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy.

By now, I think you can tell I love the book's language. I love it when poetry or prose is clean, simple, and intense.

Esperanza, however, changes within the year that the book's narrative covers. She still wants a house, a space of her own. She still wants to leave Mango Street. But, not to leave it far behind. A few characters, reminiscent of the Weird Sisters from Macbeth, tell Esperanza: "When you leave you must remember always to come back. For the ones who cannot leave as easily as you."

And I think this is what resonates most with me. A woman, who finds herself different from the others, who is mainly in a position of powerlessness, but does claim her own power by not succumbing to what is expected of her.

If I had female students, this book would be in our reading list in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I will have to find another set of people to pimp this book to. Hopefully, whoever you are reading this, you're one of them.:)