Marin Character Analysis in The House on Mango Street

An older Puerto Rican girl who lives with her cousins on Mango Street. Marin sells Avon makeup and spends most of her days baby-sitting, and so cannot leave the house. She dreams of both marrying her boyfriend in Puerto Rico and being swept away by a rich man in Chicago.

Marin Quotes in The House on Mango Street

The The House on Mango Street quotes below are all either spoken by Marin or refer to Marin. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

). Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer to the Vintage Books edition of The House on Mango Street published in 2009.

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: (speaker),

Page Number and Citation: 27

Explanation and Analysis:

Marin Character Timeline in The House on Mango Street

The timeline below shows where the character Marin appears in The House on Mango Street. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

...the Puerto Rican family, and he becomes friends with one of Esperanza’s brothers. Louie’s cousin Marin also lives with them in the basement. She is older than Esperanza and wears dark... (full context)

Marin (Louie’s cousin) has a boyfriend back in Puerto Rico whom she secretly wants to marry... (full context)

Esperanza likes Marin, who has lots of useful knowledge – like how girls get pregnant, how to remove... (full context)

As the chapter ends Esperanza imagines Marin somewhere else in the future. She is dancing beneath a streetlight, waiting for “a star... (full context)

The chapter is mostly Marin answering questions from the police. At a dance that night she had met a young... (full context)