In the following essay, Sarbanes, a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Los Angeles, assesses The House on Mango Street as an unusual example of both the novel form and the bildungsroman ("coming of age" story) as previously explored from the Chicano perspective.

Sandra Cisneros is a Chicago-born Chicana activist, poet, and fiction writer. She has published two collections of poems, Bad Boys(1980) and My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987), and a collection of short stories entitled Woman Hollering Creek (1991). Her novel, The House on Mango Street, (1983) was awarded the Before Columbus American Book Award.

The House on Mango Street is the fictional autobiography of Esperanza Cordera, an adolescent Mexican American girl who wants to be a writer. Unlike the chapters in a conventional novel, the forty-four vignettes, or literary sketches, which make up the novel could each stand on its own as a short story. Read together, they...