The House on Mango Street - Reflection

The word “esperanza” in Spanish means “hope.” I find it only fitting that the main character in Sandra Cisneros’s The House On Mango Street has the name that simultaneously describes the optimism she feels at the beginning and the end of the novel.

Interspersing the story of Esperanza with the story of her neighbors, Cisneros paints a vivid picture of life in a Hispanic neighborhood, as well as the sexual and emotional maturing of a young Chicana girl – that is, a girl of Mexican and American descent.

I began reading The House On Mango Street in the middle of the day, when it had started raining and the world was gloomy on the outside. I figured it wouldn’t take me long to form an opinion; enough to write about it anyway. By the time I’d finished I’d found a fictional paramour – if I’d been so inclined. Her sexual maturing paralleled my own sexual maturing. Finding out about my attraction to men was a slow, a gradual thing, and not without its hardships – though nothing like what Esperanza went through.

I had many “Sally” figures in my adolescence as well. So many gay guys my age were so focused on sex. Their blood ran directly past their brains and into their crotch. What I called orgies, they called Tuesday. What I called decadent, they called boring. What I blushed at, they described how it turned them on. I knew immediately I wasn’t like most gay guys in my generation, smooth hairless hormonal boys – you couldn’t call them men, not really – who had bought into the “Logo lie”, as I’d called it: the feeling that at some point you WILL be having meaningless sex and so that’s no reason to want your virginity to be something special. Throw it away like a condom, full of the seed of regrets from the night before. Toss it aside, like the many men that tossed you aside in the morning. Once the light of day hit.

I could never ascribe to that ideology. In that regard, I’m different. I’m a 21-year-old virgin but I have no regrets about that. No qualms about saving myself for someone special. Will I be having meaningless sex eventually? Who’s to say? I can’t be one to judge my future actions. I can only judge my present, and right now I’m pretty damn happy with the decisions I’ve made. My mother told my sister the day before she started high school, “Not one high school boy is ever worth crying over. Not one.” I always listened to that. Not one high school boy was worth giving my virginity to.

Esperanza crosses the barrier between girl and woman, between darkness and light, between aimless and purposeful. I’d like to think my writing allows the same thing to happen with me as well. I used writing as an escape from my physical surroundings, from the Hell that encompassed my being when I was maturing developmentally in high school. But I also used it to project myself into fantastic situations, while Cisneros and Esperanza use their writing realistically. I just had the vision of what I should write, and I wrote it. Things that didn’t exist – things that couldn’t exist, simply because they were in my mind and for the moment they provided a recompense for what torture had been daily rained upon me by some unmerciful god.

I even drew on the strength of my parents as Esperanza drew on the strength of her elders: my parents were almost the only reason I made it through high school with the boundless optimism I still possess today.

Overall, Mango Street was a delightful read, and I identify so easily with the character of Esperanza. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who asked about it.