Begimai Nuranova

Mr. Janosch

04/15/19

ELA

“The House on mango street”

Our shy, but very bright character has two meaning of her name, in English it

means hope. In Spanish it means sadness . Esperanza narrates stories about her

family, neighbors and the imaginations she has in secret. Esperanza change herself

quickly goes from a girl who loves playing outside, jumping rope, and telling stories to a

young woman who dreams about boys, deals with people she loves passing away, and

has to come to terms with her family's poverty.

She has the hope of living in a better house but on arrival to the Mango Street

she is not pleased with the type of house they are ushered into “Everybody has to share

a bedroom, I knew I had to have a house; a real house with trees around it”

(Cisneros,pg 4.). She's a young girl who struggles with her feelings of loneliness and

her shame at being poor. Like many teens, she gets embarrassed a lot and wants to fit

in.” They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that

would be ours for always so we wouldn't have to move each year. […] Our house would

be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence. This

was the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket and this was the house

Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed”(Cisneros, pg 4-5).

The fantasy of owning a beautiful white house is first presented as a family dream –

later Esperanza internalizes her Mama and Papa's dream and makes it her own.
 After moving to the house, Esperanza quickly befriends Lucy and Rachel, two

Chicana girls who live across the street. Lucy, Rachel, Esperanza, and Esperanza’s little

sister, Nenny, have many adventures in the small space of their neighborhood. The girls

are on the brink of puberty and sometimes find themselves sexually vulnerable, such as

when they walk around their neighborhood in high-heeled shoes or when Esperanza is

kissed by an older man at her first job. At school, Esperanza feels ashamed about her

family’s poverty and her difficult-to-pronounce name. She secretly writes poems that she

shares only with older women she trusts. She suddenly likes it when boys watch her

dance, and she enjoys dreaming about them.

During the beginning of the following school year, Esperanza and Sally, a girl her

age who is more sexually mature than Lucy or Rachel. Sally, meanwhile, has her own

agenda. She uses boys and men as an escape route from her abusive father. “Sally,

you lied. It wasn’t what you said at all. What the did. Where the touched me. I didn’t

want it, Sally” ( Cisneros, pg 99) . Esperanza is not completely comfortable with Sally’s

sexual experience, and their friendship results in a crisis when Sally leaves Esperanza

alone, and a group of boys sexually assaults Esperanza in her absence. A key moment

in which this power is demonstrated and tested is when she wears high heels around

the neighborhood. She senses a power in wearing those shoes, perhaps a power that

could take her out of her living situation on Mango St. However, after being sexually

assaulted, Esperanza realizes the dark side of sexuality and pulls back from her

sexuality a bit to focus on her writing.

The main theme of this book is the struggle for self-definitions. Her struggle to
define herself underscores her every action and encounter. The main conflict of book is

Human vs. Self and Human vs. Society. We see when Esperanza tries to grow and fit in

even if it meant not being herself. Man vs. Society because everyone around her peer

pressure her into bad influences. Her environment causes external conflict. She is not

happy with her environment.

By the end of the novel, she knows that even if she leaves Mango Street, Mango

Street will never leave her. Her writing has become a part of her, and she will use it to

overcome any obstacle she faces.

 Work Cited

Sandra Cisneros, “The House on Mango Street”, New York , Vintage Books 1991