The House on Mango Street

“
The House on Mango Street
is so succinct, funny, and beautiful that it is timeless. It’s poetry and song with yearning and love that we can all recognize. It’s one of those books that we will be reading and rereading for a very long time.”

—Edwidge Danticat

“Sandra Cisneros has made a difference to Latino literature; beginning with
House on Mango Street
, her works have conveyed the Southwestern Latino experience with verve, charm, and passion.”

—Oscar Hijuelos

“
The House on Mango Street
is a book that will be cherished for generations. With its tenderness, its humor, and its wide-eyed truth telling, Esperanza’s story becomes
our
story, whether we’re Latinas or not.”

—Cristina García

“Brilliant.… [Cisneros’s] work is sensitive, alert, nuanceful.… Rich with music and picture.”

—Gwendolyn Brooks

“
The House on Mango Street
has given a voice to all of us who have made the United States home, while never forgetting where we come from.… An unforgettable and indispensable book.”

—Jorge Ramos

“Sandra and her
House
are all things—the house, a home; the mango, a fruit; the street, a way, all in one.”

—Eduardo Galeano

“
The House on Mango Street
was the sort of reality-altering book that broke it all open for me. Sandra Cisneros has a voice with character, gusto, and chiseled craft. It didn’t just reach out to me because I am Latina, it insisted on reaching out to touch everyone.
Mango Street
made literary history.”

—Adriana Lopez

A
House
of
My Own

The young woman in this photograph is me when I was writing
The House on Mango Street
. She’s in her office, a room that had probably been a child’s bedroom when families lived in this apartment. It has no door and is only slightly wider than the walk-in pantry. But it has great light and sits above the hallway door downstairs, so she can hear her neighbors come and go. She’s posed as if she’s just looked up from her work for a moment, but in real life she never writes in this office. She writes in the kitchen, the only room with a heater.

It’s Chicago, 1980, in the down-at-the-heels Bucktown neighborhood before it’s discovered by folks with money. The young woman lives at 1814 N. Paulina Street second
floor front. Nelson Algren once wandered these streets. Saul Bellow’s turf was over on Division Street, walking distance away. It’s a neighborhood that reeks of beer and urine, of sausage and beans.

The young woman fills her “office” with things she drags home from the flea market at Maxwell Street. Antique typewriters, alphabet blocks, asparagus ferns, bookshelves, ceramic figurines from Occupied Japan, wicker baskets, birdcages, hand-painted photos. Things she likes to look at. It’s important to have this space to look and think. When she lived at home, the things she looked at scolded her and made her feel sad and depressed. They said, “Wash me.” They said, “Lazy.” They said, “You ought.” But the things in her office are magical and invite her to play. They fill her with light. It’s the room where she can be quiet and still and listen to the voices inside herself. She likes being alone in the daytime.

As a girl, she dreamed about having a silent home, just to herself, the way other women dreamed of their weddings. Instead of collecting lace and linen for her trousseau, the young woman buys old things from the thrift stores on grimy Milwaukee Avenue for her future house-of-her-own—faded quilts, cracked vases, chipped saucers, lamps in need of love.

The young woman returned to Chicago after graduate school and moved back into her father’s house, 1754 N. Keeler, back into her girl’s room with its twin bed and floral wallpaper. She was twenty-three and a half. Now she summoned her courage and told her father she wanted to live alone again, like she did when she was away at school. He looked at her with that eye of the rooster before it attacks, but she wasn’t alarmed. She’d seen that look before and knew he was harmless. She was his favorite, and it was only a matter of waiting.

The daughter claimed she’d been taught that a writer needs quiet, privacy, and long stretches of solitude to think. The father decided too much college and too many gringo friends had ruined her. In a way he was right. In a way she was right. When she thinks to herself in her father’s language, she knows sons and daughters don’t leave their parents’ house until they marry. When she thinks in English, she knows she should’ve been on her own since eighteen.

For a time father and daughter reached a truce. She agreed to move into the basement of a building where the oldest of her six brothers and his wife lived, 4832 W. Homer. But after a few months, when the big brother upstairs turned out to be Big Brother, she got on her bicycle and rode through the neighborhood of her high school days until she spotted an apartment with fresh-painted walls and masking tape on the windows. Then she knocked on the storefront downstairs. That’s how she convinced the landlord she was his new tenant.

Her father can’t understand why she wants to live in a hundred-year-old building with big windows that let in the cold. She knows her apartment is clean, but the hallway is scuffed and scary, though she and the woman upstairs take turns mopping it regularly. The hall needs paint, and there’s nothing they can do about that. When the father visits, he climbs up the stairs muttering with disgust. Inside, he looks at her books arranged in milk crates, at the futon on the floor in a bedroom with no door, and whispers, “Hippie,” in the same way he looks at boys hanging out in his neighborhood and says, “
Drogas
.” When he sees the space heater in the kitchen, the father shakes his head and sighs, “Why did I work so hard to buy a house with a furnace so she could go backwards and live like this?”

When she’s alone, she savors her apartment of high ceilings and windows that let in the sky, the new carpeting and walls white as typing paper, the walk-in pantry with empty shelves, her bedroom without a door, her office with its typewriter, and the big front-room windows with their view of a street, rooftops, trees, and the dizzy traffic of the Kennedy Expressway.