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2.A personal historical account written from the author’s own experience; from the story: the narrator’s teacher calls the book “not a novel and not a memoir in the sense the word usually means,” because forty-four vignettes are closer to what a barrio actually is in the body — a series of doors, windows, names, and houses.
6.A Spanish-speaking neighborhood, often in a U.S. city; from the story: Cisneros grew up in a Chicago barrio, on a street called Mango, where the family was placed by the city until it was displaced. The barrio is the place the book refuses to let the city narrate from outside.
9.The ability to speak two languages fluently; from the story: the family biculturalism — the Mexican kitchen, the Spanish songs, the English streets, the mother’s rinds of lime and the father’s English tavern — is one of the details the book restores against the city’s single narration.
11.The act of removing or being made invisible; from the story: the single city narration flattens Mango Street by erasure — Esperanza is told she is a failure, her name is replaced by a category, her street is replaced by a location.
12.To receive from a previous generation, or from the past; from the story: Esperanza inherits a street she did not choose, a name she did not name, and a vow she will have to make for herself. The inheritance is what gives the book its weight.
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1.A solemn promise; from the story: Esperanza makes a vow at the end of the book — to leave Mango Street, to come back, and to write the street that no one else has written. The vow is the structural pivot of the book.
3.To take back something that was lost; from the story: Cisneros describes the book as a refusal to let the city decide who can narrate it — which means the narrator’s act of writing is also a reclaiming of the street for the people who live on it.
4.The experience of growing up; relating to the passage from childhood into adulthood; from the story: the book is a Chicano coming-of-age narrative — the story of Esperanza’s instructions in how to become a writer, not in how to leave the street.
5.A short written piece that captures a single moment, scene, or detail; from the story: Cisneros’s book is made of forty-four vignettes — short pieces, each “a moment, a name, a room, a window” — running into one street the way the houses run into one block.
7.The act of forcing a person or community out of its usual place; from the story: the city places the family on Mango Street until it displaces them — first by the housing office, then by the school, then by the street itself. The book is written in deliberate conversation with this displacement, and what it removes.
8.The person telling the story; from the story: Esperanza is the narrator of The House on Mango Street — a girl telling her own street in her own voice. The book’s purpose is that the narrator can no longer be the city.
10.The qualities and beliefs that make a particular person or group different from others; from the story: the city tells Esperanza who she is — Chicana, poor, a girl on a street like Mango, a girl who will fail. Cisneros writes the book to give Esperanza the right to name her own identity instead.