Where Do I Belong? - The House on Mango Street

The House on Mango Street was a great, short, read. I especially loved the short vignettes. This short novel details the life of Esperanza as she struggles to fit together the pieces of her life and find out who she is and where she belongs. Throughout this short, stylistic novel, we see how Esperanza learns what defines her and we see her grow and mature from beginning to end. Sandra Cisneros, the author, touched on many important themes and aspects in this writing, but what stuck out to me the most was Esperanza’s search for her identity and finding who she is and how it connects to wanting to get away from their family home on Mango Street.

               Esperanza’s goal for herself is to be independent, and to evolve away from Mango Street. She wants to be in control of herself, unlike many of her family members and neighbors that seem to be stuck on Mango Street. Each chapter of the novel shows Esperanza’s identity in different aspects and how she evolves progressively throughout. In My Name, we see how Esperanza identities with herself and her name:

               “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing” (10).

Because of the way Esperanza describes her name, we see how she feels about herself. In my opinion, your name is who you are and because Esperanza dreams of changing her name, she has dreams of changing who she is. She wants to change her name to something that is true to her. We also see how she describes herself and her “lazy” hair (6) is another key point of her wanting to change her identity. Esperanza’s name and her descriptions of herself contribute to her sense on not belonging on Mango Street.

In Boys and Girls, Esperanza compares herself to a “red balloon tied to an anchor” (9). I think this is another way Esperanza senses that she feels stuck. Being “tied to an anchor” indicates that she feels tied to Mango street, and only being untied will set her free.

In the ending of the novel, we see how Esperanza has grown and changed. She describes the house on Mango Street as “the house she didn’t belong to” (110). She knew all along that she wanted better for herself than to be stuck powerless in that house and on that street like the rest of the people around her. Esperanza wanted a house of her own, “not a man’s house, not a daddy’s” but one all for herself (108). Esperanza deep down who she was and who she wanted to be, and that is what resonated the most to me in this novel.