The House on Mango Street

by

Sandra Cisneros

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The House on Mango Street makes teaching easy.

Dreams and Beauty Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Language and Names Theme Icon
Gender and Sexuality Theme Icon
Foreigness and Society Theme Icon
Identity and Autonomy Theme Icon
Dreams and Beauty Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The House on Mango Street, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dreams and Beauty Theme Icon

Dreams and beauty are spread throughout The House on Mango Street, and most often come as a means of escaping the harsh realities of life. Esperanza’s name means “hope” in Spanish, and dreams and beauty pervade even the writing style, which is poetic and dreamlike and scattered with internal rhymes like “their height was not tall, and their feet were very small.” Esperanza’s dream of a house also recurs throughout the book.

The idea of creating beauty offers another kind of dreaming and escape. Esperanza finds that describing things with beautiful language makes life seem less hard, and she starts to recite poems and write her own. The “monkey garden” represents another incarnation of escape through beauty, as the children create fantasies and mythologies to make their lives seem better. Throughout the book they also look up at clouds and compare them to people or objects. This fantasizing, like Esperanza’s storytelling, becomes another form of hoping for something better in the future, or a life far from Mango Street.

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Dreams and Beauty Quotes in The House on Mango Street

Below you will find the important quotes in The House on Mango Street related to the theme of Dreams and Beauty.
Chapter 1 Quotes

I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it. The house on Mango Street isn’t it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how those things go.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker), Mama, Papa
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Someday I will have a best friend of my own. One I can tell my secrets to. One who will understand my jokes without my having to explain them. Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting… It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse – which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female – but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

And since Marin’s skirts are shorter and since her eyes are pretty, and since Marin is already older than us in many ways, the boys who do pass by say stupid things like I am in love with those two green apples you call eyes… And Marin just looks at them without blinking and is not afraid.

Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker), Marin
Page Number: 27
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

No wonder everybody gave up. Just stopped looking out when little Efren chipped his buck tooth on a parking meter and didn’t even stop Refugia from getting her head stuck between two slats in the back gate and nobody looked up not once the day Angel Vargas learned to fly and dropped from the sky like a sugar donut, just like a falling star, and exploded down to earth without even an “Oh.”

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker), Angel Vargas, Rosa Vargas
Page Number: 30
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

That’s nice. That’s very good, she said in her tired voice. You just remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and I said yes, but at that time I didn’t know what she meant.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker), Aunt Lupe (speaker)
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

What about a house, I say, because that’s what I came for.

Ah, yes, a home in the heart. I see a home in the heart.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker), Elenita (speaker)
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

Ruthie sees lovely things everywhere. I might be telling her a joke and she’ll stop and say: The moon is beautiful like a balloon. Or somebody might be singing and she’ll point to a few clouds: Look, Marlon Brando.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker), Ruthie
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 28 Quotes

Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can’t see.

A boy held me once so hard, I swear, I felt the grip and weight of his arms, but it was a dream.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep…

When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees… Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Page Number: 74-75
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn’t have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a room is waiting for you.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker), Sally
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 34 Quotes

One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I’ll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

In the movies there is always one with red red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away.

I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Page Number: 89
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 38 Quotes

Somebody started the lie that the monkey garden had been there before anything. We liked to think the garden could hide things for a thousand years. There beneath the roots of soggy flowers were the bones of murdered pirates and dinosaurs, the eye of a unicorn turned to coal.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Monkey Garden
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 41 Quotes

When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are.

Related Characters: The Three Sisters (speaker), Esperanza Cordero
Related Symbols: The Three Sisters
Page Number: 105
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 43 Quotes

Not a man’s house… A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed… Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Related Symbols: Shoes
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 44 Quotes

I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free.

One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Page Number: 110
Explanation and Analysis:

They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.

Related Characters: Esperanza Cordero (speaker)
Page Number: 110
Explanation and Analysis: