The House On Mango Street: Sandra Cisneros is Brilliant

In one of the textbooks my students used in Poland, I came across a short passage from a book called The House on Mango Street by an author named Sandra Cisneros. I'd never encountered this book before, nor anything by this author. However, the passage, which described the house, moved me deeply. In Poland, I had no opportunity to read anything more by this author.

I'm back in the U.S.A. now. Ten days after landing, I had both a driver's license (an essential item in Southern California) and a library card. While looking for the books with which to break in my new card, I found The House on Mango Street. Delighted by my find, I added it to my stack, checked it out and took it home.

In The House on Mango Street Sandra Cisneros paints a picture for us of life of a Mexican-American girl growing up in the Hispanic section of Chicago. We learn that, for this little girl, Mango Street is not a place of dreams which would " have running water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs, not hallway stairs, but stairs inside the house like on T.V." Instead, the house on Mango Street is "small and with tight steps in front and windows so small you'd think they were holding their breath." The house on Mango street iss the place she and her family moved to when the pipes broke in their last apartment and the landlord refused to fix things.

The book is written as a series of vignettes by Esperanza Cordero. The short essays/articles that make up the book have a flavor of a journal or diary entries. Rather than a single story, these journal entries are a series of vignettes which alternate stories of things that happened with description of people and things. As we read, we not only learn about the house, but the neighborhood of Mango Street and the people who inhabit it.

Though not preachy in the least, the book brings us into a reality of life for a poor Latina child facing the challenges of living in a tenement, the differences in life based on class and gender. She comes face-to-face with the reality of racial enmity and some self-hate for her own differences. As she learns about life, we are hearing her voice and we are learning, too.

Esperanza means hope in English, and this is a good name for our guide through this book. She rises above the circumstances and the oppressive surroundings in which she lives. She keeps hope for us.

Though I wanted to cry for Esperanza at times, I was delighted and moved by this book. I read this book in a single evening. At 110 pages, that's not hard to do. I get to keep this book for another couple of weeks. I can guarantee I will be rereading this book again.

If you can find this book, I strongly recommend checking it out of your library or buying it for your library shelf. The House on Mango Street will leave you moved.