Her Heart Beyond Mango Street

I am your house. True, I am not white with trees around me with a great big yard and grass growing without a fence; I am only small and red with tight steps and small windows and crumbling bricks and a swollen door. But I am yours. I can help you grow. The nun may scoff at me, you may be ashamed of me, I may not offer the protection you need, but I will transform you into who you are meant to be.

In Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, the house and community that Esperanza so despises transforms into what influences her to become the Esperanza of the end of the novel. The change that Mango Street and its inhabitants have on her transform her from hating Mango to leaving to find her “open page,” to return later for those who cannot leave.

Esperanza reflects on the origin of her name - her great-grandmother - and she relates also having in common with her their birth time, and how they are both born in the “Chinese year of the horses” (Cisneros 10). Esperanza knows that her great-grandmother was strong like a horse, but due to a forced marriage sat by a window, unable to reach her full potential. Esperanza inherited her name, but hopes to not “inherit her place by the window” (11). The girl notices similarities between her and her great-grandmother, but does not want to be the “wild horse of a woman” held back and confined to only a room and a window (11).

Even though Esperanza physically does not sit locked in a room with a window as a sole comfort, she still feels cramped in Mango Street and longs for something more. Alicia, the girl who perhaps Esperanza most resembles, informs her that “Like it or not, you are Mango Street, and one day you'll come back too” (107). When Esperanza responds that she will not return until someone betters the town, Alicia implies by saying sarcastically “Who's going to do it? The mayor?” that it is up to people like Esperanza to make the difference on Mango Street.

Esperanza asks Sally if she too wants to leave Mango Street, if she wishes “your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house…” (82). Esperanza describes her dream home, finishing with this house being without “the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy” (82). Esperanza longs for freedom. Freedom from Mango Street and how it holds her back. Her aunt says to “remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free” (61). Even on Mango Street, Esperanza may access freedom. Though she does not literally have her dream home, though she still remains on Mango Street, she does not have to resign herself to be the girl locked in the house with a window as her sole solace. Esperanza “desires a space of her own, a real home with warmth and comfort and security,” and though Mango Street cannot provide that, she may access the same warmth and comfort and security in other forms - such as writing, as her aunt declares (Klein 23).

Mango does not protect Esperanza in a lot of ways, specifically physically when she waits alone for Sally. Esperanza calls to Sally for protection since Mango Street has failed her: “You never came, you never came for me… why did you leave me all alone?” (Cisneros 100). Though this can never be taken back, Esperanza still longs for a new start, though she eventually promises that she will return for those who cannot leave, so such sexual abuse will not continue. Not in Mango.

The house on Mango Street, though beginning as somewhat of a cage, develops in time to a loving figure that takes joy in her freedom and her love of writing. Mango even “says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free” (110). At first Esperanza feels embarrassed about her house on Mango Street, just like she feels ashamed of her “ordinary” shoes and fears dancing with them at her cousin's baptism. Yet as she dances, she begins to forget about her shoes, just as she will later forget about her agony in living on Mango Street.

Mango Street becomes a necessary part of Esperanza. The three magical sisters say “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” (105). Although Esperanza wishes to leave, “Mango Street is… intimately connected to the formation of her identity as a woman, an adult member of her community, and a writer” (Doyle 20). Mango Street has marked Esperanza and she has grown and matured in her time there, discovering her identity and her role in the future for Mango Street.

In James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus too discovers his identity in his home of Ireland; He too forsakes it with a cry of “Welcome, O life!” just as Esperanza will go. Both need to leave their home to seek the freedom their hearts require, but Esperanza will return, to change Mango, to aid those who cannot leave, to help those especially who are locked in their rooms with only their eyes to gaze out a window worth having.

Esperanza will leave Mango. She will leave and seek her “house,” her place to

start over, “clean as paper before the poem” (Cisneros 108). Just as Alicia said, and just as the three sisters warned, she will return, return to change Mango. She will come back for the ones she left behind, the ones who “cannot out.” She will leave the house which she belongs to - yet does not belong to. She won't forget “who I am or where I came from” (87). She will return.