The House on Mango Street
The House on Mango Street ( in engl. Original The House on Mango Street) is a 1984 published Bildungsroman of the Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros, which is attributed to the so-called Chicana literature. He describes in brief episodes growing up of Esperanza Cordero, a young, growing up in Chicago Latina. Esperanza is determined to escape the material poor in her life marked by Chicanos and Puerto Ricans district, but at the same time it promises to come back for the ones she has left behind.
The House on Mango Street has been translated into numerous languages and is now one of the reading material that is regularly treated in U.S. schools.
Content and writing style
The narrator in The House on Mango Street is Esperanza. In short episodes that focus on their daily experiences, but occasionally also contain observations and reflections, she describes her life in a world characterized by Hispanics neighborhood.
Each of the episodes could be the story for themselves and they follow no chronological order. Conflicts and problems often remain unresolved, such as the future of the people in their neighborhood is unresolved. Occasionally these episodes are only two or three paragraphs long. Their language is often marked rhythmically, such as the first sentences of the first episode, which also gave the book its title:
"We have not always lived in the Mango Street. Before we lived in Loomis on the second floor and advance in the Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that, I still can not remember. "
Although the age of Esperanza is not mentioned, it is indicated that it is about 13 years old. Many of the episodes portray the experiences of girls and women in her neighborhood who are often isolated and trapped in their role: Rosa Vargas has so many children that she is too tired to worry about it; Alicia, who must serve as the oldest sister siblings since her mother died; Minerva, who is always insulted by her husband; the thick Mamacita, which dominates only eight words in English and therefore does not dare leave the house; Rafaela, who is trapped in her house because her husband thinks too good to leave the house; Sally, who marries a much older man to escape her father, who she but even more jealous isolated.
Susanne Weingarten wrote in a 1992 review for the mirror:
" Two or three pages these morsels be short. You sound as if a friend they tell, in the afternoon with a cup of coffee - spontaneous, familiar, sprudelig, sometimes childlike. You breathe and vibrate, these simple, dabbed sketches, in their sequence, the girl Esperanza will gradually grow up. "
Reception and publishing history
The House on Mango Street in 1985 won the American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. The literary critic Claudia Sadowski -Smith, the author Sandra Cisneros referred to as probably the most well-known Chicana writer and, granted her the first Mexican-American author who has been published by one of the major U.S. publishing houses a role as a pioneer. The House on Mango Street was published in 1989, first in the small publishing house Arte Público Press, was oriented with its publishing program to a reading public with Latin American roots. The second edition, however, was released in 1991 by Vintage Books, a publishing house within the prestigious " Random House " group. As Cisneros ' biographer whole notes, it was up to this time only male Chicano authors managed to change after a first publication in a small publishing company with minority program one of the great renowned publishing houses. The fact that Cisneros 's first novel attracted so much attention that a publishers like Vintage Books took him, illustrates the increasing importance of Chicano literature within the American literary scene.
In an interview on National Public Radio Cisneros said on 19 September 1991.
" I think I can not be happy if I 'm the only one that will be published by Random House when so many other great writers - both Latinos and Latinas and Chicanas or Chicanos - is that in the U.S. not of great be published publishing houses or these are not even known. If my success would mean that publishers again a second look at these writers throw - and then run these in significant numbers, then we will finally arrive in this country. "
Autobiographical background
Sandra Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954 in Chicago, Illinois, the third of seven siblings. Her father had emigrated as a young man from Mexico to the United States, her mother was an American-born descendant of Mexicans. The frequent change between Chicago and Mexico City was the dominant aspect in Cisneros ' youth. It meant that the family had to find new housing and schools for the children regularly. When Cisneros was 11 years old, her family acquired its own modest house in a world dominated by Puerto Ricans living area. This residential area and the people who lived there, had a significant impact on Cisneros ' first novel The House on Mango Street.
Cisneros earned Bachelor 1976 at Loyola University Chicago and in 1978 received his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa. During her time at the University of Iowa their specific social background, she was in a seminar on creative writing clearly than other classmates were talking about houses that possessed storage, cellar, stairs and niches. At that moment she realized that she herself had never lived in a house that had such a thing.
"It was not that I was not aware of who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But I had not yet become me aware that this had something to do with the imbalance in my life, even though everything was connected with it! My race, my gender and my social class. But all was not yet made sense in the seminar up to that morning. At that moment I decided that I would write about about, about that my classmates could not write. "