These raggedy trees grow outside her window, and they fight to survive surrounded by concrete and buildings, and it gives her hope that she can keep fighting too. Esperanza would reluctantly go and read books to her. In fact, Alicia returns almost at the end of the book, in one of its final vignettes. They had a special connection. Aunt Lupe falls down on the street. Since she is the oldest child, she will tell the news to her siblings. "No Speak English" describes a man across the street who worked hard to save enough money to bring his mother from another country to live with him. Esperanza dreamed about having a boy hold her and kiss her someday. Interrupted by her kids, who she has shunted out to a living room where the sofa is covered in plastic, she “gets up to hit and then hug them. "Edna's Ruthie" is about another neighbor, a girl who claims to have a husband somewhere, yet she sleeps on her mother Edna's couch and hangs out with the girls on the block. Esperanza uses "Four Skinny Trees" as a metaphor for how she sometimes feels. Plot Summary. Like my aunt who happened to be walking down the street one day in her Joan Crawford dress, in her funny felt hat... Get The House on Mango Street from Amazon.com. She meets a man in the coat closet who seems nice and invites her to sit next to him in the future. Like it or not you are Mango Street, and one day you’ll come back too” (107). How was the house on Mango Street different than the other houses the family had lived in? Her father breaks down crying when he tells her, so she sits by him on her bed and holds onto him. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone. Esperanza would reluctantly go and read books to her. "Geraldo No Last Name" describes how Marin met a boy named Geraldo at a dance one Saturday night, and they spent some time together, and then he ended up dead. And Alicia, perhaps the one (other) possibly upwardly mobile figure we meet, already knows that Esperanza will not so easily be able to deny her origins, for to do so would be to try to erase something that is by now integral to her very self: “No, Alicia says. Because she was imitating aunt lupe before she died. Or Elenita, “witch woman,” who earns a few extra dollars by telling fortunes in her kitchen where “the top of the refrigerator [is] busy with holy candles” (62, 63). They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone. In "Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark," Esperanza's father comes in early one day to tell her that her grandfather has died. But by the end of the story, Esperanza has realized that the stories she is telling are a means to take her distance from Mango Street: “I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes” (110). ( Log Out / However, suddenly Aunt Lupe became gravely ill, blind, and paralyzed, living out her days under yellow bed sheets in the back room of the second floor rear apartment. Esperanza heard her from the third floor, which she never left, talking about how she wanted to go home. It is as though the book can hardly settle long enough on any of them for us to come to know where they come from or where they are going to. “And fathers” (32). The reason they all think poorly of Esperanza is because of her dear Aunt Lupe, a woman who used to be as beautiful and elegant as Joan Crawford, with a strong body like a swimmer. Her disease kept her in bed, surrounded by medicine bottles with strange smells; it caused her to go blind. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Or there is Sire, a boy who hangs out on his bike with his friends and watches as the narrator, Esperanza, passes and crosses the street: “It made your blood freeze to have somebody look at you like that” (73). Aunt Lupe of the photographs. Change ), “Patriarchy: From the Margins to the Center”. The first day Esperanza matches photos to their negatives and doesn't know where to sit at lunch or break. (106). Sometimes she would read her own poems, and Aunt Lupe would encourage her to keep writing. Dark. But they are also, of course, a way to return, to render homage to those who stayed, to those, “las mujeres” to whom the book is dedicated, who were unable to leave and had to live in the shadows. Dozens of characters flit through the pages of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. Then she saw him with his girlfriend and envied the way he tied her shoes or walked around the block with her. Lupe tells her writing will keep her free. 3. 4. Why does Geraldo have no last name? In her Joan Crawford dress and swimmer’s legs. Nobody knows what ails her, but just that she seems to be dying for years. Then the narrative swiftly moves on–to a tale of “Darius & the Clouds”–leaving the suggestion of some unmentionable violence hanging in the air. In "Elenita, Cards, Palm, Water," she goes to Elenita who reads people's fortunes for five dollars. Then he tells her it's his birthday and asks for a kiss, so when she leans in, he grabs her and kisses her hard on the mouth. She really does love them, only sometimes they are rude” (64). The chapter "Born Bad" is about Esperanza's Aunt Lupe. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street - Laughter 1. She had two children and then became sick. Alicia, for instance, who “is young and smart and studies for the first time at the university”; but her mother has died and so she has “inherited her mama’s rolling pin and sleepiness” as she has to get up early and look after the family, before taking “two trains and a bus” to study because “she doesn’t want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin” (30-1). But Esperanza does, Alicia points out, have the house that gives this very book its title: You live right here, 4006 Mango, Alicia says and points to the house I am ashamed of. Lupe is the first person to connect Esperanza’s love of writing with her desire to escape Mango Street. The chapter "Born Bad" is about Esperanza's Aunt Lupe. Many of these characters disappear in the wake of these quick but arresting pen portraits. Describe the house on Mango Street. In Alicia’s case, this is when we are told that she is afraid of nothing except the mice she sees (or imagines she sees) late at night as she burns the candle at both ends. She refused to learn English, and she became upset when the baby boy began to speak it. Since he does not speak English, Esperanza worries that he has family in another country that will always wonder what happened to him because they will never hear from him again. But this apparent randomness disguises an artful exploration of themes of individual identity and communal loyalty, estrangement and loss, escape and return, the lure of romance and the dead end of sexual inequality and oppression. Why does Esperanza believe she deserves to go to hell? She had two children and then became sick. She died soon after, and they felt bad for having made fun of her. I don’t ever want to come from here. Shame is a recurrent feature of Esperanza’s experience in this Chicago neighborhood: she is made to feel (and internalizes) shame for being female, poor, and Hispanic. Structured as a series of vignettes, it tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicana girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. What does the narrator want to have someday? ( Log Out / ( Log Out / No, this isn’t my house I say and shake my head as if shaking could undo the year I’ve lived here. The yellow pillow, the yellow smell, the bottles and spoons. Sometimes she would read her own poems, and Aunt Lupe would encourage her to keep writing. At the time the young girl “didn’t know what she meant”–and in fact she and her friends treat her aunt shamefully, imitating her, mocking her blindness and incapacity, “with our heads thrown back, our arms limp and useless, dangling like the dead” (61). He keeps his windows covered and his door locked tight, so when it opens, the smell of old records blows out. Esperanza read books to her aunt because she was blind. Order our The House on Mango Street Study Guide, There Was an Old Woman She Had So Many Children She Didn't Know What to Do, Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays, teaching or studying The House on Mango Street.
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