The House on Mango Street
“The house on Mango Street is about a young woman’s search for a house of her own, and by that I meant, the character was looking for another way to be” - Sandra Cisneros
An example text for this mapping unit is the House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, written in a series of short vignettes from the point of view of Esperanza, a young girl growing up in Chicago struggling to make sense of her world, as all young people are wont to do. A “deeply cartographic novel,” The House on Mango Street is indeed an attempt to map (and thus create) the microcosm of a world, an identity, a self, through words.
As the author says in the above quote, the search for a house of her own was at the same time a search for an identity, a place and understanding and purpose in the universe. In the very first vignette, for instance, a nun walks by a young Esperanza and points to the ramshackle apartment and asks, “You live there?” This pointing and naming and mapping of her home, her world, as a place of no value, consequently, imbues those who live there, as having little to no worth or meaning. The fact that this third-party judgement is made by a nun, also implies that perhaps God himself has decreed such a Divine Order to things, with Esperanza at the bottom of that transcendent and immutable hierarchy. The rest of the novel is her attempt to rename and remap the spectacle of her world, to re-value the given judgments, to wrest her destiny back from the clutches of the world, to become Self-authoring.
By mapping Esperanza’s own experiences and life journey, students can use the personal cartography strategies mentioned above as tools to think more deeply about her character change, and how those same lessons apply to their own lives .The vignette form is also a great starting point for mapping and writing about the self. The short sketch form allows them to be written frequently on all manner of specific places, memories, people, etc that usually form a larger narrative memoir, without being presented as a long form essay assignment.
Mapping Esperanza’s Heart
Give every student a blank heart map form. Explain to them they will be creating a heart map for the main character in the story, Esperanza. They can begin this at any time after starting the novel. What are the things, people, places, and memories that are most important to the main character? What does she most value and aspire to? This can be done in groups or individually. These can then be compared and discussed as a class, with attention given to the varying form and content. For instance, what are the differences between what students decided to place more in the center of Esperanza’s map? Are there differences in the frame? (i.e. did some students use a different frame than a heart? How might that change the meaning of the map?). The heart maps of Esperanza can be used as notes for a written character analysis. Also consider having students create two heart maps for Esperanza, one near the beginning of the novel, when Esperanza is a child, and one later on when she has grown up and experienced more of life. By comparing the two maps side by side, students have a visual and symbolic representation of character change and growth over the course of a novel. This can also be very helpful in writing a literary character analysis.
X Marks the Name
As an example of how easily any of the map strategies can be adapted for a lesson:
- Have students (re)read the vignette “My Name.”
- Give students a blank (heart) map form
- Have students create a Name Map (See teaching strategies above) for Esperanza.
- Have students create their own name map in a similar style.
- Have students write their own name vignettes based on their map. Include the resulting work in their Atlas of Experience portfolio.
Mapping our World and our House
Having students create a neighborhood or “home” map is a perfect mapping assignment to use with the House on Mango Street since that novel is so centered on physical space and its influence on identity. By inviting students to map their home (and the idea of ‘home’ should intentionally be left nebulous. It can mean a child’s room, or house, or street, or neighborhood) they will automatically be in a conversation with Sandra Cisneros and the issues of the novel.
For example, one 7th grader named Cristian wrote a series of vignettes each focusing on persons that lived near him on the street he grew up on, inspired by The House on Mango Street. When asked to draw this microcosm “world” as a map, he drew the street he lived on with the houses next to his in bright vivid colors, each belonging to people which have influenced him in various and positive ways. The street and block across from him was depicted as a wide grey no man’s land, a forbidden territory of drug use and violence where he was not allowed to go. A solitary figure was drawn in this area, a person Cristian called “Jay” who is a drug dealer. Jay is judged by everyone, including the world and Cristian’s parents, as a degenerate to be avoided, and yet, in a profound value-rendering within his written vignettes, Jay becomes to Cristian a kind of Virgil figure, one who lives in the “land of the dead'' and yet is very wise, and acts as a guide and protector of Cristian, who also does not allow Cristian to visit his side of the street or become involved with drugs, but tries to guide him in positive ways as best he can. In a very real sense, Cristian’s microcosm, his world is bound by the street block, and yet all of heaven and earth exists there in full. Cristian’s maps and vignettes formed the cornerstones of extended conversations and thinking about what he values and why, and a deep reflection on how to navigate difficult moral and social interactions without losing his own conscience.
