Banishment In The House On Mango Street

In the novel The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, we read about a girl named Esperanza, who lives in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago, a city where a lot of destitute areas are racially segregated. In a series of vignettes, Esperanza explains the time she meets her neighbors and the difficult times in their lives. Throughout the book, it proposes a selection of characters and their cultural background, how they are affected by banishment, poverty, and are even trapped. Alicia is a young woman whose mother died, who inherited her mother’s place to cook and clean. “Studies all night and sees the mice, the ones her father says do not exist.”(pg.32). Alicia has to wake up early in the morning to make tortillas for her father for lunch, where she sees mice. She is in the university and wants to escape from her father because she doesn’t want to work in a factory or always be her father’s maid. We can infer that Alicia wants to move out because in the text it says, “Two trains and a bus, because she doesn’t want to spend her life in a factory or behind a rolling pin.”(pg 32). This makes a connection to Esperanza because she wants to escape from her neighborhood, from the poverty she lives in. As a child Esperanza only wants to escape her neighborhood, it doesn’t really matter to
In the text it say, “ She has many troubles, but the big one is her husband who left and keeps leaving.” Minerva is a trapped woman because her husband leaves her, but then in the middle of the night he comes back to her, saying he is sorry and she lets him in again. “Same story.” Minerva doesn’t know what to do, her husband beats her, in the text it says, “Next week she comes over black and blue and asks what can she do?” Minerva might be afraid to do something or else he is going to beat her. This connects to Esperanza because she will have to try and work hard quickly if she does not want to end up like