Reading Process #5
So I finally just finished The House on Mango Street. As I predicted, there was no real story line to the book at all. The entire book was a collection of little memoirs each used to show something different from her life, or to emphasize a different idea. While it was obvious throughout the book that she was Hispanic, there was not much focus on discrimination. The main themes of the story were poverty, innocence, and treatment of women.
I also thought the last few chapters were really interesting. Esperanza implies that she wants to leave Mango Street and get a house of her own, without any man or children to hold her back. She absolutely hates where she lives and how she sees all the women around her being controlled by the men in their lives. She doesn’t want to end up like the women she knows, Sally for example. She wants to be completely independent and strong and her own person. But she realizes she is selfish for thinking that she never wants to come back. Because she took an interest in reading and writing, she has potential to create her own life for herself. But the people she lives with don’t have the same opportunities as her, and she doesn’t realize this at first. It is an important realization for her.
Throughout the book I definitely predicted that the memoirs of Esperanza are the reflections of the author, Sandra Cisneros, and her own experiences. On the last page there is a little biography of Cisneros and it says she lives happily in her own house without a husband or children. This is a direct connection to what the main character Esperanza so badly wants. I definitely think that these memoirs are based off of Cisneros’s own life experiences and what she wants the reader to know about what she had to endure and what people like her, immigrants and minorities and women, have to endure throughout their lives.













