William Clark Miss. Everwine ELA 9 23 May, 2023 THoMS Final Essay Based on Esperanza's description of her house and her neighborhood a home doesn't have to be the place you live. In fact, a home can come in many different forms. These forms can be the physicality of a home, connections with people, and personal growth. To begin, a home can be a connection. Esperanza's close relationship with friends in her neighborhood helps her realize her own identity. Mango Street's diverse community helps Esperanza realize the true meaning of herself and her place in the world. She watches the lives of those around her, and witnesses the struggles they face. Through her observations, she gains a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by women in her community. For example, Esperanza has various neighborhood friends who relate to her such as Meme Ortiz, Sally, Louie, or Marin. These friends have …show more content…
Esperanza's focus on the description of her house and neighborhood underscores the symbolic power of home. For her, home represents not only a physical structure but also a reflection of her aspirations and desires. She yearns for a house of her own, one that is not defined by societal expectations but embodies her individuality. She states, "Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias" (Cisneros 108). Esperanza's longing for a house becomes a symbol of personal choice and a space where she can freely express herself. Beyond the physical structure, Esperanza's home serves as a sanctuary, offering protection from the harsh and dangerous realities of the outside world. In a neighborhood covered by violence, cruelty and poverty, Esperanza is able to find safety within her home. It becomes a place where she can express herself and seek relief. By emphasizing the importance of her safe place, Sandra emphasizes the significance of having a space where one can feel
“You can pick up a mistake and carry it as a burden; or you can set it down and use it as a stepping stone to greatness.” -Unknown. This book claims that Esperanza goes through alot when she lives on Mango Street. We become the people that we are in life because of friends, family and mistakes . Friends have a big impact on people's lives because as in the book House on Mango Street.
The impacts of surroundings: An analysis of characters on The House on Mango Street In this essay, I will be going over characters such as Sally and Esperanza and explaining how their environment affects their way of thinking and or how they act. Esperanza's poverty helped her realize that she wants a better home some day. Esperanza and her family moved a lot before settling into the house on Mango Street, this is shown when Esperanza states "But what I remember most is moving a lot."
Question 1 One of Esperanza’s social identities is that she is from a lower socioeconomic class. She and her family live on Mango Street which is characterized by poverty and limited resources. Another aspect of her social identity is her age. She’s a young adolescent girl and even though her exact age is not clear, the way her age is described is as if she is at a stage in her life where she’s experiencing physical, emotional, and social changes. Esperanza is entering the age where young people grapple with issues related to their identity, self-discovery, and the pressures of transitioning to young adulthood.
Although she was already ashamed of her house before she felt that the way people around her spoke of her house justified the way she thought of it. She couldn’t find the good or beauty in her home since no one else did. In the beginning of the chapter she mentioned how her parents described to her, “Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence. ”(4). The quote shows how Esperanza was given hope that she was able to live in a home that was as beautiful as she can imagine it to be.
In the end, she embraced where she came from, and her concept of home was home in a heart and not a physical place. Esperanza in the beginning of the book did not want her home to be linked to her identity. She did not want people to know she lived in the house on Mango Street. To begin with, Esperanza was living in poor conditions by her having to share bedrooms and bricks crumbling in places. Then, a person bullied her because she
Esperanza’s idea of home develops throughout the story. Esperanza’s view of home is different throughout the story. At first, she thinks of home as more of a physical place. In The House on Mango Street Esperanza and her family live in poverty.
Esperanza Cordero is a young girl who lives in the small red house on mango street in Chicago,Illinois who dreams through the story that she would one day buy a big white house with spacious rooms and all to herself, “One that I could point to.”(pg.5). The book are separated through small chapters or vignettes about small clips about the main character,esperanza’s life that give small details that are important in the other vignettes. Esperanza’s life is filled with important people and impactful experiences. “The House On Mango Street” starts with Esperanza painting a picture of her new house that her family just moved into,she mentions her previous residences and why they had to leave them. For an example the Cordero family had to leave their flat in Loomis because a water pipe broke and the landlord couldn't fix it because the building was too old.
But still feels lonely. Also, throughout the story Esperanza gets negative attention from boys because of her culture. For some men she comes across in the story they see her as a toy for her ethnicity and not being from America. This also embarrasses her as she is still trying to find out what love is but can’t because if the negative attention. Therefore, even though she struggles pushing through with her ethnicity, others have it just as hard as well, showing how different ethnicities can clash.
As a child, Esperanza wants only escape from mango Street. Her dream of independents and "self-definition" also means leaving her family behind without any responsibilities to her family. Throughout the book, her has also faced some situation where is feels ashamed to be part of the Mango Street community and in some instances refuses to admit she has anything to do with mango street. At the beginning of the book near the earlier chapters, Esperanza feels very insecure about herself in general along with the house that she lives in. As mentioned before, she doesn’t want to discuss her name nor where she lives.
Many people are undermined by the drawbacks of belonging to a low socioeconomic status. In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is raised in a poor, Latino community, causing her to be introduced to poverty at an early age. This introduction of poverty affects Esperanza in many ways, one including that she is unable to find success. Esperanza struggles to achieve success in life because the cycle of poverty restricts her in a position in which she cannot break free from her socioeconomic status.
“It's small and red with tight steps in the front and windows so small you'd think there holding their breath. ”(page 4) Home, is where you feel safe. Home is where you grow up and become the best you. Home is on mango street for Esperanza. The last place she wants to be.
In the series of vignettes The House on Mango Street, the author Sandra Cisneros details the life of main character Esperanza, a young girl living in a barrio of Chicago. As Esperanza tells the reader about her experiences in her day to day life, the reader hears about her struggles and dreams, her hopes and expectations in life and how these affect her. Being a young girl, Esperanza holds naivety and hope for the world, not having experienced many mature situations or society yet, and since she is going through the time in her life when she begins experiencing these issues, we see her heartbreak and the world she knew shatter. For example, when Esperanza and her family move to Mango Street, as our story kicks off, her parents would often talk about the life that they would get when they win the lottery, like having “A real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn't have to move each year. And our house would have running water and pipes that worked.
Yet her refusal to do so prevents her growth. She instead chooses to sit by her window and miss something that she can no longer have. Esperanza throughout the novel does the same. She misses a home, even though at that moment her home is Mango Street. She is constantly repeating throughout the novel that Mango Street is temporary and not her home.
Esperanza and her family are always moving because they do not have much money, but they finally moved into a house on Mango Street where they “Don’t have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise” (703). Although it sounded like a nice place, when a nun from her school saw where Esperanza lived, she said, “You live there?” (703). That made Esperanza feel like nothing and made her realize she needs a real house, one that is really nice. Esperanza wants to change her life and make the best of what she has.
Esperanza’s interest is writing poem, appears in many of the chapters where it explains a way of bonding with her community by sharing poems with one another. Because Esperanza has become a writer her observations strengthen throughout the novel. One example of how she matures through writing is in the beginning of the book she told stories that were obviously meant for a younger audiences but through the middle of the book she started to use more observation based upon what she saw which helped develop the story more for the reader. This change shows that she is becoming an artist, and also that she is starting to distance herself from her community, since she focuses more on capturing experiences than living through them, she starts to further her self from interaction and focuses more on observation of the people around her. By the end of The House on Mango Street, she knows that she underwent a huge transformation and her relationship with mango st is starting to weaken.