In 1983, Sandra Cisneros released her collection of short stories titled The House on Mango Street
Esperanza, a young woman who writes in the first person, shares her adventures during her first year of living in a home on Mango Street. Esperanza gives a description of her new home, her routine, and her insights.
The book is situated in Chicago, Illinois
Chicago is home to many Spanish-speaking Latinos. Evidently, authors prefer to communicate their personal experience or situation in the society through writing. As a result, the author chose to use the locales because she spent a large portion of her youth there. The author accurately uses different settings to portray the period in which the novel exited. For instance, Esperanza and her family move to a low-income area. Moreover, the various plot of the tale tends to typify the period in which it was shared. The song Marin frequently sings to herself and the car Louie steals to establish the time like the late 1960s.
The House on Mango Street has various symbolic aspects
including the image of the house where Esperanza lived is highly symbolic-it was drab, crooked and small. The house serves as a reminder that she has neither the finances nor the desired surroundings; it is also used to describe women's confinement in the novel or their independence and liberation. In The Four Skinny Trees, Esperanza relates with the trees since they do not seem to fit the neighborhood but persist even though it tends to ground them. She does not belong to this surroundings, but perseveres despite the obstacles that her poor neighborhood poses.
