The House on Mango Street

First published in 1984, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street is a coming-of-age novel told in forty-four short vignettes. Its narrator, Esperanza Cordero, is a Mexican American girl whose family moves into a small house on Mango Street, in a Latino neighborhood of Chicago. It is not a house she can be proud of, and she longs for a home of her own.

Esperanza records the life of the street around her: her younger sister Nenny, her friends Lucy and Rachel, the glamorous Sally, Marin waiting for someone to change her life, Alicia studying at university, and the women kept at home by their husbands and fathers. Through them she begins to see what is expected of girls like her, and starts to decide what she wants instead, finding in writing a way to hold on to Mango Street while imagining a way out.

Written in spare, lyrical prose that sits between poetry and fiction, the book won the American Book Award in 1985 and has become a mainstay of school and college reading lists.