The House on Mango Street

When I first read Sandra Cisnero's The House on Mango Street, I really disliked it. Admittedly, it took me much longer than it should have to read all 100 pages of it. I think the reason I disliked it so much was because I was expecting it to be similar to the other books we read in class -- and in some ways it was. Obviously The House on Mango Street was a coming-of-age story, but it expanded on the themes of racism and sexism that were also explored in To Kill a Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hills Like White Elephants, etc. However, my fatal flaw was assuming that The House on Mango Street would more or less follow in the footsteps of these novels. I expected chapters and a consistent plot among other things. I guess you could say I judged this book by its cover.

"Oh my God. Did he really just do that? What a horrible pun. Way to go for the low-hanging fruit, Paul." you may be thinking to yourself. Yes, that just happened. YOLO, as the kids would say. Moving on.

It wasn't until I read the book a second time through that I really discovered what it had to offer. Instead of trying to weave together a full-on character arc for Esperanza like I attempted to do during my first read through, I considered each "chapter" of The House on Mango Street to be an intentionally brief glimpse into Esperanza's life that were meant to convey emotional truths as opposed to an intensely interwoven and designed plot.

That's not to say my second reading of the book gave me a completely new perspective that made me enjoy every aspect of the book; I still think the second chapter of the book, Hairs, to be really stupid. However, I did like several parts of the book. One thing that Cisneros did that I found interesting was the inverse relationship she established between writing and Mango Street itself; as Esperanza become more involved with writing and connecting inwardly with herself, the farther she grew away from Mango street.

All in all, I thought The House on Mango Street was alright, but what I really valued from my experience with the novel was how it made me reflect on other literature and media. I drew some parallels between this book and The Things They Carried. Both novels are basically a collection of tangentially related vignettes that work together to make a cohesive assertion about something -- in this case writing or war, respectively. I also thought about some films like Crash, Vantage Point, and Night on Earth that operate in a similarly disjointed manner.

What really surprised me though was the similarities I found between The House on Mango Street and a movie I had recently watched for the first time, A Knight's Tale. On the surface the two have nothing in common; The House on Mango Street is about a Mexican-American youth growing up in a troubled neighborhood, and A Knight's Tale is about a Medieval peasant who aims to become a champion jouster. However, one of the common themes in A Knight's Tale is the idea of "changing your stars". Although the main character, William Thatcher, is born to peasant parents, through determination and sheer sense of will he comes to compete against the world's best jousters, knights born into royal families. Esperanza also hopes to change her stars. She desperately wants to escape from the confines of Mango Street. Additionally, Geoffrey Chaucer, author of Canterbury Tales, serves as a sort of sidekick in A Knight's Tale. He first appears in the movie naked with no possessions to his name because he's racked up severe gambling debts. In the movie he vows to get revenge on those who put him in such a position by negatively immortalizing them in his literature. In this way, writing is a venue for freedom for Chaucer, just as it is for Esperanza.