The House On Mango Street Analysis

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros puts in perspective what it is like to grow up in a Latino neighborhood. Esperanza Cordero, the protagonist, is a young Chicana that lives in a Latino neighborhood in the city of Chicago. Esperanza comes from a big family that is constantly on the move from house to house until they get to the house on Mango Street. The neighborhood that Esperanza and her family find themselves in is one where the opportunities are low. In The House on Mango Street, the setting impacts Esperanza’s views on roles of women, violence, and the economy in the Hispanic culture.
In the Latino neighborhood, there are different roles that women take upon, and Esperanza gets to observe that, which impacts what she thinks about

Esperanza had always lived in poor neighborhoods where her family rented houses until they bought the house on Mango Street, and this made her create a stance on economic aspects in her life. She was very first impacted when a nun made the comment of “You live there?,” (Cisneros 5) referring to her old house, from then on Esperanza developed an obsession to get herself a pretty house of her own. As said by Christina Rose Dubb, after the event between Esperanza and the nun, Esperanza “makes the internal realization… that she must own a ‘real’ house,” (225). Esperanza even said “I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to,” (Cisneros 5). That event was what would set her to always be talking about the perfect house that she wanted and how she pictured it. She wanted a “white house with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence,” (Cisneros 4) and by living in the Latino neighborhood it made her obsession bigger because it was the complete opposite of what she dreamed of. Esperanza, as said by Faruk Kalay, wanted “a place where she can freely express and do,” (Kalay) something that she could not do in the house on Mango Street. In the neighborhood Esperanza gets got to witness the different social classes that exist there, she talks about the Vargas’s kids as if they were lower than she was because of their economic status. Overall, Mango Street gives Esperanza a view of the economic status of the Hispanics in her