The House on Mango Street

This is the first book I ever read by a Latina author. I was nineteen years old and a student at a small private liberal arts college in Connecticut. My professor assigned it to my American Literature class. I thought she’d made a mistake because some of the words in the book were in Spanish. I didn’t know you could do that—write in English but have some words in Spanish peppered throughout the dialogue and text. I was stunned.

I remember reading about Esperanza and her experiences in her Mexican neighborhood in Chicago, meeting characters on Mango Street, and falling… show more.

Written in 46 short vignettes, this is a coming-of-age story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Yet the novel is anything but one protagonist’s story, as it consistently juxtaposes Esperanza’s story with stories of secondary characters who make a brief appearance in the novel to seldom reappear and tie loose ends of the “sub-plots”: Marin, Louie, Alicia, Geraldo, Rafaela, Minerva, and others. Narrative continuity via a protagonist’s psychological journey that is a key trait of coming-of-age novels, or of mainstream Western or realist novels at large, is repeatedly disrupted here, making the… show more.

The best books invite us into a perspective that’s different from our own, and this bestselling classic, perfect for younger YA or MG readers, powerfully explores the influence of Latin American and white cultures on a girl growing up Latina in Chicago. The short chapters punctuate neighborhood anecdotes and childhood adventures with notes of humor as well as sadness, and I love how Esperanza’s strong dreams are expressed in her unforgettable voice.

The House on Mango Street is an evocation of a place written in prose poetry vignettes. Families, relationships, and neighborhood emerge as the vignettes are woven to create a narrative. Shards are pieced together as the setting becomes a character that supports, encourages and is the catalyst for young Esperanza’s emerging sense of self. It is this sense of neighborhood that draws me in, making me think of the responsibility of a community to help raise each child.

A celebrated modern classic, The House on Mango Street unfolds in a series of intimate vignettes told to us by Esperanza, a young girl growing up amid the color and chaos of her Latinx Chicago neighborhood, with all its striking loves and pains. Esperanza brings the reader into the heart of her family, and into her personal dreams that strive to live in a place where so many dreams are crushed. Mango Street is an intimate story infused with love, humor, sadness, and hope.

I grew up in the same city as the 13-year-old protagonist of this powerful novel, not far from where it is set, but one closed off to me. Though I read this novel long after my own teen years, it took me back to a younger self in which I grappled, inarticulately, with ethnic and class difference, both despising those who would exclude me and longing for inclusion in a shallow, idealized version of what others have. The novel is controversial, partly because it deals with abuse and coercion, but the narrator’s name Esperanza enforces the positive direction of this… show more.

In this classic series of vignettes, 12-year-old Esperanza Cordero grows up in impoverished and violent Chicago. She yearns for autonomy and is excited as her physique becomes more shapely and womanly, but she is sexually assaulted at her first job and raped by several men at a carnival. Her best friend is abused physically by her father and, to escape, marries before she enters the eighth grade. Though she wants to leave Mango Street, Esperanza remains rooted to her patriarchal Mexican-American heritage and community. This is a book to savor slowly—the text, as Cisneros has written, “is as succinct and… show more.