House on Mango Street PPT Presentation.pptx

1. House on Mango
Street
By Sandra Cisneros

2. The Author:
 Born: Chicago, l954
 Early life:
◦ 6 brothers, felt isolated
◦ constant migration of her family
between Mexico and the USA was
"always straddling two countries ...
but not belonging to either culture."

3. Cisneros's work deals with:
formation of (Chicana) identity
challenges of being caught between
Mexican & Anglo-American cultures
facing the misogynist attitudes in
both cultures
experiencing poverty

4. Education & Experience
 B.A. English and M.F.A. Creative Writing
◦ Teacher-creative writing
◦ counselor to high-school dropouts
◦ artist-in-the schools
◦ college recruiter
◦ arts administrator
◦ visiting writer at a number of
universities including UC, Berkeley

5. Cisneros Books & Trivia
 Other works:
◦ Bad Boys
◦ My Wicked, Wicked Ways
◦ Woman Hollering Creek
◦ Hairs/Pelitos
◦ Caramelo
 House on Mango Street- first published in 1984, won
American Book Award in 1985, and is required reading
in middle schools, high schools and universities across
country
 San Antonio, Texas
 “Mexican-pink” house
 She also built her office in the backyard & painted it
Mexican-marigold because the “colors make [her] happy”

6. Genre
 Autobiography- A little girl tells
the story of growing up in a bad
neighborhood.
 Coming-of-age story: difficult teenage
years and learning about what it
means
to be an adult

7. Narrator
young girl, Esperanza
Cordero
◦from her point of view
◦explains what her new
house on Mango Street
looks like and shares her
personal feelings of
loneliness and shame with

8. Setting
 Esperanza and family just moved to a poor,
Latino neighborhood (author’s hometown,
Chicago)
 Late 1960s- clues: the car Louie steals, the
song Marin is constantly singing to herself
 Most action happens elsewhere in the
neighborhood – on the street, on Edna's back
porch, in Gil's junk shop, in the tree in Meme's
backyard, at school, the monkey garden next
door. Esperanza's community plays a large
part in establishing her home.
 Esperanza is free to run around the
neighborhood shows her independence
◦ Other women in community are confined to
the home (husbands, familial obligations, or,
foreignness and fear

9. Title
 The House on Mango Street is about
a home, a family, and a girl who
wants to feel like she belongs to
community
 as our vision of suburban cuteness
is crushed, so is Esperanza's. And
ultimately, this isn't the story of a
house – it's the story of a girl, her
disappointment, and where it leads
her.

10. Theme 1: Identity
 The House on Mango Street revolves around
one girl and her struggle to fit the puzzle pieces
of her identity – ethnicity, gender, cultural
inheritance, sexuality, and economic status, to
name a few examples – into a coherent whole.
 Esperanza learns that, more than anything
else, what defines her is her ability to tell
stories. Her writing allows her to reconcile
herself to those aspects of her background that
made her feel uncomfortably different from her
peers, and she emerges a confident writer with
ambitious plans.

11. Theme 2: Dreams, Hopes, and Plans
symbolized by a house
For parents,
happiness/security is a
white house, big enough for
their whole family.
Esperanza’s dream is to
have a house to herself to
write in

12. Theme 3: Society and Class
Reader figures out that
characters are poor by pulling
clues from the text.
Ex: crumbling, run-down
apartments/houses.
◦Envy beautiful, well-kept
houses in nice
neighborhoods of the city.

13. Theme 4: Innocence
a coming-of-age story about a
young girl
loss of innocence and
familiarization with sex.
◦Esperanza tries to cling to a
childhood,, but threatened by
sexual violence (rape) as
soon as she enters
adolescence.

14. Theme 5: Gender
Female characters are
oppressed.
◦ Men beat wives/daughters,
and confine them to the home.
Refuses to conform to the
female expectations by getting
married or acting feminine.
Defies gender roles and remains
independent as an act of
rebellion, and a source of power.

15. Themes 6: Women & Femininity
Beauty=source of feminine
power,
she admires and envies
beauty in her female
characters
But the beautiful women suffer
the most at the hands of men.
Esperanza seeks a new forms
of feminine power that will
allow her to be independent

16. Themes 7: Foreignness and 'The
Other'
 explores loneliness, isolation, shame, and
a sense of not belonging.
 describes social attitudes towards
foreignness, from fear on the part of white
people who venture into the Latino
neighborhood by mistake, to apathy on the
part of hospital workers called on to tend
to a dying Mexican man, to condescension
on the part of neighbors like Cathy who
are eager to make themselves look
superior in some way.

17. Theme 8: The Home
overcome isolation and
experience belonging, (she
needs to feel at home)
a home can explain a past that
she can be proud of, and
inspire her to have a vision of
a home in her future

18. Theme 9: Family
 a sense of belonging
 BUT she doesn't always feel close to
her family.
◦ She thinks her little sister Nenny is
a drag, she rolls her eyes at her
parents' long-shot dreams of
winning the lottery, and part of her
hates going to visit her sick aunt in
her smelly old apartment.

19. Theme 10: Friendship
 wide variety of friendships over the
course of the novel that seem to
increase in intensity and meaning.
 babysitting her sister, to connections
made with neighborhood girls over a
shared bicycle, to the empathy and
advice offered to her by Alicia,
Esperanza grows more and more
mature in her friendships.