At birth, each person begins a search to know the world and others, to answer the age-old question, “Who am I?” This search for knowledge, for truth, and for personal identity is written about in autobiographies and in bildungsroman fiction. For years, though, the canon of United States literature has included predominantly the coming-of-age stories of white, heterosexual males. Where are the stories of the others—the women, the African Americans, the Asian Americans, the Hispanics, the gay males and lesbians? What differences and similarities would we find in their bildungsromans? Many writers, silenced before, are now finding the strengths, the voices, and the market for publication to tell their stories.

Chicano/a writers, like African Americans, Asian Americans, and others, are being heard; in autobiography and in fiction, they are telling their coming-of-age stories. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya (1972) and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1989) are two such Chicano/a works of fiction. In these texts, Anaya and Cisneros show the forces—social and cultural—that shape and define their characters. These two novels, separated by about a generation, one about the male experience, one about the female; one rural, one urban; one mythopoetic and one dialectic, both show the struggle of the Chicano/a people to find identities that are true to themselves as individuals and artists but that do not betray their culture and their people.

This is no mean feat, considering that Anglos did not teach them to value their cultural heritage and experiences, that they were shown no Chicano/a role models, that, in fact, they were often discouraged from writing. The struggle to overcome these barriers may, of course, be different for different Chicano/a writers, but for these two, there are common threads. Both make similar comments about their roots. Anaya says that Chicano/a writers

came from poor families … but we were rich with love and culture and a sense of sharing and imagination. We had to face a school system that very often told us we couldn't write. It did not teach us our own works and we had nothing to emulate.

(Bruce-Novoa 1980, 198)

Cisneros says that as a writer growing up without models of Chicano/a literature, she felt impoverished with nothing of personal merit to say.

As a poor person growing up in a society where the class norm was superimposed on a tv screen, I couldn't understand why our home wasn't all green lawn and white wood. … I rejected what was at hand and emulated the voices of the poets … big, male voices … all wrong for me … it seems crazy, but … I had never felt my home, family, and neighborhood unique or worthy of writing about.

(1987a, 72)

Even though neither had Chicano/a literature to read as a child, both cite “reading voraciously” as a major factor in becoming writers. Anaya remembers Miss Pansy, the librarian who kept him supplied with books on Saturday afternoons which

disappeared as the time of day dissolved into the time of distant worlds. … I took the time to read. … [T]hose of you who have felt the same exhilaration … will know about what I'm speaking.

(1983, 306)

Anaya spent much time as well playing with friends, but Cisneros, being an only daughter in a family of six sons, was often lonely. She read, in part, to escape her loneliness. Cisneros reflects that her aloneness “was good for a would-be writer—it allowed … time to think … to imagine … to read and prepare” (1990, 256). Cisneros in “Notes to a Young(er) Writer” explains that her reading was an important “first step.” She says she left chores undone as she was “reading and reading, nurturing myself with books like vitamins” (1987b, 74). Perhaps these experiences by Anaya and Cisneros nurtured their creation of protagonists who, like themselves, had no models—but were possessed by destiny, by inclination, and by courage to be artists—writers who would spin Chicano/a stories.

Bless Me, Ultima and The House on Mango Street are strong coming-of-age stories containing many of the elements of the traditional bildungsroman as well as other features that place them firmly in the Chicano/a tradition. The protagonists come of age by going through painful rites of passage, by performing heroic feats or passing tests with the help of mentors, by surviving symbolic descents into hell, and finally by reaching a new level of consciousness—the protagonists have changed and have moved from initial innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adolescence. Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima closely follows the traditional male bildungsroman. Its protagonist is the child, Antonio Márez; the novel begins when he says, “Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven” (1). Antonio, the first-person narrator, travels an almost classical mythic road, moving chronologically through his coming of age.

Cisneros' House on Mango Street is also narrated by a child protagonist. Esperanza, the protagonist, tells about her life on Mango Street; we see her family, friends, and community, their daily troubles and concerns. By the end of the story, she has gained understanding about both herself and her community/culture. But, unlike Anaya's chronological novel, The House on Mango Street is the story of growing awareness which comes in fits and starts, a series of almost epiphanic narrations mirrored in a structure that is neither linear nor traditional, a hybrid of fictive and poetic form, more like an impressionistic painting where the subject isn't clear until the viewer moves back a bit and views the whole. Esperanza tells her story in a series of forty-four, individually titled vignettes. Ellen McCracken believes that this bildungsroman, which she prefers to label a “collection” rather than a novel, “roots the individual self in the broader socio-political reality of the Chicano/a community” (1989, 64).

The settings of these two novels are very different—one essentially rural and the other urban—but each functions symbolically in the character's childhood and developing consciousness. In Bless Me, Ultima, Antonio lives on the edge of the llano, a wide open prairie, a place where his father's anarchic and noisy relatives and ancestors roamed as cowboys. The restlessness of his forebears is in Antonio's blood, and from the llano he learns about the wild forces of nature, herb lore, and the pagan awesomeness of the natural world. Through this landscape runs the river, heavily endowed with significance. Anaya has said that as a child in Santa Rosa, he spent much time by the river, his “numinous” place.

I was haunted by the soul of the river. … [T]hat presence … touched my primal memory and allowed me to discover the river gods and the other essential symbols which were to become so important to my writing.

(1977, 40)

But there are polarities even in the landscape in Bless Me, Ultima, for Antonio lives close to town, and he must try to learn the lessons of his schooling and the teachings of the Catholic Church. He must also try to understand the sometimes violent, sometimes despairing lives and compulsions of the people who live in the town. And there is yet a third place of importance to Antonio, El Puerto de Luna, the village of his mother, where the people are rooted, entrenched in agriculture and the land, moving quietly through life under the cycles of the moon. All these landscapes claim Antonio as a child, and he must decide upon their importance and allow or disallow their influences as he grows into adulthood.

For Esperanza in The House on Mango Street, the notion of “house”—or a space of her own—is critical to her coming of age as a mature person and artist. Ramón Saldívar says that this novel “emphasizes the crucial roles of racial and material as well as ideological conditions of oppression” (1990, 182). At the beginning of the novel, Esperanza explains how her parents talk about moving into a “real” house that “would have running water and pipes that worked” (Cisneros 1989, 4). Instead she lives in a run-down flat and is made to feel embarrassed and humiliated because of it. One day while she is playing outside, a nun from her school walks by and stops to talk to her.

Where do you live? she asked.

There, I said pointing to the third floor.

You live there?

There. I had to look where she pointed—the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa had nailed in the windows so we wouldn't fall out. You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing.

(5)

Later in the novel, in a similar occurrence, a nun assumes that Esperanza lives in an even worse poverty-stricken area than, in fact, is the case. Julián Olivares says thus the “house and narrator become identified as one, thereby revealing an ideological perspective of poverty and shame” (1988, 162-63). Esperanza desires a space of her own, a real home with warmth and comfort and security, a home she wouldn't be ashamed of. For Esperanza, the house is also a necessity; echoing Virginia Woolf, she needs “A House of My Own” in order to create, a “house quiet as snow … clean as paper before the poem” (Cisneros 1989, 108).

Other houses on Mango Street do not live up to Esperanza's desires either, for they are houses that “imprison” women. Many vignettes illustrate this. There is the story of Marin who always has to babysit for her aunt; when her aunt returns from work, she may stay out front but not go anywhere else. There is also the story of Rafaela whose husband locks her indoors when he goes off to play dominoes. He wishes to protect his woman, his “possession,” since Rafaela is “too beautiful to look at” (79). And there is Sally whose father “says to be this beautiful is trouble. … [H]e remembers his sisters and is sad. Then she can't go out” (81). Sally marries, even before eighth grade, in order to escape the confinement and abuse of her father's house, but in the vignette, “Linoleum Roses,” we see her dominated as well in the house of her husband.

She is happy. … except he won't let her talk on the telephone. And he doesn't let her look out the window. …

She sits home because she is afraid to go outside without his permission.

(101-02)

Esperanza sees, as Olivares notes, that “the woman's place is one of domestic confinement, not one of liberation and choice” (163). And so, slowly, cumulatively, stroke by stroke, and story by story, Esperanza comes to realize that she must leave Mango Street so that she will not be entrapped by poverty and shame or imprisoned by patriarchy.

Another element of the bildungsroman is the appearance of a mentor who helps guide the protagonist. These coming-of-age novels both feature guides although they differ greatly in the two texts. In Bless Me, Ultima, we are introduced to Antonio's mentor, Ultima, in the very first line. Ultima, who comes to live with Antonio's family is a wise woman, called a curandera. She is also a midwife, knowledgeable in healing and herb lore, and she possesses other, seemingly magic, shaman-like qualities: an owl “familiar” and the power to deal with the evil of witches (brujas). Antonio takes to her from the beginning. He says,

I was happy with Ultima. … [S]he taught me the names of plants and flowers … of birds and animals; but most important, I learned from her that there was beauty. … [M]y soul grew under her careful guidance.

(14)

Beset by tensions and confusion in his world, Antonio turns increasingly to her.

In The House on Mango Street there is an ironic twist to the guidance of mentors, for often Esperanza is guided by examples of women she does not want to emulate, such as Sally and Rafaela. Esperanza's other mentors are very different from Ultima, but there are several role models who sometimes give her advice. They nurture her writing talent, show her ways to escape the bonds of patriarchy, and remind her of her cultural and communal responsibilities. Minerva is a young woman who, despite being married to an abusive husband, writes poems and lets Esperanza read them. She also reads Esperanza's writing. Aunt Lupe, dying of a wasting illness, urges Esperanza to keep writing and counsels her that this will be her freedom. Alicia, who appears in two stories, is, perhaps, the best role model. While she must keep house for her father, she still studies at the university so she won't be trapped. Alicia also reminds Esperanza that Esperanza is Mango Street and will one day return. McCracken says that Alicia fights “what patriarchy expects of her” and

at the same time represents a clear-sighted, non-mystified vision of the barrio. … [S]he embodies both the antipatriarchal themes and the social obligation to return to one's ethnic community.

(69-70)

The story, “Three Sisters,” is a kind of subversive fairytale. Esperanza attends the wake of her friends' baby sister and is suddenly confronted by three mysterious old women. These women examine Esperanza's hands, tell her to make a wish, and advise, “When you leave, you must remember always to come back. … [Y]ou can't forget who you are. … [C]ome back for the ones who cannot leave as easily as you” (Cisneros 1989, 105). They direct her to remember her responsibilities to her community. In this bildungsroman, Esperanza is reminded consistently that the search for self involves more than mere personal satisfaction. All of these women offer guidance to help Esperanza in her coming of age.

The protagonists must endure other rites of passage to reach full personhood and understanding. Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima is deeply mythic. Part of Antonio's understanding comes from a series of ten dreams that Vernon Lattin believes are “just as important as Antonio's waking life. … [These] Jungian dreams help Antonio across the thresholds of transformation” (1979, 631). Antonio's first dream, for example, helps him with the anxiety he feels about the conflicting expectations that his father's and mother's families have for him. The dream is about his birth, and in it both families are at odds, battling with one another for control of Antonio's future. When the battle becomes so furious that guns are drawn, Ultima steps in and cries that only she will know his destiny. Antonio learns from this dream that he must not be destroyed by guilt or by the expectations of either family, but with Ultima he must find his one way in the world.

Near the end of the novel, Antonio experiences a terrifying, apocalyptic dream after witnessing the violent murder of Narcisco, who was coming to warn Ultima of danger. In the dream, Antonio sees his own death, and the blasphemous deaths of Ultima and the golden carp, symbol of the naturalistic, pagan world. All die and everything is destroyed; yet at the end it is decided that people will survive in “new form. … [There is] a new sun to shine its good light upon a new earth” (168). David Carrasco, who believes that Bless Me, Ultima can be read as a “religious text,” says that the message Antonio learns is “the pattern of death and rebirth, decay and regeneration” and that Antonio is consciously aware that the “integration of his diverse and conflicting elements and the cultivation of sacred forces within a human being can lead to a life full of blessings” (1982, 218).

Antonio endures rites of passage in his waking life as well: he sees the brutality of his schoolmates towards those who are different; he watches two people, Lupito and Narcisco, shot to death; he is with Ultima when she dies. Perhaps his descent into darkness, a traditional rite of passage, occurs when he goes with Ultima to help cure his Uncle Lucas, who is desperately ill because of an evil spell cast by the witch-like Tenorio sisters. Ultima battles this spell, using Antonio as a kind of medium to expel the evil. He is very sick, but both he and his uncle vomit poisonous bile and recover. In the middle of the novel, he realizes what Ultima revealed earlier in a dream: “The waters are one, Antonio. … [Y]ou have been seeing only parts … and not looking beyond into the great cycle that binds us all” (113). And so, Antonio comes of age, having gone beyond the dualities in his life.

Esperanza's rites of passage speak not through myth and dreams, but through the political realities of Mango Street. She faces pain and experiences violence in a very different way. Her major loss of innocence has to do with gender and with being sexually appropriated by men. In the vignette, “The Family of Little Feet,” Esperanza and her friends don high heels and strut confidently down the street. They are pleased at first with their long legs and grown-up demeanors, then frightened as they are leered at, yelled to, threatened, and solicited. McCracken says, “Cisneros proscribes a romantic or exotic reading of the dress-up episode, focusing instead on the girls' discovery of the threatening nature of male sexual power” (67).

Perhaps Esperanza's “descent into darkness” occurs in the story “Red Clowns.” Unlike the traditional bildungsroman, the knowledge with which she emerges is not that of regeneration, but of painful knowledge, the knowledge of betrayal and physical violation. In this story, she is waiting for Sally, who is off on a romantic liaison. Esperanza, all alone, is grabbed and raped. Afterward, she says, “Sally, make him stop. I couldn't make them go away. I couldn't do anything but cry. I don't remember. It was dark. … [P]lease don't make me tell it all” (Cisneros 1989, 100). In this story, Esperanza is also angry and calls Sally “a liar” because through books and magazines and the talk of women she has been led to believe the myth of romantic love. María Herrera-Sobek calls this story a “diatribe” that is directed not only at Sally,

but at the community of women in a conspiracy of silence … silence in not denouncing the “real” facts of life about sex and its negative aspects in violent sexual encounters, and complicity in romanticizing and idealizing unrealistic sexual relations.

(177-78)

Esperanza, triply marginalized by race, class, and gender, has lost her innocence. Yet, despite this pain and violation, she manages to tell her story. She has come of age, and she understands that in the future she must serve both herself and her community.

I will say goodbye to Mango. … Friends and neighbors will say, what happened to that Esperanza? … They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot get out.

(Cisneros 1989, 110)

And so, these two novels are every bit as strong, as literary, and as meaningful as the bildungsromans traditionally read in United States-literature classes. At the same time, they take different paths, preventing a single or stereotyped view of the Chicano/a coming-of-age experience. Bless Me, Ultima celebrates a rich cultural past and heritage, taking joy in myth and in the spiritual quest. The House on Mango Street, instead, celebrates the search for the real self and cultural responsibility in the face of different oppressions. Yet both texts show that Chicano/a literature has come of age; they announce “I am.” That announcement should not go unheard.

Works Cited

Anaya, Rudolfo A. 1983. “In Commemoration: One Million Volumes.” American Libraries 14.5 (May): 304-07.

———. 1977. “A Writer Discusses His Craft.” The CEA Critic 40 (Nov.): 39-43.

———. 1972. Bless Me, Ultima. Berkeley, CA: Tonatiuh Quinto Sol International Publishers.

Bruce-Novoa, Juan. 1980. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: U of Texas P.

Carrasco, David. 1982. “A Perspective for a Study of Religious Dimensions in Chicano Experience: Bless Me, Ultima as a Religious Text.” Aztlan 13 (Spring/Fall): 195-221.

Cisneros, Sandra. 1990. “Only Daughter.” Glamour (Nov.): 256, 285.

———. 1989. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage.

———. 1987a. “From a Writer's Notebook: Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession.” The Americas Review 15.1 (Spring): 69-73.

———. 1987b. “Notes to a Young(er) Writer.” The Americas Review 15.1 (Spring): 74-76.

Herrera-Sobek, María. 1988. “The Politics of Rape: Sexual Transgression in Chicana Fiction.” The Americas Review 15.3-4 (Fall-Winter): 17-82.

Lattin, Vernon E. 1979. “The Quest for Mythic Vision in Contemporary Native American and Chicano Fiction.” American Literature 50.4 (Jan.): 625-40.

McCracken, Ellen. 1989. “Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street: Community-Oriented Introspection and the Demystification of Patriarchal Violence.” Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings. Ed. Asunción Horno-Delgado et al. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P. 62-71.

Olivares, Julián. 1988. “Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and the Poetics of Space.” Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature. Ed. María Herrera-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes. Houston, TX: Arte Publico P. 160-69.

Saldívar, Ramón. 1990. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: U of Wisconsin P.