The House on Mango Street

Imagery is comprised of words that conjure the five senses in our imaginations: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. In chapter four of The House on Mango Street Cisneros uses the image of the...

A hyperbole is an exaggeration and is used for emphasis. In The House on Mango Street, the following passage contains a hyperbole: On Tuesdays, Rafaela's husband comes home late because that's the...

Houses symbolize many things in The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. They represent freedom and confinement, success and failure, and fantasy and reality. Beginning with the house on...

An interesting allusion is in the vignette entitled "The Family of Little Feet." In this section, Esperanza and her friends are trying on old high-heeled shoes. The girls feel as though it is...

The theme of this chapter is Esperanza's desire to transcend the hold of her heritage and her female gender. She approaches this longing for liberation through exploring her name. Esperanza tells...

Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros’s 1983 novel The House on Mango Street presents the narrative of Esperanza Cordero, a 12-year-old Chicana girl living in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago....

In Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, the passage that you refer to takes place in Chapter 12. Cisneros writes: All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood...

The central ideas of “Four Skinny Trees” from Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street are strength and endurance. In this vignette, Esperanza states that these trees are “the only ones who...

The saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a child." This is so true. Growing up, a young person comes in contact with many people, mostly from his community. They all make impressions on the...

One significant event in The House on Mango Street is when Cathy tells Esperanza that her family is moving away from Mango Street. This is eye-opening for Esperanza, because Cathy is referring to...

In the early part of the book, Esperanza gives the impression that her identity is still in the early stages of being formed. Somewhat inevitably, this has a noticeable effect on her storytelling...

Geraldo has no last name because there are no identification documents on his person. The text tells us that Geraldo had nothing in his pockets at the time of his death. Because he had no...

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, is structured using a series of vignettes, which are grouped under chapters that address a common theme. A vignette is to a story as a sketch is to a...

In the vignette "Papa Wakes up Tired in the Dark," Esperanza's father comes into her room to tell her that her grandfather has passed away. She is completely taken off guard when she sees her...

Sandra Cisneros, the author of The House on Mango Street, is a Mexican American writer. Her protagonist, Esperanza Cordero, is a Latina preteen living in Chicago, Illinois. Esperanza's first-person...

The Four Skinny Trees are out of place on Mango Street. To a great extent, Esperanza identifies with them because she sees herself out of place, to a large extent, on Mango Street. In identifying...

In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, the main conflict is an internal one for main character Esperanza. The house on Mango Street was where Esperanza lived during her formative years,...

In Chapter Four of The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros uses personification in one of her most important quotes. Esperanza, the main character, is named after her grandmother. Esperanza does...

Esperanza is a member of many cultures, and she feels affinity for and experiences others. She is Latina, as her family comes from Mexico, and she is also a Chicana, which means an American person...

Esperanza's war is her fight against the social expectations that are placed upon her as a young woman. Let's look at the words that Esperanza uses in this sentence. The first thing that stands out...

One of the symbols in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street is shoes. At least twice in the novel, shoes are mentioned as representing one's inner self and the conflict which can arise as a...

The conflict in The House on Mango Street is both internal and external. Esperanza Cordero's external conflict comes from living in a ghetto-type environment. She is not happy with this location....

The 1984 work The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros presents the journey to maturity of the protagonist Esperanza as she attempts to break away from poverty in her community and become a...

Four-legged furry creatures—namely mice—scare the living daylights out of Alicia. Primarily, that's because they act as a constant reminder of just how poor she is, and how hopeless life seems....

Authors write for many reasons. I think the key to Cisneros’s purpose is in the narrator. In The House on Mango Street, the narrator is a young Latino girl. She describes her neighborhood and...

Personification is defined as prescribing active or human qualities to nonhuman things. Each of the following is a different example of personification from Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango...

One example of irony is in the chapter titled "Those Who Don't." Esperanza talks about strangers who come through her neighborhood. She observes that they are afraid and view her neighborhood as...

The following references are examples of figurative language and other literary devices in The House on Mango Street: Hyperbole is used in the chapter "And Some More" when Nenny talks about snow....

If we look at what we know about Sandra Cisneros's life from interviews and compare it to Esperanza's life, we can see similarities. The House on Mango Street is autobiographical in the same way...

To determine the "speaker" or "voice" of the narrator, you have to determine from what point of view the narrator is speaking. (Think of it in everyday spoken language.) If the narrator is...

Imagery has to do with phrases, references, or figurative language that uses one or more of the fives senses. The creation of imagery happens when an author uses the senses of sight, smell, taste,...

It is clear that one of the biggest internal and external conflicts that Esperanza faces is her own desire to break free from her barrio and to leave it, seeking her own life and forming her own...

Esperanza admires Marin because "she is older and knows lots of things". Marin is worldly, and flaunts a sense of sexuality that the younger girls are only beginning to discover. Marin...

In the section titled “Cathy Queen of Cats,” Esperanza makes her first friend in her new neighborhood. Cathy tells Esperanza that the reason her family is moving is that the neighborhood is going...

In The House on Mango Street, as you're probably aware, many of the women have to face constant, terrible abuse. The abuse starts early on when Esperanza tells us about her great grandma and great...

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a coming-of-age novel told in vignettes from the point of view of Esperanza, a young girl who grows up in a barrio neighborhood in Chicago. How the...

Chanclas are sandals, and in the vignette entitled "Chanclas," Esperanza does not have any nice ones for the baptism party held at Precious Blood Church. Her mother buys her a new pink dress, a new...

Esperanza spends time discussing her views of her name in the vignette titled "My Name" in the novel. Even though her name means "hope" in English, she sees it as a burden. According to Esperanza,...

Esperanza's neighborhood is central to the setting of The House on Mango Street. Nearly all the action in the book's poems and vignettes take place out and about in this neighborhood rather than in...

Names are a sign of one's identity, and Esperanza wishes to change her identity (to some degree) and move away from the house on Mango Street. In the chapter entitled "My Name," she speaks about...

Esperanza manages to convince her mother to let her eat lunch at school by repeatedly nagging at her for a few days until she gives in. Initially her mother argues that it would create extra work...

Sire is a man in the neighborhood who leers at Esperanza as she walks by. He has a girlfriend, Lois, who "is tiny and pretty and smells like baby's skin...but she doesn't know how to tie her...

At the beginning of The House on Mango Street, Esperanza makes it clear that the house on Mango Street is not the one her family has been dreaming about. She says, "But the house on Mango Street is...

As a young adult novel, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a coming-of-age story, and therefore, relationships play a key role in Esperanza’s development as a character. How she...

Sally and Esperanza are similar in that they’re both adolescent girls growing up in the same community. Both girls display an interest in experimenting with their fashion choices and makeup. Before...

It might be hard to find a specific age for Esperanza, Lucy, and Rachel, because time is not clearly defined in Sandra Cisneros’s novel. She doesn’t seem to keep track of time by numbers; she seems...