The House on Mango Street
Written and Narrated By: Sandra Cisneros
Length: 2 hrs and 18 mins
I dunno… Maybe it worked better in 1977?
There’s a lengthy foreword to start The House on Mango Street where Sandra Cisneros talks about how she didn’t fit in with her MFA program, and she came to realize that she was The Other. She felt alienated, and in 1977 started writing the stories that were shaped and came to be in the book. She wanted to put something out there that was reflective of her experience as being an American Mexican, of being poor. And according to her, she succeeded like all get-out. People bought the book like crazy, and people came to her readings in droves. Droves, she tells us—Droves! She apparently perfectly captured what it was like for her gente.
I dunno… maybe in 1977. Because I sure didn’t feel my own experience, my own sense of family or childhood in the book. Perhaps there truly WAS nothing written at the time, so it came off as stronger when it came out in 1984. And it actually does indeed start off well, with Esperanza, our protagonist who tells each story, talking about how her house was NOT the house she dreamed of living in, what her parents told her they miiiiight someday, if they won the lottery, live in. So we get a sense of living in poverty through that, her dreams that were decidedly not coming true. And it goes on to tell us about some of the neighbors.
But that’s where it starts going wrong. At first they at least have Hispanic names, but their situations are so universal and generic that one doesn’t feel The Other, one doesn’t find oneself in those characters. Add to that, through the book there’s a friend named Sally… Sally? Really? Couldn’t you even pick a different name? Something more representative of the neighborhood? Cisneros talks about poverty in her foreword, but we don’t really see Esperanza wanting for anything; sure, we’re told repeatedly how embarrassed she is by her house, but that’s about as far as anything goes. Did you wear hand-me-downs? Were you hungry?
Add to that, and this is where I have to frown a bit when I read that the book empowers women: Women are shown as being trapped in situations, in their homes, giving kids money through a window to buy them a certain drink, or being married and kept indoors, unable and unwilling to do anything more. Plus, there’s an ABRUPT sexual assault that ends the book, and I didn’t find it moving at all. Rather, it seemed to shriek: Victim. In a book about giving voice to a people, Cisneros doesn’t give us any sense of resilience from that assault, any sense of wisdom that a person would hope to read in a book relating perhaps, what? Insight gained from the author’s vantage point? And why would anyone want to go back to the neighborhood if that was the defining moment? The book ends FAR too abruptly.
When you put all that together with Cisneros narrating it herself, oh my. She has the voice of a six-year old, not a twelve-year old girl. Her voice is a tad cloying and irritating, and I couldn’t really see the character doing the things like getting excited by free and taboo high-heeled shoes—she just came off as sooo much younger.
Perhaps it was unfortunate, but I listened to this before I listened to Esperanza Rising, a book where the heroine there was also, naturally, named Esperanza. But the two books are so far apart it’s crazy. While the latter is tagged as a Kids book, thematically and situationally, it tackles so much more.
I know, I know. The House on Mango Street is a verrrry popular book, and supposedly, it touches the heart of many a person (I know this cuz Cisneros tells us so), and people feel like it gave voice to their own lives lived here in the States… as The Other. But honestly? What with the childlike narration, and other than a single story where kids ponder God in the sky, there’s not a whole lot there to teach one, or for one to absorb.
I didn’t find my family in it. I didn’t find my friends in it. I didn’t find the house on my own street in it…
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