A Review of "The House on Mango Street"

Thirty-three years ago Sandra Cisneros wrote a novel called The House on Mango Street that has won Cisneros the American Book Award, and has been taught in schools, both high school and colleges, across the United States and Canada, and for good reasons. This book tells an American story that needs to be told. Cisneros gives a Latina girl the age of twelve the lead role. Her name is Esperanza, and she tells of her observations about herself and those around her as she grows up and comes of age in a Chicano/Puerto Rican neighborhood, stained with poverty and violence against women.

Escaping Mango Street is Esperanza’s greatest dream, and she thinks writing is not only her guardian in life, but may be her way out. She watches the women around her try to maneuver the same dream, and speculates on what they will have to overcome just to touch it.

Through this story, Cisneros shows how impossible it can be for a woman in a low income minority neighborhood to make a beautiful (or even tolerable) life for herself. Cisneros does so with a string of prose poetry, each one is a vivid clip, which Cisneros calls vignettes, showing charming scenes from Esperanza’s youth, or the textural fluidity of a culture, or a poignantly staged moment of violence or oppression, and threads these vignettes into a story. Cisneros lets the story of Esperanza Cordero, sing, laugh, shout, whisper, dance, run, and cry through the girl’s telling of her life and her dreams.

“Close your eyes and they’ll go away, her father says or You’re just imagining. And anyway a woman’s place is sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star, the one that appears early just in time to rise and catch the hind legs hide behind the sink, beneath the four-clawed tub, under the swollen floorboards nobody fixes, in the corner of your eye.”

 So, for Esperanza, and the women around her, all “in a separate world from the boys,” it is not so much uncovering the magical way out, but being keenly aware of the obstacles, and uncovering a way to twist around them.

There are many reasons this book is regularly assigned to classes, but the way it manages to be poetic and scene driven while it guides the reader through the stages of a novel, creating a work of fiction soaked in truth, is why I admire and enjoy about the book.