Or, that could be read in a series to tell one big story. I wanted stories like poems, compact and lyrical and ending with a reverberation.
The House on Mango Street is the story of Esperanza and her neighborhood on Mango Street. As Esperanza struggles to break free from the cycle of poverty, marriage, motherhood, and broken dreams she sees on her street, she must also come to terms with her place in the community and the responsibilities she has toward it as a member. The source of the book's inspiration has practically become part of its story. When Cisneros was a graduate student in the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, one of her classes was discussing the idea of physical space, based on writings by French philosopher and poet Gaston Bachelard. In his book Poetics of Space, Bachelard suggests that space deeply affects, even inspires, a person. Cisneros's classmates seemed to agree, but she felt at odds with the whole concept. In her introduction to the Knopf 1994 tenth anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street, she writes of her reaction: "What was this guy talking about when he mentioned the familiar and comforting 'house of memory'? It was obvious he never had to clean one or pay the landlord rent for one like ours."
Growing up, Cisneros and her family shuttled between Chicago and Mexico, where her father's family lived.
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