The House On Mango Street Chapter Summaries

Jordyn Rizzo the House on Mango Street Grade 9

Esperanza is the main character of this small story. She is tiny girl who moves with her family to a house on Mango Street. Now she lives in a small, crumbling red house in a poor city-based neighborhood in Chicago. This is not what she had been hoping for when her parents told her one day that they'd live in a real house, with running water, and not hallway stairs real ones like they saw on television. Esperanza has three other siblings’ two brothers and has a younger

sister whose nickname is Nenny but her real name is Magdalena who practically follows her everywhere she goes, but has a mind of her own.

She loved to talk to the people of people Mango Street and describe their often very hard lives in a series of short sketches throughout the book.

Most of the neighborhood's citizens are of diverse ethnicities including Esperanza, whose dad is Mexican and whose mom is Latina. The opening of this book shows us a lot of different characters and the discoveries of their ethnic backgrounds and how they are affected by poverty, loss, and the struggles in everyday life. After moving into the dilapidated red house on Mango Street, Esperanza suddenly becomes close friends with Lucy and Rachel, two girls who live in the same neighborhood. All the girls act liked they’ve known each other their entire life, but they obviously didn’t. Lucy, Rachel, Esperanza, and Esperanza's little sister, Nenny, have many exciting adventures on Mango Street like walking around in heels, buying a bike together and just having

fun.

As Esperanza changes during the year she lives Mango Street, over the summer, Esperanza slides into puberty and she experiences a sequence of realizations, and the most important is realizing who she is. At the beginning of the book, Esperanza is not really ready to develop from kid to teenager. Esperanza thinks that boys and girls live in completely opposite worlds. When she develops into a teenager, she begins to think about boys. She suddenly likes it when boys watch her dance, and she likes fantasizing about them. Marin, a young woman who lives on Mango Street teaches Esperanza and her friends about boys and this is where she gets her ideas.
When Esperanza thinks more about boys, she seeks friendship in sally, which she was friends with at the very beginning of the story.

Esperanza thinks boys find sally desirable, which they do. Sally thinks she is beautiful and cruel, like the women she saw in movies or on television. Esperanza hears rumors at school about Sally being promiscuous but she doesn’t believe them. Instead, she thinks of Sally as someone to befriend and confide in and someone who also spends her time fantasizing of leaving Mango Street forever. Sally, however, is not interested only in driving boys wild and then scoffing them away, as the women in the movies do. Instead, she finds security and relief in being promiscuous the feelings that she does not get at home when her father hits her. Eventually Esperanza feels discomfort around sally because she does not wish to go to extremes with her, and Sally ends up putting Esperanza in physical

danger.

Esperanza finally understands that she needs to alter her approach in trying to get what she desires. She wants to do a 360 with her life. She splits herself from her family, reluctant to go with them to visit houses in the suburbs because she no longer wants to dream about a house, she wants to get one herself. She remembers not to forget her heritage. Until this point, Esperanza has said nothing but a desire to leave her neighborhood, never to return. She now understands that the nice suburbs she once dreamt are now flawed because there is no place in there for a girl like her. In the last chapter of the novel, Esperanza tells us that she likes to tell stories. Then she tells us that she's going to tell us a story "about a girl who didn't want to belong.” Writing helps Esperanza feel better, and helps to free her from her environment.

When I first started reading this book I was extremely confused I didn’t understand how Esperanza life was moving so fast within each chapter. Then I realized its little pieces of everyone in her life throughout the book. And by the end of the novel I could really relate to her because I used to write as an outlet as well. But overall I think it’s a good book for incoming freshman because it’s about a girl wanting a fresh” look on life rather than being stuck living in Mango street.