Esperanza, Nenny, Lucy, and Rachel are talking about getting “Hips.” Esperanza gives the others some scientific information learned from Alicia and says one has to practice walking with hips; Nenny says that the walk is to rock a baby inside you to sleep. The girls are jumping rope, and their thoughts fit in with their jump-rope steps and rhymes. Everyone makes up an original rhyme for double-dutch, but Nenny uses a worn-out old rhyme.
In “The First Job,” Esperanza gets a summer job in a photo-development establishment where her aunt works. She needs the money in order to go to the Catholic high school, and she lies about her age in order to get the job, which she finds easy but tiring. She is nervous in her new workplace; at last a man befriends her, but he does so only to take sexual advantage of her.
Early one morning, Esperanza’s father tells her that her grandfather is dead. He weeps, and Esperanza thinks how she would feel should he die. As the eldest child, she must tell the others the news. She knows her father will go to Mexico for the funeral.
Esperanza has an aunt who has been ill for years, lying in bed while her husband and two sons take care of her, the house, and each other, a job they don’t do too well. Esperanza has sometimes read to her from her library books and once read one of her own poems to her aunt. Aunt Lupe told her to keep writing. Now, in “Born Bad,” Esperanza is ashamed because she and Lucy and Rachel have, for fun, imitated Aunt Lupe’s voice and mannerisms, laughing at the way she did and said things. Esperanza’s mother happened to see them and was angry, and now Lupe has died.
Esperanza goes to visit a “witch woman” in “Elenita, Cards, Palm, Water.” This person knows how to tell fortunes by various means and also knows how to make things happen by magic. Elenita sends her children out of the room while she tells Esperanza’s fortune. Esperanza is disappointed because she wants in particular to find out if she will have a house. Finally she asks Elenita, who says Esperanza will have a home in the heart—something Esperanza doesn’t understand.
