Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Leslie S. Gutiérrez-Jones

SOURCE: "Different Voices: The Re-Bildung of the Barrio in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street," in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, edited by Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 295-312.

In the essay below, Gutiérrez-Jones discusses Cisneros's transformation of conventional elements of the Bildungsroman genre in The House on Mango Street, focusing on the link between communal and individual narrative strategies.

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The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.

            —de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Dreaming of a day when she might attain the "American dream" of home ownership, the young protagonist of Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street promises herself that if that day comes, she will joyfully...
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