The House on Mango Street

Aunt Lupe was once a beautiful woman with swimmer’s legs, but Esperanza only knows her aunt as a sick woman with withered legs. Esperanza tries to determine why some people get sick with disease and others do not. She doesn’t know why, but she knows that Aunt Lupe has been sick so long that everyone is used to it. Lupe is mostly bed ridden, blind, and her dark apartment is filthy. Esperanza hates to visit her alone, but she takes her library books and reads to Aunt Lupe. She even reads Lupe her own poetry. Aunt Lupe tells her that her poetry is good: “That’s very good…You just remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free” (61).

One afternoon, Esperanza and her friends are playing a game where they each have to imitate someone, usually a celebrity. The girls decide to imitate Lupe, which they realize later is cruel. On the very same day that they made fun of Aunt Lupe, she dies. Esperanza is horrified, and her mother agrees that she will most likely “go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there. My mother says I was born on an evil day and prays for me” (58). After Lupe dies, Esperanza begins having significant dreams. 

Esperanza goes to see Elenita, a “witch woman” (62) in order to have her future read. Elenita works out of her kitchen, which is full of holy candles and her supplies. Her young children are home, squabbling at her feet. Elenita asks Esperanza to fill a glass with water and place it in the center of the table. Elenita “makes the sign of the cross over the water three times and then begins to cut the cards” (63). She lays out Tarot cards on the table and tells her that “lose spiritus are here” (63). Elenita asks Esperanza if she can feel them; Esperanza lies and says yes. Esperanza is hoping to see or hear something about a house. Elenita sees “a home in the heart” (63). This is very disappointing to Esperanza, who was hoping to hear that a big, beautiful house is in her future. She asks Elenita to look again but gets the same result. Esperanza is not pleased to have spent five dollars on this reading.

Marin meets a man at a dance club, and the only thing she knows about him is his first name: Geraldo. After he is killed in a hit-and-run accident, Marin has to tell the story of his last night, spent dancing with her, over and over again. Geraldo doesn’t have any identification in his pockets and there is no way to contact his next of kin. The narrator says that no one will ever know about “the two-room flats and sleeping rooms he rented, the weekly money orders sent home, the currency exchange. How could they?” (66). His family in another country will never know what happened to him after he “went north” (66).

Ruthie owns the building next door to Esperanza’s home. Ruthie is a mean and volatile landlord, throwing tenants out on a whim. Ruthie’s adult daughter, Edna, lives with her mother. Esperanza describes Edna as childlike, dressing in vibrant clothes and walking her dog while laughing by herself. Ruthie whistles beautifully and notices “lovely things everywhere. I might be telling her a joke and she’ll stop and say: The moon is beautiful like a balloon” (68). Ruthie seems very afraid to socialize with other adults, preferring to keep to herself or play cards with the girls. She tells them that she used to have prospects but never accepted any job offer. Instead, she got married and moved into her own house. Ruthie says that she is just visiting her mother, and soon her husband will pick her up and bring her home, “but the weekends come and go and Ruthie stays” (68). Ruthie likes it when Esperanza brings books from the library to show her. Ruthie used to be a children’s author, or so she says. Esperanza wants to impress Ruthie, so she memorizes a poem by Lewis Carroll called The Walrus and The Carpenter and recites it to Ruthie. Afterward, Ruthie only comments on how beautiful Esperanza’s teeth are. 

Earl, a jukebox repairman, lives in Edna’s basement apartment. He works nights and keeps his blinds shut all the time such that the smell of mold wafts out every time he opens his door. He has two little dogs that follow him around and an apartment full of records. He shares the records with his neighbors, but he keeps all the country music for himself. Earl has a wife, who Edna says is blond and thin. Esperanza can’t understand why Edna thinks Earl’s wife is blond when she sees Earl with a tall redhead in “tight pink pants and green glasses” (71) all the time. Esperanza doesn’t understand that Earl is seeing his mistress, not his wife, and she says that the neighborhood can’t agree on what his wife “looks like” (71). 

A boy in the neighborhood begins to watch Esperanza with sexual interest. This is her first experience of having a boy “look at you [her] that” (72). She is scared of him and the way he stares but doesn’t want him to know, so she walks past and acts like she doesn’t care. The one time she decides to make direct eye contact, he gets so distracted that he crashes his bicycle into a parked car. Her father tells her that he is the wrong kind of boy for her. Then this boy, Sire, gets a girlfriend: “She is tiny and pretty and smells like baby’s skin […] her barefoot baby toes all painted pale pink, like little pink seashells” (73). Seeing Sire with his girlfriend makes Esperanza long to be like Lois, a girl that her mother implies is promiscuous. Esperanza begins to fantasize about how it would feel for Sire to hold and kiss her. 

Esperanza sees herself reflected in the four skinny trees outside of her house: “They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them” (74). She notes the strength and tenacity of their roots growing down through concrete and their branches and leaves lifting high into the sky. She sees that even though trees are not meant to grow in concrete, they “reach and do not forget to reach” (75).