īecause the novel deals with sensitive subject matters, such as domestic violence, puberty, sexual harassment, and racism, it has faced challenges and threats of censorship. It was adapted into a stage play by Tanya Saracho, which was staged in Chicago in 2009.
It was on The New York Times Best Seller list and is the recipient of several major literary awards, including the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. The book has sold more than 6 million copies, has been translated into over 20 languages and is required reading in many schools and universities across the United States. The House on Mango Street is considered a modern classic of Chicano literature and has been the subject of numerous academic publications in Chicano Studies and feminist theory. Elements of the Mexican-American culture and themes of social class, race, sexuality, identity, and gender are interwoven throughout the novel. Based in part on Cisneros's own experience, the novel follows Esperanza over the span of one year in her life, as she enters adolescence and begins to face the realities of life as a young woman in a poor and patriarchal community.
House on mango street series#
Structured as a series of vignettes, it tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicana girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. The three sisters convince Esperanza that, when she leaves, she must come back for those who cannot leave as easily, and work to make Mango Street a better place.The House on Mango Street is a 1984 novel by Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros. An encounter with three spiritual sisters at a neighborhood wake suggests that she will be successful in escaping the neighborhood, but that she will never be able to deny her past. She dreams of having a house all her own, where she can write. Witnessing the fate of her female schoolmates who marry young to escape the abuse of their fathers, only to suffer at the hands of their new husbands, Esperanza resolves to leave Mango Street with her books and her papers. Esperanza's mother encourages her not to let men hold her back, and not to "lay her on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain" of marriage (35.3). Some of Esperanza's friends also suffer significant hardship: Alicia, whose mother is dead, is forced by her father to rise early every morning to make tortillas for her family Sally, a beautiful girl at school, endures regular beatings by her father Minerva, a teenaged mother of two, is constantly being abandoned or beaten by her husband. Puberty also provokes some feelings of shame for Esperanza, whose experience of adolescence is made even more painful than usual by two instances of sexual aggression – one in which an old man at work forces her to kiss him, and one in which some boys at a carnival rape her.
Esperanza is ashamed of her family's poverty, and describes several instances in which she lies, or tries to hide the fact that she is poor, by saying she lives in a different house, or hiding her unattractive shoes under the table at a party. (By the way, check out Sandra Cisneros's opinion on the terms "Hispanic" and "Latino" under "Trivia.") The beginning of this book introduces us to a collection of characters and explores their cultural backgrounds and how they are affected by poverty, exile, and the restrictions of prescribed gender roles. Most of the neighborhood's residents are Hispanic, including Esperanza, whose father is a Mexican immigrant and whose mother is Latina. Esperanza, who's often followed by her younger sister Nenny, meets the other residents of Mango Street and describes their often difficult lives in a series of vignettes, or short sketches. It's a small, crumbling red house in a poor urban neighborhood – not at all what Esperanza had been hoping for when her parents promised to move the family to a house. Esperanza is a little girl who moves with her family to a house on Mango Street.
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