The house on Mango Street

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The house on Mango Street (in English Original The House on Mango Street ) is an educational novel by the Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros , published in 1984 , which is assigned to the so-called Chicano literature . In short episodes he describes the growing up of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina who grew up in Chicago. Esperanza is determined to escape the materially poor life in her Chicano and Puerto Ricans neighborhood, but at the same time she promises to come back for those she left there.

The house on Mango Street has been translated into numerous languages ​​and is now part of the reading material that is regularly covered in American school classes.

Content and writing style

The first-person narrator in The House on Mango Street is Esperanza. In short episodes that focus on her daily experiences, but occasionally also contain observations and reflections, she describes her life in a neighborhood dominated by Hispanics.

Each of the episodes could stand for itself as a story and they do not follow any chronological order. Conflicts and problems often remain unsolved, just as the future of the people in their neighborhood is unsolved. Occasionally these episodes are only two or three paragraphs long. Their language is often rhythmic, such as the first sentences of the first episode, which gave the book its title:

“We haven't always lived on Mango Street. Before that we lived in Loomis on the second floor and before that in Keeler. Before the Keeler it was the Paulina, and I can't remember before. "

Although Esperanza's age is not mentioned, it is implied that she is around 13 years old. Many of the episodes portray the experiences of the girls and women in their neighborhood who are often isolated and trapped in their roles: Rosa Vargas has so many children that she is too exhausted to care for them; Alicia, the oldest sister who has had to look after the siblings since her mother passed away; Minerva, who is always berated by her husband; the fat Mamacita, who only speaks eight words of English and therefore does not dare to leave the house; Rafaela, trapped in her home because her husband thinks she is too beautiful to leave; Sally, who marries a much older man in order to escape her father, who only isolates her even more jealously.

In 1992, Susanne Weingarten wrote in a review for Der Spiegel :

“These bits are short on two or three sides. They sound like a friend is telling them about them in the afternoon over a cup of coffee - spontaneous, familiar, bubbly, sometimes childlike. They breathe and vibrate, these simple, dabbed sketches, in the sequence of which the girl Esperanza gradually grows up. "

Reception and publication history

The house on Mango Street received the 1985 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation . The literary critic Claudia Sadowski-Smith has described the author Sandra Cisneros as probably the best-known Chicana writer and as the first Mexican-American author to be published by one of the major American publishing houses to grant her a pioneering role. The house on Mango Straße was first published in 1989 by the small publishing house Arte Público Press , whose publishing program was geared towards a reading public with Latin American roots. The second edition, however, was published in 1991 by Vintage Books, a publisher within the respected Random House group. As Cisneros' biographer Ganz notes, up until this point only male Chicano authors had succeeded in switching to one of the major, renowned publishing houses after first publishing in a small publishing house with a minority program. The fact that Cisneros' first novel attracted so much attention that a publisher such as Vintage Books took on it illustrates the growing importance of Chicano literature within the American literary scene.

In an interview on National Public Radio , Cisneros said on September 19, 1991.

“I don't think I can be happy if I'm the only one published by Random House when there are so many great writers - both Latinos and Latinas or Chicanos and Chicanas - who are not great in the US Publishing houses are published or are not even known to them. If my success meant that the publishers would take a second look at these writers - and then publish them in large 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 immigrated to the United States from Mexico as a young man, and her mother was a US-born descendant of Mexicans. The frequent alternation between Chicago and Mexico City was the dominant aspect in Cisneros' youth. It meant that the family had to regularly find new housing and schools for the children. When Cisneros was 11, her family bought their own modest home in a Puerto Rican-dominated neighborhood. This neighborhood and the people who lived there were a major influence on Cisneros' first novel The House on Mango Street .

Cisneros received his bachelor's degree from Loyola University Chicago in 1976 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in 1978 . During her time at the University of Iowa, she learned her specific social background in a creative writing seminar when fellow classmates talked about houses that had attics, basements, stairwells, and alcoves. At that moment she realized that she herself had never lived in a house that had anything like this.

“It wasn't as if I didn't know who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But, I didn't think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, whereas it had everything to do with it! My race, my gender, and my class! And it didn't make sense until that moment, sitting in that seminar. That's when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn't write about. "

“It wasn't that I wasn't aware of who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But I had not yet realized that this had something to do with the imbalance in my life, although everything was connected with it! My race, my gender and my class. But none of this had made any sense up until that morning in the seminar. At that moment I decided that I would write about something my classmates couldn't write about. "

expenditure

literature

  • Felicia J. Cruz: On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street. In: Modern Fiction Studies. 47 (4/2001), pp. 910-946, doi: 10.1353 / mfs.2001.0078 .
  • Reed Way Dasenbrock: Interview: Sandra Cisneros'. In: Dasenbrock: Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 1992, ISBN 0-87805-572-X , pp. 287-306.
  • Jacqueline Doyle: More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. In: MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) 19 (4/1994), pp. 5-35, doi: 10.2307 / 468200 .
  • Robin Ganz: Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings and Beyond. In: MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) 19 (1/1994), pp. 19-29, doi: 10.2307 / 467785 .
  • Deborah L. Madsen: Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2000, ISBN 1-57003-379-X .
  • Alvina E. Quintana: Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices. Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1996, ISBN 1-56639-373-6 .
  • Claudia Sadowski-Smith: Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville 2008, ISBN 978-0-8139-2689-6 .

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Cruz: On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street. 2001, p. 910.
  2. ^ Cisneros: Das Haus an der Mango Straße, p. 1. The original quote is: We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can't remember.
  3. ^ A b Fresh from the street - SPIEGEL editor Susanne Weingarten on the author Sandra Cisneros In: Der Spiegel. dated June 22, 1992.
  4. ^ The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation (1980–2012). In: BookWeb. American Booksellers Association, 2013, archived from the original March 13, 2013 ; Retrieved September 25, 2013 (1985 - The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros' ).
  5. ^ Sadowski-Smith: Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States. 2008, p. 33.
  6. ^ Complete: Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings and Beyond. 1994, p. 27.
  7. ↑ Interview with Tom Vitale on National Public Radio, quoted in Ganz 1994, p. 27.
  8. ^ Complete: Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings and Beyond. 1994, p. 22.
  9. ↑ Madsen: Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. 2000, p. 107.
  10. ^ Doyle: More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. P. 6.