Sandra Cisneros

The house on Mango Street

lara

Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away? 

They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.

When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.

People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don't look down at all except to be content to live on the hills.

Maybe the sky didn't look the day she fell down. Maybe god was busy. (...) 

But I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone. Like my aunt who happened to be walking down the street one day...

Sometimes you get used to the sick and sometimes the sickness, if it is there too long, gets to seem normal.

Is a good girl, my friend, studies all night and sees the mice, the ones her father says do not exist. Is afraid of nothing except four-legged fur. And fathers.

Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.

Someday I will have a best friend all my own. One I can tell my secrets to. One who will understand my jokes without my having to explain them. Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor.

aral

Esperanza. The one with marble hands called me aside. Esperanza. She held my face with her blue-veined hands and looked and looked at me. A long silence. When you leave you must remember always to come back, she said. (...) You must remember to come back. For the ones that cannot leave as easily as you. 

Luna 🌙

Norma, I did it by doing the things I was afraid of doing so that I would no longer be afraid. 

It’s such a regular occurrence she thinks these storms of depression are as normal as rain. 

Ghofran Mustafa 

"A House of My Own" Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after. Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.
..
Reading this novel brings back so many memories about my childhood.

Sarah Sammis

Cisneros creates a very strong sense of place through the house, her neighbors' places, the nearby stores, and the houses she lived before Mango Street. Among more recently published books, The House on Mango Street is a good companion read to Like Home by Louisa Onomé (2021).

http://pussreboots.com/blog/2021/comm...

river

you grew out of the novelty of life and then you learn 

ayoldagm

Syahla Aurel

One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away.

marj

I read this one in middle school, at the time I wasn't very sure of anything that was being said. It's a story about growing up with the experiences as a latina in America, an experience I would never have. The stories in this book make a lot more sense to me now that I'm older. Revisiting this book as an adult was a great idea. The writing is simple and clean and can be just that. But all the stories the pain and everything in between lies beyond the simple writing, it's a whole different world, a whole different meaning when going beyond the simple words. This book means a lot to me and I think about the main character's and her friends, and non-friends, experiences a lot as I grow up and continue to experience things in my own way. Almost as if we were growing up together.

farah farooq

Lara Engle

My students complain about this book sometimes because they find it confusing. They're freshmen and they have a hard time adjusting to the vignette style of writing. Not having plot as a center is difficult for them. But, they're getting it! As we focus on character, tone, mood, and theme, they have great insights. They're actually getting really good at finding the undertone and the implications in the text. This is only part of why I like this book. The rest is that it's beautifully written. The vignettes truly flow like poetry, chock full of the kind of poetic language that makes reading aloud a joy. Seeing Esperanza grow up is bittersweet, but wondrous.

A beautifully told book about being a minority in poverty. Having grown up in the same situation it hit me and stung deeply - and it is clear that Cisneros understands this pain just as much. This is truly one of few books that deserve to be read by all.

Maya

Told in a series of short vignettes, this is the story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in a Mexican American barrio in Chicago. Winner of the American Book Award.

The House on Mango Street

rumbledethumps

I normally don't really care for fiction that sort of ambles around and goes nowhere, as this book seemed to do at first. But as I was nearing the end of this book, I realized it had been going somewhere all along, and Cisneros was just delivering it in the way we typically experience life: in little vignettes that all connect together without our necessarily realizing it.

The introduction to this book was beautiful and honest. It served the purpose that it should, but so many other novelists fall short on. The collections present a coming of age story - one that is raw, and often heartbreaking, but is always authentic.

Syrina Akbari

Maite Alarcon Leon

Authentic, heartbreaking, beautiful and nostalgic

Faith Ho 

This was amazing. I read this in a day, but found myself inexplicably pausing at moments to just let the words sit with me. Marvelling at the end of every short vinigrette — the way they ended so perfectly. The author’s writing is incredible. She uses unconventional similes that strangely feel so right (”Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor” ”sings with velvety lungs as powerful as morning glories”). The main character has a very unique cadence of speech that is both deceptively simple and startlingly illuminative. Some vinigrettes deal with very heavy topics, but in a non-graphic way that evokes more emotionality that any detailed description can. It is a book that sits with me. 

"Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem."

Shay

At the ripe old age of (almost) 27, I've finally read The House on Mango Street. It's taken me an awfully long time to get around to it, mostly because these kinds of books weren't accessible to me growing up. But after reading Cisneros' work, I really wish I'd been able to read this when I was younger. 

A lot of these stories were great and a couple of them hit me really hard. Geraldo No Last Name comes to mind immediately. It was the saddest and my favorite of the vignettes in this collection. 

Cisneros writes this book from the perspective of Esperanza, a young girl who is growing up poor and struggling with friendships, family, and life in general. The range of these vignettes is so wide, covering topics of school, religion, abuse, immigration, poverty, boys, sisters, having fights with friends, the magic of old hangout spots fading as you get older, and so so much more. Each one is individual and yet connected at the same time.

In addition to the book being great, the preface was amazing. Cisneros wrote about her life growing up, what inspired these stories, what it was like growing up Latina in a poor neighborhood—


  When she thinks to herself in her father's language, she knows sons and daughters don't leave their parents' house until they marry. When she thinks in English, she knows she should've been on her own since eighteen.


This is one of those books everyone should read at least once.

Jeannette Ordas

A lovely and poetically told story about class, race, gender, and community.

Alexandra Sklar

Short young-adult book. Poignant and sad, but hopeful. Easy read.

Claudia Ganea

Coming at you again with the uni-required readings!! This was so short it feels like it passed in a complete blur - and yet the messages it sent didn’t need a lot of words to be masterful. I loved seeing a little bit of Esperanza’s world, I loved the way she told her story, and I’m really glad this book is so easy to write about since I’m starting my dissertation chapter on it tomorrow 😅

Drew Dost

Beautiful wording, it gives the reader such great insight into the mind of the narrator and many different things going on in her life. At times it got a little confusing to me with so many characters, but overall I really enjoyed reading this book and getting a peek into the narrator's life on Mango Street.

Mercy K

linda

I picked up this book because of one of my students. She is writing about The House on Mango Street for her boarding school essays, so I thought that I should also read the book to better understand her thoughts and the context of her essays.

I liked The House on Mango Street a lot. Especially what Sandra Cisneros writes at the beginning: “People who are busy working for a living deserve beautiful little stories, because they don’t have much time and are often tired.” For them, she envisions "a book that can be opened at any page and will still make sense to the reader who doesn’t know what came before or comes after.” And that’s what this book was like for me. It’s elegant and simple. It didn’t make me think too hard, but it still managed to touched me.

My student’s favorite line was this one, when Esperanza muses, “People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don’t look down at all except to be content to live on hills…One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I came from.” I love the way Cisneros discusses the idea of homecoming in this book. It reminded me a lot of what Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and Shamus Khan wrote, even though I cannot recall their exact quotes. Their whole lives, they aspired to to “live on a hill” (and some of them literally did, haha); but they never forgot the Bronx, Altgeld, or the South Side. In the same way that “the hood would come knocking—or just smash through the door” (Padilla), they knew that would always be confronted by the differences between where they come from and where they aspired to be and embraced themselves wholly. In the book, Esperanza is told that she will “go very far.” She is also told that “[she] will always be Mango Street. [She] can’t erase what [she] knows. [She] can’t forget who [she is].”

Like Esperanza, Sotomayor et al. never left their homes to leave them behind; they left to come back for the ones who cannot leave as easily as they did. They slept close to the stars to lift up those who live too much on earth. 

Reading Cisneros’ book has made me think about my own homecoming. After ten years abroad (albeit with a brief return in 2014), I am back in Beijing, the city where I was raised. To my surprise, coming “home" has been one of the most jarring, uncomfortable things I have ever experienced. I never expected to feel like a foreigner in my own city. But I know I am no longer wholly Chinese: I no longer round out my vowels like a true Beijing should, now prefer Starbucks to my grandmother’s pu’er tea, find traditional medicine as repulsive as 豆汁, and I shudder with anger when anyone in my family suggest that, no, I do not need to pursue an ambitious career, but do need to think about marrying well. 

Yesterday, when I was talking to a friend on the phone about my discomfort in Beijing, he told me, “Linda, you are an American Asian.” His inverse struck me because I had always conceived of myself as an "Asian American," not the other way around. His words confirmed what I had learned in Vietnam this summer, the first time I ever answered “America” when people asked me where I was from: I had to leave America to see myself as American, to see America as home.

So here I am, an American in Beijing, learning to smile when I watch the tanks roll by during the national celebration parade, to quote the Chinese poets with as much ease as I can quote Vergil, to listen to everyone around me rather than creating ideological echo chambers for myself. Beijing is my Mango Street. I can’t run away, I can’t rebel, I can’t erase it from my upbringing. To paraphrase Cisneros: So long as I live, Beijing will always make its home in me. I have Beijing stories I have yet to tell, and so long as those stories kick inside me, Beijing will still be home.

Nicole Dykeman

A very quick read. Absolutely beautiful prose. I just never would’ve picked this up on my own.

Trever

For some reason the analogy I made in my mind was to  The Catcher in the Rye, but the only similarities are that they're both coming-of-age stories written in conversational styles. Other than that, they're pretty dissimilar. Esperanza has legitimate issues, where Holden Caulfield is a privileged whiner.

I can see how reading this as assigned reading would make it unbearable, since that usually entails analysis and this isn't a very easy or fun-to-analyze book. Also, it's a quick read, and dragging it out would be annoying. 

But if you hated it because of that, I'd check it out again.

Vivian

"I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be."

The bestselling coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes-sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous-Sandra Cisneros' masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.

Flavia Louise

4.25 stars
A book I read very fast but will be thinking about for a long time.

The house on Mango Street

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