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Abstract

In “A Seat Near the Window: A Glimpse Inside Esperanza’s Multicultural Life in

Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street” Axelson examines the cultural and linguistic

challenges faced by Esperanza Cordero, the protagonist of Sandra Cisneros’ novel The

House on Mango Street. Axelson investigates Esperanza’s struggle for identity as a natural-

born United States citizen who is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She uses the image

of a confining window frame and the metaphor of a house as a dream to further analyze

Esperanza’s internal and external conflicts. Her argument is supported with textual

evidence, quotations from other scholars in the field, and the comparison and contrast with

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Álvarez. Also applied is the multi-being idea

of butterfly halves belonging to Psychologist Kenneth Gergen.

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A Seat Near the Window: A Glimpse Inside Esperanza’s Multicultural Life in Sandra

Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street

Kathryn N. Axelson

In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros uses a series of vignettes to tell the

story of a maturing female protagonist, Esperanza Cordero. Set in Chicago and published in

1984, The House on Mango Street explains the challenges of a girl who is growing into

American culture as found in the urban United States. However, her parents are deeply

rooted in their native Mexican ways. Esperanza is torn between the culture of her home

and the culture of her education.

Cisneros is no stranger to this battle. Born in the United States, Cisneros, like

Esperanza, is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. Cisernos’ father was from Mexico while

her mother was a Mexican-American. She and her six siblings were, like Esperanza, raised

in Chicago, but, unlike Esperanza, they took frequent trips to Mexico City to visit their

paternal grandmother (Newman 44). There are traces in similarities between Cisernos’ life

and Esperanza’s life but The House on Mango Street is more loosely based on stories of

Cisernos’ students. Her second novel, Caramelo, holds more autobiographical information

but is still considered a fictional work. In an interview following the release of Caramelo

Cisneros said, “This is not a family memoir. A lot of people are going to take it as that. They

always take my writing as factual. It’s fact-based, but I just use it as a springboard”

(Newman 45). Of her own journey, Cisernos says, “I knew I was a Mexican woman, but I

didn’t think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, whereas it

had everything to do with it! My race, my gender, my class! That’s when I decided I would

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write about something my classmates couldn’t write about” (Maycock 229). Out of this

mindset developed Cisernos’ niche as a Latina writer. When she began writing, Latino

writers were only being published by smaller presses. However The House on Mango Street

is often regarded as a being published at a pivotal point in Latina literature or works

primarily written in English by women of Latin American heritage (Martínez 6).

Perhaps vital in its success is that a majority of the problems presented in The House

on Mango Street are not new problems. The novel is composed of traditional challenges

immigrants face upon entering a new country: challenges with culture, community, and

place. It also confronts the historic battle between Spanish and English for language

supremacy. Should one completely abolish her previous way of life and devote herself

fully to the new American way or should she hold tightly to the tradition in which she is

comfortable, the tradition of her homeland?

Yet for Esperanza, this battle is different because the United States is her homeland.

Mexico, the land often titled “the homeland” is really her parents’ homeland. Esperanza’s

parents immigrated to the United States, bringing their culture and expectations with them.

Esperanza has her own cultural expectations as a natural-born US citizen. Throughout the

novel she seeks to define her own identity through the opposing forces of her school,

community, and home.

Life for first generation American-born children of immigrants is challenging in that

they must seek to find the balance between the old and new cultures. These external forces

try to push Esperanza in a plethora of different directions. Forces from inside her home

demand she fulfill the submissive female role of a Mexican woman. Forces from Mango

Street, her Mexican-American surrounding neighborhood, push her from her childhood and

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into their cultural expectations. All the while Esperanza is seeking to balance the

multiculturalism built into her life and also break free to find her own societal niche.

Historically, the Latina woman had three directions to turn: to the church as a nun,

to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother (Anzaldúa 39). This is the culture

into which Esperanza’s parents and grandparents were raised. It is in this fashion that

Esperanza’s parents are trying to raise her as well. Yet Esperanza’s hopes and dreams for

her own life stretch beyond the confining walls of the kitchen. Living in the United States

has filled Esperanza with the dream of a life different than that of her ancestors.

In an article entitled, “Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the

Bildungsroman in Sandra Cisernos’s The House on Mango Street and Jamaica Kincaid’s

Annie John, literary scholar Maria Karafilis explains that the idea of a woman looking

longingly out of the window for her whole life “seems to be common for Chicanos,

imprisoned within the domestic sphere by husbands or fathers, confined within the frame

of a window” (66). The sole role of women in society was to remain in the home cooking,

cleaning, and raising the children. Women were expected to be found in the kitchen and

nowhere else. In analyzing “The Architecture of Ethnicity in Chicano Literature,” Monika

Kaup explains, “A recurring image of domestic confinement, boredom, and loneliness is a

woman sitting in a window frame, or standing in a doorframe, longingly gazing out” (388).

From the kitchen window women could look out at the world they were not permitted to

enter. They are held hostage by the window pane and the males in society demanding

women fulfill domestic expectations. The idea of a confining window frame is a theme

repeated throughout Cisneros’ novel.

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In the vignette entitled, “No Speak English,” Esperanza discusses her neighbor

nicknamed Mamacita. Mamacita’s son worked long hours at two jobs in order to bring

Mamacita to the United States. Upon doing so, she settled herself in their third-floor

apartment and refused to leave. Esperanza says, “Whatever her reasons, whether she is fat,

or can’t climb the stairs, or is afraid of English, she won’t come down. She sits all day by the

window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her

country in a voice that sounds like a seagull” (Cisneros 77). However, unlike many of the

other women confined to inside of a window, Mamacita chose a domestic lifestyle for

herself. Esperanza says the man returns to the apartment each evening and she overhears

him telling Mamacita, “We are home. This is home. Here I am and here I stay. Speak

English. Speak English. Christ!” (Cisneros 78). But Mamacita and her domestic attitude do

not belong in the United States sitting side of the window looking at a world she is not

brave enough to enjoy.

The vignette immediately following is entitled “Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut and

Papaya Juice on Tuesdays” and it shares an opposite scenario. Rafaela’s husband forces her

to remain inside of their home so she looks out of the window rather than actually

venturing out of the home. Esperanza says, “On Tuesdays Rafaela’s husband comes home

late because that’s the night he plays dominoes. And then Rafaela, who is still young but

getting old from leaning out the window so much, gets locked indoors because her husband

is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at” (Cisneros 79). In this

instance, it is the fear of the husband that puts his wife indoors. Rafaela is not content with

this restricting, demeaning attitude of her husband. Esperanza says, “Rafaela leans out the

window and leans on her elbow and dreams her hair is like Rapunzel’s. On the corner

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there is music from the bar, and Rafaela wishes she could go there and dance before she

gets old” (Cisneros 80). Rafaela aches for the world outside of her apartment, the world

she is not permitted to explore.

Esperanza’s namesake, her great-grandmother, also would have liked to enjoy the

world outside of the kitchen. Readers are introduced to her great-grandmother while she

is seated in her position near the window. Esperanza desires to avoid this fate and not

inherit her great-grandmother’s seat near the window by also desiring not to inherit the

limitations places on her by history, tradition, and culture. This history, these traditions,

and this culture exemplify the conflicting expectations into which Esperanza was born. Her

family and their native Mexican culture expect one set of cultural behaviors while she seeks

to fulfill the expectations of the society surrounding her.

Mexican culture is rooted in male superiority and domination. It is for the men to

decide what is best for society. Chicano literary scholar Gloria Anzaldúa explains, “Culture

is made by those in power—men… males make the rules and laws; women transmit them”

(38). While the societal rules and regulations are set up for women by men, it is other

women that enforce these regulations. Society believed that women must be protected

from themselves. Again Anzaldúa explains, “Culture [read ‘males’] professes to protect

women. Actually, it keeps women in rigidly defined roles” (39). It is out of these rigidly

defined rules and regulations that Esperanza desires to break. She is expected to accept the

cultural norms of her family’s history and continue to fulfill them without protesting.

Esperanza is not willing to accept a position as inferior to males, primarily. She “refuses to

join the ranks of Mexican-American women who serve men” (Maycock 225). While she

may not have physically crossed the US-Mexico border with her parents, it is Esperanza’s

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responsibility to cross the cultural border and find a way to merge Mexican and American

cultures into something where she and her siblings cannot just survive but can thrive.

Esperanza will not accept being confined to the kitchen like her ancestors. She will

not accept the cultural stigma that a woman is a failure if she does not marry and have

children (Anzaldúa 39). Living in an over-full home in the city of Chicago where she shares

a single bedroom with her parents, younger sister, and brothers, Esperanza has grown

tired of seeking but being unable to achieve dreams.

For all of her childhood Esperanza’s parents filled her days by telling her about

owning their own dream home. Esperanza explains:

They also told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would

be ours for always so we wouldn’t have to move each year. And our house would

have running water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs, not

hallway stairs, but stairs inside like the house on T.V. and we’d have a basement and

at least three washroom so when we took a bath we wouldn’t have to tell everybody.

Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing

without a fence. This was the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket

and this was the house Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went

to bed. (Cisneros 4)

Ultimately, the Corderos must rapidly leave their third-floor apartment on Loomis

Road due to broken water pipes, and in this haste they purchase the house on Mango

Street. Kaup explains that the Cordero family lives in an “ugly little red house… not only

too small to accommodate the imaginative world of the narrator-daughter Esperanza but

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also incapable of fulfilling the dreams of other family members” (385). Again Esperanza

explains:

But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It’s small and red

with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their

breath. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to

push hard to get in. There is no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by

the curb. Out back is a small garage for the car we don’t own yet and a small yard

that looks smaller between the two buildings on either side. There are stairs in our

house, but they’re ordinary hallway stairs, and the house has only one washroom.

(Cisneros 4)

Yet Esperanza’s parents are content with the house on Mango Street even though it

does not fulfill their expectations. Superfluous dreams must be sacrificed in order for the

family to fulfill the most important dream for the Cordero family: owning a home. Kaup

writes, “In the United States in particular, the home is more than just a shelter; it is a

national institution almost as sacred as the American flag. In home ownership, the

American Dream and the American Way are manifest: the civic values of individualism,

economic success, and self-sufficiency are asserted, according to Gwendolyn Wright, in ‘the

single-family detached house in the suburbs’” (361). Esperanza’s parents are pleased with

their home purchase because their homeownership signifies success and accomplishment.

However, Esperanza is not pleased with the home that was purchased because it does not

fulfill the dreams she had been promised.

Esperanza’s identity has been shaped by the red house in which she lives with her

parents and siblings. The colored façade marks the house as a non-white residence,

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revealing the Cordero family’s inability to achieve their dream of successfully fitting into

American society. By living in the red house on Mango Street, Esperanza is still separated

from her white peers. She still yearns for the home of her dreams. She says, “I knew then I

had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it. The house on

Mango Street isn’t it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know

how those things go” (Cisneros 5). Her parents’ dreams had become Esperanza’s dreams as

well. She realizes the house on Mango Street will not satisfy these dreams and thus she

abandons her parents’ dreams and cultural norms in order to seek and achieve her own

dreams. These new dreams involve a home of her own.

Esperanza desires her own space, her own dreams fulfilled, and her own home. She

says:

Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all

my own. With my porch and my pillows, my pretty purple petunias. My books and

my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at.

Nobody’s garbage to pick up after. Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to

go, clean as paper before the poem. (Cisernos 108)

To Esperanza, a home is a social status of American success but it is more than that.

It is also a space to call one’s own, something she does not have in their home on Mango

Street.

Esperanza now desires her own space, her own dreams fulfilled, and her own home.

In an article entitled, “A Room of One’s Own,” Jacqueline Doyle compares Esperanza’s

longing for a home of her own to Virginia Woolf’s argument that women need a room of her

own. Doyle explains that the space Esperanza desires is “both solitary and communal, a

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place of refuge both for herself and for others” (22). Esperanza enjoys the community that

surrounds her on Mango Street but desires her own space to escape the chaos and allow

others to do the same. Doyle says, “In Cisneros’ reconstruction of Woolf’s Room of One’s

Own, Esperanza’s house of my own simultaneously represents an escape from the barrio, a

rejection of the domestic drudgery of ‘home’… a solitary expression of woman’s lives” (22).

For Esperanza, the home of her own is a space to call hers but also the symbol of

independence and the fulfillment of dreams. She seeks to break free from the life and

submissive culture into which she has been born. Instead, she desires to blaze her own

trail, achieve her own American dream, and seek a life away from the chaos on Mango

Street. Esperanza desires this home of her own because she does not desire the fate forced

on many other woman in her society, presently and historically. She again explains about

her great-grandmother after whom Esperanza was named. Esperanza says, “I would’ve

liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my

great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she

were a fancy chandelier” (Cisneros 10-11). The Esperanza’s great-grandmother fought to

break the system and be an independent woman rather than one defined by the male

society surrounding her. Unfortunately, her plan failed and she was doomed to rebel by

spending all of her days sitting at the window staring longingly at the world that was not

hers to enjoy (Cisneros 11). Her great-grandmother was confined by society and trapped

within the confines of her own home. Esperanza says, “I may have inherited her name, but

I do not want to inherit her place near the window” (Cisneros 11). Esperanza desired to

rebel against the society but she sought to have a better outcome. It was the Mexican

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cultural tradition of her parents that Esperanza has rejected. Instead she has chosen to

embrace the American way of life where a woman can exist outside of the home.

In creating for herself a home of her own, Esperanza is freed from the constant

discussion and ridicule regarding her language of choice. Living in two cultural worlds has

forced Esperanza to pick a preferred language of communication. At home, the language of

choice is Spanish, but at school everything is completed in English. Most of the characters

living in Esperanza’s barrio, her neighborhood, vacillate between English and Spanish. In a

chapter entitled “Meme Ortiz” Esperanza says, “Meme has a dog with gray eyes, a sheepdog

with two names, one in English and one in Spanish” (Cisneros 21). Everything, even the

dog, has two names, an English name and a Spanish one. The community is split between

English and Spanish, merging the two languages and creating a chasm between the two

worlds.

The cultural conflict and language dichotomy surrounding Esperanza can also be

found in something as simple as her own name. She must reconcile the hope and longing

confined within her name and within her doubly marginalized roles as a Chicana woman in

a patriarchal society. According to Esperanza her name—inherited from her confined

great-grandmother—creates a dichotomy between the Spanish language of her family and

the English language of her community, her education. She explains, “In English my name

means hope. In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting”

(Cisneros 10). It appears initially as though Esperanza prefers the English translation of

her own name. Yet later in the same chapter she slowly shifts her favor towards the

Spanish pronunciation. This great divide is emphasized in the classroom. Esperanza says,

“At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out tin and hurt the roof of

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your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not

quite as thick as sister’s name—Magdalena—which is uglier than mine” (Cisneros 11).

Esperanza appears to fluctuate between having a language preference thus furthering her

identity struggle.

Esperanza’s language struggle is not unique to her situation, it is a struggle faced by

many Latinos as they struggle to form an identity for themselves in the United States. This

struggle for identity becomes a precarious balance between the old way of life and the new.

It is the merging to two distinct cultures into a single entity, pleasing and appeasing both

sets of expectations.

Just as the varying usages of English and Spanish within communities, authors of

Latin American literature also vary heavily in their opinions of which language should be

the primary language of the text. Every author has his or her own opinion regarding how

to address language usage in a piece of literature. These opinions are based on personal

preference as well as character development. For example, in Sandra Cisneros’ novel

Caramelo, the usage and translation of Spanish varies by character. The protagonist, Lala,

was born in the United States and has grown up in a Chicana neighborhood in Chicago but

spends time annually in Mexico City, her grandmother Soledad’s home city. On these

annual visits to Mexico, Lala feels out of place due to her lack of Spanish. To show the

disconnect “Cisneros translates almost all of Lala’s Spanish. This represents Lala’s Chicana

identity, a hybridized identity that is the direct creation of US-Mexican relations”

(Alumbaugh 60-61). To accommodate the monolingual reader, Cisneros italicizes Lala’s

Spanish before translating it directly to English. However, Soledad, Lala’s grandmother,

prefer to speak Spanish and her Spanish is thus often left un-translated. In an article

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focusing on Caramelo, Heather Alumbaugh writes, “Cisneros frequently does not translate

many of the Spanish words and phrases Soledad uses to describe herself or her culture

when she shares her story with Lala” (60). To Soledad, Spanish is her language of choice

and another language should not be needed. Alumbaugh continues, “Soledad’s Spanish,

which is her beloved first language, represents her identity as a Mexican born in Mexico,

and although multiple ethnicities and two nationalities inform her identity—she is a

Mexican-American and permanently moves to the US before her death—Spanish is the

language she most fervently associates with her ethnic identity” (60). Despite immigrating

to the United States, Soledad continues to consider herself Mexican and therefore prefers to

use the Spanish language and is appalled by the fact that only one of her grandchildren

speaks fluent Spanish. To be consistent with this character, Cisneros decides against

translating Soledad’s Spanish remarks.

The Spanish background for most Latino authors stretches beyond the physical

language on the page as used by various characters. In an article entitled “On Sub-versive

Signifiers: U.S. Latina/o Writers Tropicalize English” Frances R. Aparicio remarks, “[T]he

most important contributions of U.S. Latina/o writers to American literature is not only in

the multiple cultural and hybrid subjectivities that they textualize, but also in the new

possibilities for metaphors, imager, syntax, and rhythms that the Spanish subtexts provide

literary English” (797). The influence of the Spanish language can be seen even in texts

written in English.

Each author approaches the use of language in a different manner. Author Helena

María Viramontes explains, “Sometimes my mistakes turn out to be my best writing.

Sometimes I think in Spanish and translate… I still say that if my works were translated

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into Spanish they would somehow be better. More, more, what’s the word? At home” (qtd.

in Aparicio, “Sub-versive Signifiers,” 797). Viramontes may prefer Spanish but other Latino

authors are English-dominant with mere hints and echoes of the Spanish languages in their

works. Cisneros is among those authors who prefer to write in English “because it has

been the language of [her] education and intellectual formation, proof that the cultural

conquest has had its consequences” (Aparicio, “Sub-versive Signifiers,” 796). Another

contributing factor in Cisneros’ language of chose is that she “is concerned with

representing the silenced and marginalized, including children, homosexuals, and the

working class and immigrant Chicanos and Mexicans whose stories have been untold or

untranslated” (Mullen 11). Cisneros seeks to tell the stories previously unavailable in

English and therefore writing in Spanish would only exacerbate the problem rather than

alleviate it.

Well-know Latina author, Julia Álvarez, was born in New York but was raised in the

Dominican Republic before returning to the United States. Despite Spanish being her first

language, Álvarez does not consider herself truly bilingual. Rather she is English-dominant.

Álvarez is considered among the initiators of women of Latina heritage who write

primarily in English (Martínez 6). As with many other Latino writers, Álvarez’s works are

translated to Spanish by individuals other than the author. Regardless of the language

preference of the author, Latina literature tends to hold Spanish undertones with syntax.

Reconciling the language barriers and contrast is only a small step Latino authors and

characters must take within the society of the United States.

In addition to the personal challenges immigrants face in coming to a new country,

such as the abandonment of family, traditions, and a homeland, they are often unwelcomed

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in their new country. Immigrants, who leave a poor situation hoping for a better one, often

find racism and are made scapegoats rather than being given the opportunities to achieve

the American Dream. Poniatowska explains the situation for Chicanos: “Mexico, their

country of origin, had not been capable of feeding them, much less giving them an identity.

The United States casts them aside and blames them for all their societal ills: robberies,

rapes, vandalism” (39). They are not accepted in Mexico but neither are they accepted in

the US. Thus “Chicanos are caught between two worlds that reject them: Mexicans who

consider them traitors and Americans who want them only as cheap labor” (Poniatowska

37). It is in this hostile environment that Esperanza and her family must learn to survive

rather than to, as they had hoped, be successful.

Cisneros argues that the space for a Chicana to develop “is not in the dominant

American culture nor in some type of ‘authentic’ traditional Mexican culture but rather a

cross-cultural location of one’s own creation” (Karafilis 71). It is the responsibility of the

Chicana to develop her own culture, to struggle with the conflicting and ultimately merging

of ideas, and to blaze one’s own trail. Society will be teaching Chicanas to balance their

opposing forces, hyphenating them into a blended identity. The Chicana has the

responsibility to create a third culture for herself, to accept new cultural aspects while still

maintaining loyalty to the culture of her family. Karafilis writes, “Cisneros forces the

reader to do what Esperanza must do—to make sense of these disjointed parts and

fragments and construct them into a life, an experience, a narrative” (67). As Esperanza is

growing and developing, Cisneros encourages the reader is growing and developing along

side of her.

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In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza forces readers to realize the multicultural

problems she has faced in Chicago. It is impossible for Esperanza to reconcile the two

cultures into a single entity, even under the Chicano label. By labeling themselves

Chicanos, Mexican-Americans are not longer hyphenated people split between two worlds.

They are no longer multiple cultures forced to reconcile differences and unify as a single

entity. Rather, they are a third cultural group with aspects of Mexican culture and aspects

of American culture living in unity as one Chicano culture. Esperanza proves that this is not

as simple as one would make it seem. The unification of Mexican and American cultures is

the unification of two opposing forces. Among other aspects, the unification of Mexican and

American cultures is the unification of a culture in which a woman is expected to be

domestic and a culture where a woman is permitted outside of the home.

As a woman, the Chicana has the duty to create a third culture for herself, to accept

new cultural aspects while still maintaining loyalty to the culture of her family. The lack of

peace leaves Esperanza torn between two worlds. She has the responsibility of forming her

own culture from the familial and social influences she has been given. Instead of being

able to form her own identity, Esperanza is found constantly switching between cultural

expectations unable to neatly merge the two.

The battle Esperanza faces is not the same battle faced by many other immigrants

represented in literature such as How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Álvarez.

Esperanza’s parents emigrated from Mexico to the United States, bringing with them their

traditional values, ways of life, and expectations. Esperanza, on the other hand, is a

natural-born United States citizen. While her parents try to force her into their Mexican

ways, she is drawn to the American ways surrounding her. In Álvarez’s novel, the four

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sister protagonists, the García girls, emigrated with their parents from the Dominican

Republic to New York. As child immigrants to the United States the García girls desire to

embrace the ways of the United States and remove themselves from the Dominican culture

in which they and, more importantly their parents, were raised. Each of the girls has

memories of life in the Dominican. The memories of the older daughters are more vivid

than those of the younger but still the girls remember their homeland. Ties to the country

of their origin are also strengthened by annual summer visits. The girls explain, “Mami and

Papi got all worried they were going to lose their girls to America… The next decision was

obvious: we four girls would be sent summers to the Island so we wouldn’t lose touch with

la familia. The hidden agenda was marriage to homeland boys, since everyone knew that

once a girl married an American, those grandbabies came out jabbering in English and

thinking of the Island as a place to go to get a suntan” (Álvarez 109). These summer visits

emphasized the girls’ struggle to balance the culture they learned in the United States and

the culture their family expected of them in the Dominican Republic. For example, in

Dominican culture it is unacceptable for a couple to ride alone in a vehicle. Instead there

must always be a third person, a chaperone, riding along with them. The girls and their

cousins oblige this rule initially before finding ways to bypass it. They tell, “Carla must ride

with Fifi in Manuel’s pickup, la chaperona, at least until we’re off compound grounds. Then

she is dropped off at Capri’s to join the rest of us. Fifi and Manuel steal off for some private

time from the watchful eye of the extended family” (Álvarez 123). While the privacy of a

young couple would be considered acceptable in the United States, it is considered a

scandalous act of defiance against the family and Dominican culture.

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Patriarchal Dominican society places a high importance on honoring the father as

the head of the household. As the father of four daughters and living in the United States,

Carlos García has a difficult task of raising respectful, honorable women. He frequently

tells his daughters, “I don’t want loose women in my family” (Álvarez 28). Meaning his

daughters would not be permitted to spend time alone with their boyfriends, they would

not participate in anything deemed socially unacceptable in the Dominican Republic

despite their living in the United States. Álvarez writes:

His daughters had had to put up with this kind of attitude in an unsympathetic era.

They grew up in the late sixties. Those were the days when wearing jeans and hoop

earrings, smoking a little dope, and sleeping with their classmates were considered

political acts against the military-industrial complex. But standing up to their father

was a different matter altogether. Even as grown women, they lowered their voices

in their father’s earshot when alluding to their bodies’ leisure. Professional women,

too, all three of the, with degrees on the wall! (28)

The girls reconcile the cultural differences by privately partaking in portions of American

culture but trying to respect their parents at home.

Throughout their time in the United States, the García girls continue to accept the

American culture and expectations rather than embracing their Dominican heritage and

familial expectations. They become Americanized in their actions, language, and voice. In

an article entitled, “Julia Álvarez and the Anxiety of Latina Representation” Lucia M. Suárez

says, “However, even though the García girls lose their Spanish accents, they cannot lose

their Dominican heritage” (128). The more time they spent in the United States, the more

American they become yet aspects of their Dominican childhood will always be a part of

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them. Suárez continues, “Even if the García girls become American, they cannot escape the

Spanish name that identifies them” (129). Yolanda especially struggles with the varying

pronunciations of her name from the Spanish name her parents intended to give her to the

American mispronunciation and inadvertent shortening for convenience sake. She says,

“Yolanda, nicknamed Yo in Spanish, misunderstood Joe in English, doubled and pronounced

like the toy, Yoyo—or when forced to selected from a rack of personalized key chains, Joey”

(Álvarez 68). Yolanda, for example, may grow accustomed to answering to English “Joe”

rather than Spanish “Yolanda” but she will still be torn between the two languages. Her

husband John tries to compose a rhyme involving “Yolanda” and struggles to do so.

Instead, she suggests he use “Joe” which has more rhymes. Eventually she tells him, “Yo

rhymes with cielo in Spanish” (Álavrez 72). In doing so, “Yo was running, like the mad, into

the safety of her first tongue, where the proudly monolingual John could not catch her, even

if he tried” (Álvarez 72). At another point in the novel Yolanda finds herself in a university-

level writing workshop surrounded by native English speakers and writers. She says,

“Suddenly, it seemed to me, not only that the world was full of English majors, but of people

with a lot more experience than I had. For the hundredth time, I cursed my immigrant

origins” (Álvarez 94). It is the fault of her Dominican birth that she does not understand

the English jokes and is not fully part of American culture. She continues, “If only I too had

been born in Connecticut or Virginia, I too would understand the jokes everyone was

making… I too would be having sex and smoking dope; I too would have suntanned parents

who took me skiing in Colorado over Christmas break, and I would say things like ‘no shit,’

without feeling like I was imitating someone else” (Álvarez 94-95). Due to her

Axelson 20

international birth—something over which she had no control—Yolanda is forever doomed

to be separated from her American-born peers.

While comfortable with speaking English and with the American culture

surrounding them, Yolanda and her sisters cannot deny their Dominican heritage and their

first language, Spanish. The García girls are “caught between two countries [and therefore]

develop a double identity with dual codes of behavior and two languages that define and

defy them” (Suárez 127). They are no longer solely Dominican yet also cannot be solely

United States American. Julia Álvarez uses How the García Girls Lost Their Accents to

“highlight the differences between Caribbean and United States cultures that impeded

assimilation as well as the contradicting gender messages immigrant girls hear from their

two cultures” (Martínez 12). No matter how strong the connections between two cultures

and the loyalties to the first culture, there must also be reconciling when one shifts societal

expectations.

The García girls dance over the cultural boundaries and often times seek to push off

Dominican ways and cultural expectations. They are more interested in becoming

American that maintaining their Dominican roots. Even though Esperanza lacks the ties to

Mexico that the García girls have to the Dominican Republic, she does face a battle very

similar to that faced by the García girls in trying to find a role for oneself in this new land.

Like Esperanza, the García Girls are caught between two countries, two languages, and two

sets of expectations. Esperanza and the García girls are constantly switching between

cultural expectations in order to please those surrounding them. The question becomes

which culture and codes of behavior best represent these hypendated people stuck

Axelson 21

between two sets of expectations? Reconciling the opposing cultural regulations forced

upon them by their families is an impossible task.

Psychologist Kenneth Gergen has noticed similar conflicting expectations and

provides an alternative for people forced between multiple worlds such as Esperanza.

Gergen explains that regardless of his or her heritage every person is a multi-being or

someone who plays multiple roles. He says, “Behind the façade of unity, coherence, and

wholeness lies another world” (135). For Esperanza, this incoherence cannot be hidden

but rather displayed in her every being. According to Gergen, each relationship a person

forms has simultaneously formed the person. Every relationship Esperanza has formed

has also formed Esperanza. She is who she has become due to her various relationships

with her family, her neighbors on Mango Street, and her classmates. Every individual is

formed by his or her relationships because “the individual represents the common

intersection of myriad relationships” (Gergen 150). Every encounter influences who a

person is and who he or she is becoming. According to Gergen, every interaction with

someone else is a portion of that second person being added to first person. Every person

can be represented by the by the half of a butterfly made of slivers shown in Figure One.

Axelson 22

Figure One

Gergen 150

Behavioral tendencies, expectations, and reactions are accumulated from every

single relationship and thus forming the half of a butterfly. It is as if “from every

relationship there emerges a residue or a resource in the form of potential actions, any of

which may be activated in the moment. Some relations leave residues that are well

practiced, while other leave little whispers of possibilities” (Gergen 149). Every

relationship influences who a person in, but some relationships hold more influence than

others. A variety of factors including the situation and previous interactions contribute to

the self a person represents on any given day in any given situation. Gergen explains that

in daily relationships only partial persons, fragments are encountered and these are often

mistakenly regarded as the whole personality (138). It is the fragments of others that are

seen to be the whole person. Each fragment makes up a different self and frequently these

different aspects of self are in direct contradiction with each other.

Axelson 23

According to Gergen, the half of a butterfly represents all of one’s true self within the

context of a particular relationship. One’s butterfly half represents all of his or her being

including every relationship the person has ever been a part of, every memory, and every

expectation. Each person brings his or her own half of the butterfly into the relationship.

As the relationship forms, the two butterfly halves unite to form a single completed

butterfly as shown in Figure Two.

Figure Two

Gergen 153

The completed butterfly is not identical to any other butterflies formed by other

relationships because no two people have the exact same background experiences or same

relationships. A person is only who she is in the specific relationship when with the person

completing the other half of the butterfly. That is to say that a person does not have a

façade but rather she is who she is when interacting with the particular second person. For

example, a girl interacts differently with her father than with her boyfriend than with her

Axelson 24

professor. This is actually very beneficial because all relationships cannot demand the

same expectations from a single person.

However, sometimes these varying relationships and expectations are starkly

different. Due to the varying cultural expectations in Esperanza’s life, her various selves

are frequently in direct conflict with each other. As is the case with many Chicanos,

Esperanza struggles to reconcile the varying expectations into one single being. Yet,

according to Gergen, she can represent herself as a multi-being fully aware that her varying

butterfly halves conflict based on the situation. Esperanza interacts differently with her

parents than she does with her peers. She represents a different set of cultural

expectations while inside of the house on Mango Street than she does when she is playing

in the neighborhood than she does she is at school. Esperanza’s different butterfly-halves

are accentuated because of her cultural dichotomy. These different interactions and

relationships not only define Esperanza’s behavior but also the language she uses and the

cultural rules she obeys. Even though these differences and inconsistencies oppose each

other, Esperanza should not be forced to choose a culture and language to form her single

identity. She should be free to move between different sets of expectations always

knowing who she is presently as well as the Esperanza of her past.

In the end of The House on Mango Street Esperanza reflects and remembers the sad

red house on Mango Street. She says, “The house I belong but do not belong to” (110).

Mango Street, the house, and the community formed Esperanza’s identity but they do not

define Esperanza herself.

Despite a cultural conflict between her parents’ Mexican homeland and her United

States homeland, Esperanza Cordero in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street

Axelson 25

manages to form her own identity. Esperanza does not define herself solely by her family,

her community, or her peers. Rather, she merges these multiple entities into her single

multi-being. While she cannot neatly reconcile multiple cultures, languages, and societal

expectations, she does accept them as they are and their influence on her identity.

Axelson 26

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