Mango Says Hello Sometimes: Introduction

The first entry in a new series that focuses on Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street

INTRODUCTION

I’m not as well read as most of the people I admire. I’ve lacked the stamina to become a true champion of literature, and also the discipline to develop it for myself. I am annually astounded by the reading lists of others, lists that often number in the hundreds, oceans upon oceans of words drunk. There have been a few periods of my life when I’ve found a faster pace, but even in those phases I may have finished thirty books from cover to cover. I read essays a lot, too, but those are harder to quantify.

Anyway, the titles I do land on usually become obsessions until they eventually become cornerstones. This is the way of things when you are prone to fixation. So just as often my reading choices come out of other obsessions, the selections presenting themselves as so many paths I’ll have to take to shake loose of whatever I’m hung up on, doors I’ll have to open if I want this other thing I care about to feel right.

It’s that time of year again in my school calendar, so I’d like to spend a lot of time sharing my thoughts—all of them, if I can help it—about one of these obsessions turned eternal in the roots of me. This one did not come from a prior passion or even my own looking. It is Sandra Cisneros’ triumph, The House on Mango Street. I didn’t read it until I started teaching it with my coworker, we’ll name her Rosa,¹ who had used the work for a few years. Since my first year teaching the novel in 2016, this little book has thrilled me and unspooled itself within me. It does still. It will next time. This is the way of things that are larger than time and space and can still fit in your lap.

This book and its author, its narrator, present themselves simply. The novel, or rather, the collection of scenes, memories, feelings, and dreams, is a window into a year in this young girl’s life, in a neighborhood that emerges as a character in its own right. And that is all it is, but in it, Cisneros plumbs meaning out of every single thing and she demonstrates that there is truly no end to the endless connections of the world. She does this by using her own childhood experiences, pairing them with her lived experience as a young Chicana writer and emerging on the other side with precious stones, flecks even, gems that unfold into themselves for eternity. It comes as though you are reading a journal of a dream of a real life, because that is what it is. Cisneros found the voice of her ancestors and the remembrances of her own past selves and gave them all such rich life that I struggle to avoid my sentimental musings for the thing she has done. And to prove how poor of a reader I am, it is the only title of hers that I have started.

And so we begin reading The House on Mango Street again in my 8^th grade English class. As we do, I would like to put down as much of that experience as I can for you to see and read if it grabs you that way. I have wanted to document this process for a long time. Teachers all have lines—each one probably has about a hundred, even if they couldn’t tell you one of them. I could tell you dozens of mine, even if I’d rather listen to all the ones I’m unaware of that 8^th graders are. One that applies here though is my reader’s mantra: somebody somewhere decided for this thing to be this way. It’ll get stuck in your mouth but not in your head if you just keep saying it. It will help you strike at your purpose as a reader, which is important territory for an educator. For while we all adore the personal pleasure and fulfillment that a book will bring us, our true purpose as readers is to seek a deeper understanding of the maker. This endeavor draws us closer to another individual, impossibly close, while allowing us at the same time to explore the depths of ourselves freely and without judgment. This is the way of things when you accept that a delivered work is the most precious reflection of its maker that they could possibly offer. When you acknowledge and accept a gift so perfect and so freely given, you acknowledge and accept, in part, the perfect gift that you are, too.

ON INTERPRETATION

I use this text in classrooms to teach the lesson of ultimate authorial control. Just as you can discover a new joke in each new viewing of Arrested Development, so too can you find new layers of Cisneros’ genius upon each reading of The House on Mango Street. There are universes embedded here, from a phrase to a sectional level and everywhere in between. So much so that I encourage my students to be detectives of her mark, tireless sleuths looking for any connection that may even possibly exist, because in Cisneros’ very special case, they likely do. From this launch point, we embark on the deepest literary dive I myself have ever participated in. We identify as much of her figurative language and symbolism as we can, and we seek to make interpretations of it: why did this somebody decide for this thing to be this way?

This is a dangerous landscape for the reader. Interpretation is slippery, and it can take a reader away from the objective qualities of a maker’s craft and into a world totally unintended by the author. We seek to rectify this problem by giving a floor for each and every interpretation as much as possible. These require evidence from the source text, a devoted attention to its every mark upon which to build analysis. Fortunately, the text here provides evidence in spades. One of the finest qualities of Mango St. is its flexible fabric. Cisneros presents such perfectly polished vignettes, which converge to make such a perfectly constructed whole, that almost every interpretation of her myriad chapters can coexist. Their coexistence in this scenario is markedly different than almost any other fictional work I’ve encountered because consistently, these repeatedly different interpretations almost never conflict with each other. Rather, Cisneros’ chapters allow each of them to breathe, and in so doing, allows each of them to be as plausibly true for the reader as the next. In these essays, I will attempt to offer as many of these interpretations as I have gathered over the years of studying this novel with my students. Many of these will come from students themselves, and I will merely be their broadcast.

MY PROCESS

I have not yet settled on how I would like to go about things, but I know it will be on a chapter by chapter basis at least to start. The difficulty is making navigable the countless connections that emerge across chapters within the novel. This will eventually alter the order of this analysis, or at least provide avenues to the reader as they explore my essays.

In class, we use the College Career and Readiness Standards system, a document which lays out the skills for students to master in their respective grade levels. While clunky, this system does make an honest attempt to quantify the universe that is language and literature, and provides teachers and students a general blueprint of various skills related to a content area like English Language Arts or Math. Obviously, the standards for Math lend themselves a bit more directly to this method. On the other hand, ELA standards are one by one packed with about four to six skills that an adult reader takes for granted.

One approach to this study would be to take chapters from these skills’ standpoint, unpacking each vignette from each standard’s perspective. This would be thorough, although I wonder if thoroughness will occur regardless. If it does, then the process of analyzing these chapters becomes the highest priority.

This leads me away from our standards-based analysis and into a realm that is less uniform, but more able to handle the constant jumping and connecting that this book so wonderfully utilizes. This direction will be more boring, though. It would be a line by line, phrase by phrase, chapter by chapter deconstruction of Cisneros’ text. This process would fully map my findings in this text, but navigating this map might prove challenging with the presentation of a Substack post. However I proceed, I’ll do my best to link and link and link everything I can.

MY PERSPECTIVE AS A MALE

The last element of this introduction has to focus on my own reader’s perspective, and the impossible oceans that separate me from a genuinely personal reading of The House on Mango Street. I am a white man, and this perfect book is about a Latina girl. This presents two gaps in experience that no amount of empathy can ever close. The lived experience of woman is wild and universal, and incomprehensible for anyone like me who has walked down each street of my life as a male, eaten dinner at every house as one, never once worried about my solitary preferences because I am one. As much as I can ever comment on or resonate with the experiences of Esperanza, our narrator and Cisneros placeholder, I will never be able to experience the events of this book in the way that our author did. Likewise, I will never have the relationship with this book that my Latina 8^th graders have. I would like to read their essays of this kind about this title, but they have not written them yet. I have a passion for this book that cannot wait that long, and one that is so sincere that I cannot any longer allow gender and culture barriers to keep me from celebrating this magnificent literary contribution. Hopefully this choice, and the publication that it inspires, will be in keeping with the overarching themes of Mango Street, themes I will explore and flesh out in my coming entries.

For now, I hope that this introduction will excite you into buying The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I hope that you will read it, and then you will read it again, and then you will read it one more time but closely. It will not take you long to read, but it will take you a good long time to work through it. This book is not a vacation; it was made for the living in it. I invite you now to live in it with me and my 8^th graders, and I hope I can deliver to you some insights that enhance your reading of this novel. I hope I can provide a document that even remotely strikes at the value of Cisneros’ writing, one that captures even a decibel of the loud wonder that this book will freely give you. Please join me!

1. Rosa and I share what I like to call the most productive creative relationship of my life. When I look back on my past decade in education, all the stories and poems and essays I’ve ever finished share a lack of the genuine, prolonged collaboration between two working people that Rosa and I have devoted to the assessments we author for our classes. This will be important later.