Esperanza's Future

In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza is really Sandra Cisneros. The story by itself is simply realistic- if not Cisneros, then Esperanza may be someone that Cisneros once knew. However, there are to many key points that point towards it being Cisneros herself.


On page 109, it describes Esperanza as being a story teller. "I like to tell stories. I am going to tell you a story about a girl who didn't want to belong." This makes a strong connection between Esperanza and Cisneros. Cisneros has written countless other novels, and the book implies that Esperanza has done this as well. One of the most important parts of Cisneros being who she is has to do with her amazing writing skills; to say that Esperanza has also become a writer over time says that Esperanza is, in fact, Cisneros.

Another bit of evidence is on pages 10 and 11. Esperanza is describing just how much she hates her name, and how much she wants to change it. "I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees." So. Sandra Cisneros might not always have been Sandra. Perhaps she really did change her name, and marriage could explain the last name.

Now. The prompt for the assignment was, in a nutshell, to explain what Esperanza's future is. What will she do, who will she save? I believe that her way of saving these people. That Esperanza, now Sandra, wrote this novel as a way of helping the one's that "can't out".

Okay what.

      Chapters eight and nine. The first sentence of chapter eight is okay- she's exhausted, okay, that's understandable, every person gets exhausted from something at one point or another. But then the second and third lines are,

"She hadn’t had a healthy appetite in forever and had a hard time sleeping the last few nights. But on the flipside, becoming a non-eating insomniac did wonders to a girl’s figure."

This is basically thinspo. This line is telling girls that it's a good idea to starve yourself and get absolutely no sleep, because then you can lose weight and be 'beautiful'. Both of these things are completely unhealthy and I find it appalling that the author is spreading this message like it's good advice. So no, I don't think that she's a relatable protagonist. Anyways, she's apparently a complete and total outcast with no friends other than Stella, who is supposed to be popular at this huge high school but she only has over two hundred friends. I mean, here at ASTI, this teeny high school, most students have over five hundred friends. If you're trying to be realistic, give her a larger amount of friends. Jeez. Get real.
      Another of the questions involves whether or not being Filipino is cool, or whether she should be a different ethnicity. Truth is, the ethnicity really doesn't matter. As long as she has a personality and good character development, no one cares. She could be African, she could be Italian, she could be Chinese, she could be Canadian... it doesn't matter.
      Also, it says 'heartthrob' twice, once in Dorothy's thoughts and once in Stella's speach. Change up the diction a little, will ya?
      And both Adrian and Dorothy are unrealistic characters. It's like you stuck in a Mary Sue and a Gary Stu and paired 'em up. Make them believable.
      Dialogue doesn't contribute or take away from anything. It's dialogue. It's in every fiction novel. I dare you to find one novel that is fiction that spans more than three hundred pages and has absolutely no dialogue at all whatsoever. Seriously.
      And no. Adrian is not compelling. I feel like stealing his wallet, taking all the money and cards out, and taking a crap in it before returning it.

Gender Inequalities

   In the book The House on Manga Street, a series of vignettes by Sandra Cisnero, the gender inequality is highly noticeable. Men aren't necessarily treated better, but they get away with more and aren't pushed to do as much work as the women do.
    In the vignette titled "Marin" it says, "She says he didn't get a job yet, but she's saving the money she gets from selling Avon and taking care of her cousins," (page 26). Marin is putting in quite a lot of effort in order to marry and live with her boyfriend, who lives in Puetro Rico, but he hasn't even gone out and gotten himself a job yet. People just accept this- they don't find it unfair or uneven, and they don't try to persuade Marin that this boy isn't worth it. They've been trained to think that the woman has to be a strong, hard worker, but the man barely has to do any work at all. This is also shown in another quote from the same vignette, "When the light in her aunt's room goes out, Marin lights a cigarette and it doesn't matter if it's cold out or if the radio doesn't work or if we've got nothing to say to each other," (page 27). Here, once again, is the imbalance. The girls are out there in the cold, waiting and waiting for some hormone driven boy to sweep them off their feet. They've already made it very easy for any boy to walk up and make a move. They've already done all of the hard work. Because women, of course, MUST do all of the work in order to make something, even a relationship, happen.

Holding Bubble Bees

Holding Bubble Bees

Table of Contents

1. The Bees
2. Her
3. No Fear
4. Amazing Grace
5. Funnies
6. Blowing Bubbles

The Bees

    I used to be afraid of bees. I used to scream at the sight of them, run away, hide in the corner of my room until Mutti came to get me. When I was younger there were a lot of bees where I lived. They were innocent, of course. All bees are. A bee will not sting a person unless it is necessary- for when they sting a person, they die. All of their organs pool out and they fall to the ground, only to be stomped on.
    There were a lot of bees in the backyard at the house that I lived in with my family. They lived between the trees, hiding in the grass and bushes. They hovered over the surface of the old pond and rested on the wood of the work bench that leaned against the house. I was never stung, but I always kept an eye out.
    We owned a lot of animals, too. I tried to keep them away from the bees, because I wanted to make sure that the animals stayed safe. But we had too many- we had a zoo in our house. Five cats, two dogs, a rabbit, four chinchillas, a cage full of rats, another cage full of mice, and a guinea pig. I couldn't keep the bees away from all of them forever, no matter how hard I tried.
    We owned a shovel. I never got to touch it, but my brother used it a lot. I never saw the holes, but I could always find the places where the grass had been torn away and the soil had been packed differently. I would stare at them solemnly and the bees would just fly away. I miss all of the small ones we buried.



    Her
   
    I was eleven when I met her. It was Thanksgiving. My uncle was bringing his new girlfriend and her daughter along for the meal. I shook hands with the daughter, and her hands were soft and small. My own were soft as well, though they were calloused. We shook hands, and we became fast friends, doing everything together, going everywhere together, playing games together, ogling at boys together.
    I had other friends, too, from school. I played games with them, pretend games that involved ghosts and magic. But we were growing up, and pretending was such an awfully childish thing to do. We acted as though what we did was real, and that the rest of the world was blind.
    I told Her about the ghosts. I wanted to impress Her, to make Her think that I was powerful or something like that, because we were constantly competing, trying to be better than the other.
    “I can see ghosts,” I told Her proudly. “And I have the ability to let them possess me.”
    Of course She thought it was spectacular. She wanted in on the game. Slowly but surly, over the next few months, I was forced to incorporate Her into the game- I had to act as though She were a mermaid princess. Then, as She developed her make-believe powers and Her supposed beauty, She wanted more. It was my job to supply Her,
    Some of them didn't even have names. Most of them didn't have personalities. They were Her boyfriends, the 'privileged' and made up souls that haunted my days. They were me, I was them. Rules no longer exist, or personal opinions. Reality was stretched, sexuality was disrespected. I was taken advantage of. I didn't tell anyone for about a year, though I did eventually tell my Mutti. Staring down at my hands, mumbling my words, and she didn't seem surprised. She just apologized.
    “I should have known,” she said, and she hugged me.
    My calloused hands grew ugly in my eyes, and I was sure that Hers were just as clean and smooth as before. It wasn't fair. None of it was fair.
    One day I called her mother, my uncle's girlfriend, and told her about what had happened. She didn't believe me, but that's okay because at least my hands weren't dirty anymore.




    No Fear
   
    I've never cried at a funeral before. I always cry after, when I've got my thoughts to myself. My grampa died when I was a year old, so I never got to meet him. But when I was five, we all visited his grave: me, my parents, my siblings, my aunt, and my gramma. The cemetery was fairly empty that day. I still remember how overcast the sky was, and how green the grass was, and how beautiful all the trees were. I didn't sit under them, though, on one of the many benches available. I sat on the grass, plucked at the flowers, and rested my chin on my knees, crying about my dead grampa that I never met.
    There were lots of bees there. My brother told me not to be scared, and that I was being ridiculous. He was always braver than I was, and still is.
    By that time I already knew that a bee would only sting a person if it really needed to. I kept this in mind as I approached one buzzing fellow, slowly making my way forward and bending to my knees. The bee ignored my presence, fluttering from one tiny flower to the next. I sat forward to see it better, and it was then that I saw just how fuzzy the bee was.
    It was adorable, this furry little thing.
    “Don't be scared of bees,” he said, my brother. “They're not going to hurt you.”


    Amazing Grace

    “My daddy can't see.”
    I've always known that he was blind. I can't think of a single time that I didn't know. Ever since I first knew how to blow bubbles, ever since I first started chasing butterflies, I've always understood that my father couldn't see a thing. Up until a couple years ago, he'd always had his guide dog, Bowler, who was a black lab with a bad hip. Bowler had been a part of the family since I was a month old.
    “Why's he got that cane?”
    People didn't know that he used his cane to sweep the sidewalk to make sure that he wouldn't run into anything. He had the cane, and Bowler, and sometimes he still ran into street signs or other people.
    “Can he see the faces I'm making?”
    Often times, my siblings and I, and sometimes my friends, would stand in front of him and make silly faces at him because we knew he couldn't see. What we didn't know was that he could feel the air shifting around us, and he could hear practically every move we made. My daddy had good hearing.
    “My daddy can't see.”
    I like to show him off, like a special pet. Whenever someone new meets him, whenever someone comes to my house, my tan and red house with the short pine tree out front, I always have to tell them that he's blind. He's my daddy, my daddy who can't see.


    Funnies

    People in my family know how to laugh.
    My brother’s funny is like medicine. He's a genius. He always knows just what he can say to make a person laugh so hard they cry. He makes jokes about life, about politics, about religion, and about subjects that would usually be serious. When I was really little, whenever I would scrape my knee or hit my head on the edge of a cupboard, he wouldn’t just tell me it was okay, like most people. He would make sympathetic jokes, and soon I’d be laughing more than crying. As I got older I stopped crying altogether. Now, if I accidentally hurt myself, the pain doesn’t last that long--the medicine of laughter lasts forever. My brother can cure anyone.
    My sister’s funny is a thorn. She likes to poke fun at people. Even if she admires someone, she'll make a joke about their personality or appearance. She talks about people that come into the store she works at, and about people on the Internet. She can be just as funny as my brother, but in her own way. Her husband likes to make fun of people, too, but more in the teasing sort of way. He says it to their faces, but in such a way that they laugh, too. He helps people to be able to laugh about themselves.
    My dad’s funny is a lot younger. He has a really dorky sense of humor. People don't always laugh at what he has to say. He gets really funny when he starts pretending to argue- he's really good at bantering with me or my mom, and we always end up giggling madly. I wish he would do that when my siblings were around- then they could see that dad can be humorous, too. They’ve never seen his funny before.
    My mom’s funny is like an old book. She’s the one that knows best. She's the wisest of us all, and because she knows so many years and so many tales and just so much about life in general, she knows which strings to pull and which buttons to press to make us laugh. She jokes like my brother. In fact, he got his funny from her. It's like when we start joking around, they become part of the same brain and they're always on the same page.
    I don't really know what my funny is yet. I'm young, undeveloped. I'd like to think that my funny is a mix of everyone else in my family- I know how to joke around just like each and every one of them. I can make people laugh about current events in politics. I can get people to laugh at themselves. I can argue playfully with someone to get them grinning. But I don't know what I'll be like in ten years, or how much my funny will have changed.

Roses and Tuesdays

      In the book The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros writes a series of vignettes following the life of a girl named Esperanza. In the book, Cisnero uses quite a lot of symbolism, and she repeats her utilization of certain things like feet, windows, and the color red. She also uses roses as symbolism, and Tuesdays. The roses seem to represent moments of warmth and happiness whiles Tuesdays represent losing something. However, the loss that comes with this symbol isn't always a bad thing, as though Esperanza is starting new.

      On page six, when she is describing her family through their hair, she says,

"But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day..." (paragraph two) 

Here she describes the mother's hair as being like rosettes. Esperanza finds comfort and happiness in her mother, and one of the features that she likes the most is her hair. Then, on page 50, Esperanza is discussing hips with Nenny, Lucy, and Rachel.

"They bloom like roses, I continue, because it's obvious I'm the only one who can speak with any authority; I have science on my side," (paragraph four). 

She describes hips as blooming like roses because she feels comfortable with the subject, and comfort with the fact that she is being listened to.

      Roses may also be used to describe discomfort. On page 77, she describes the toes of Mamacita as being like "tiny rosebuds". Since the rest of the story is about discomfort and cutting herself off from the world, I believe that Esperanza uses this to explain that Mamacita tries to be comfortable with herself, but may fail at this. Then, on page 101, a chapter is titled "Linoleum Roses". The chapter in question is about Sally marrying a man who doesn't turn out to be the best husband. The chapter title symbolizes that Sally wanted to find comfort and happiness with her husband, and that she wanted to escape her home and her father, but that this happiness turned out very wrong. Like a gorgeous dress being made of sharp glass, these roses aren't natural- they're made of linoleum. Not silver, not copper, not any precious metal. Linoleum.

Now onto the topic of Tuesdays. I only have two quotes, and my idea isn't much more than that: an idea. A could-be.

 "You want a friend, she says. Okay, I'll be your friend. But only till next Tuesday," (page 13, paragraph two). 

Then, on page 42, it says,

"Lucy hides [the shoes] under a powerful bushel basket on the back porch, until one Tuesday her mother, who is very clean, throws them away. But no one complains."

 Cathy will be moving away on Tuesday, thus leaving Esperanza's life. However, Esperanza never really becomes her friend. They talk for a bit, but then Esperanza meets Rachel and Lucy and becomes friends with them instead. So she loses Cathy, but doesn't really care. And this happens on a Tuesday. Then, Lucy, Rachel, and Esperanza desperately don't want to have anything to do with the shoes because of what happened to them when they wore them. The shoes are gotten rid of on a Tuesday, but the girls probably feel relief more than anything else. Thus, Tuesday is a day of losing things in a good way.

Pirates

This is what I've written so far for a humorous piece I'm working on that is, so far, title-less. I think I like it more than Nolias. Thoughts?
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    Ttom wasn't used to pubs. Well, not ones with lots of ale. He wasn't used to drinking either, or gambling, or anything else like that. It was because of this that he stood out- he was clean and shaven and wore upper class clothing, a healthy pink in his cheeks. Perhaps to outsiders he would look like a strong young man; here he looked like a lumpy sack of flesh and bones.

    He stared around at loud, drunken men who laughed and roared between each other. In one corner, a group huddled together with pipes in their mouths, all of them cheating at their current game of poker. Near the center, a few men who'd had one drink too many were singing off-key to an old sailor's song. There were various arm-wrestling games scattered about the room, and the tinkling of gold coins after one man or the other would win. Ttom pushed his way through the room and, after getting lost a few times, eventually made it to the back where the bartender was.

    The man cracked a toothy grin at him. He was a large man, the kind who could easily crack your skull with one hand and still be able to read a book at the same time, if he so chose to. “Aye!” he said. “Wha's a shrimp like yerself doin' in 'ere?”

    Ttom glanced down at the yellow parchment he held in his hands and said, “Er... I'm looking for... Luna Zeget?”

    “'round these parts we call 'er Captain Luna,” the man said, passing a tall, dark drink to an old, sad-looking man. “An' wha' kinda business might yeh have with 'er, eh?”

    Ttom sighed. “Look, is she here or not?”

    The man pointed to one of the darker corners of the huge room. Sitting at the farthest back table were two people, a man and a woman. Ttom approached cautiously, and waited until he'd gotten their attention before speaking. “Er, hello,” he said lamely. “My name is... I mean...”

    The woman set her drink down and glared up at him. “Hey,” she said, stopping him as he tried to say a few coherent words. “Spit it out.”

    “Well, you see, my name is Ttomas Melmoor and, er...”

    “Boy-o,” the man said, taking a swig of what smelled like whiskey. “Git on with it. We 'aven't got all day.”

    “I wanted to know... if I could join your crew.” He gulped and stared Luna straight in the eye, trying to seem brave. She laughed wildly, catching the attention of those nearest to them for only a moment.

    “You!” she choked. “A scrawny thing like you!”

    Ttom's shoulders slumped. He supposed he should have expected this response. And even if he were to carefully explain his reasoning for wanting to join her crew, she probably still wouldn't allow it. But it was worth a try, wasn't it? “Listen,” he said. “I really need this.”

    “Boy-o,” the man said, chuckling. “Give it a rest, already. We don't need yeh.”

    “Wait, wait, wait,” Luna said, trying to calm her mad laughter. She took a long chug of her drink and said, “Yeh can have a job... washing floors!”

    Ttom hesitated. If he agreed, she would have to let him, even if she'd been joking around in the first place. However, doing such a thing would most likely rob him of any strands of dignity he still had left in him. Then again, what dignity did he have left after coming into this place, this pub full of pirates? None, as far as he was concerned. To other peoples, he would appear to be a strong, lean young man with a good future ahead of him... to these people, he was a wiry scrap of nothing.

    “Alright,” he said. “I'll take the job.”

    Luna howled with laughter. The man had an expression that was a mix between disgust and amusement. “I am Caption Luna Zeget, as yeh well may know,” she chuckled. “And this 'ere, this fantastic bastard is-”

    “Tobias Carlen,” the man said, turning in his seat. “Yeh'll call me Sir, though, or yer ass is dead.”