"The House on Mango Street" Sandra Cisneros

I wasn’t sure what to think about Mango Street when I first opened it and found out that the chapters were so short. The back cover of the book said that it is laid out in a series of vignettes, and at first I thought that each chapter was really a short story. I initially thought the book would be like Yasumari Kawabata’s "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories," a book of very short stories, some less than a page in length. However, the vignettes of Cisneros in "Mango Street" are parts of a single story, even though each chapter could be read individually.

I once said that the stories in Louise Erdrich’s "Love Medicine" created a image like a lithograph adding one layer of color at a time until a complete image is unveiled. Cisneros’s writing is different, and the image she is creating is like a mural; each chapter paints one section at a time. Think of Mango Street running through the middle of the mural, and each chapter paints a room or a house along Mango Street. In “Marin,” we see Marin dancing under a streetlight trying to get the boys to notice her. Mamacita in “No Speak English” is trying to not become assimilated to Mango Street by isolating herself from the outside world. Each chapter paints another part of the mural until Cisneros provides with a picture of the community in which Esperanza lives.

I thought the language of Mango Street was very easy to read and was wondering if the book was intended for adult or adolescent readers. The subject of several chapters including “The First Job” and “Red Clowns” seems a little strong for young readers. In one of the articles I read about Mango Street, it referred to the rape in “Red Clowns,” and I probably wouldn’t have thought that Esperanza was raped without the additional reading, although I assumed that she was assaulted in some way. Regardless, the sexual content of the book is not always so subtle, and after finishing the book, I was surprised to find that it is widely read in school at both the elementary and high school levels. I was surprised for two reasons: I had never heard of this book before and feel that I am not keeping up with the literature that my students read in school, and I was surprised that a book with so much sexual content was read by elementary students. The latter feeling of surprise is related to the Puritanical attitudes of my family and how I was raised; however, I think that it is important that young girls and boys discuss these issues. I was the victim sexual assault that began when I was ten years old, and I had no way to discuss this with anyone for the longest time. I think that if I had read a book such as "Mango Street" as a third-grader, then I would have been better prepared to communicate what was happening to me or better prepared with how to deal with it.

I am continually brought up short and reminded of how little I know and understand. I read books like "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," "The Perez Family" and "Como Agua Para Chocolate," and I think I know about Latin culture. Then I read another book like "Mango Street," and it reminds me that I shouldn’t be so arrogant to think that Latin culture is one-dimensional, that I should realize that each country or region would have a different culture and that even within one group of people there are still a wide variety of experiences. In particular, I thought that family was the strongest bond in Latin culture and nothing comes before that, but in "Mango Street," Esperanza does not seem to have the same familial bond that I see in other books. For instance, in "Como Agua Para Chocolate," the main character gives up love in order to take care of her mother, but Esperanza wants to get out, get away, and we are to assume that she does.

Once, one of my students asked a man from Toronto, “Do Canadians like to travel?” I wondered why my student would think that all thirty million Canadians would like the same thing? I try to teach my own students to not make assumptions based on little information and yet, I catch myself doing the same thing. I was in China for three weeks once on an exchange program and talked to some students of Hebei Teachers College to help them with their English conversation skills. Those students had very specific ideas about people in the U.S.−we all carry guns and we are all rich. So, maybe it is common for people all over to apply what little they know to each situation which results in flawed ideas of culture. That doesn't console me.

Written on 13 March 2009.