SOURCE: Valdes, Maria Elena de. “The Critical Reception of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street.” In Gender, Self, and Society: Proceedings of the IV International Conference on the Hispanic Cultures of the United States, edited by Renate von Bardeleben, pp. 287-95. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

In the following essay, Valdes provides an overview of critical responses to The House on Mango Street, based on reviews published in three different sets of sources: mainstream newspapers, academic journals, and the ethnic-oriented periodicals. Valdes examines the intersection of the “symbolic reader” and the “implied reader” in Cisneros's text.

In 1984 a young Chicana writer from Chicago published The House on Mango Street, a post-modern novel which weaves a tapestry of apparently isolated vignettes into a poetic unity. The public response from readers has been predictably of three kinds: 1) reviews in the daily press, especially in the Southwest, where Cisneros's publishers are...