Sandra Cisneros. The House on Mango Street. 1984; Vintage, 2009.
The House on Mango Street was mentioned a number of years ago on the Advanced Placement English Literature Exam.1 I happened across a copy and decided to pick it up.
The House on Mango Street is a collection of sketches. Nearly all of them are three pages or less. They do not so much tell a story as give a sense of place and time. Mango Street in Chicago is where the narrator Esperanza and her family move when she is junior high age. It may have been set in a certain place and time (the sixties) but the tales are universal.
The sketches mostly describe the various people and families that live on the street and attend Esperanza’s school. She gradually becomes more aware of the world around her and more aware of what it means to be growing up.
Probably the most engaging chapter is entitled “The Family of Little Feet.” Esperanza and two of her middle school friends try on some high heels and strut around the neighborhood. It is the first time that some of the men and boys notice them. The experience is both exhilarating and scary. It shows her the effect a young woman can have on men, but it also suggests something that Esperanza is not ready for.
There are winners and losers. There is a young bride whose husband turns out to be abusive. (There is an undercurrent of abuse in a number of the sketches.) Some people in the neighborhood are destined to rise up and out as the American Dream comes true for them. Others, tempted by drugs and crime, will waste their lives.
Some of the people look back. Esperanza envies one friend who still speaks of her hometown in Mexico. They go back to visit, and some day, her friend tells her, she will return to live there. Others, like Esperanza herself, are not so much uprooted as unrooted, to coin a term. She rattles off all the streets they lived on before Mango Street. Now her family owns the house, but she is not sure that is where she belongs.
Cisneros at heart is a poet, and these sketches are more like prose poems. There is a tenderness and attention to detail that come through.
Back in the eighties, when Salinger was still very much alive, a student asked me why we did not read Catcher in the Rye in class. She loved the book and some of her friends at another school had studied it in their English class. I told her that it was written by a contemporary American, and you are a contemporary American. You do not need a teacher to understand it, other than maybe a few symbols you might miss. I would rather spend time with a book that you need a teacher for.
To illustrate, back in the eighties I used to feel that way about The Great Gatsby. I do not any more. Back then my students knew people who had fought in World War I and remembered the Roaring Twenties. Even many of the songs in the book were ones they had heard. A lot of them had seen gangster films set in the twenties. I have taught the book in some classes for about fifteen years now. Many of the students have not even heard of Al Capone these days.
Anyway, I would certainly recommend The House on Mango Street to any student taking the English Literature AP test or not, but I would honestly not know how to teach it. Cisneros is still with us. She is a contemporary American. The book speaks for itself.
1 By the way, your reviewer will be taking part in the Advanced Placement Exam reading for the next week starting tomorrow. We will all have things to learn this year with the combination of the manner in which the test was given online and with the new essay scoring system.