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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

"The Firm on Mango Street is so succinct, funny, and beautiful that information technology is timeless. It'south poetry and song with yearning and honey 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; outset with Firm on Mango Street, her works have conveyed the Southwestern Latino experience with verve, charm, and passion."

—Oscar Hijuelos

"The Business firm on Mango Street is a book that volition 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 non."

—Cristina García

"Brilliant.… [Cisneros'south] work is sensitive, alert, nuanceful.… Rich with music and picture."

—Gwendolyn Brooks

"The House on Mango Street has given a vocalism to all of united states of america who have made the United states home, while never forgetting where we come from.… An unforgettable and indispensable volume."

—Jorge Ramos

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

—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 vocalisation with grapheme, gusto, and chiseled arts and crafts. It didn't merely reach out to me considering I am Latina, it insisted on reaching out to touch everyone. Mango Street made literary history."

—Adriana Lopez

SECOND VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, FEBRUARY 2009

Copyright © 1984 past Sandra Cisneros

Introduction © 2009 by Sandra Cisneros

All rights reserved. Published in the The states by Vintage Books, a sectionalization of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random Business firm of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Arte Público Printing in 1984.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

This is a piece of work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the production of the writer's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cisneros, Sandra.

The house on Mango Street / past Sandra Cisneros.

p. cm.

"Originally published by Arte Público Press in 1984"—T.p. verso.

I. Title.

PS3553.I78H6 1991 813'.54—dc20 90-50593

eISBN: 978-0-345-80719-9

Author photograph (introduction) © Diana Solis

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1_r1

A las Mujeres

To the Women

Contents

Cover

Championship Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: A House of My Own

The House on Mango Street

Hairs

Boys & Girls

My Proper noun

Cathy Queen of Cats

Our Good Twenty-four hour period

Laughter

Gil's Article of furniture Bought & Sold

Meme Ortiz

Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin

Marin

Those Who Don't

There Was an Onetime Woman She Had And then Many Children She Didn't Know What to Do

Alicia Who Sees Mice

Darius & the Clouds

And Some More

The Family of Petty Feet

A Rice Sandwich

Chanclas

Hips

The Offset Job

Papa Who Wakes Upwards Tired in the Dark

Born Bad

Elenita, Cards, Palm, H2o

Geraldo No Last Name

Edna'due south Ruthie

The Earl of Tennessee

Sire

4 Skinny Trees

No Speak English language

Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays

Sally

Minerva Writes Poems

Bums in the Attic

Beautiful & Fell

A Smart Cookie

What Emerge Said

The Monkey Garden

Cerise Clowns

Linoleum Roses

The 3 Sisters

Alicia & I Talking on Edna'due south Steps

A House of My Own

Mango Says Farewell Sometimes

Near the Author

Other Books by This Author

A

House

of

My Ain

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 chamber when families lived in this apartment. Information technology has no door and is merely slightly wider than the walk-in pantry. Merely it has great light and sits in a higher place the hallway door downstairs, so she can hear her neighbors come and go. She'southward posed every bit if she'southward merely looked up from her work for a moment, just in real life she never writes in this office. She writes in the kitchen, the only room with a heater.

It'southward Chicago, 1980, in the downward-at-the-heels Bucktown neighborhood before information technology'southward 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 accept this space to await and recall. When she lived at home, the things she looked at scolded her and made her experience deplorable and depressed. They said, "Wash me." They said, "Lazy." They said, "You lot ought." Merely the things in her office are magical and invite her to play. They fill her with light. It'south the room where she can exist quiet and however and listen to the voices inside herself. She likes beingness 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 former 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 immature woman returned to Chicago after graduate school and moved back into her father'due south 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 male parent she wanted to live alone once more, like she did when she was abroad at school. He looked at her with that eye of the rooster earlier information technology attacks, just she wasn't alarmed. She'd seen that wait 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 author needs quiet, privacy, and long stretches of confinement to think. The father decided too much higher and too many gringo friends had ruined her. In a way he was right. In a mode she was correct. When she thinks to herself in her father's language, she knows sons and daughters don't leave their parents' house until they ally. When she thinks in English, she knows she should've been on her ain since eighteen.

For a fourth dimension father and daughter reached a truce. She agreed to move into the basement of a edifice where the oldest of her six brothers and hi

southward married woman lived, 4832 W. Homer. But afterward a few months, when the big brother upstairs turned out to be Large Blood brother, she got on her bicycle and rode through the neighborhood of her high schoolhouse days until she spotted an apartment with fresh-painted walls and masking tape on the windows. And so she knocked on the storefront downstairs. That's how she convinced the landlord she was his new tenant.

Her father can't empathise why she wants to live in a hundred-year-old building with large windows that permit in the cold. She knows her flat is make 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 zero 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 fashion he looks at boys hanging out in his neighborhood and says, "Drogas." When he sees the space heater in the kitchen, the begetter shakes his head and sighs, "Why did I work so hard to buy a business firm with a furnace and so she could go backwards and live like this?"

When she'south lone, she savors her apartment of loftier 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 chamber without a door, her office with its typewriter, and the big front end-room windows with their view of a street, rooftops, trees, and the dizzy traffic of the Kennedy Expressway.

Between her building and the brick wall of the next is a tidy, sunken garden. The only people who ever enter the garden are a family who speak similar guitars, a family with a Southern accent. At sunset they appear with a pet monkey in a cage and sit on a green bench and talk and laugh. She spies on them from behind her bedroom curtains and wonders where they got the monkey.

Her begetter calls every week to say, "Mija, when are you coming home?" What does her female parent say nigh all this? She puts her hands on her hips and boasts, "She gets it from me." When the begetter is in the room, the mother simply shrugs and says, "What can I practise?" The mother doesn't object. She knows what it is to live a life filled with regrets, and she doesn't want her girl to live that life besides. She e'er supported the daughter's projects, so long every bit she went to school. The female parent who painted the walls of their Chicago homes the color of flowers; who planted tomatoes and roses in her garden; sang arias; proficient solos on her son's drum set; boogied forth with the Soul Train dancers; glued travel posters on her kitchen wall with Karo syrup; herded her kids weekly to the library, to public concerts, to museums; wore a button on her lapel that said "Feed the People Non the Pentagon"; who never went beyond the ninth form. That mother. She nudges her daughter and says, "Expert lucky y'all studied."

The father wants his girl to be a weather girl on television, or to marry and have babies. She doesn't desire to be a Tv set weather daughter. Nor does she desire to marry and have babies. Not yet. Maybe afterwards, but there are then many other things she must do in her lifetime starting time. Travel. Learn how to dance the tango. Publish a volume. Alive in other cities. Win a National Endowment for the Arts accolade. See the Northern Lights. Jump out of a block.

She stares at the ceilings and walls of her apartment the way she once stared at the ceilings and walls of the apartments she grew up in, inventing pictures in the cracks in the plaster, inventing stories to go with these pictures. At night, under the circumvolve of light from a cheap metallic lamp clamped to the kitchen table, she sits with paper and a pen and pretends she's non afraid. She'southward trying to live like a author.

Where she gets these ideas near living like a writer, she has no inkling. She hasn't read Virginia Woolf notwithstanding. She doesn't know near Rosario Castellanos or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga are cutting their own paths through the world somewhere, but she doesn't know nigh them. She doesn't know anything. She's making things up as she goes.

When the photo of the young woman who was me was snapped, I still called myself a poet, though I'd been writing stories since grammar school. I'd gravitated back to fiction while in the Iowa poetry workshop. Verse, as it was taught at Iowa, was a firm of cards, a belfry of ideas, but I tin can't communicate an thought except through a story.

The woman I am in the photograph was working on a series of vignettes, little by little, along with her poesy. I already had a championship—The House on Mango Street. Fifty pages had been written, but I yet didn't think of information technology every bit a novel. It was just a jar of buttons, like the mismatched embroidered pillowcases and monogrammed napkins I tugged from the bins at the Goodwill. I wrote these things and idea of them as "little stories," though I sensed they were continued to each other. I hadn't heard of story cycles notwithstanding. I hadn't read Ermilo Abreu Gómez'southward Canek, Elena Poniatowska'due south Lilus Kikus, Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha, Nellie Campobello's My Female parent's Hands. That would come later, when I had more time and solitude to read.

The woman I once was wrote the starting time three stories of House in one weekend at Iowa. But because I wasn't in the fiction workshop, they wouldn't count toward my MFA thesis. I didn't contend; my thesis advisor reminded me too much of my father. I worked on these petty stories on the side for comfort when I wasn't writing verse for credit. I shared them with colleagues like poet Joy Harjo, who was also having a hard time in the poetry workshops, and fiction writer Dennis Mathis, a modest-town Illinois native, but whose paperback library was from the world.

Lilliputian-piffling stories were in literary vogue at the time, in the '70s. Dennis told me almost the Japanese Nobel Prize winner Kawabata's minimal "palm of the hand" stories. We fried omelets for dinner and read García Márquez and Heinrich Böll stories aloud. We both preferred experimental writers—all men dorsum then except for Grace Paley—rebels similar ourselves. Dennis would become a lifelong editor, marry, and voice on the telephone when either one of us lost heart.

The young adult female in the photo is modeling her volume-in-progress after Dream Tigers by Jorge Luis Borges—a writer she'd read since high school, story fragments that ring like Hans Christian Andersen, or Ovid, or entries from the encyclopedia. She wants to write stories that ignore borders between genres, between written and spoken, between highbrow literature and children's nursery rhymes, between New York and the imaginary hamlet of Macondo, between the U.S. and United mexican states. It'south true, she wants the writers she admires to respect her piece of work, but she also wants people who don't usually read books to relish these stories too. She doesn't want to write a book that a reader won't understand and would feel ashamed for non agreement.

She thinks stories are about beauty. Beauty that is there to be admired by anyone, similar a herd of clouds grazing overhead. She thinks people who are decorated working for a living deserve beautiful little stories, because they don't take much fourth dimension and are often tired. She has in mind a volume that can be opened at whatsoever page and will still make sense to the reader who doesn't know what came before or comes after.

She experiments, creating a text that is as succinct and flexible every bit poetry, snapping sentences into fragments then that the reader pauses, making each judgement serve her and not the other way round, abandoning quotation marks to streamline the typography and make the page as elementary and readable every bit possible. So that the sentences are pliant equally branches and tin can be read in more ways than i.

Sometimes the woman I once was goes out on weekends to meet with other writers. Sometimes I invite these friends to come to my flat to workshop each other's work. Nosotros come from Black, white, Latino communities. We are men and we are women. What we have in common is our sense that art should serve our communities. Together we publish an anthology—Emergency Tacos—because we terminate our collaborations in the early hours before dawn and gather at the aforementioned twenty-4-hour taquería on Belmont Avenue, like a multicultural version of Hopper'southward Nighthawks painting. The Emergency Tacos writers organize monthly arts events at my brother Keek's apartment—Galeria Quique. We do this with no upper-case letter except our valuable time. We practice this because the world nosotros live in is a firm on f

ire and the people nosotros love are burning.

The young woman in the photograph gets up in the morning to go to the job that pays the rent on her Paulina Street apartment. She teaches at a schoolhouse in Pilsen, her mother'due south old neighborhood on Chicago'southward due south side, a Mexican neighborhood where the rent is cheap and likewise many families live crowded together. Landlords and the city take no responsibility for the rats, trash that isn't collected frequently enough, porches that collapse, apartments without burn escapes, until a tragedy happens and several people dice. And so they agree investigations for a little while, merely the problems go on until the next death, the next investigation, the next bout of forgetting.

The immature adult female works with students who have dropped out of loftier school simply take decided to try again for their diplomas. She learns from her students that they have more difficult lives than her storyteller's imagination can invent. Her life has been comfortable and privileged compared to theirs. She never had to worry virtually feeding her babies before she went to class. She never had a begetter or boyfriend who beat her at nighttime and left her bruised in the morn. She didn't have to programme an alternative route to avoid gangs in the school hallway. Her parents didn't plead with her to drop out of schoolhouse so she could help them earn coin.

How can art make a difference in the world? This was never asked at Iowa. Should she be teaching these students to write poetry when they need to know how to defend themselves from someone chirapsia them up? Tin a memoir past Malcolm X or a novel past García Márquez save them from the daily blows? And what almost those who accept such learning problems they tin can't even manage a book past Dr. Seuss, but can weave a spoken story and then wondrous, she wants to take notes. Should she give up writing and study something useful like medicine? How can she teach her students to accept control of their own destiny? She loves these students. What should she exist doing to salvage their lives?

The immature adult female's teaching job leads to the next, and now she finds herself a counselor/recruiter at her alma mater, Loyola University on the north side, in Rogers Park. I have health benefits. I don't bring piece of work dwelling anymore. My work solar day ends at five p.one thousand. At present I have evenings free to do my own work. I feel like a real author.

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