The House on Mango Street

“Red Clowns” completes Esperanza’s maturation from innocent child to losing her virginity. The vignette is short and stark, relying on fragments of images and memories to convey the events. The theme of the vignette (rape) is told through the lens of children playing at a carnival, which creates tension in the tone of the piece. Esperanza’s intentions at the carnival were innocent: “I went to be with you because you laugh on the tilt-a-whirl, you throw your head back and laugh” (99). This contrasts starkly with the boy “who wouldn’t let me go. He said I love you, Spanish girl, I love you, and pressed his sour mouth to mine” (100). This boy rapes Esperanza, and she cannot bear to tell the details. Instead, she implores Sally and society at large to explain why no one saved Esperanza, why Sally didn’t come when she heard her call. And she wonders why Sally and “the books and magazines…all lied” (100) about what sex and losing your virginity is really like. Esperanza blames Sally for what happened to her.

The next vignette describes Sally’s fate. She ends up married as a seventh-grade girl to a mean man who won’t let her out of the house. Esperanza illustrates a depressing scene where Sally is finally free of her father, free to buy what she likes for her own house, only she lives in fear of her husband’s anger. Sally and Esperanza share the dream of leaving their family homes for houses of their own, but Sally’s fate shows Esperanza the futility of trading one patriarch for another.

This lesson of patterns like Sally’s appears again in the following vignette “The Three Sisters.” The three elderly women occupy a mystical role, acting as sages who can see into the future. Importantly, they do not tell Esperanza that she will marry or have children. Instead, they celebrate her name (and her heritage by extension) and tell her she is “special” and will “go very far” (104). They instill confidence in her so that she may go on and pursue independence. They also remind her that “when you leave you must […] come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are” (104). This passage echoes Esperanza’s earlier discomfort in the vignette titled “My Name”: in this vignette she claims that “the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong” (10).

Following these vignettes, Esperanza wants to become a strong woman, and she wants to honor her Mexican ancestors as well. The three sisters help her see that, if she tries to erase her identity, she will be weaker than if she can successfully integrate her past with her future. Her friend Alicia reinforces this message when she tells Esperanza that “like it or not you are Mango Street, and one day you’ll come back too” (106). Alicia and Esperanza acknowledge that no one else can help make Mango Street better for them or future generations except themselves: “the thought of the mayor coming to Mango Street makes me laugh out loud. Who’s going to do it? Not the mayor” (106). Esperanza recognizes that the government and other powers will not help ease the pain of living as an immigrant. It is up to her to speak for her community, and in that way, she can help alleviate their pain. Similarly, she asserts in “A House of My Own” that she wants a real house, “not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own" (108).

Esperanza’s conflicted relationship with her family and their home on Mango Street is the topic of the final vignette, “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes”. Here, Esperanza tells her readers that she will leave the “sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to” (109). She knows that when she leaves to become a writer, people will wonder where she went and why, but “they will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out” (110). Her final line refers to all the women and men who have come before her. Friends like Sally and neighbors like Minerva, who wish for a better life but lack the talent or luck that Esperanza has. Esperanza finishes the novel by acknowledging her role as a writer and her duty to represent her community that she will leave behind. The bitter irony is that she must individuate and leave her community for higher education and experience (detailed in the author’s foreword) in order to come back and tell the stories of her life on Mango Street.