Rating: 4/5, good
This book was originally published in 1984 and it’s been a standard in classrooms. I’ve definitely seen it around, though I was never assigned it. We did read Sandra Cisneros’s story “Eleven” in class in 7th grade, and I loved that story. I think The House on Mango Street is so often assigned for its “simple” prose style and because it’s relatable to the experiences of young Chicana women.
It’s about a 12-year-old girl named Esperanza growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. It’s also about the community of characters in her neighborhood. Each chapter is like a short poem and is often named for the character it is about: “Meme Ortiz”, “Marin”, “Alicia Who Sees Mice”. The characters are very quirky, though most are also archetypal, representing different types of people living in the barrio.
The simple prose can be a little boring, and I had a hard time being motivated to keep reading at points, but there are some memorable scenes. For instance, when the girls get high heels and run all over town feeling powerful, but then a bum hits on one of them and they decide to hide the shoes. I can’t speak to how authentic it is from a Chicana or working-class perspective, but from a female one it rings true.
One thing about the prose is that it sounds better out loud, so if you read it out loud or listen to an audiobook version it might be more enjoyable. This is probably another aspect that makes it well-suited for reading in school.
The House on Mango Street is also noted for its feminism. It contains straightforward (though not too explicit, this book is recommended for ages 14+) depictions of rape and domestic violence, which sheds light on the darker aspects of the feminine experience. Esperanza is torn between desire and fear regarding sex. She likes experimenting with sexy dress and fantasizing about boys, but she’s not ready to do anything physical. She’s beginning to learn how being sexy can make women feel powerful, but also leave them vulnerable.
She sees a lot of different models of femininity around her, from girls flirting with boys and getting married young (in one case to escape an abusive father), to women stuck inside due to not knowing the language or being commanded to stay at home by their husband. The kind of woman that she wants to be doesn’t really exist on Mango Street, but in movies with femme fatales: “In the movies there is always one with red red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away.”
Esperanza hopes to be a writer (like the author) and not grow up to be stuck at home like her great-grandmother and many other women, who “sit their sadness on an elbow”. She wants to work and support herself without relying on or being subject to a man.
Particularly, she wants to control the material conditions of her life. She recognizes her past on Mango Street, but she wants a future in a nice big house of her own. She wants to escape Mango Street, but she also wants to give back to people who have less once she achieves a middle-class lifestyle. There’s a chapter about Esperanza thinking she’ll have a nice big house, but she’d let bums live in the attic because she knows what it’s like to struggle with housing.
At the very end, she says:
“Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away?
They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.”
She wants to escape Mango Street, but she also knows she can never forget about it. It can’t be out-of-sight-out-of-mind for her like it is for people who were born middle-class. Sandra Cisneros has given back a fair bit. She wrote this book, which brought a lot of Chicana issues to light, and founded a writer’s workshop group and a foundation that gives writing grants to Latin authors. She’s also taught creative writing at almost every grade level.
There has been some drama recently about Sandra Cisneros endorsing American Dirt, which was an Oprah book club pick but was accused of getting the facts wrong about Mexico and presenting it as dangerous and drug-ridden.
The author of The Dirty Girls Social Club, Alisa Valdes, called Sandra Cisneros out in a long post on her blog. She wrote about how Cisneros shunned her for not embodying the “right” type of Latina and how Cisneros’s agent Bergholz accused her of being inauthentic (I’m guessing for writing about white Latinas but she didn’t say exactly). Valdes said, “Once you convince them to become professors and appoint themselves the Arbiters of Authenticity, then they begin to police themselves, weeding out people like – well, like me.”
Valdes rips Cisneros a new one in her conclusion to that article:
“Truth is, Cisneros has always been a literary minstrel show, shucking and jiving to Bergholz’s choreography, but until now everyone has been too afraid to say it because the punishments of challenging this duo and the literary and “ethnic studies” universes for which they are gatekeepers are severe. Cisneros gives colorful, campy, “authentic” voice to the low expectations the dominant class, and particularly the publishing establishment and academia, have of exoticized, tropicalized, dehumanized Latinos, whom they not only expect, but require, to be exotic. Cisneros supported American Dirt, because of fucking course she did; she has never known anything about actual Mexico, and would not have noticed the problems those who are familiar with that place and its issues noticed; she saw a soul-sister, writing the same tired stereotypes that she herself has parroted for decades. Her skin tone has left her immune to criticism, however. Till this blog.”
I’m honestly not sure what to make of that because I’m white and I have no idea what authentic Chicana culture is. Is it the society in The House on Mango Street (lower-income, Spanish-speaking, mostly newer immigrant) or the girls in Dirty Girls Social Club (higher-income, may or may not have accent, mix of older and newer immigrants, mix of ethnicities from white to black to Native American). The girls in Dirty Girls are more diverse, but they’re also not all from the same neighborhood, as they met at college, whereas the characters in Mango Street are all living in the same Hispanic Chicago neighborhood, so it would make sense for them to be a little more homogenous.
Dirty Girls is obviously more modern, but it was published in 2007 where Mango Street was published in 1984. I don’t really know the scene but it sounds like The House on Mango Street opened up a lot of white readers to Latin literature and gave Latinas a figure to look up to where there may not have been one before. But power, fame, and money can go to one’s head, and to tell someone they’re not performing their ethnicity right is unethical. The thing is, Valdes is also calling Cisneros inauthentic. She might be right… Cisneros might be putting it on to sell more books, but she also might really identify with the flower headdresses and the bright colors, who knows? Although in her younger pictures, she’s wearing minimalist fashion, so maybe Bergholz did pressure her into diva-ing it up for publicity? It’s likely.
Books are often touted as a good way to learn about other peoples, but everything has its bias. I think it’s good to read a lot of different perspectives and compare, and also listen to people when they express their personal experiences in person or online. It’s important when learning about another culture not to imprint too deeply on the first piece or type of media you experience and be open to real life contradicting what you learn in media.
I definitely won’t be reading American Dirt anytime soon, though. Books about minority life written by white people are always going to be a little suspect from the get-go. 😉
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