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 18th 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.
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