The house on mango street written activity

Universidade Federal de Santa Maria
Deparetamento de Letras Estrangeiras Modernas
Disciplina: Literaturas de Língua Inglesa: The Novel
Student: Karen Foletto Ferreira

The House on Mango Street written activity

The House on Mango Street is a short novel structured in vignettes, which are pieces of a particular composition that blends a poetic atmosphere and narration of incomplete stories. The main character is Esperanza, a girl who is about twelve years old and moves to a Latino neighborhood in Chicago.
In the first pages of the book, readers can already perceive that Esperanza longs for belonging to some place where she could call home and identify herself, as a shelter, a place of her own. “What I remember most is moving a lot. (…) They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be our for always so we wouldn't have to move each year. (…) But this isn't it. The house on Mango Street isn't it” (p.3-5). It is clear that the house on Mango Street is the first one her parents actually own, however, is it not what Esperanza has dreamed for herself.
Only one year passes through the narrative, but Esperanza clearly abandon childhood during this period. Her hips start to grow, she starts to work, has her first contacts with man and starts to write poems to express herself and escape out of her oppressive, sad and poor neighborhood. She decides she will leave Mango Street someday and have a house the way she always dreamed. Yet, she discovers that she will never leave Mango Street completely, and one day she will have to return and help the women who stayed.
The main issue problematized in the story is the cultural clash that emerges from the contact of two different cultures: Mexican and American. At school, Esperanza feels ashamed to live among poverty and wants to change her name, as if then she could define herself on her own terms. “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means sadness, it means waiting”