I believe that Esperanza focuses on the hair of her family because it is an adolescent and silly way of categorizing those around her. Early on, Esperanza takes little notice of the boys and men in her neighborhood and in her life in general. She talks about the hair of the men in her family in very plain ways, “Carlos’ hair is thick and straight”, etc. Her descriptions of hair are based on looks, but they are also based on what she thinks of that person. The men in her life don’t take up much of her thoughts, at least initially. Only her father gets an interesting description, “his hair is like a broom, all up in the air”. It’s not a rousing endorsement. Typical for a pre-pubescent girl, she is unhappy with her looks and her situation. She …show more content…
It matches my eyebrows exactly. It is mostly straight when I have it cut short and I typically keep it pretty short. If I let my hair grow longer, say to my collar, it starts to curl up on the ends. I don’t really like the way it looks when it starts to curl. I usually wear a hat when my hair gets too long. The ends of my hair curl around the bottom of the hat. I also wear the hat to keep my hair out of my eyes. It becomes very unruly and irritating to me. My dad has very curly hair. It’s funny, because of its tightness. It takes a long time to notice that his hair has gotten long because the girls are so tight. His hair doesn’t touch his collar, but if you pull a piece with your fingers, it stretches past his collar. My hair gets wavy and uncontrollable and his just keeps being curly and orderly. It’s kind of like layers and layers of little twigs that form a bird’s nest. It looks very neat and tidy, but there is a lot more to it. It has layers of interesting bits to it. My hair is pretty straightforward. What you see is what you get. There isn’t much to it. It does things though. It catches the light, and there is something nice about that. I know that when I see clean straight hair I like that about it. It has glossiness to it. My dad’s hair is like something that attracts the light and holds in all in: a big, curly black hole of sorts. Light goes in and nothing comes out. That’s a strange thing to say about hair I …show more content…
I think having lived in an apartment building previously; she thought that moving to a house would be exponentially better. She explains some of what she thought it would have: “a basement … three washrooms … trees … a big yard, etc.” The reality of the house was far less wonderful than she had dreamed it would be. Her previous home on Loomis was embarrassingly bad. She felt that when she pointed out where she lived, others were disgusted by its state of disrepair: “the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa had nailed on the windows so we wouldn’t fall out”. She had hoped for something as far from their old home as possible. The house on Mango Street fell far short. The trees were small, the yard was small, and the garage was small. It all made her feel small and insignificant. She was unhappy about the fact that they moved to a home and not only did they still had to share one bathroom, “Everybody has to share a bedroom--Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny”. This disappointment lit a fire in her to leave this place and find her a respectable home that she could be proud of. She would move to a home far away from her childhood embarrassment and dissatisfaction. It was not only the size of the house on Mango Street, but its dilapidated appearance “bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in”. Esperanza fears
In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, there is an emphasizes on how rough it is to be part of the low economic class . Through her words you can create an image about the way poverty affects children. She goes through the book making great remarks on the topic. The different experiences that Esperanza goes through have a lot to connect with her family's financial status. She specifically describes her feelings about the poverty they live in through three of her short stories. The three short stories in which poverty seems to be an obstacle are The House on Mango Street, Our Good Day, and Chanclas. When the book begins the downgrading of Esperanza's esteem begins with it.
matter how hard people wish on a star or on a candle, the wishes never seemed to be
“Someday, I will have a best friend all my own. One I can tell my secrets to. One who will understand my jokes without me having to explain them” (9). These are the longing words spoken by Esperanza. In the novel The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is young girl experiencing adolescence not only longing for a place to fit in but also wanting to be beautiful. This becomes complicated as Esperanza becomes more sexually aware. Throughout the novel, Cisneros argues the importance of beauty and how Esperanza deals with beauty as a part of her identity. When Esperanza meets Sally a new friend, Esperanza’s whole world is turned upside down. Esperanza’s views on beauty change from a positive outlook to a negative one by watching how beauty has damaged Sally’s life.
This book is so powerful because Sandra Cisneros gives a first-hand account of the everyday magic and misery of young Esperanza, simultaneously applying themes of her desire for escape and love for the people and bittersweet childhood of Mango Street. In many other novels of this sort, the dialog comes across as an extended complaint, a long and tiresome negative report of how down-trodden and hopeless is a given situation, and how arrogantly nonchalant are those who benefit from or cause it. The beauty of this book is Cisneros' deft mingling of Mango Street's poverty and low social status with its inherently human beauty and magic when seen through the eyes of a young girl. Mango Street's humanly rich qualities are what will bring Esperanza back. The mayor won't help Mango Street, so who will? Clearly, at the end of the book, she will. Her telling of their story in such a positive and invigorating light might change the mayor's mind. Reading Cisneros' brief biography on the last page says that she taught high school drop-outs, probably not from towns like Amherst or Acton, but from neighborhoods like Mango Street. Seldom can an author make a pointed social and political statement about poverty and social stratification without making it oppressive and depressing. Esperanza realizes her situation enough to want to escape it. She sympathizes with her father who wakes up in the dark every morning and is gone before the rest of the house is awake. But she is at the same time wonderfully innocent. She and her friends believe that the Earl of Tennessee's prostitutes are his wife, and no one can agree on what she looks like.
Esperanza builds her strength off the mishaps that occur while living on Mango Street. In the vignettes, Esperanza describes some very interesting things that take place on Mango Street. She recalls a time when Sally befriended her and told Esperanza to leave her alone with the boys. Esperanza felt out of place and was very uncomfortable and very ashamed to be in that situation. She wanted more from life than that, so she left the scene.
Esperanza was an independent person. She always felt that everyone was like her. She thought everyone was rich but she was wrong not everyone was like her not everyone was rich. She lived on a farm called El Rancho de las Rosas with her and her Papa. her father died and her Tio Luis tried to marry mama for their money. They fled the country and someone burned their house down. They went to a place where everyone was not rich they weren’t like Esperanza. They had kids going to work just so they can help get money for their family.
Mexican immigrants were faced with bad housing,low wages,and discrimination once in the U.S ,but they never gave up. In the book Esperanza rising by Pam Munoz Ryan,Esperanza was forced to emigrate to America because her dad suddenly died without notice fast,and they were also forced to leave because,her uncle wanted them to stay so lois can marry her mom.After learning about immigrant workers,Esperanza faced several challenges as an immigrant such as working in fields,taking care of mama,and discrimination of us.
When you watch the television and see all of these great success stories of people, especially people of color, making it out of the projects, it’s more than likely that you’ll about the struggles they faced during their upbringing. Not to mention that we love to hear stories like these, or in this case read about them. Sandra Cisneros did a great job on illustrating her fictional character Esperanza’s struggles of understanding machismo, her sexuality/gender, and living in the slums on Mango St. Also, she gives you some insight on the transitions immigrants make and how they cope in the United States. Although I had too many chapters from this novel to choose from, I decided to categorize them as much as I could.
One of the things that stuck out to me greatly is the theme of sexuality. Within the story Esperanza has begins to mature in a sexual way which in modern day society is considered in appropriate for her age of 12. She begins to obtain sexual thoughts of other men. The powerful aspect of this is revealed later on in the story when she pieces together that sexual relations and staying in the neighborhood go hand in hand. Most of the women married are mostly forced to stay in the neighborhood which she does not want at all. But knowing this, she does not allow it to heavily sway her desires to the other boys.
At first, Esperanza is young, insecure, and immature. Her immaturity is apparent when she talks about her mom holding her, saying it is, “sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you and you feel safe” (Cisneros 6-7). This shows Esperanza’s insecurity because her mom is still a big comfort source to her. She feels a false sense of comfort because her mom is there and will protect her. In addition, Esperanza’s immaturity is shown through her dislike for outsiders of the neighborhood when she says, “They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake” (Cisneros 28). This indicates how defensive and protective Esperanza is towards her barrio by calling outsiders stupid for reacting the way they do, even though she dislikes Mango Street....
As the chapter opens, the first impression of Sire is one of a James Dean type of character. Sire and his friends are just sitting on their bikes, pitching pennies, or in other words, gambling. Esperanza tells us that she is scared of them, which makes me wonder why she would be afraid of them? She then says how her dad calls him a “punk.”
Esperanza is constantly influenced by the women in her own family including her mother, sister and other various family members. Even early in the novel Esperanza recognizes that the boys hold more powers than the girl. She states “The boys and the girls live in different worlds” and how once outside of the house her brothers will not talk to the girls (10). Her brothers recognize that if the other boys in the neighborhood see them with their sisters, they will be mocked. This signals that Esperanza has internalized that the men hold more power even from an early age and her male siblings hold mor...
She also talks about the opposing point of view, in which white people are scared of brown people, and how it makes Esperanza feel. She states, “They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake… But we aren’t afraid… All brown all around, we are safe.” (28) It seems as if Esperanza’s tone is offended, and also condescending towards white people. She does not understand why people of her culture are expected to be criminals, and this bothers her. On the other hand, Esperanza talks about how when brown people go into a different neighborhood, they are just as scared, if not more. “...But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight. That is how it goes and goes.” (28) Esperanza knows that in this period of time, her culture is at a disadvantage, because not only do people of other nationalities expect Esperanza’s people to be bad, but they also do not want them mixing in their neighborhoods and towns. This fact is what scares Esperanza’s people, and why she simply says “That is how it goes and goes,” as she cannot do anything about it. It’s a time where Esperanza is pondering more and more on why her culture isn’t
In Sandra Cisneros book, The House On Mango Street , the theme is of how
In recent years Sandra Cisneros’s novel, A House on Mango Street, has been considered a classic piece of literature. After its first publication by the Arte Público, a small, Hispanic publishing house, Cisneros’s work attracted many readers as she became an emerging talent in the literary world. Six years after the first publication, Cisneros’s A House on Mango Street was republished and well received. Her book was considered a defining piece of literature for Chicana writers. Her audience would soon expand beyond the Chicana and Latino communities, enticing families and students of all ages and ethnicities.