Stereotypes In House On Mango Street By Sandra Cisneros

The House on Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros, is a novel about a young girl growing up in the Latino area of Chicago. It is highly admired and is taught in a plethora of grade schools and universities. The House on Mango Street expresses the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is full of harsh realities and jarring beauty. Esperanza doesn’t want to belong- not to her run-down neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza’s story is of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing what she will become for herself. While Esperanza and the other women have many differences, as in the way she is fortunate to avoid the pitfalls of her environment and others are not, there are just as many

In all aspects of life, women are pressured to be someone they are not. They are put in situations that force them to chose a path of life. In “The House on Mango Street”, Esperanza is forced to think about leaving Mango Street in the future, because she is surrounded by women who are pushing her to become an adult.

Imagine feeling like you don’t belong and never will, or that the odds of your success is a slim chance to none. The House on Mango Street written by Sandra Cisneros, leads us into a world of poverty, broken dreams, and slithers of hope. The House on Mango Street follows the life of a young girl by the name of Esperanza Cordero, who occupies her childhood in an indigent Latino neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. The books expresses her dire need to have a place where she can call home, and escape the harsh reality of her expected life. Though, her life on Mango Street is bearable with help of her little sister Nenny, her two best friends Rachel and Lucy, and her other friend Sally. On her journey to adulthood, Sandra Cisneros will show how Esperanza assimilates into a mature young lady, who truly find her identity, and develops emotionally as well as physically.

In life, we are often deeply influenced by the people who surround us. Consider the age-old adage “Birds of a Feather Flock Together”; this familiar saying reminds us that, in life, we gravitate toward people who appeal to us, and those people can have a great impact on who we are and the choices we make. In Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, Esperanza meets many women who play a role in her life. Some of the women impact her in negative ways, but others help her to see that she can make more of her life than what her Chicago neighborhood offers. Of all the women in Esperanza’s life, Esperanza is most influenced by her mother and Alicia because they teach her to rely on herself in order to escape Mango Street.

In the collection of vignettes, The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros develops the theme that people should not be devalued because of their financial circumstances through metaphors of classism, the motif of shame, and the contrast between minor characters Alicia and Esperanza’s mother. Esperanza, the protagonist, is a Mexican-American adolescent living in the rural Chicago region. She occupies a house on Mango Street with her father, mother, two brothers, Carlos and Kiki, and little sister, Nenny. Mango Street is filled with low-income families, like Esperanza’s, trying to adapt to their difficult circumstances. Esperanza realizes it is difficult, but she dreams of leaving her house and Mango Street altogether.

When passing through a poor neighborhood, have you ever thought, “this place is dangerous.” even though you just see what’s on the surface? The dirty buildings, run down stores, and unkempt roads persuade us to perceive that neighborhood in a negative light, but you might do this unconsciously because ever since we were young, socioeconomic status is what separates the “good”, from the “bad”. Sandra Cisneros’, House on Mango Street, shows us how harmful having a previous notion of a place or person can be. In the novel, we meet Esperanza Cordero, a girl whose parents never strived above the working class. Because of their low income, they are forced to move into neglected homes on the verge of crumbling, their final stop being Mango

For centuries, a great deal of ethnic groups have been disempowered and persecuted by others. However, one should realize that none are more intense than the oppression of women. In the novel, The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, women living in the Mango Street neighborhood suffer from their restricted freedom. Three such women, Rafaela, Mamacita, and Sally, provide great examples. All try to escape from their dreadful environment. Most of them fail, but at first, Sally seems to succeed in escaping from her father. However, she ends up meeting a husband as equally bad as her father. Ultimately, the men who live with Rafaela, Mamacita, and Sally act as insuperable obstacles that limit the freedom in their women’s lives.

Esperanza is a shy but a very bright girl. She dreams of the perfect home now, with beautiful flowers in their luscious garden and a room for everyone to live in comfortably all because of the unsatisfied face the nun made that one afternoon--when she moves to the house of Mango Street. She thinks it’s going to be a “grand house on a hill that will have a bedroom for everyone and at least three washrooms so when they took a bath they would not have to tell everybody.” (Cinceros 4) Reality is so different for her when her dream is shot down in a heartbeat when she

Sandra Cisneros’, “The House on Mango Street” focuses on the narration of Esperanza, a young adolescent growing up in Chicago. Throughout the novel, Esperanza strives to develop her own sense of identity, while searching for the means out of her poverty-stricken neighborhood. With the help of her friends and family, Esperanza discovers how the world works, and what she needs to do in order to successfully better herself. The novel features several concepts of gender and sexuality studies including that of class structures, red-lining, gender, sexuality, intersectionality, and beauty. Those listed are simply a few more prominent features, as each character Esperanza introduces displays many more concepts within each scene. The concept of gender is portrayed widely throughout the novel and creates a foundation for the expectations the girls are about to face as they grow. Intersectionality interplays within the daily lives of each girl, and is seen within every page of the novel. Finally, beauty standards play an important role in the transition from adolescent to young adult each girl faces. Together, gender, intersectionality, and beauty standards, make up the novel, as it portrays the importance of each of these three core concepts of gender, women and sexuality studies.

Sexism is a challenge almost all women face. In a way, sexism can be beneficial because it can motivate women to defy society's standards and anything holding them back. However, in The House on Mango Street, author Sandra Cisneros, shows both sides of sexism, and how it can motivate women. Sexism can also make women give up and not accomplish anything. While Cisneros has the protagonist fight off sexism, Esperanza runs into many cases of sexism where the women just give up. Similarly, with The Help, author Kathryn Stockett, also shows both the positive and negative side of sexism. Skeeter, the protagonist fights off sexism to gain freedom, and in doing so she finds that all her friends don’t want to change the roles they have. Both

Throughout The House on Mango Street Esperanza learns to resist the gender norms that are deeply imbedded in her community. The majority of the other female characters in the novel have internalized the male viewpoint and they believe that it is their husbands or fathers responsibility to care for them and make any crucial decisions for them. However, despite the influence of other female characters that are “immasculated”, according to Judith Fetterley, Esperanza’s experiences lead her to become a “resisting reader” in Fettereley’s terminology because she does not want to become like the women that she observes, stuck under a man’s authority. She desires to leave Mango Street and have a “home of her own” so that she will never be forced

Society has built a role for women. And there’s no better example of this idea than The House on Mango Street, in which Esperanza describes specific moments of her life which lead her to believe in women independence and feminism. She has different ideas and thoughts on the definition of women and what they should be. Esperanza doesn’t fit into the constructed definition Mango Street has of how women should be.

Lindsey Rietzsch once said “A negative attitude drains, a positive attitude energizes.” This quote means that having a negative attitude lowers your self versus having a positive attitude where is actually increases attitude and it energizes you by inspiring you. “The House on Mango Street” sets up in Chicago, where the narrator(Esperanza) lives on Mango Street. The House on Mango Street that Esperanza lives in is really bad condition and old. It is so small that the narrator has to share beds in the same room with her family. Esperanza begins to lower her self esteem because she does not like where she lives and every time when some asks, “Where do you live?” She wants a real house that she could point to and she thinks the House On Mango street is not. But later, along the times, Esperanza’s negativity of herself begins to slowly change by looking at nature and take a closer look at the environment she lives in. Cisnero shows that knowing and being able to accept where our background is from is an important part of growing in life also as determining the real you.

The theme of a patriarchal society where beauty is a weakness and having too much of it only means darkness is very prominent in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. Esperanza, the protagonist of the numerous vignettes, highlights how this affects the young women on Mango Street.

In today’s world there are countless social problems. People are often treated as an inferior or as if they are less important for many different reasons. In The House on Mango Street, the author Sandra Cisneros addresses these problems. Throughout the story Cisneros does a thorough job explaining and showing how these issues affect the public. This novel is written through the eyes of a young girl, Esperanza, growing up in a poor neighborhood where the lifestyles of the lower class are revealed. Cisneros points out that, in today’s society, the expectation of women and their treatment, discrimination based on poverty, and discrimination because of a person’s ethnicity are the major