House on Mango StreetBy Sandra Cisneros

Background Information on Sandra Cisneros-Born in 1954 in Chicago, IL-Father is Mexican and mother is Mexican-American-She has 6 brothers-During her childhood, her family moved frequently between Mexico City and Chicago-She recalls a great deal of loneliness from the constant moves and not having a sister

Cisneros Continued… She was very shy and spent a great deal

of time reading Her favorite book was The Little House

because it described the kind of stable family she longed for

She wrote in secret during her elementary school years

In high school, she wrote poetry and edited the school literary magazine

Cisneros in College While in a creative writing class in

college in 1974, she began writing seriously and developing her own unique voice

She received a B.A. in English from Loyola University in Chicago and her M.A. from the writing program at the University of Iowa

She was the only minority female in the class so she felt like an outsider. This feeling led her to develop her

own unique voice

Cisneros’ Writing House on Mango Street was her first

book written in 1983 Some of her other works are: My Wicked

Ways (1987), Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), and Loose Woman: Poems (1994)

Sandra Cisneros currently lives and writes in San Antonio, TX

Voice The quality of a piece of writing that makes it

the author’s own Writers work to develop a distinct, individual

voice When Sandra Cisneros was enrolled in the Iowa

Writer’s Workshop in the late 1970’s, she was the only Mexican-American woman in the group

She realized that she could not write in the same way as her classmates because her life experiences as a poor girl living in a barrio were so different from what they had experienced

She began to write about things she knew and developed her own unique voice

Figures of Speech Literary devices that give the writer a

non-literal way to describe images and events

Example: “My papa’s hair is like a broom, all up in the air.” Simile (Esperanza uses this description of

her father’s hair in “Hairs” on page 6)

Character Notes An author creates a

character, in this case Esperanza Cordero, by giving her traits such as physical attributes, thoughts, and feelings

The author develops these traits by telling what the character says, does, and thinks

Writers usually base their characters, at least in part, on a real person or persons, and then elaborate The life of the

narrator, Esperanza Cordero, is in many ways similar to that of Sandra Cisneros

Character continued… A good writer will

make the characters believable for the readers.

House on Mango Street is a “coming-of-age” story where the central character becomes more aware of herself because of events that occur.

In this memoir, the awareness comes because of Esperanza’s experiences growing up in the barrio neighborhood in Chicago.