Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street explained with chapter summaries in just a few minutes! Course Hero Literature Instructor Russell Jaffe explains the themes in Sandra Cisneros's novel The House on Mango Street.
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Sandra Cisneros's poignant bildungsroman The House on Mango Street traces the evolution of teenaged Esperanza Cordero as she comes of age in a low-income urban neighborhood in the 1970s.
Esperanza and her friends wander the barrio, observing the lives of the men and women who inhabit it. She hopes to escape, motivated in part by her observations of the cloistered lives of the women, who spend their days indoors awaiting the return of their husbands.
Falling in with a popular girl at her school, she is ultimately traumatized when she is raped at a carnival. Nonetheless, she perseveres and redoubles her resolve to leave her straitened circumstances.
However, Esperanza stays on Mango Street—eventually realizing home is who she is, not where she is.
A testament to the resilience of immigrant communities, the novel has gained a significant following and is considered a classic of Latino American literature.
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street was first published in 1984. American by birth and Chicana by heritage, Cisneros is considered a leading voice in Latino and feminist literature. Cisneros’s varied body of work—which includes poetry, novels, and essays—explores the lives of working-class Latinas navigating dual cultures.
The novel The House on Mango Street contains many enduring themes, including identity, as Esperanza struggles to determine whether she wants to remain a child or become an adult; the lives of women, as the women are expected to aspire only to marriage and motherhood; and sexual awakening, as the thrill of attraction is tempered by cultural fear and disapproval of female sexuality.
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