But what I remember is moving a lot.Įsperanza’s age is never given, but, from the text, it appears she’s about 12 or 13 at the start of the novel which covers the family’s first year in their house. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. The House on Mango Street is a novel comprising 46 vignettes of one to seven pages each. move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in. Then as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is getting bad…. Ruthie, tall skinny lady with red lipstick and blue babushka, one blue sock and one green because she forgot, is the only grown-up we know who likes to play…She is Edna’s daughter, the lady who owns the big building next door, three apartments front and back.Īnother neighbor whom Esperanza meets shortly after arriving at the family’s new house on Mango Street is Cathy, Queen of Cats, who lives with her father in a home he built. There’s even Ruthie, an emotionally fragile woman, who wears a babushka, the colorful traditional Russian headscarf that, in mid-twentieth century Chicago, was ubiquitous as a means of protecting the hair of women of many backgrounds from the wind.

No wonder it’s read in so many high school classes.Īt the same time, the book’s strength as literature is that it tells the story of a unique girl in a unique place - a Mexican-American girl in the neighborhoods of Chicago whose life is focused not only on the changes in her body but also on her need to figure out how to maneuver in the broader world.Įsperanza lives in a community that is made up of newly arrived immigrants from Mexico and first-generation Americans, but also includes black and white people from such places as Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Puerto Rico.

This is the story of Esperanza Cordero, and, at its heart, it is the story of every child who has gone through the very difficult transformation into becoming a teenager with all its excitement, fear, challenge and risk. There is a universal quality to Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and also something very specific.

The house on mango street book