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There are several significances in Esperanza’s analysis. At first, through the comprehensive analysis of Esperanza, her personality, responsibility, growth process and her real life will be decoded. Secondly, because Cisneros embeds her story and ambition into the narrator Esperanza, therefore, the analysis of the heroine, in some way, is to detect the author’s attitudes to Chicanas and their problems. It can help us to better understand the real life of Chicana, their problems and how they trying to change their problems. Thus it can help readers to comprehend the novel in directly way and to know what the author wants to tell. It also helps researchers study the whole novel well. Last but not least, The House on Mango Street is a master work of Chicana Literature. Through the comprehensive analysis of Esperanza, the hidden Chicana Literature features and themes can be found. Therefore, it can also help readers to know Chicana literature deeply.
II. About the Author and the Novel
2.1 Sandra Cisneros
“Sandra Cisneros was born in 1954 in Chicago. Her father is a Spanish-speaking Mexican and her mother is an English-speaking Mexican descent. She was the third child and only daughter in a family of seven children. While she spent most of her childhood in one of Chicago’s Puerto Rican neighborhoods, she also traveled back and forth to Mexico with her family.” (Doyle 12) Cisneros has published two books of poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Woman; a children’s book titled Hair; a collection of stories titled Woman Hollering Greek and other stories; and most recently a second novel, Caramelo. The House on Mango Street was her masterpiece. Her works reflect the issues of race and gender in the 1980s. Cisneros is part of a group of Chicana and Latina writers who became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s.
The terms Chicana or Chicano is a chosen identity of Mexicans, primarily of indigenous or mestizo origin who grew up in the United States. The name “Chicana” is not interchangeable with Mexican-American. Both names are chosen identities within the Mexican community of the United States. The term became widely used during the Chicano Movement, mainly amongst those Mexicans of the United States who wanted to express a new self-identity, an identity based on community values, rather than the assimilationist mentality of Mexican-American. The term Chicana is also used to describe the literary. Chicana literature tends to focus on themes of identity, discrimination, and culture, with an emphasis on validating Mexican American and Chicano culture in the United States. Rodolfo Gonzales’s Yo Soy Joaquin is one of the first examples of Chicano poetry, while José Antonio Villarreal’ s Pocho is widely recognized as the first major Chicana novel. The novel, Chicana by Richard Vasquez, was the first novel about Mexican-Americans to be released by a major publisher.
2.2 The House on Mango Street
The House on Mango Street makes Cisneros best known. It received mostly positive reviews when it was published in 1984, and it has sold more than two million copies worldwide. It is a traditional coming-of-age story. Only one year passes over the course of the novel, but Esperanza (the heroine) matures tremendously during this period. The House on Mango Street consists of several vignettes that are not quite poems and not quite full stories. Cisneros call them “lazy poems”. The vignettes are something only two or three paragraphs long, and they often contain internal rhymes, as a poem might. This form also reflects a young girl’s short attention span, flitting from one topic to another, never placing too much importance on any one event.