The first of these works, The House on Mango Street, originally published in 1984, has been especially popular in schools. The narrator and main character is Esperanza Cordero, a girl just entering adolescence, who introduces and describes her family and friends and her day-to-day life with all its troubles and pleasures, in a direct, engaging, and delightfully original voice. Esperanza speaks to readers her own age in their own language; older readers will gain from her narrative an ironic awareness that Esperanza herself does not yet possess.
The book has been called a collection of stories, even a group of prose poems. Yet if a novel is a longish fiction following the course of ordinary life and showing the development of a character through tension and conflict, Mango Street fits the definition very comfortably. Its central theme is a universal one: a young girl's struggle both to find her own place within her culture and, at the same time, to discover and preserve her individuality. The book's structure, which may appear at first to be a random ordering of incidents and reflections, is actually what holds the seemingly disparate pieces of narrative together, creating lines of tension and conflict out of what Esperanza tells us.
