The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.

Calling The House on Mango Street a novel feels a little strange. It does have central protagonist, the narrator Esperanza, and location, the titular Mango Street. But there's no strong through-line and not a lot of continuity between the vignettes--calling them stories sets expectations they don't often fulfill, of a beginning, a middle, and an endings. Most of them--none are longer than 5 pages--are sketches of a resident of Mango Street that Esperanza doesn't really know. Like a child does, she talks about them based on their most visible characteristic--their car, their absent husband, the time they broke both of their arms, their lack of a last name.

There are around 30 of these vignettes and while most don't progress the previous ones, there is a loose through-line of Esperanza and her friends growing up, coming of age and, it must be said, being harassed and assaulted by various men in the neighborhood. The specters of racism and class hover in the subtext, except for when they become text, as when Esperanza talks about visitors to the neighborhood who huddle together, scared of the same characters she lovingly describes elsewhere.

Sanda Cisneros was a poet before she was a novelist and those skills shine through both in the loose, less-concrete metaphors that appear throughout, and also the rhythm of the prose which sometimes even has little internal rhymes. It's nice to read, but the structure of the book prevented me from ever really sinking into the world of Mango Street, as much as I liked the individual pieces. There are two times, however, when the book breaks this pattern and those stories are the strongest, and most harrowing. First, as alluded to earlier, there's the ongoing story of Esperanza's coming of age and her sexual awakening, always communicated obliquely and tastefully but nevertheless maturing and culminating in a sad, scary recounting of a trip to the fair that ends in ambiguous (but not really) tragedy.

The other character that gets multiple stories (besides Esperanza's sister and her two friends) is Sally, a girl "with Egypt in her eyes" and shiny black hair who adheres to a very traditional religion. Though Cisernos never spells it out, Sally seemed Muslim-coded, and her progression--beautiful girl with from an abusive patriarchal home to easy girl about town to her marriage and miserable hermetic existence with a very jealous marshmallow salesman(?) is a real downer and uncomfortable in ways I'm not altogether sure I like.

In closing stories, Esparanza learns from a trio of fortune telling sisters that she's got a gift for writing, and she's told to come back to the street, to speak for the ones who can't leave. So in the end this is a collection of stories by a writer who made it out, but maybe not really, who will always be a part of the life she worked to leave. It felt a little tidy, ending such a  fragmented collection by retroactively adding a wraparound story, but maybe the tidiness is the point, a happy ending for all the residents who will never get a happily ever after of their own.

A fun aside is, I keep calling this book Last House on Mango Street, which evokes a much different book.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

I like to use a story from this collection called "Geraldo No Last Name" at the beginning of the school year. It is about a girl named Marin who dances with a boy she doesn't know at a club right before he is hit by a car. Though Marin doesn't even know his last name, she waits at the hospital for hours while he is in surgery, perhaps because the little that she knows is greater than most of the people he encounters, who dismiss him out of hand as a "wetback" or "brazer," and because those he's closest to live thousands of miles away, in Mexico. I use it because it sets up a conversation about the power of names--a sneaky way to help me learn the names of my students--and because it's short enough to be read, digested, and picked apart in a single class period.

But I had never read the whole book. For better or worse, the stories collected here never deviate far from the pattern of "Geraldo No Last Name"--they are all short, some no more than a page, and they all concern a cluster of Hispanic immigrant families in Chicago, drawn from Cisneros' own childhood. The central figure is Esperanza, a young Mexican girl whom Cisneros follows from youth to young adulthood, mapping her journey of self-discovery, so to speak. To providethe full effect, I reproduce a story called "Laughter" in full:

[excised]

There is a lot to like here--for instance, I think Cisneros aptly captures that deja vu feeling that haunts all of us, the way we are reminded of things without knowing why. Her spare, domestic metaphors ("ice cream bells' giggle") are inventive but seem to originate wholly from Esperanza's world. And the whole thing is wonderfully succinct.

The problem is, there are about thirty of these. Cisneros' style, with its unattributed quotation, is exhaustingly detached, and her subject matter is repetitive. If you were to pare down some of the vignettes of "quirky" neighbors (who cares?) and the litany of stories in which Esperanza and her friends discover their budding sexuality and changing physiques, you might be left with a very powerful fifty-page collection. Instead, even at 110 pages, The House on Mango Street feels long and padded, without a center to revolve around.