Libro The House Of Mango Street

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros Contents

Introduction
The House on Mango Street
Hairs Boys & Girls My Name Cathy Queen of Cats Our Good Day Laughter Gil's Furniture Bought & Sold Meme Ortiz Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin Marin Those Who Don't There Was an Old Woman She Had So Many Children She Didn't Know What to Do Alicia Who Sees Mice Darius & the Clouds And Some MoreThe Family of Little Feet A Rice Sandwich Chanclas Hips The First Job Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark Born Bad Elenita, Cards, Palm, Water Geraldo No Last Name Edna's Ruthie The Earl of Tennessee Sire Four Skinny Trees No Speak English Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays Sally Minerva Writes Poems Bums in the Attic Beautiful & Cruel A Smart Cookie What Sally Said The MonkeyGarden

The Monkey Garden Red Clowns Linoleum Roses The Three Sisters Alicia & I Talking on Edna's Steps A House of My Own Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes A Note About the Author

Introduction
It's been ten years since The House on Mango Street was first published. I began writing it in graduate school, the spring of 1977, in Iowa City. I was twenty-two years old. I'm thirty-eight now, far fromthat time and place, but the questions from readers remain, Are these stories true? Are you Esperanza? When I began The House on Mango Street, I thought I was writing a memoir. By the time I finished it, my memoir was no longer memoir, no longer autobiographical. It had evolved into a collective story peopled with several lives from my past and present, placed in one fictional time andneighborhood—Mango Street. A story is like a Giacometti sculpture. The farther away it is from you, the clearer you can see it. In Iowa City, I was undergoing several changes of identity. For the first time I was living alone, in a community very different in class and culture from the one where I was raised. This caused so much unrest I could barely speak, let alone write about it. The story I was living attwenty-two would have to wait, but I could take the story of an earlier place, an earlier voice, and record that on paper. The voice of Mango Street and all my work was born at one moment, when I realized I was different. This sounds absurd and simple, but until Iowa City, I assumed the world was like Chicago, made up of people of many cultures all living together—albeit not happily at times butstill coexisting. In Iowa, I was suddenly aware of feeling odd when I spoke, as if I were a foreigner. But this was my land too. This is not to say I hadn't felt this "otherness" before in Chicago, but I hadn't felt it quite as keenly as I did in graduate school. I couldn't articulate what it was that was happening, except I knew I felt ashamed when I spoke in class, so I chose not to speak. I cansay my political consciousness began the moment I recognized my otherness. I was in a graduate seminar on memory and the imagination. The books required were Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, and Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. I had enjoyed the first two, but as usual I said nothing, just listened to the dialogue around me, too afraid to speak. The third book,though, left me baffled. I assumed I just didn't get it because I wasn't as smart as everyone else, and if I didn't say anything, maybe no one else would notice. The conversation, I remember, was about the house of memory—the attic, the stairwells, the cellar. Attic? My family lived in third-floor flats for the most part, because noise traveled down. Stairwells reeked of Pine Sol from the Saturdayscrubbing. We shared them with the people downstairs; they were public zones no one except us thought to clean. We mopped them all right, but not without resentment for cleaning up some other people's trash. And as for cellars, we had a basement, but who'd want to hide in there? Basements were filled with urban fauna. Everyone was scared to go in there including the meter reader and the...