Esperanza's age in The House on Mango Street is not given, but clues in the novel suggest she is a pre-adolescent girl of approximately 12 years old. She is old enough to be thinking about her future and what her life options are, yet young to still play dress up with her friends. She is old enough to respond with a sort of sexual desire to the stares of Sire, a boy who lives in her neighborhood but young enough to be confused.
Esperanza is in the process of awakening to the restrictions that are placed on her as a woman, realizing that she wants more than the restricted life of so many Latino women of her mother's generation, who were constrained to marriage and childbearing. Esperanza's name means hope, and as she begins to enter adolescence, she dares to break out of her assigned role and hope for more....
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A hint of this comes through when she stares back Sire, asserting her equality. It also emerges in her desire to soar high and to become a writer.
The book is effective because it combines the singular perspective of a Latino girl growing up in an immigrant community in the 1950s and 1960s with the universal experience of coming of age as an adolescent.
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In The House on Mango Street, how old are Esperanza, Lucy, and Rachel?
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 to note the passage of time with stories which suggest that time has gone by.
In one chapter, Esperanza is riding bikes with Lucy and Rachel. In another chapter, she’s noting the arrival of her thighs. In a later section, she gets a job. While it might be incautious to give Esperanza an exact age, it probably wouldn’t be wrong to say that, for most of the vignettes, Esperanza is a teen.
Considering the close relationship Esperanza has with Rachel and Lucy, it seems like it’d be safe to say that they are teens too. The three girls share many experiences together, which suggests that they are close in age. When the three girls experiment with wearing high heels, Esperanza announces, “We have legs.” The “we” implies that they’re growing up together and around the same age.
If someone were to do an internet search for Esperanza’s age, they might find that she’s 12, or about 12, or she’s 12 when the novel starts and 14 when it ends. Yet these numbers seem like guesses. In the text itself, Cisneros mentions birthdays, but it’s hard to spot a specific age. It seems like Cisneros is intentionally elusive about ages, which might be a part of the poetry of the story.