House on Mango Street

1. House on Mango Street By Sandra Cisneros

2. Background Information on Sandra Cisneros -Born in 1954 in Chicago, IL -Father is Mexican and mother is Mexican-American -She has 6 brothers -During her childhood, her family moved frequently between Mexico City and Chicago -She recalls a great deal of loneliness from the constant moves and not having a sister

3. Cisneros Continued… • She was very shy and spent a great deal of time reading • Her favorite book was The Little House because it described the kind of stable family she longed for • She wrote in secret during her elementary school years • In high school, she wrote poetry and edited the school literary magazine

4. Cisneros in College • While in a creative writing class in college in 1974, she began writing seriously and developing her own unique voice • She received a B.A. in English from Loyola University in Chicago and her M.A. from the writing program at the University of Iowa • She was the only minority female in the class so she felt like an outsider. • This feeling led her to develop her own unique voice

5. Cisneros’ Writing • House on Mango Street was her first book written in 1983 • Some of her other works are: My Wicked Ways (1987), Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), and Loose Woman: Poems (1994) • Sandra Cisneros currently lives and writes in San Antonio, TX

6. Voice • The quality of a piece of writing that makes it the author’s own • Writers work to develop a distinct, individual voice • When Sandra Cisneros was enrolled in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the late 1970’s, she was the only Mexican-American woman in the group • She realized that she could not write in the same way as her classmates because her life experiences as a poor girl living in a barrio were so different from what they had experienced • She began to write about things she knew and developed her own unique voice

7. Figures of Speech • Literary devices that give the writer a non-literal way to describe images and events • Example: “My papa’s hair is like a broom, all up in the air.” • Simile (Esperanza uses this description of her father’s hair in “Hairs” on page 6)

8. Character Notes • An author creates a character, in this case Esperanza Cordero, by giving her traits such as physical attributes, thoughts, and feelings • The author develops these traits by telling what the character says, does, and thinks • Writers usually base their characters, at least in part, on a real person or persons, and then elaborate • The life of the narrator, Esperanza Cordero, is in many ways similar to that of Sandra Cisneros

9. Character continued… • A good writer will make the characters believable for the readers. • House on Mango Streetis a “coming-of-age” story where the central character becomes more aware of herself because of events that occur. • In this memoir, the awareness comes because of Esperanza’s experiences growing up in the barrio neighborhood in Chicago.