House on Mango Street

What Women Have To Do In 1984 Sandra Cisneros wrote the novella The House on Mango Street based on the narrator, Esperanza’s, first year living on Mango Street. A young Latino girl, by the name of Esperanza, is growing up in the suburbs of Chicago and is determined to leave her life on Mango Street in her past. In this novella Cisneros explores the effect of loss of innocence on Mango Street. The roles of women and how they treat each other is highly prominent in The House on Mango Street. Throughout Esperanza’s year on Mango Street she begins to realize that women have a responsibility to not harm each other but to help. As soon as Esperanza arrives on Mango Street she meets an adolescent girl named Cathy that hurts her right from the get-go. When Esperanza meets Cathy the first thing she tells her is that she can only be her friend for one day because “the neighborhood is getting bad” (Cisneros 13). Cathy implies that the neighborhood is getting bad because of all of the Latinos. This makes Esperanza feel bad because she had just moved in and she had done nothing to this young girl or her family yet they feel almost uncomfortable living on Mango Street because of Esperanza’s “kind”. We can imply that Cathy’s family is racist because they want to move off of Mango Street due to all of the Latinos.Cathy claims that she is the “great great grand cousin of the queen of France” (12). This implies that Cathy thinks that she is better than everyone, or at least better than Esperanza and her family, on Mango Street. At one point Cathy says that her family is going to “fly to France one day and find her great great distant grand cousin on her father’s side and inherit the family house” (13). Cathy’s entire statement about being the “great great grand cousin of the queen of France” is quite ironic given the fact that France has not had a queen since Marie Antoinette in 1755 (12). Later in the novella Esperanza realizes that you cannot necessarily trust every women