The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

This is a novella which reads like a memoir that really packs a punch--and you know that it does because it was reissued for the 25th anniversary of it's release. It has staying power. I loved the Introduction of this novel just as much as I love the actual novel itself. Cisneros explains how she came to write this book, explaining that she felt ostracized when she moved from Chicago to Iowa for graduate school because she is Mexican American. Eventually she realized that she should write the book that none of her classmates could, the book that would encapsulate her childhood and the childhoods of so many other Mexican Americans that faced discrimination and “othering” because of the color of their skin or the language they spoke at home or where their parents were born. While it was written in 1983, it is so true today, almost 50 years after they were written. I no longer find this surprising, as we are coming up on 200 years since America could import people to sell, and yet the racism that scaffolded slavery is alive and well in the 21st century. When the book opens, we meet our narrator, twelve-year-old Esperanza Cordero. She and her family has moved around a lot, but most recently — and it will turn out to be her home for the next several years — they have moved into a house in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood on Mango Street. It’s not all she’d hoped for and she goes on to tell us why.