When she was a teenager, her parents bought a house, a goal they had always dreamed of achieving but Cisneros regarded the house as ugly and shabby, and nothing like what she had imagined a house should be. She spent the majority of her childhood living in apartment buildings in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago's South Side. Her sense of cultural displacement as a Chicana was, in part, due to her family's frequent moves between Mexico and the United States. The only girl in a family of seven children, she often felt dominated by her brothers and father. BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATIONĬisneros was born on December 20, 1954, in Chicago, Illinois, to a Mexican father and a Chicana mother. As a result, Cisneros was awarded the McArthur Foundation 'genius' award in 1995. Cisneros has been widely recognized for her groundbreaking work, which utilizes experimental forms of prose narrative and challenges traditional gender roles. The House on Mango Street is also considered a coming-of-age story, highlighting Esperanza's quest for self-definition and self-empowerment through the creative act of writing. Through the character of Esperanza, a twelve-year-old Chicana girl and the narrator of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros examines issues of Chicana identity in the bi-cultural context of the Latin-American community. Cisneros received the American Book Award and the Before Columbus Foundation Book Award in 1985, both for The House on Mango Street, which was a best-seller and has become a mainstay on grade school, high school, and college reading lists. INTRODUCTIONĬisneros is best known for her young adult prose volume The House on Mango Street (1984), a collection of vignettes based on her experiences growing up in a working-class Latin-American neighborhood in Chicago.

The following entry presents criticism on Cisneros's young adult short-story collection The House on Mango Street (1984) through 2006. Read more to go' in the midst of her oppressive surroundings.American novelist, poet, and author of young adult short stories and picture books. Capturing her thoughts and emotions in poems and stories, Esperanza is able to rise above hopelessness and create for herself 'a house all of my own quiet as snow, a space for myself. For Esperanza, Mango Street is a desolate landscape of concrete and run-down tenements where she discovers the hard realities of life - the fetters of class and gender, the spectre of racial enmity and the mysteries of sexuality.

Told in a series of vibrant vignettes, The House On Mango Street is the story of Esperanza Cordera, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago. Description for The House on Mango Street Paperback.

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