TheHouseonMangoStreet.pdf

The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros

Contents

Introduction

The House on Mango Street

Hairs

Boys & Girls

My Name

Cathy Queen of Cats

Our Good Day

Laughter

Gil’s Furniture Bought & Sold

Meme Ortiz

Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin

Marin

Those Who Don’t

There Was an Old Woman She Had So Many Children She Didn’t Know What to Do Alicia
Who Sees Mice

Darius & the Clouds

And Some More

The Family of Little Feet

A Rice Sandwich

Chanclas

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Hips

The First Job

Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark

Born Bad

Elenita, Cards, Palm, Water

Geraldo No Last Name

Edna’s Ruthie

The Earl of Tennessee

Sire

Four Skinny Trees

No Speak English

Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays Sally

Minerva Writes Poems

Bums in the Attic

Beautiful & Cruel

A Smart Cookie

What Sally Said

The Monkey Garden

Red Clowns

Linoleum Roses

The Three Sisters

Alicia & I Talking on Edna’s Steps

A House of My Own

3

Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes

A Note About the Author

4

Introduction
It’s been ten years since The House on Mango Street was first published. I began writing it in
graduate school, the spring of 1977, in Iowa City. I was twenty-two years old.

I’m thirty-eight now, far from that time and place, but the questions from readers remain, Are
these stories true? Are you Esperanza?

When I began The House on Mango Street, I thought I was writing a memoir. By the time I
finished it, my memoir was no longer memoir, no longer autobiographical. It had evolved
into a collective story peopled with several lives from my past and present, placed in one
fictional time and neighborhood—Mango Street.

A story is like a Giacometti sculpture. The farther away it is from you, the clearer you can
see it. In Iowa City, I was undergoing several changes of identity. For the first time I was
living alone, in a community very different in class and culture from the one where I was
raised. This caused so much unrest I could barely speak, let alone write about it. The story I
was living at twenty-two would have to wait, but I could take the story of an earlier place, an
earlier voice, and record that on paper.

The voice of Mango Street and all my work was born at one moment, when I realized I was
different. This sounds absurd and simple, but until Iowa City, I assumed the world was like
Chicago, made up of people of many cultures all living together—albeit not happily at times
but still coexisting. In Iowa, I was suddenly aware of feeling odd when I spoke, as if I were a
foreigner. But this was my land too. This is not to say I hadn’t felt this “otherness” before in
Chicago, but I hadn’t felt it quite as keenly as I did in graduate school. I couldn’t articulate
what it was that was happening, except I knew I felt ashamed when I spoke in class, so I
chose not to speak.

I can say my political consciousness began the moment I recognized my otherness. I was in a
graduate seminar on memory and the imagination. The books required were Vladimir
Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, and Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of
Space. I had enjoyed the first two, but as usual I said nothing, just listened to the dialogue
around me, too afraid to speak. The third book, though, left me baffled. I assumed I just didn’t
get it because I wasn’t as smart as everyone else, and if I didn’t say anything, maybe no one
else would notice.

The conversation, I remember, was about the house of memory—the attic, the stairwells, the
cellar. Attic? My family lived in third-floor flats for the most part, because noise traveled
down.

Stairwells reeked of Pine Sol from the Saturday scrubbing. We shared them with the people

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downstairs; they were public zones no one except us thought to clean. We mopped them all
right, but not without resentment for cleaning up some other people’s trash. And as for
cellars, we had a basement, but who’d want to hide in there? Basements were filled with
urban fauna. Everyone was scared to go in there including the meter reader and the landlord.
What was this guy Bachelard talking about when he mentioned the familiar and comforting
house of memory? It was obvious he never had to clean one or pay the landlord rent for one
like ours.

Then it occurred to me that none of the books in this class or in any of my classes, in all the
years of my education, had ever discussed a house like mine. Not in books or magazines or
films. My classmates had come from real houses, real neighborhoods, ones they could point
to, but what did I know?

When I went home that evening and realized my education had been a lie—had made
presumptions about what was “normal,” what was American, what was valuable—I wanted
to quit school right then and there, but I didn’t. Instead, I got angry, and anger when it is used
to act, when it is used nonviolently, has power. I asked myself what I could write about that
my classmates could not. I didn’t know what I wanted exactly, but I did have enough sense to
know what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to sound like my classmates; I didn’t want to keep
imitating the writers I had been reading. Their voices were right for them but not for me.

Instead, I searched for the “ugliest” subjects I could find, the most un-“poetic”—slang,
monologues in which waitresses or kids talked their own lives. I was trying as best I could to
write the kind of book I had never seen in a library or in a school, the kind of book not even
my professors could write. Each week I ingested the class readings and then went off and did
the opposite. It was a quiet revolution, perhaps a reaction taken to extremes, but it was out of
this negative experience that I found something positive: my own voice.

The language in Mango Street is based on speech. It’s very much an antiacademic voice—a
child’s voice, a girl’s voice, a poor girl’s voice, a spoken voice, the voice of an American-
Mexican. It’s in this rebellious realm of antipoetics that I tried to create a poetic text with the
most unofficial language I could find. I did it neither ingenuously nor naturally. It was as
clear to me as if I were tossing a Molotov.

At one time or another, we all have felt other. When I teach writing, I tell the story of the
moment of discovering and naming my otherness. It is not enough simply to sense it; it has to
be named, and then written about from there. Once I could name it, I ceased being ashamed
and silent. I could speak up and celebrate my otherness as a woman, as a working-class
person, as an American of Mexican descent.

When I recognized the places where I departed from my neighbors, my classmates, my
family, my town, my brothers, when I discovered what I knew that no one else in the room
knew, and then spoke it in a voice that was my voice, the voice I used when I was sitting in

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the kitchen, dressed in my pajamas, talking over a table littered with cups and dishes, when I
could give myself permission to speak from that intimate space, then I could talk and sound
like myself, not like me trying to sound like someone I wasn’t. Then I could speak, shout,
laugh from a place that was uniquely mine, that was no one else’s in the history of the
universe, that would never be anyone else’s, ever.

I wrote these stories that way, guided by my heart and by my ear. I was writing a novel and
didn’t know I was writing a novel; if I had, I probably couldn’t have done it. I knew I wanted
to tell a story made up of a series of stories that would make sense if read alone, or that
could be read all together to tell one big story, each story contributing to the whole—like
beads in a necklace. I hadn’t seen a book like this before. After finishing my book, I would
discover these novels later: Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Nellie Campobello’s
Cartucho, Ermilo Abreu Gomez’s Canek, and Tomás Rivera’s Y no se lo tragó la tierra.

While I was writing Mango Street, I remember reading Nicanor Parra’s Antipoems and
delighting in their irreverence to “Poetry,” just as I had been delighted by Carl Sandburg’s
wise-guy, working-class voice and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Bronzeville poems. I remember I
was trying to write something that was a cross between fiction and poetry—like Jorge Luis
Borges’ Dream Tigers, a book whose stories read like fables, but with the lyricism and
succinctness of poetry.

I finished writing my book in November 1982, miles from the Iowa cornfields. I had traveled
a great distance both physically and mentally from the book’s inception. And in the meantime,
lots of things happened to me. I taught Latino high-school dropouts and counseled Latina
students. Because I often felt helpless as a teacher and counselor to alter their lives, their
stories began to surface in my

“memoir”; then Mango Street ceased to be my story. I arranged and diminished events on
Mango Street to speak a message, to take from different parts of other people’s lives and
create a story like a collage.

I merged characters from my twenties with characters from my teens and childhood. I edited,
changed, shifted the past to fit the present. I asked questions I didn’t know to ask when I was
an adolescent. But best of all, writing in a younger voice allowed me to name that thing
without a name, that shame of being poor, of being female, of being not quite good enough,
and examine where it had come from and why, so I could exchange shame for celebration.

I had never been trained to think of poems or stories as something that could change
someone’s life. I had been trained to think about where a line ended or how best to work a
metaphor. It was always the “how” and not the “what” we talked about in class. Even while I
was teaching in the Chicago community, the two halves of my life were at odds with each
other—the half that wanted to roll up my sleeves and do something for the community, and the
half that wanted to retreat to my kitchen and write.

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I still believed my writing couldn’t save anyone’s life but my own.

In the ten years since Mango Street has been published those two halves of my life have met
and merged. I believe this because I’ve witnessed families buying my book for themselves
and for family members, families for whom spending money on a book can be a sacrifice.
Often they bring a mother, father, sibling, or cousin along to my readings, or I am introduced
to someone who says their son or daughter read my book in a class and brought it home for
them. And there are the letters from readers of all ages and colors who write to say I have
written their story. The raggedy state of my books that some readers and educators hand me to
sign is the best compliment of all. These are my affirmations and blessings.

Am I Esperanza? Yes. And no. And then again, perhaps maybe. One thing I know for certain,
you, the reader, are Esperanza. So I should ask, What happened to you? Did you stay in
school? Did you go to college? Did you have that baby? Were you a victim? Did you tell
anyone about it or did you keep it inside? Did you let it overpower and eat you? Did you
wind up in jail? Did someone harm you? Did you hurt someone? What happened to
Margarita, Fat Boy, Gizmo, Angelica, Leticia, Maria, Ruben, Silvia, José, Dagoberto,
Refugia, Bobby? Will you go back to school, find somebody to take care of the baby while
you’re finishing your diploma, go to college, work two jobs so you can do it, get help from
the substance-abuse people, walk out of a bad marriage, send paychecks to the woman who
bore your child, learn to be the human being you are not ashamed of? Did you run away from
home? Did you join a gang? Did you get fired? Did you give up? Did you get angry?

You are Esperanza. You cannot forget who you are.

November 16, 1993

San Antonio de Bexar, Texas

8

The House on Mango Street

We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor,
and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t
remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. Each time it seemed there’d be one
more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six—Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my
sister Nenny and me.

The house on Mango Street is ours, and we don’t have to pay rent to anybody, or share the
yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn’t a
landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it’s not the house we’d thought
we’d get.

We had to leave the flat on Loomis quick. The water pipes broke and the landlord wouldn’t
fix them because the house was too old. We had to leave fast. We were using the washroom
next door and carrying water over in empty milk gallons. That’s why Mama and Papa looked
for a house, and that’s why we moved into the house on Mango Street, far away, on the other
side of town.

They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be
ours for always so we wouldn’t have to move each year. And our house would have running
water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs, not hallway stairs, but
stairs inside like the houses on TV. And we’d have a basement and at least three washrooms
so when we took a bath we wouldn’t have to tell everybody. Our house would be white with
trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence. This was the house Papa
talked about when he held a lottery ticket and this was the house Mama dreamed up in the
stories she told us before we went to bed.

But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It’s small and red with tight
steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. Bricks are
crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in. There is
no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by the curb. Out back is a small garage for
the car we don’t own yet and a small yard that looks smaller between the two buildings on
either side. There are stairs in our house, but they’re ordinary hallway stairs, and the house
has only one washroom. Everybody has to share a bedroom—Mama and Papa, Carlos and
Kiki, me and Nenny.

Once when we were living on Loomis, a nun from my school passed by and saw me playing
out front.

The laundromat downstairs had been boarded up because it had been robbed two days before
and the owner had painted on the wood YES WE’RE OPEN so as not to lose business.

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Where do you live? she asked.

There, I said pointing up to the third floor.

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

I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it. The
house on Mango Street isn’t it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I
know how those things go.

10

Hairs

Everybody in our family has different hair. My Papa’s hair is like a broom, all up in the air.

And me, my hair is lazy. It never obeys barrettes or bands. Carlos’ hair is thick and straight.
He doesn’t need to comb it. Nenny’s hair is slippery—slides out of your hand. And Kiki, who
is the youngest, has hair like fur.

But my mother’s hair, my mother’s hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly
and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is
holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is
the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and
you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and
Mama’s hair that smells like bread.

11

Boys & Girls

The boys and the girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My
brothers for example. They’ve got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside
they can’t be seen talking to girls. Carlos and Kiki are each other’s best friend . . . not ours.

Nenny is too young to be my friend. She’s just my sister and that was not my fault. You don’t
pick your sisters, you just get them and sometimes they come like Nenny.

She can’t play with those Vargas kids or she’ll turn out just like them. And since she comes
right after me, she is my responsibility.

Someday I will have a best friend all my own. One I can tell my secrets to. One who will
understand my jokes without my having to explain them. Until then I am a red balloon, a
balloon tied to an anchor.

12

My Name

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it
means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father
plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.

It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born
like me in the Chinese year of the horse—which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born
female—but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like
their women strong.

My great-grandmother. I would’ve liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so
wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried
her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That’s the way he did it.

And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the
way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what
she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I
have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of
your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite
as thick as sister’s name—Magdalena—which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least
can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza.

I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one
nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the
X will do.

13

Cathy Queen of Cats

She says, I am the great great grand cousin of the queen of France. She lives upstairs, over
there, next door to Joe the baby-grabber. Keep away from him, she says. He is full of danger.
Benny and Blanca own the corner store. They’re okay except don’t lean on the candy counter.
Two girls raggedy as rats live across the street. You don’t want to know them. Edna is the
lady who owns the building next to you. She used to own a building big as a whale, but her
brother sold it. Their mother said no, no, don’t ever sell it. I won’t. And then she closed her
eyes and he sold it. Alicia is stuck-up ever since she went to college. She used to like me but
now she doesn’t.

Cathy who is queen of cats has cats and cats and cats. Baby cats, big cats, skinny cats, sick
cats. Cats asleep like little donuts. Cats on top of the refrigerator. Cats taking a walk on the
dinner table. Her house is like cat heaven.

You want a friend, she says. Okay, I’ll be your friend. But only till next Tuesday. That’s when
we move away. Got to. Then as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is
getting bad.

Cathy’s father will have to fly to France one day and find her great great distant grand cousin
on her father’s side and inherit the family house. How do I know this is so? She told me so. In
the meantime they’ll just have to move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther
away every time people like us keep moving in.

14

Our Good Day

If you give me five dollars I will be your friend forever. That’s what the little one tells me.

Five dollars is cheap since I don’t have any friends except Cathy who is only my friend till
Tuesday.

Five dollars, five dollars.

She is trying to get somebody to chip in so they can buy a bicycle from this kid named Tito.
They already have ten dollars and all they need is five more.

Only five dollars, she says.

Don’t talk to them, says Cathy. Can’t you see they smell like a broom.

But I like them. Their clothes are crooked and old. They are wearing shiny Sunday shoes
without socks. It makes their bald ankles all red, but I like them. Especially the big one who
laughs with all her teeth. I like her even though she lets the little one do all the talking.

Five dollars, the little one says, only five.

Cathy is tugging my arm and I know whatever I do next will make her mad forever.

Wait a minute, I say, and run inside to get the five dollars. I have three dollars saved and I
take two of Nenny’s. She’s not home, but I’m sure she’ll be glad when she finds out we own a
bike. When I get back, Cathy is gone like I knew she would be, but I don’t care. I have two
new friends and a bike too.

My name is Lucy, the big one says. This here is Rachel my sister.

I’m her sister, says Rachel. Who are you?

And I wish my name was Cassandra or Alexis or Maritza—anything but Esperanza—but
when I tell them my name they don’t laugh.

We come from Texas, Lucy says and grins. Her was born here, but me I’m Texas.

You mean she, I say.

No, I’m from Texas, and doesn’t get it.

This bike is three ways ours, says Rachel who is thinking ahead already. Mine today, Lucy’s
tomorrow and yours day after.

15

But everybody wants to ride it today because the bike is new, so we decide to take turns after
tomorrow. Today it belongs to all of us.

I don’t tell them about Nenny just yet. It’s too complicated. Especially since Rachel almost
put out Lucy’s eye about who was going to get to ride it first. But finally we agree to ride it
together. Why not?

Because Lucy has long legs she pedals. I sit on the back seat and Rachel is skinny enough to
get up on the handlebars which makes the bike all wobbly as if the wheels are spaghetti, but
after a bit you get used to it.

We ride fast and faster. Past my house, sad and red and crumbly in places, past Mr. Benny’s
grocery on the corner, and down the avenue which is dangerous. Laundromat, junk store,
drugstore, windows and cars and more cars, and around the block back to Mango.

People on the bus wave. A very fat lady crossing the street says, You sure got quite a load
there.

Rachel shouts, You got quite a load there too. She is very sassy.

Down, down Mango Street we go. Rachel, Lucy, me. Our new bicycle. Laughing the crooked
ride back.

16

Laughter

Nenny and I don’t look like sisters … not right away. Not the way you can tell with Rachel
and Lucy who have the same fat popsicle lips like everybody else in their family. But me and
Nenny, we are more alike than you would know. Our laughter for example. Not the shy ice
cream bells’ giggle of Rachel and Lucy’s family, but all of a sudden and surprised like a pile
of dishes breaking. And other things I can’t explain. One day we were passing a house that
looked, in my mind, like houses I had seen in Mexico.

I don’t know why. There was nothing about the house that looked exactly like the houses I
remembered. I’m not even sure why I thought it, but it seemed to feel right.

Look at that house, I said, it looks like Mexico.

Rachel and Lucy look at me like I’m crazy, but before they can let out a laugh, Nenny says:
Yes, that’s Mexico all right. That’s what I was thinking exactly.

17

Gil’s Furniture Bought & Sold

There is a junk store. An old man owns it. We bought a used refrigerator from him once, and
Carlos sold a box of magazines for a dollar. The store is small with just a dirty window for
light. He doesn’t turn the lights on unless you got money to buy things with, so in the dark we
look and see all kinds of things, me and Nenny. Tables with their feet upside-down and rows
and rows of refrigerators with round corners and couches that spin dust in the air when you
punch them and a hundred TV’s that don’t work probably. Everything is on top of everything
so the whole store has skinny aisles to walk through.

You can get lost easy.

The owner, he is a black man who doesn’t talk much and sometimes if you didn’t know better
you could be in there a long time before your eyes notice a pair of gold glasses floating in the
dark. Nenny who thinks she is smart and talks to any old man, asks lots of questions. Me, I
never said nothing to him except once when I bought the Statue of Liberty for a dime.

But Nenny, I hear her asking one time how’s this here and the man says, This, this is a music
box, and I turn around quick thinking he means a pretty box with flowers painted on it, with a
ballerina inside. Only there’s nothing like that where this old man is pointing, just a wood
box that’s old and got a big brass record in it with holes. Then he starts it up and all sorts of
things start happening. It’s like all of a sudden he let go a million moths all over the dusty
furniture and swan-neck shadows and in our bones. It’s like drops of water. Or like marimbas
only with a funny little plucked sound to it like if you were running your fingers across the
teeth of a metal comb.

And then I don’t know why, but I have to turn around and pretend I don’t care about the box so
Nenny won’t see how stupid I am. But Nenny, who is stupider, already is asking how much
and I can see her fingers going for the quarters in her pants pocket.

This, the old man says shutting the lid, this ain’t for sale.

18

Meme Ortiz

Meme Ortiz moved into Cathy’s house after her family moved away. His name isn’t really
Meme. His name is Juan. But when we asked him what his name was he said Meme, and
that’s what everybody calls him except his mother.

Meme has a dog with gray eyes, a sheepdog with two names, one in English and one in
Spanish. The dog is big, like a man dressed in a dog suit, and runs the same way its owner
does, clumsy and wild and with the limbs flopping all over the place like untied shoes.

Cathy’s father built the house Meme moved into. It is wooden. Inside the floors slant. Some
rooms uphill. Some down. And there are no closets. Out front there are twenty-one steps, all
lopsided and jutting like crooked teeth (made that way on purpose, Cathy said, so the rain
will slide off), and when Meme’s mama calls from the doorway, Meme goes scrambling up
the twenty-one wooden stairs with the dog with two names scrambling after him.

Around the back is a yard, mostly dirt, and a greasy bunch of boards that used to be a garage.

But what you remember most is this tree, huge, with fat arms and mighty families of squirrels
in the higher branches. All around, the neighborhood of roofs, black-tarred and A-framed,
and in their gutters, the balls that never came back down to earth. Down at the base of the
tree, the dog with two names barks into the empty air, and there at the end of the block,
looking smaller still, our house with its feet tucked under like a cat.

This is the tree we chose for the First Annual Tarzan Jumping Contest. Meme won. And
broke both arms.

19

Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin

Downstairs from Meme’s is a basement apartment that Meme’s mother fixed up and rented to
a Puerto Rican family. Louie’s family. Louie is the oldest in a family of little sisters. He is my
brother’s friend really, but I know he has two cousins and that his T-shirts never stay tucked
in his pants.

Louie’s girl cousin is older than us. She lives with Louie’s family because her own family is
in Puerto Rico. Her name is Marin or Maris or something like that, and she wears dark
nylons all the time and lots of makeup she gets free from selling Avon. She can’t come out—
gotta baby-sit with Louie’s sisters—but she stands in the doorway a lot, all the time singing,
clicking her fingers, the same song: Apples, peaches, pumpkin pah-ay. You’re in love and so
am ah-ay.

Louie has another cousin. We only saw him once, but it was important. We were playing
volleyball in the alley when he drove up in this great big yellow Cadillac with whitewalls
and a yellow scarf tied around the mirror. Louie’s cousin had his arm out the window. He
honked a couple of times and a lot of faces looked out from Louie’s back window and then a
lot of people came out—Louie, Marin and all the little sisters.

Everybody looked inside the car and asked where he got it. There were white rugs and white
leather seats. We all asked for a ride and asked where he got it. Louie’s cousin said get in.

We each had to sit with one of Louie’s little sisters on our lap, but that was okay. The seats
were big and soft like a sofa, and there was a little white cat in the back window whose eyes
lit up when the car stopped or turned. The windows didn’t roll up like in ordinary …