¿Donde Esta Mango Street?

Sandra Cisneros’s coming-of-age novel “The House On Mango Street” follows Esperanza Cordero through the trials of being a young girl coming to grips with her Latina-hood in a hood of Latinos. Cisneros doesn’t specify if she is a Mexican Latina or a Puerto Rican Latina or a Dominican Latina; she omits all identifiers of parks, neighborhoods, buildings, and could be set in any myriad of Latino neighborhoods spread throughout the country, such as New York City, Detroit, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and all of Texas, yet anyone who’s ventured into apartment hunting in Chicago will immediately be punched in the face by the fist of recognition by the clump of streets listed on page one, chapter one, and know that this story wholly Chicagoan.

“We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember.”

*Paulina is pronounced Paw-Lie-Na, to all you outsiders.

But Mango Street is a fictional street, and the town in which it is set is unnamed. Writers have a tendency to borrow ideas from real-life experiences, however, and Cisneros is a Chicago based writer, so the location of the real-life counterpart of Mango Street annoyed me like the sound of sirens outside my apartment window in five minute intervals. I decided enough was enough! I had to know where Mango Street was.

Ethnicity

Knowing ethnicity to maneuver your way through Chicago is as essential as identifying neighborhoods in Chicago identifying the toe protrusions of your shoes to know which one is left and which is right. The Chinese have Chinatown in Bronzeville; the Koreans have Korea-town on Lawrence next to Jefferson Park; the Jews have Touhy Ave. and Rogers Park; the Puerto Ricans in Humboldt Park down the westside on North Ave.; Mexicans have Pilsen on 18^th Street; African-Americans have the southside, and the list goes on and on. The fact is that Chicago is an extremely diverse and, in turn, extremely segregated city. So much so, in fact, that sociologist coined a new term to describe Chicago’s ethnic borders, Hyper-segregation.

So what’s Esperanza’s ethnicity? Cisneros doesn’t readily identify her as anything, but there is one little excerpt that implies her great-grandmother was Mexican while talking about her ethnic name:

“It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it’s mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse – which is suppose to be bad luck if you’re born a female- but I think this is a chinese lie, because the chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong.”
-from the chapter “My Name”

She compares the sentiments of the Chinese to that of Mexicans, implying that she has inside knowledge of the inner-workings of Mexican sentiments.

Great! Now we have an ethnicity.

Neighborhood

Due to this new found evidence, I’m going to take a calculated gamble here and say its most likely set in Pilsen, a predominately Mexican-american community. How can we be sure we’re dealing with a Hispanic neighborhood and not just a Hispanic family in any neighborhood? White Flight of course!

Esperanza experiences this after she becomes friends with one of her white neighbors, Cathy:

“Cathy’s father will have to fly to France one day and find her great great distant grand cousin on her father’s side and inherit the family house. How do I know this is so? She told me so. In the meantime they’ll have to move a little further north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in.”
-from the chapter “Cathy, Queen of Cats”

The movement North by Chicago’s most prestigious family’s and residents is nothing new. Since the days before the great fire of 1871, the areas north of the business district were where the movers, shakers, and money makers decided to build their residences, leaving the southern portions to immigrants flocking to Chicago to work in the most industrialized areas.

“…people like us” means that Esperanza lived in a neighborhood quickly filling up with Mexicans, so much so that Cathy’s family had to move “north.”

Pilsen is situated southwest of Down Town, and predominately white neighborhoods lie north, such as the West Loop, Little Italy, Wicker Park, Bucktown, Lincoln Park.

Final Conclussion

After hours of close reading the text, triangulation of Loomis, Keeler, and Paulina, the three streets we know Esperanza definitely doesn’t live anymore, and deducing those possible neighborhoods from the list, I was able to pin point the exact location for the inspiration of Mango Street.

Drum Roll Please:

1525 N. Campbell St., in the Humboldt Park neighborhood.

Actually no, I didn’t do all that, I just looked it up on Sandra Cisneros’s website. But it was a fun journey and I hope you read the book. It’s rich with vivid characters and language, and it is definitely a piece of the canon of Chicago Literature.

Chi-Raq in Literature: Exhibit A

Cover of "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen

“The south side of Chicago," starts Jim Croce’s 1973 hit song “Leroy Brown,”  “is the baddest part of town. And if you go down there, you best beware of a man named Leroy Brown.”

Now, I’m not sure about Leroy Brown, but Chicago’s south side has definitely garnered a nasty reputation. To refer to “The south side” is to refer to an entire general portion of the city that draws connotations of strict racial polarization, poverty, and rampant crime; and, though it technically begins anywhere south of the down town area, around Roosevelt Rd., those familiar with the city landscape will argue that it refers to just about anywhere south of the Bronzeville neighborhood, inhabited by predominantly African-American communities. 

"Chicago South Side has long had a distinct identity. Often identified in the second half of the twentieth century with the city's African American population..." 

- Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society

Area consisting of Chicago's South Side

Statistically, this area has been the breeding ground for a high percentage of violent crimes, as shown in this map.Yet crime in this part of town is more historical than racial. Prior to the turn of the 20^th century, and into the 1970's, this section was home to Chicago’s vast shipping docks, slaughter houses, rail yards, and shanty towns which invited labor workers from all over the country, citizens and immigrants alike, which, in turn, was the spring board to brothels, gambling houses, and to rampant violent crime. You could read more about the South Side's history on the Chicago Historical Society's website. 

Residents of Chicago's south side have historically been collateral damage in the city's gentrification process around the down town business district, or the Loop, and in turn have felt victimized by a much larger socioeconomic structure. This sentiment has prompted much anger and pain in these communities and the feeling that there is little to no help in sight from the city's political structure.  

Violence here is so prominent it's even prompted the use of the term “Chi-raq,” a combination of the words “Chicago” and “Iraq,” a suggestion that conflict in Chicago is comparable to that of a military war zone. It's debatable where the term came from, but Chicago rapper Chief Keef popularized in his "Chi-raq" mixtapes. Recently renowned film director, Spike Lee, has brought it to the national consciousnesses by (and has been scrutinized for) further glorifying the moniker in his new film, Chi-raq, which takes place, where else? You guessed it, in the city's south side.

Which brings us to Jonathan Franzen. The National Book Award winning writer from Western Springs, Il., a southwest Chicago suburb, is known for his novels "The Corrections," "Freedom," and most recently "Purity." Fanzen is a master at shining the spotlight on the drama of common dysfunctional families. His novel "Freedom" brought him much acclaim and earned him a feature in Time Magazine at it's release.

"Freedom" is about the horribly unsatisfied Berglund clan. Each and all of the members of this selfish family can never seem to get a grasp of the satisfaction of life's beautiful opportunities dangling in front of their eyes, and are constantly searching the next best alternative. (Read the book!)

Chicago's south side was not lost on Franzen. In this college flashback scene from Chapter 2, page 111(HC version), Walter Burglund's girlfriend, Patty(later his wife), decides to take a cross-country road trip with his less stable, wannabe rock star roommate, Richard, with fantasies of wooing him into bed and dumping the more educated and politically ambitious Walter. 

During this road-trip from Minnesota, the party van drives through Chicago's south side to look for one of Richard's grunge buddies:

“She had about three hours to entertain this fantasy-staring at the taillights of the traffic rushing down and down toward the great metropolis, and wondering what it would like to be Richards’s chick, wondering if a woman he respected might succeed in changing him, imagining herself never going back to Minnesota, trying to picture the apartment they might find to live in, savoring the thought of unleashing Richard on her contemptuous middle sister, picturing her family’s consternation at how cool she’s become, and imagining her nightly erasure-before they landed in the reality of Chicago’s southside. It was 2 a.m. and Richard couldn’t find Herrera’s friends’ building. Rail yards and dark, haunted rivers blocking their way. The streets were deserted except for gypsy cabs and occasional Scary Black Youths of the kind one read about.”

-Freedom, Jonathan Franzen

 This is a minor example in relation to authors we'll look at later, such as Sandra Cisneros, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Studs Terkel; yet this little excerpt exhibits so many subtle innuendos.

Analysis:
1) Contrast:
 Notice the first, long sentence. Patty's daydreams are embossed in between two hyphens, then the sentence suddenly ends when she is snapped to as they "landed in the reality if Chicago's southside." Period. End of sentence. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Franzen does not elaborate what the consequences of the driving through the southside at 2 a.m. are, but they can't be good if it's enough to snap Patty from her daydreams. This is such a clear and contrasting example that the reader immediately feels sense of urgency to get indoors.

2) Adjectives:
His use of adjectives describing the rivers and the taxi cabs aren't flattering. They aren't just rivers, they are "dark, haunted rivers." And they aren't just cabs, but "gyspy" cabs. What would a Northside river and cab look like in Franzen's novel? But check for your wallets, everyone!

3) Capital Letters:
What do writers normally capitalize? Titles, brands, and proper names. Let's say I was reading "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen on the El on the way to Doctor Martinez's office for an appointment, while listening to "Serial" on my Sony Walkman(dated, I know).

When something is capitalized one can readily identify a specific functional purpose to the capitalization; it becomes a  proper noun. So in this passage Franzen capitalizes "Scary Black Youths," and describes them of the "kind one read about." This is no accident.

He does this to highlight the general perception of being a young black person in the south side. Scary Black Youth is their title that they can't shake, because if you haven't been to the southside, you should've at least "read about" them.

Thank you for reading and come back as we discuss further discuss Chi-Raq in literature in future posts.