The House On Mango Street: Identity

            “All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight.”

            A central piece of the adolescent experience is finding your true identity. As we age, we are constantly trying to decide the kind of person we are and where we belong in the world. Everyone looks for the place that they best belong, where they feel like their truest self. The House On Mango Street is no exception to the adolescent search for identity. If anything, the central character, Esperanza, has a more difficult time discovering her identity because of the prejudice against her race and sex she experiences. It is already difficult enough to discover your identity, so adding the stereotypes that surround being a woman of Latin heritage complicate Esperanza’s journey of self-discovery. The quote above is one of the most poignant pictures of the struggle to find identity. While Esperanza feels at home in her community that is “all brown all around,” the second she ventures outside of it, she is unsure of herself. She feels judged by white people, by rich people, by those who drive by and stick up their noses at the way Esperanza and her neighbors live. She feels rejected, less than. Despite Esperanza’s comfort in her own world, she feels a desperate desire to have a home like those who look down on her. She wants to break free of the lifestyle of her community. As her story unfolds in each vignette, we learn that Esperanza is saddened by the girls who’s fathers beat them, by the ones who get married to early, by the ones that leave school because they’re ashamed of their clothes. She feels like she needs to flee, to get away from Mango Street, to find a house and an education and a life fuller than the one she lives in now. While many in her community remain in the difficult life forced upon them by systemic racial and sexual oppression, Esperanza feels the need to escape.

            At first, that’s all it is. A need to escape. A desire to do more than what her community offers her. But as Esperanza grows, she realizes her purpose is to break out of the oppression and come back for the ones who aren’t strong enough to break out. To rescue them from the life that discrimination and poverty has thrust upon them. Esperanza, by the end of the book, has mostly reconciled her desire to run with her desire to remain loyal to her culture.

            That’s the thing about Esperanza’s identity. Because she is a Latina, she has little to no opportunity offered to her. As a Latin person, she is thought to be lazy and unintelligent. As a woman, she is thought to be worthless to greater society, nothing more than a child-bearing, sexual object. She sees the way her friends and family allow themselves to get swept away by the stereotypes. Take Sally, for example. Life is so hard on her she just wants to escape. She has accepted that her identity will always be “victim,” and marries an abusive man just like her father is abusive. The difference between Sally and Esperanza is, that while both accept where they come from, Esperanza does not accept where the world has her going. She embraces her identity as a Latina, but she refuses to let the world’s preconceived notions of what a Latina’s life should be like keep her from realizing her full value and potential as a human being. She starts her own quiet revolts, like leaving her chair untucked after dinner because she doesn’t want to become the obedient housewife. She decides to work hard in school and leave Mango Street so she can be strong and come back for her loved ones. Esperanza accepts her identity as a Latina girl, but more than that, she accepts her personal identity as Esperanza. Although her race and sex make that harder to do, Esperanza slowly learns throughout the book what it means to be brown, to be a woman, and to be Esperanza. By the end of the novel, she doesn’t seem to feel the need to be anyone else.