The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Reading Level: Adult Fiction

Submitted by Gerti

Back in the days when I taught a short story class to college freshmen, Sandra Cisneros was one of the authors the school chose for me to teach them. The story they chose of hers was called “The House on Mango Street,” and it comes from this collection of vignettes, published back in 1984. I never liked it as much as some of the other stories I had to teach, and I was amazed every semester that the students I taught at the New Hampshire technical college always responded so well to it.

Cisneros writes this story collection about the daily life, dreams and encounters of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. We see the house she lives in, and meet her family, neighbors, friends and teachers, and despite her simple “young girl” language, the characters are distinctly if not completely drawn. We meet the landlord, the crazy cat lady, and the teenaged neighbor girl who does the baby sitting who is desperate to escape that street and that life. We see the desperation and “harsh reality” of the area, symbolized by a beautiful hidden garden that gradually gets filled with junker cars after the hard-working Asian family who tended it moves away. We see the girl Esperanza’s shame at the shabbiness of her house, and her growing desire to exceed expectations and leave the area to become someone different from her own mother, someone who lives up to their dreams and is not burdened by raising children.

The critics still like this book more than do I, and they heap praise on Cisneros’ writing. “Marvelous… spare yet luminous” reads the blurb from the San Francisco Chronicle writer, although I would only agree with the word “spare.” “Deeply moving” writes the critic from the Miami Herald, and once again, I disagree. I find too much of Cisneros’s anger in the vignettes, and am uncomfortable with her obviously biographical “voice”. I find it more poignant than delightful, as spare as poetry but without a poet’s skill. I don’t find her “one of the most brilliant of today’s young writers” as Gwendolyn Brooks says, and find the pictures Cisneros’ draws as difficult to access and understand as a blue period Picasso.

The only story that sings for me (with the clever line “Today we are Cinderella”) is the one where Esperanza and her sisters are given second-hand shoes to wear. The young girls run up and around the neighborhood wearing the fashionable footware, until they realize that the high heels have turned them into sexual objects to the men in the neighborhood, and then they hide the shoes away until they are thrown out. Only in this story do I hear the shrill note of the neighborhood, and feel the fear and sobriety that is the undercurrent of living there.

I don’t like it, and I wouldn’t want to read more by Cisneros in this style. But at least I can say now that I’ve read the whole book, and “it’s not her, it’s me.”