Constructing a house of one's own in Sandra Cisneros’
e house on Mango Street
Ileana Molina Espinoza
InterSedes, Revista electrónica de las sedes regionales de la Universidad de Costa Rica,
ISSN 2215-2458, Volumen XXIV, Número 49, Enero-Junio, 2023.
10.15517/isucr.v24i49 | intersedes.ucr.ac.cr | intersedes@ucr.ac.cr
A: is article explores the symbolic construction of the house, linked to the creative
process of writing and telling stories, in the novel e house on Mango Street (1983), by
Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros. e main challenge for the protagonist, Esperanza Cordero,
is to overcome her feelings of isolation and experience a sense of belonging, which is another
way of saying that she needs to feel “at home”. For Esperanza, it is important to have a home
that she can be identied identify with, as a way of embracing a past that makes her feel
proud and at the same time having a vision of a home in her future. It is through writing
and storytelling that Esperanza manages to create a house of her own. e recreation of the
house is closely linked to a process of empowerment and liberation by the protagonist, which
is also manifested in the construction of a new identity. In a way, she is also the new house.
Together with this process of emancipation, Esperanza nds in education a way to leave the
marginal neighborhood of her childhood. Part of the conceptual framework used includes
the theoretical notions of Chicano critics Tey Diana Rebolledo and Gloria Anzaldúa who
study the ways in which Chicana writers explore subjectivity and identity in their writing.
R: El presente artículo explora la construcción simbólica de la casa, vinculada al
proceso creativo de escribir y contar historias, en la novela La casa en Mango Street (1983),
de la escritora chicana Sandra Cisneros. El mayor desafío de la protagonista, Esperanza
Cordero, es superar sus sentimientos de aislamiento y experimentar un sentido de
pertenencia, que es otra forma de decir que necesita sentirse “como en casa”. Para Esperanza
es importante tener un hogar con el cual poder identicarse, como una forma de abrazar
un pasado que la haga sentirse orgullosa y al mismo tiempo tener una visión de un hogar
en su futuro. Es a través de la escritura y la narración que Esperanza logra crear una casa
propia. La recreación de la casa está íntimamente ligada a un proceso de empoderamiento y
liberación por parte de la protagonista, que se ve manifestado también en la construcción de
una nueva identidad. De cierta manera, ella es también la nueva casa. Unido a este proceso
de emancipación, Esperanza encuentra en la educación una manera para salir del barrio
marginal de su infancia. Parte del marco conceptual utilizado incluye las nociones teóricas
de críticos Chicanos como Tey Diana Rebolledo y Gloria Anzaldúa quienes estudian las
formas en que las escritoras chicanas exploran la subjetividad y la identidad en su escritura.
Universidad de Costa Rica
Montes de Oca,
San José, Costa Rica
Ileana.molina@ucr.ac.cr
Publicado por la Editorial Sede del Pacíco, Universidad de Costa Rica
P : casa, chicana, escritura, narración, cultura
K: house, Chicana, writing, narration, culture
Construyendo un espacio propio en la novela de Sandra Cisneros
La casa en Mango Street
Recibido: 13-03-22 | Aceptado: 10-06-22
C (APA): Molina Espinoza, I. (2023). Constructing a house of one's own in Sandra Cisneros’ e
house on Mango Street. InterSedes, 24(49), 37-56.
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Introduction
e present article analyzes Sandra Cisneros’ novel e house
on Mango Street as a reconstruction of the traditional female place,
the house, a space for self-assertion and growth. e motif of the
house is a constant element in Chicano literature. As Tomás Rive-
ra (1989) says: “La casa is the most beautiful word in the Spanish
language. It evokes the constant refuge, the constant father, the
constant mother. It contains the father, the mother, and the child.
It is also beautiful because it demonstrates the strong connection
between an image in the mind and an external form” (p. 23). As
the title suggests, the image of the house plays a very important
role in the development of the novel. e house located on Mango
Street represents Chicanos/as diaspora in the United States and
their need to have a “constant refuge”. It is connected to their sense
of alienation as well as their social, political, and economic mar-
ginalization.
Sandra Cisneros is a novelist, poet, short story writer and artist
born in the United States, daughter of a Mexican father and a Mex-
ican-American mother. In her works, she experiments with liter-
ary forms that explore emerging subject positions, which Cisneros
herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity
and economic inequality that provided her with unique stories to
tell. Her literary production includes a chapbook of poetry, Bad
Boys (1980); two full-length poetry books, My wicked wicked ways
(1992) and Loose woman (1994); a collection of stories, Woman
hollering creek and other stories (1991); a children’s book, Hairs/
Pelitos (1994); the novels e house on Mango Street (1983) and
Caramelo (2002), and the picture book Have you seen Marie?
(2012). A house of my own: stories from my life (2015) is a collection
of personal essays, and Puro amor (2018) is a bilingual story that
she also illustrated. Forthcoming works include the Spanish and
English story Martita, I remember you/Martita te recuerdo (Vin-
tage 2021) and a poetry collection, Mujer sin vergüenza (2022).
She has received numerous awards including two National En-
dowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships in poetry and prose,
1982, 1988; an honorary Doctor of Letters from the State Universi-
ty of New York at Purchase, l993; an honorary Doctor of Humane
Letters from Loyola University, Chicago, 2002; and honorary de-
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ILEANA MOLINA | Constructing a house
39
grees from DePaul University in 2014 and from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016; the Texas Medal of the Arts,
2003. She was also awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art
of Change fellowships in 2017 and is regarded as a key gure in
Chicana literature.
In e house on Mango Street, Cisneros writes a coming-of-
age story about a teenager’s perception and experience of life and
her struggle to construct a sense of identity as a Chicana and as a
woman. In this way, the text opens a literary space for Chicanas to
speak up and tell their own stories, participating in the representa-
tion and construction of a dierent society. e novel narrates the
experience of a Chicana girl who grew up in a poor community
in Chicago and struggled to nd a place of her own and to forge
a better future than her friends and neighbors. e image of the
house becomes a signier of the private space traditionally inhab-
ited by women; a metaphorical crossroads of the protagonist Espe-
ranza Cordero who searches for herself in her personal encounter
and experience of the world. Cisneros’ work is rooted in issues of
ethnicity, gender and resistance by providing coping strategies for
the protagonist to develop a sense of belonging in a multiethnic
society.
is article explores rst Esperanza’s use of writing and story-
telling to create a house of her own and second it examines her
choice of education as a powerful mean to achieve economic in-
dependence and break free from her marginal barrio. ese ways
become survival strategies that have a chain-reaction eect within
the novel, ,so they function as as alternative ways for Esperanza to
reconstruct a sense of identity in a constraining community.
Justication
Sandra Cisneros graduated from Loyola University of Chicago
where she obtained a B. A. in English and She graduated from the
writing program at the University of Iowa. She has been a writ-
er in residence at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the
University of California at Irvine and the University of New Mex-
ico in Albuquerque. It was the publication of e house on Mango
Street which provided recognition for her work as a Chicana writer
within the Chicano community as well as within the United States
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mainstream. In 1985, e house on Mango Street was awarded in
the “Before Columbus American Award.” Later the same year, Cis-
neros received the “Dobie-Paisano Fellowship”.
e Cisneros’ idea of writing about a house came during a
seminar when the class discussed Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of
space and the metaphor of the house. For Bachelard, the house
constitutes a space of human stability and happiness. Moreover,
it is the place where the imagination and dreaming dwell. It “shel-
ters daydreaming, protects the dreamer, allows one to dream in
peace” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 6). During the seminar, Cisneros and
her classmates discussed about their houses of their imagination.
However, she realized that the metaphor of the house had a totally
dierent meaning for her. Instead of feeling safety in this space,
she felt homeless: “ere were no attics and cellars and crannies.
[She] had no such house in her memory” (Fellner, 1995, p. 127).
She remembers: “A house, a house, it hit me. What did I know ex-
cept third-oor ats…at’s precisely what I chose to write: about
third oor ats, and fear of rats and drunk husbands sending rocks
through windows, anything as far from the poetic as possible. And
this is when I discovered the voice, I’d been suppressing all along
without realizing it” (Ghosts and voices, 1987, p. 73). is mo-
ment became for her the discovery of an unknown voice inside
herself. With this voice, she decided to write about Chicano barri-
os where houses are usually dierent from Bachelard’s joyful por-
trayal. e seminar was an epiphany for Cisneros that revealed a
way to express and rediscover herself through literature and the
creative power of the imagination.
e richness of Cisneros’ novel has allowed people from dier-
ent elds of study to use the text for a great variety of purposes. In
an article entitled “Do you know me? I wrote e house on Man-
go street (1987), Cisneros herself writes that her novel is “used in
universities across the country from Yale to Berkeley, as well as in
elementary, junior high and high schools. [It] has been used in ev-
erything from Women’s studies, Ethnic studies, English, Creative
writing, Sociology, and even Sex education classes” (p. 77).
e house on Mango Street has been widely analyzed by critics
such as Margarite Fernandez Olmos, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Renato
Rosaldo, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Héctor Calderón, José David
Saldivar among others. Most of them agree on the relevance of
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ILEANA MOLINA | Constructing a house
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Cisneros’ work within the Chicana literary tradition who “demon-
strates her talent for creating multiple meanings through simple
imagery” (Shirley, 1998, p. 157). Cisneros’ work portrays recurrent
motifs within Chicana narrative. One of them is the exploration
of childhood, of growing up Chicana: “many Chicana narrative
and lyric voices appear to be those of young girls, as in the work of
Gonzales-Berry, Cisneros, Mary Helen Ponce and Helena María
Viramontes” (Rebolledo, 1995, p. 108).
Cisneros ‘novel deals with the complex processes of the con-
struction of a gendered subject in an urban working-class Chica-
no community. As Ramón Saldivar (1990) arms, with her novel,
Cisneros is “building an instructive alternative to the exclusive-
ly phallocentric subject of contemporary Chicano narrative” (p.
175). Héctor Calderón and José David Saldivar also agree on the
importance of this novel within Chicana literary production as a
text that deals with the “construction of identity and the politics of
culture” (p. 7). Attached to this process of identity construction,
the image of the house becomes a vital element in Esperanza’s pro-
cess of growing up.
e consulted critics acknowledge the importance of the met-
aphor of the house as a motif that unies the forty-four vignettes
which comprise the novel. ey also point out the crucial role of
the image of the house as a signier of space in Esperanza´s pro-
cess of constructing an identity. However, they fail to consider the
transformation of this space in Cisneros´ novel: from a place of en-
trapment and shame to one of liberation and growth. In fact, most
critics focus on the house as the traditional female space rather
than on Esperanza´s dream to have “a house of her own”. More-
over, most critics do not acknowledge Cisneros´s contributions in
terms of concrete coping strategies to survive and achieve self-em-
powerment in a patriarchal and ethnocentric society. erefore,
this research contributes with a critical analysis of Cisneros´s pow-
erful proposal that changes the traditional notion of the space of
the house into one that reconciles community and personal iden-
tity construction, as well as past events and future expectations.
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Theoretical framework
For the analysis of the proposed topic, elements of Chicano lit-
erary criticism, produced by Tey Diana Rebolledo in Women sing-
ing in the snow (1995) and Gloria Anzaldúa in Making face (1990),
related to the role of writing and Chicana identity construction
will be taken into consideration. In their struggle to redene
themselves, Chicana writers have found in the act of writing a way
to ght the multiple levels of domination, rewriting the myths and
stereotypes that keep them prisoners of an ethnocentric, male-ori-
ented society. In this way, women who have been “written all over
… carved and tattooed with the sharp needles of experience”
(Anzaldua Making face, 1990, XV) will have the opportunity to
erase those tattoos and design their own drawings. Chicana writ-
ings originate from “the need to survive rst, by deconstructing
others’ denition of [them], and then by replacing them with their
own” (Córdoba, 1993, p.182). In this constant movement through
the white page from silence to voice, from ction to reality and vice
versa, “reality” is being constructed and reconstructed, erased and
written over. As Gloria Anzaldua asserts in Making face (1990):
“we transform the posos, apertures, barrancas, abismos that we are
forced to speak from. Only then, we can make a home out of the
cracks” (XXV). As a result, writing plays a crucial role for most
Chicanas in the process of questioning the status quo and creating
dierent identities from the one prescribed by society.
A woman of color who writes is aware of her race and gender.
She cannot overlook those features of her identity which aect her
condition as a citizen and a community member. In the creative
act of writing, there is an inherent search for the self; an introspec-
tive journey towards the inner being which conveys self-analysis.
Writing, then, constitutes a kind of trip “a travelogue, a constant
journeying across the threshold between event and narration, be-
tween authority and dispersal, between repression and representa-
tion, between the powerless and power, between the anonymous
pre-text and the accredited textual inscription” (Chambers, 1994,
p.11). By sending their voices and visions to the world, Chicanas
are participating in the reconstruction of society.
In Women singing in the snow, Tey Diana Rebolledo (1995)
addresses the recurrent theme of growing up Chicana present in
Cisneros’ novel:
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As we look at works like Cisneros’ Mango Street, Viramon-
tes´ Growing and Gonzales-Berry’s Rosebud, among others,
what seems to be simple stories of childhood evolve into
complex representations of ethnic social relations. It is of-
ten as a result of examining complex situations the young
narrators do not understand—situations that oen deal
with social rejections—that the narrators begin to under-
stand what means to be a woman, or what means to be a
Chicana (p. 108).
Esperanza, as the young narrator of her life in the barrio, nds
herself caught up between her expectations and desires and the
dictates of her surroundings. Writing becomes for her a way to
articulate the complexities of her struggle for representation and
belonging.
Development
As Tey Diana Rebolledo states in Women singing in the snow
(1995): “Writing, aer all, is naming, mapping, and leading, as well
as creating. It forms an explanation of the meaning of existence;
it can order chaos, introduce reason into ambiguity, recreate loss,
call up the past, and create new models and traditions. In sum, it
orders existence and create new worlds” (p. 117). It is through
the power of ction, represented by the creative acts of story-writ-
ing and narrating, that Esperanza can create order in her life and
“build” a house of her own. As Esperanza says: “I like to tell sto-
ries. I tell them inside my head. ... I make a story for my life, for
each step my brown shoe takes. I say, “And so she trudged up the
wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she
never liked” (p. 109). Writing involves both a process of self-ex-
ploration and self-empowerment. For Esperanza, it is a process of
self-liberation too: “I like to tell stories. I am going to tell you a
story about a girl who didn’t want to belong … I put it down on
paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down
and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with
both arms. She sets me free” (p. 110). rough writing, the pro-
tagonist nds a way to cope with “the girl” in the story. Cisneros
refers to this aspect of writing as a “way to make peace” with one’s
ghosts. She says: “I used to think that writing was a way to exor-
cise those ghosts that inhabit the house that is ourselves. But now
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I understand that only the little ghosts leave. e big ghosts still
live inside you, and what happens with writing [is] that you make
peace with those ghosts. You recognize they live there” (qtd. in Ro-
driguez-Aranda, 1990, p. 67). Similarly, Esperanza nds in writing
a liberating form to reconcile her inner contradictions and deal
with painful events in her life. In this constant movement through
the white page from silence to voice, from chaos to order, Esperan-
za discovers a way to nd herself and her dream house.
Since Esperanza does not have a house of her own, she decides
to write/narrate one. Esperanza’s life is marked by a state of con-
stant migration which prevents her from developing a sense of be-
longing. e absence of a permanent residence causes a deep sense
of placelessness forcing her to live in a sort of perpetual exile. is
experience is connected to her feelings of uprootedness because
she feels neither American nor Mexican. e house, in this sense,
functions as a metaphor of the concept of nation. For Esperanza,
to be homeless is also to be nationless. In order to have a nation/
house in which she can nally feel at home, Esperanza participates
of what Homi Bhabha calls in Nation and narration (1995) “the act
of writing the nation” (p. 292). It is through the act of writing and
narrating that the protagonist “seeks to portray the great power of
the idea of the nation in the disclosures of [her] everyday life, in
the telling details that emerge as metaphors for national life” (p.
294). In the novel, Esperanza has a dream house which is intro-
duced in the rst vignette titled “e house on Mango Street.” In
this section, Esperanza has a humiliating encounter with a school
nun, who asks her about her house. During this conversation,
Esperanza is confronted with a deep sense of homelessness and
shame:
ere, [Esperanza] said pointing up to the third oor. You live there’
ere. I had to look to where [the nun] pointed-the third
oor, the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa had nailed on
the windows so we wouldn’t fall out. You live there’ e
way she said it made me feel like nothing. ere. I lived
there. I nodded (p. 5).
Confronted with her marginality, Esperanza says: “I knew then
I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this
isn’t it. e house on Mango Street isn’t it. For the time being, Mama
says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how those things go” (p. 5).
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is revelation constitutes the beginning of Esperanza’s journey
towards her dream house, which parallels an introspective voyage
towards her inner being: “e house in essence becomes you. You
are the house” (Cisneros qtd. in Rodriguez- Aranda, 1990, p. 73).
Since Esperanza identies herself with the house, the act of point-
ing to it means recognition and acceptance of herself. is new
house would not be a source of embarrassment for her. On the
contrary, it would have all the commodities Esperanza has never
had: “Our house would have running water and pipes that worked.
And inside it would have real stairs, not hallway stairs, but stairs
inside like the houses on T.V. ... Our house would be white with
trees around, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence”
(p. 4). e whiteness, openness and presence of vegetation oppose
the marginal apartments Esperanza has inhabited while growing
up. By participating in the act of narrating her dream house, she
begins the process of creating a symbolic space to house herself as
part of her search for self-identity and artistic expression.
In her journey to have her house, Esperanza visits a witch wom-
an to have her wish granted. In “Elenita, cards, palm, water,” Espe-
ranza asks the fortune teller: ‘’What about a house ... because that’s
what I came for” (p. 64). Aer looking into the cards carefully,
Elenita answers: “Ah, yes, a home in the heart. I see a home in the
heart” (p. 64). Signicantly, the fortune teller refers to a “home.”
She seems to know the dierence between a building and the sense
of belonging implicit in the word home, which is what Esperanza is
really looking for. Even though Esperanza does not understand El-
enita’s answer at the moment, the fortune teller’s prediction is the
rst strong indication in the novel that Esperanza will eventually
create a home for herself.
It is until the end of the novel, in the vignette titled “A house of
my own,” when Esperanza is nally able to construct, through the
power of narration, her dream house:
Not a at. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s
house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch
and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and
my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody
to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up aer.
Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go,
clean as paper before the poem (p. 108).
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When describing her house, Esperanza emphasizes the reap-
propriation of her space by the repetitive use of the possessive
adjective “my”. With this emphasis, she reinforces the sense of
ownership of her place, a space inhabited but, above all, possessed
by her. e alliteration caused by the repetition of the consonant
“p” in the words “porch”, “pillow”, “pretty”, “purple” and “petunias”
add strength to the description. Esperanza’s house combines the
simple, essential elements that comprise her life, such as her pillow
and shoes and, of course, her books and stories because she is a
writer at heart. As the protagonist conrms “only a house quiet as
snow, a space for myself to go” (p. 108). She emphasizes the white-
ness of her house, which is compared to snow and to a piece of
clean paper. e reference to paper is directly connected to Esper-
anza’s desire to express herself and her potential to write. Esperan-
za’s construction of “a new house, a house made of heart” (p. 64),
is part of a process of self-recognition and empowerment present
throughout Cisneros’ text.
e process of recreation of the house is interconnected to Es-
peranza’s reconstruction of herself. is reconstruction implies a
resemanticization of the house as an alternative space where Es-
peranza can revise the prevailing concept of womanhood in her
society and reinvent herself as a woman writer and as a Chicana:
“Resemanticization deals not only with words but with ideas and
symbols, that cross borders and languages to take dierent mean-
ings” (Burciaga, 1995, p. 101). Esperanza resemanticizes the pri-
vate space of the house by transforming it from a source of shame
and uprootedness into a renewed place where growth is possible.
is is a crucial step in her process of redening her position in so-
ciety since, as Michel Foucault (1993) says: “Space is fundamental
in any form of communal life, space is fundamental in any exercise
of power” (p. 168). Recreating the private space of the house is, for
Esperanza, an act of self-creation which includes her subjectivity,
her autonomy, and her creativity.
Paradoxically, Esperanza’s rebuilding of the private space takes
place within the domestic sphere of the house itself. When “she
sets out to look for an alternative space for her identity, a special
house of her own, she appropriates the metaphor of the house for
her own specic needs” (Fellner, 1995, p. 129). In regard to this in-
ternal transformation, Rafael Pérez-Torres (1995) states in Move-
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ILEANA MOLINA | Constructing a house
47
ments in Chicano poetry that “domestic space provides an alternate
space by which to dene self and from which to assume strategies
of survival” (p. 51). Esperanza’s “sad” house, which is a source of
humiliation and shame, functions as a catalyst for her imagina-
tion and as a powerful source for literary creation. e protagonist
can transform her marginalized experience of life into creativity,
building a path to leave the oppressive barrio behind at the same
time.
In the novel, the house and the street function as the signiers
of the public and the private spheres. Esperanza’s life develops be-
tween these two ambits, determined, and controlled by masculine
gures of authority: fathers, brothers, and husbands. Her narra-
tion corresponds to Cisneros’ strategy to create “an alternate space
for the Chicana subject, one that is not subjected by the geomet-
rical homogeneity of contemporary patriarchal culture” (Saldivar,
1990, p.186). e rebuilding of the house parallels a process of fe-
male empowerment by which Esperanza can recreate herself and
choose a dierent way from the one prescribed by her society and
followed by most of her female friends in the text. As Cisneros
herself states in an interview conducted by Feroza Jussawalla: “you
have to learn how to build a room before you build a house” (qtd.
in Cahill, 1994, p. 459). e search for the house constitutes, then,
a manifestation of the internal process at stake: Esperanza’s re-con-
struction of her internal “room,” the reappropriation of herself.
Furthermore, the recreation of the house is an act of “subver-
sion” within the patriarchal system since Esperanza does not con-
form to the social expectations of living in a man’s house: “Not a
man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own” (p. 108). More-
over, she openly declares war on patriarchy: “I have begun my
own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a
man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate” (p.
89). Esperanza rebels against a system she considers unjust, which
includes her own ethnic heritage as a Chicana. As she narrates in
“My name,” she belongs to a patriarchal tradition which does not
“like their women strong” (p. 10). Although she is connected to
her ethnic background by her name, she can free herself from the
place given to her by tradition and rmly states: “I have inherit-
ed [my great grandmother’s] name, but I don’t want to inherit her
place by the window” (p. 11). Unlike her grandmother, who was
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dominated by her grandfather, Esperanza decides “not to grow up
tame like the others” (p. 88) and to choose a dierent path.
e protagonist’s internal process of empowerment, expressed
by the reconstruction of the space of the house, is also revealed by
her desire to change her name. is manifests her need to name/
dene herself instead of being named/spoken to by others. As
Beauvoir (1989) states: “[a woman] is simply what man decrees”
(xxii). Naming implies power and control. Renaming herself con-
stitutes for Esperanza an act of self-recognition and an act of speak-
ing out. In Women singing in the snow, Tey Diana Rebolledo (1995)
refers to Esperanza’s process of renaming herself: “In the narrative
speaker’s litany of naming, [Esperanza] considers and discards all
the names that ‘don’t t.’ [She] recognizes the heritage linked to
her name ‘Esperanza,’ also her grandmother’s name, but sees it as
the female heritage of being the object, not the subject, of cultur-
al discourse” (p. 104). Esperanza’s initial rejection of her house
parallels the way she feels about her name. As a matter of fact,
she does not like her name. She says: “In English my name means
hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it
means waiting” (p. 10). Both in English and in Spanish, her name
conveys feelings of discontent and incompleteness for “to hope”
and “to wait” signify, above all, the absence of fulllment. e act
of hoping and waiting is also connected to the “eternal feminine,”
since these “states” relate to the stereotyped female role of passivi-
ty and dependence. Interestingly, Esperanza’s last name, Cordero,
which in English means “lamb,” is also related to traditional female
features such as gentleness, meekness, and obedience. Moreover,
the symbol of the lamb is charged with connotations of sacrice,
purity, innocence, piety and self-denial within Christian religions..
e protagonist’s confrontation with her name implies both an act
of subversion against society’s prescriptions and a redenition of
her own concept of womanhood.
e act of naming is an essential element in the process of revi-
sion experienced by Esperanza who wishes to baptize herself with
a dierent name. She says: “I would like to baptize myself under a
new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees” (p.
11). e use of the verb “baptize” by the narrator is very important
because she does not express her desire to have, nd or get another
name. Instead, she wants to “baptize” herself. is provides the act
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ILEANA MOLINA | Constructing a house
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of renaming herself with the power implicit in the sacrament of
baptism, a religious ritual used to denote the beginning of a hu-
man soul. Traditionally, the act of baptism is performed in most
churches by a priest or pastor, a masculine gure of authority who
functions as a representative of divine power on earth. is sym-
bolic act constitutes an example of men’s access and control of the
“word”. Men are, then, “entitled” to name/dene the world, a privi-
lege inherited from God the Father through a patrilineal hierarchy
of power. Quoting Tey Diana Rebolledo (1995), “to name some-
thing ... is to have power” (p. 103). By baptizing herself, Esperanza
is taking into her hands the power to name and recreate herself.
Esperanza´s symbolic baptism marks the beginning of her new
self: “I would like to baptize myself under a new name…. Esperan-
za as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze
the X will do” (p. 11). In this way, she is reborn under a new name,
which is strong, powerful, mysterious, and above all, her own cre-
ation. “It is a name that conceals, does not reveal all; yet it implies
an active role in life” (Rebolledo, 1995, p. 105). e act of naming
is an articulation of the protagonist’s voice, a voice of resistance. By
choosing the name Zeze the X, Esperanza overtakes the patriarchal
privilege of naming and identifying. Only then, her name will not
represent sacrice and self-denial but would be transformed in a
“good, good name” (p. 104), la esperanza of creating realities be-
yond the ocial one.
e act of renaming herself also conveys a revision of the pro-
tagonist’s ethnic background since her Spanish name connects her
to an ethnic tradition of male dominance. In fact, it is a name in-
herited from her great grandmother. is “re-vision,” as Adrienne
Rich calls it, constitutes “the act of looking back, of seeing with
fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction”
(qtd. in Fetterly, 1993, p. 35). For Rich, this act is “an act of survival”
in a patriarchal environment that objecties women, taking their
subjectivity and possibilities of dening themselves beyond male
patterns. In an interview conducted by Pilar Rodriguez-Aranda
(1990), Sandra Cisneros refers to this act of revision which she
herself experienced as a teenager: “I felt as a teenager, that I could
not inherit my culture intact without revising some parts of it. We
accept our culture, but not without adapting ourselves as women”
(p. 67). is process of adaptation is part of what Norma Alarcon
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calls “reinventing” the concept of womanhood, which is precise-
ly what Esperanza experiences in her process of constructing an
alternative concept of womanhood that will provide her with the
necessary space to grow.
rough the power of ction, expressed by the acts of story-
telling and writing, Esperanza can create a house that fullls her
needs as a Chicana and as a woman. By writing, she is able to
dwell in a special house, “the house of story-telling” (Fellner, 1995,
p. 129). is is connected to Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own”,
as a space for artistic creation to take place. During this process,
she reinvents herself, leaving Esperanza behind to become Zeze
the X. With her writing, Esperanza is ordering the pages of her
life, which is sustained by experiences and memories as well as by
the imagination. Writing/narrating becomes, for her, a powerful
means to deconstruct the world, a creative process of inscribing
herself in life and participating in its construction. Writing con-
stitutes a strategy of representation, a means of facing reality and
making it coherent. e last vignette of the novel titled “Mango
says goodbye sometimes” reveals the end of Esperanza’s journey.
She is nally ready to leave Mango Street: “One day I will pack my
bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I
am too strong for her to keep me here forever [my emphasis].
One day I will go away” (p. 110). Living on Mango Street symbol-
izes alienation, poverty and oppression. e protagonist’s deter-
mination and strength to go away reveals that she is in her way to
head home.
e second section of this article will concentrate on educa-
tion as an important means for the protagonist in her process of
self-discovery and empowerment. As writer Sandra Cisneros says,
“you have to confront your own destiny by getting an education”
(qtd. in Rodriguez-Aranda, 1990, p. 69). Together with the power
of ction, formal education constitutes a strategy in Esperanza’s
life to leave the paternal house and her marginal barrio. To cre-
ate a house of her own house, Esperanza must nd the means to
support herself and achieve economic stability and independence.
Education is represented in the novel as a powerful way to ght
patriarchal female roles and subvert male oppression, a liberating
path towards self-assertion.
is liberating potential of education is represented in some
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ILEANA MOLINA | Constructing a house
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of the vignettes of the novel. In “Alicia who sees mice”, Esperanza
refers to her friend Alicia, who is obliged to do the house chores
due to her mother’s death. For Alicia’s father, “a woman’s place is
sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star, the one
that appears early just in time to rise and catch the hind legs hide
behind the sink, beneath the four-clawed tub, under the swollen
oorboards nobody xes, in the corner of [her] eyes” (p. 31). For
Alicia, the kitchen is a “four-clawed” monster which waits for her
every morning. is perception of the kitchen reveals the oppres-
sive destiny she has inherited in a patriarchal society which per-
petuates gender roles from mother to daughter. Alicia resembles
her mother and has even gotten “her mama’s rolling pin and sleep-
iness” (p. 31). Above all, Alicia has inherited her mother’s place
in the kitchen. is is part of a tradition in which “women be-
long in the connes of the private sphere, and career and family
are incompatible for them (men, of course, are guaranteed both)”
(Greene, 1993, p. 189). However, Alicia nds in education a way
to free herself from tradition and search for her own place in the
world. She is “young and smart and studies for the rst time at the
university. Two trains and a bus, because she doesn’t want to spend
her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin” (p. 32). For Ali-
cia, education means breaking away from her mother’s destiny and
being able to construct her own. It also implies the opportunity to
leave the marginal environment of poverty in which she grew up,
opening the possibilities for a dierent life.
Similarly, Esperanza nds a liberating path in her life in educa-
tion. Even though she grows up in a male-oriented society where
most women stay home and do not attend high school or univer-
sity, Esperanza decides to study. In “Mango says goodbye some-
times,” she describes the material objects that she will take with
her when she nally leaves her barrio: “One day I will pack my
bags of books and paper.... Friends and neighbors will say, What
happen to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books
and paper? Why did she march so far away?” (p. 110). e refer-
ence to “books and paper” conveys the importance of education
and writing in Esperanza’s life since they empower her to break
free from the multiple chains that tie her to poverty and domesti-
cation.
Esperanza’s mother is very important in the protagonist’s pro-
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cess to educate herself and improve her condition both as a woman
and as a Chicana. She acts as a role model, transmitting alterna-
tive ways that subvert traditional gender roles and open space for
new horizons. Even though there exist patriarchal relations within
the Chicano family structure, the mother gure occupies a cen-
tral position, establishing important bonds with other women. In
“A smart cookie”, Esperanza’s mother is portrayed as a traditional
housewife who has dedicated her life to raising her children and
do the house chores. However, she does not want the same destiny
for her daughter: “I could’ve been somebody, you know? Esperan-
za, you go to school. Study hard. at Madame Buttery was a fool.
She stirs the oatmeal” (p. 91). Esperanza’s mother expresses her
frustration by saying that she “could have been somebody,” which
reveals that she probably feels like “nobody.” When explaining to
her daughter the reason why she quit school, she says “Shame is a
bad thing, you know. It keeps you down. You want to know why
I quit school? Because I didn’t have nice clothes. No clothes, but I
had brains. Yup. she says disgusted, [my emphasis] stirring again.
I was a smart cookie then” (p. 91). Her words show great sorrow
and regret for her decisions in the past, a moment that is now gone.
In the same vignette, Esperanza’s mother refers to her comadres,
who have been abandoned by their husbands, as examples for Es-
peranza not to follow: “Look at my comadres. She means Izaura
whose husband le and Yolanda whose husband is dead. Got to
take care all your own, she says shaking her head” (p. 91). Edu-
cation is advised to Esperanza to be “somebody” in life, beyond
the prescribed roles prevailing in her society. It also implies being
economically independent from male support.
Similarly, in an interview directed by Rodriguez-Aranda (1990),
Cisneros refers to the great importance and impact education had
on her personal life as a way “to escape the trap of the barrio” (p.
69). For her, education constitutes a way to “confront ... [your]
own destiny” and is part of a dynamics of constructing one’s place
in the world and helping others to get free from poverty and op-
pression by coming back to the marginal neighborhood with ideas
and projects. Like Esperanza’s mother, Cisneros’ main role model
and ally when growing up was her own mother: “Rather than raise
me in the kitchen, rather than have me take care of my little broth-
ers like all my girlfriends did, rather than keeping me at home all
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the time, she’d excuse me from domestic duties because I needed
to read” (p. 79). Cisneros’ mother, like Esperanza’s, contributed a
great deal to “the construction of a room of her own” where she
could nd the peace and privacy to develop her writing abilities:
“My mother defended my right to have that space [to write], she
defended my right to study” (p. 79). Education, especially high-
er education, is an important means for the preservation of cul-
ture and a catalyst for experimentation and change. “Culture and
people persist or change based upon how culture is transmitted or
transformed through creative action” (Arvizu, 1993, p. 305). For
both Cisneros and Esperanza, education is vital in their process of
self-rearmation and personal growth.
Unlike many female characters in the novel like Sally or Min-
erva, Esperanza nds in education and the process of writing
powerful tools to empower herself and move away from patriar-
chal control. ey become survival strategies for her to cope with
the diculties of growing up without roots and to have a better
future than the one available in her neighborhood. Writing also
functions to reconcile on paper the internal and external chaos
she encounters in her life. e image of the house connects space
and place in an extended metaphor that reveals the human need to
have a spatial connection with the world to understand oneself in
relation to a collectivity. For both Cisneros and Esperanza, writ-
ing/narrating and obtaining an education are the paths to build at
last “a new house, a house made of heart” (p. 64).
Conclusion
Mango says goodbye sometimes
e theme of space is fundamental in Sandra Cisneros’ e
house on Mango Street. It is represented by the image of the house.
“La casa” as Tomás Rivera (1989) says, “is the most beautiful word
in the Spanish language” (p. 22). For Esperanza, it is many hous-
es. It is the homeland she never had. It is the barred windows on
her apartment on Mango Street. It is moving constantly with her
family and never growing roots. As Esperanza says: “We didn’t al-
ways live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the
third oor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was
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Paulina, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember
most is moving a lot” (p. 3). e deep sense of uprootedness ex-
perienced by the protagonist is the source of her desire to have a
house of her own. As Gaston Bachelard (1994) says:” without the
house, [one] would be a dispersed being,” a lost child “without the
cradle of the house” (p. 7). e notion of space is also connected
to Esperanza’s dream house and the possibility of transforming
marginality into creation. is extends to the recreation of her-self
under a new name, a new identity. rough the power of ction,
expressed by the acts of storytelling and narration, she can make
sense of her reality and create a “house quiet as snow, a space for
[herself] to go (p. 108). Writing opens, in this sense, literary space
for Chicanos/as to inscribe themselves in the world. In Retrospace,
Juan Bruce-Novoa (1990) states that: “the existence of Chicano/a
literature itself can make writers less concerned for their survival,
they now have a space to work in” (p. 166).
Furthermore, Esperanza nds in education a strategy to leave
the paternal house. Getting formal education opens horizons for
the protagonist to go beyond the boundaries of her marginal bar-
rio and have a better future than most of her female friends. In this
way, writing and education are powerful means to ght alienation
and poverty in the protagonist’s journey towards self-assertion and
empowerment. e last vignette entitled “Mango says goodbye
sometimes” manifests the end of this journey: “I write it down and
Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both
arms. She sets me free “(p. 110). e word “goodbye” functions as
a narrative device that announces the story’s imminent end and
its resolution. Esperanza comes to terms with her house, with her
identity in process, she is nally ready to leave Mango Street.
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