Esperanza Rising Essay

Esperanza Rising Essay

  • Submitted By: srap
  • Date Submitted: 05/29/2013 5:45 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 404
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 196

In The House On Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros portrays an adolescent girl’s

view of her neighborhood through a series of vignettes. An excerpt from “Those Who

Don’t” states:

“Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake.

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. Yeah. That is how it goes and goes.”


The main character, Ezperanza, is a teenage girl in the midst of becoming a

woman. Esperanza’s story is told with a series of “snapshots” of her hispanic

neighborhood. The neighborhood is filled with trouble, poverty, and crime. She grows up

ashamed of her poverty, and sometimes tries to hide it from others. There aren’t any

neighborhoods that are extremely dangerous directly near me;however, crime

can happen anywhere you go.

Esperanza’s vignettes show the people in her neighborhood, and what happens

in their daily lives. Some commit crimes, some are strange, and some are good citizens

that have nothing wrong with them. They are all stereotyped. No matter how good or bad, smart or stupid, they are all labelled.
Esperanza lives on Mango Street, a street filled with poverty, crime, and sadness. The people on her street struggle with their daily lives, but they still dream. They dream that they will get out of Mango street, but few make it out. Esperanza often is one of the ones who dreams of making it out of Mango Street, making it out of the hardships and poverty. Esperanza sometimes tries to hide her poverty from others, including her school teachers. Although many in her neighborhood are poor, she still tries to hide this.
There aren’t any neighborhoods directly around our neighborhood that are really...

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