![]() (Over the last quarter century, of course, it has been heavily gentrified.) ![]() Although Cisneros has acknowledged that she plumbed her own life experience for her novel, the West Town community area where her family’s home was situated was solidly Hispanic (about 60 percent) during the 1980s. and where she lived in her adolescence. It’s tempting to imagine that Cisneros was thinking about the area of Chicago where her family bought its first house - at 1525 N. Mango Avenue would be in the southwest suburb of Stickney. If, like many Chicago streets, Mango Avenue continued further south, a house at 4006 S. would be in the Portage Park neighborhood which, in the mid-1980s when this novel was published, was only about five percent Latino. Chicago’s Mango Avenue runs on through much of the Northwest Side, from North Avenue to Elston Avenue, three blocks west of Central Avenue. There is a Mango Avenue in Chicago, but no Mango Street. The descriptions in the vignettes of the growing Hispanic presence in the neighborhood would seem to suggest that the house is on the Near Southwest Side - 4006 S. Late in the novel, Esperanza gives its address as 4006 Mango. There is no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by the curb.Ĭisneros is cagy about the location of the house, keeping it vague. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in. ![]() It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. She is the oldest child with two brothers and a sister, and, after living in so many apartments - she uses the popular Chicago term “flats” - the family has dreamed of a house that “would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence.”Īlas, the family has to move quickly from their flat on Loomis, and what they can afford doesn’t fit their dreams. 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.
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