beats her, and Minerva secretly writes poetry to help her hold onto her identity in the midst of her horrible life.

Sally is a beautiful girl with an abusive father. She flirts with the boys to try to find her place, but this gets both her and Esperanza into trouble.

Indeed, many of Esperanza's neighbors are dealing with the same struggles that she is, trying to find out who there are, where they belong, and what the true meaning of home actually is. Esperanza is told that she will leave Mango Street one day. She does so now through her writing and imagination. She will later through education. But Mango Street will always be a part of Esperanza.

One main theme in the first chapter of The House on Mango Street (fittingly called “The House on Mango Street”) could be fantasy versus reality.

Think about how Esperanza talks about the home she wants for her and her family—it’s quite dreamy. There’s grass, trees, a basement, and at least three bathrooms. This ideal home isn’t solely the product of Esperanza’s imagination. This romanticized vision of what a good home should be came from her mom and dad as well. They, too, had a fantasy of living in a picturesque home.

In reality, the home that Esperanza and her family move into is a long way away from the home they’ve been talking about. It’s tiny, there’s no front yard, no big trees, and there’s only one bathroom. Indeed, there’s a big gap between the imagined home and the home that Esperanza and her family inhabit in the real world.

The emphasis on homes and their external elements could connect to another theme: superficiality. It’s as if Esperanza and her family want the nice home because they think the appearance of a nice home produces a nice life. While this might be true sometimes, it can also be false. Appearances can be misleading. Remember, Esperanza doesn’t describe the Mango Street home in the kindest of ways; however, looks aside, it’s hard to argue that her new home isn’t filled with warmth and love, which is probably more important than how her new home looks.

None of the vignettes in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street have just one theme, but this is a good opportunity to consider this vignette in the context of the whole book and identify what stands out to you as the primary theme that makes this a part of the whole. In "Our Good Day," a good theme to focus on might be childhood innocence. In many ways, The House on Mango Street is about the loss of childhood innocence, as Esperanza experiences racism, classism, sexism, and sexual assault, as well as the death and illness of family members, all of which darken her perspective on the world and move her away from a more carefree younger childhood.

In a book that is filled with these difficult scenes, "Our Good Day" represents just that—a good, carefree day. Esperanza unexpectedly befriends two of the neighborhood girls, Rachel and Lucy, in the spur-of-the-moment way that kids can make friends. They band together to buy a bicycle off another kid from the neighborhood, and they ride it through town, all of them balancing on the handlebars and body of the bike at once. Several details in this vignette really underscore the theme of childhood innocence, like the girls' "shiny Sunday shoes without socks" which "makes their bald ankles all red." This creates a familiar, charming image of young girls being dressed for church service on Sundays—and the girls' childhood carelessness (or just carefree-ness) means that they don't think twice about wearing these nice shoes as they go careening happily through the streets on their new bike.

The House on Mango Street explores many themes, including identity, hope, gender, family, and friendship.

For the theme of identity, Esperanza is frequently exploring what defines her as a person. She is constantly seeking to understand how concepts of sexuality, culture, ethnicity, and gender constitute who she is and how the world sees her. Over the course of the story, her identity goes through a transformation, culminating in the realization that she is a writer.

Hope also is a central theme. Many of the characters in The House on Mango Street share their hopes for the future. Often, these hopes are represented as a house. Esperanza's parents hope for a large white house for the whole family. Esperanza hopes for a house to provide her the privacy she desires to complete her writings.

The theme of gender repeatedly comes up, too. Gender dynamics play a huge role on Mango Street, and Esperanza is not a fan of this. She sees how gender roles often serve to keep women in a subservient role while giving men a huge amount of freedom. Esperanza constantly rejects these socially constructed gender roles by refusing to act feminine.

The theme of family is shown in Esperanza's sense of belonging. Even though, like many teenagers, Esperanza tries to create distance with her family as she attempts to forge her own identity, she keeps finding herself returning to the comfort and love of her relatives.

Friendship is another central theme. Esperanza is frequently trying to make meaningful friendships. At first, these friendships often appear superficial. As the book progresses, her friendships take on more meaning and intimacy as Esperanza matures.

This excellent novel is above all a coming of age story that charts one girl's discovery and acceptance of her position as a poor Latino in America. The fragments that we are presented with in this story show Esperanza's struggles with the society in which she grows up and the way that she both accepts those limitations and at the same time struggles to transcend them. In particular, this is related to Esperanza's position as a woman and what she sees happening to her various female friends as they marry early and live lives full of children, abuse and lack of opportunity. In particular, her observations and her own painful experience of sexual awakening in "Red Clowns" causes her to declare stridently in "Beautiful and Cruel":

I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.

Esperanza therefore chooses to forge a path for herself that is uniquely different from the life of the other women in her community and she deliberately rejects the role of subservient femininity. In particular, Esperanza's search for a house acts as an extended metaphor that points towards her search for a home that reflects her identity. I have included a few links below to help you think through this question in a bit more detail.