The House on Mango Street

The House on Mango Street is a novel by the American writer Sandra Cisneros, published by Arte Publico Press. It is written as a series of short vignettes rather than as a continuous narrative, and it is one of the most widely taught books in American schools.

Esperanza is twelve and lives with her family in a house that is cramped, in a neighbourhood that is poor, and nothing like the home her parents talked about before they bought it. The book is made of her impressions, each one a few pages long, of the street and the people on it: the neighbours, the girls who are not allowed out, the women who married young and the ones who did not, and the adults in her own family whose lives have been shaped by what was expected of them. Much of it is about being a girl in a community where the rules for men and women are different, and about Esperanza's conviction that she will one day have a house of her own, one that she is not ashamed of.

Cisneros drew on her own childhood in Chicago for the book, which has sold millions of copies, been translated into more than twenty languages, and is treated as a modern classic of Chicano literature.