Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954)

Cisneros is a widely published Chicana, or Mexican-American, writer, born of a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother in Chicago. Her stories recreate in loving detail the environment where many working-class Americans live. Cisneros’s first published work titled The House on Mango Street, from which this story is selected, is not so much a collection of short stories as a series of brief vignettes or impressions about the life of the narrator, a young woman named Esperanza Cordero, and those living near the poor little house on Mango street. “Esperanza means “hope,” a quality she possesses as she develops a fuller, richer, more mature understanding of her own experience and of the life she witnesses around her in a Hispanic urban ghetto. Like many of the stories in the volume, “The House on Mango Street” touches on experiences in Cisneros’s life, while resonating with social and cultural significance.

“The House on Mango Street" (pp. 127-28)

The house referred to in the title reflects the impoverishment of the neighborhood. The windows are small, the steps tiny, the brickwork crumbling, the rooms few, and all six members of the family share the same bedroom and bathroom. Although the few paragraphs comprising the story do not provide extensive details from which we may infer the narrator’s character, we do learn of the things that pain her, namely the squalor of earlier family residences, the embarrassment caused by the physical details of the house on Mango street, the even greater embarrassment and shame deriving from the house on Loomis, and the ironic conclusion at the story’s end. The result is that the narrator is shown to be a person with good powers of observation, combined with strong feelings about her status and her wish to improve and rise in the world.

The family may be large, it may be Latino, and it may be poor, but it is a family, bound together by a love that protects the children from the vicissitudes and strains of a childhood upset by frequent moves and the social stigma of being poor. The family has no choice but to endure the indignities and exploitation. When the water pipes break in their apartment, they can only flee to another house. But in spite of all, they remain a cohesive family, dreaming a dream of a better time and a better home, but always realistic about their prospects. The Mango Street house is something of a shambles, far from the dream house the family envisions, but a small step closer to that dream than the one on Loomis. As the final paragraph makes clear, the narrator will continue to believe in the dream–but the possibilities of attaining it will be tempered by a healthy and protective sense of realism.