House on Mango Street: Where is Esperanza Going?

    The House on Mango Street,  by Sandra Cisneros, is a collection of vignettes that tells a Coming-of-Age-Story told through the eyes of an adolescent girl.I think that Esperanza will leave her home and not return. She has waited her whole life to get out of her house on Mango street because she is embarrassed by it and she does not like living there. At the first chance she gets, she will leave and try to forget the negative years on Mango street. In the beginning of the book and the end of the book, Esperanza states a list of all the places she has lived. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, but what I remember most is Mango Street, sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to(109-10)”. When I read this, I got the feeling that Esperanza does not like any of the houses that she has lived in. She seems to really care about where she lives and it reflects in her feelings. She had  such a negative idea in her mind about her house that she would never want to return to it.

    In the second to last vignette in The House on Mango Street, Esperanza describes her perfect house and all of the conditions to make it perfect. “Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own... Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after.” In this quote, Esperanza is describing her perfect house. She seems so attached to this idea, that if she were to leave, then I highly doubt that she would return because her house that she would find would be great. She seems to resent the work that she has to do when she says she does not want to pick up after anyone. That would be another reason for her not to return, because she might have to do more work and that was one of the main reasons she would have left.