I read a book called The House on Mango Street which is written by Sandra Cisneros. This book that I read was deceptive work. It is a book of short stories and sometimes not even full stories, but character sketches and vignettes that add up, as Sandra Cisneros has written, "to tell one big story contributing to the whole like beads in a necklace."
This story was to show how sometimes people have broken hearts and that they are sometimes deeply joyous. The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperenza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh beauty, Esperenza doesn’t want to belong. She doesn’t want to belong to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperenza’s story is that of a young girl coming in to her power, and inventing for herself what she will become. She hated the apartment she was living in, and she almost moved three times already. Her apartment was so old that she was ashamed of it and she wished to live in a big beautiful house with stairs inside. The stairs like those in the movies. She just hated that place, and wished to move out from Mango Street somewhere far away, where she can live happily.
This story took place on Mango Street, but a young girl, Esperenza, did not always live on Mango Street. Before that she lived on Loomis on the floor, and before that she lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, but what she remember most is Mango Street, the sad red house, the house she belonged in but did not belong to.
The title had to do with the place she is living in that she really hates. The title is the thing that she is talking about the whole time. The House on Mango Street appears to wander casually from subject to subject, from hair to hips, from clouds to feet, from an invalid aunt to a girl named Sally, who has "eyes like Egypt" and whose 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.
The House on Mango Street is also a book about a culture of Mexican-Americans that has long been veiled by demeaning stereotypes and afflicted by internal ambivalence. In some ways it resembles the immigrant cultures. But unlike Americans of Slavic or Jewish ancestry, Chicanos have been systematically excluded from the American mainstream in ways that suggest the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. Although Cisneros uses language as a recurring metaphor for the gulf between Mexican-Americans and the majority culture, what keeps Esperenza Cordero and her family and friends locked in their barrio is something more obdurate than language: a confluence of racism, poverty, and shame. This tells us that the ancestors of many Chicanos did not come to the US by choice, but simply found themselves in alien territory as a result of US’s expansionist policy into country that had once been Mexican.
I really liked this story because it is based on a young girls life and it tells us everything that she liked and hated about her life. I liked it because to me this story was very touching. In some parts it was so real to me because now in the world many parents abuse their child same like Sally’s father. There are many reasons that I liked this story. It was just great story. And it was also very hard to understand.
