Aunt Lupe, ill for a long time, has been a sort of fixture in Esperanza’s life, her condition both frightening and repulsive to the girl. Now the person who praised her poetry is dead. And with her aunt’s death, Esperanza moves closer toward her own mortality: Why was this woman, young and pretty once, struck down? Finally Esperanza can only believe that death does not choose for a reason but merely points at random to its next victim. It is an unsettling and very adult thought. The combined emotions surrounding these deaths bring dreams to Esperanza and her friends, and they discover for the first time that the dead can haunt the living.
Part of the horror Aunt Lupe’s illness has inspired in Esperanza and her friends (who have visited Lupe together) may stem from the condition of the sick woman’s house and the kind of care she has received from her husband and sons. Traditionally, the wife and mother is in charge of all housework, including cooking and cleaning but also, often, repairs, painting, and refinishing as well. Lupe has obviously not been able to hold up her end of this household work, and (as Esperanza makes clear in this chapter) her husband and sons resent having to perform these “feminine” chores and show their resentment by performing them badly or not at all. The dishes pile up in the sink, Lupe’s sheets are dirty, as are the walls and ceiling. Like the other adult women Esperanza knows and will come to know, her aunt serves as a sort of model; this is one possible future for Esperanza herself, and a terrible, terrifying one. If men are always possessed of the power in sexual and marital relationships, the men in Lupe’s life are using that power cruelly against their wife and mother, and clearly no one expects any other kind of behavior from them.
Darkness enters these chapters in another way as well. While some of the changes associated with growing older are exciting (the blossoming of the womanly figures that the girls will need to know how to deal with) and others at least somewhat positive (Esperanza’s feeling that science is “on her side” and her imaginative self-assurance, despite the fact that these developments are carrying her “light years” beyond and away from Nenny), still other changes are disturbing.
The further Esperanza gets from childhood, the less she can be protected—and, ironically, the more she is in need of protection. Her parents are determined that she continue to go to Catholic schools, where they believe (perhaps with justification) that she will be morally safer than in a public high school. This eventuality may still be some time in the future, but in order to make it possible, Esperanza now needs to get a job and thus needs to look older than she is. This is a family decision, but once away from her family and neighborhood, Esperanza is in territory that holds dangers for a young girl who has managed to appear older than her age. In another foreshadowing of what will happen to her in a later chapter, Esperanza in her innocence is taken advantage of by a man who pretends to be her friend. Forced by circumstances to enter this part of the adult world on her own, she is initiated into its sexual dangers in a distressing and—to a young girl—frightening way.
A note is in order, at this point, on the book’s structure. As a coming-of-age novel, Mango Street takes its plot from the tensions that exist for its protagonist—between childhood and adulthood, between identification with family and community and the discovery of self-identity and independence, and between the unconventional life of the mind and the conventional “feminine” choices of marriage and family. Aware of these tensions but not able or willing to verbalize them, still Esperanza is concerned about what choices she can and ought to make. But telling her own story, she can relate only some things that happen, some things she does, that seem to her important. She cannot tell us the plot, nor even select and order the incidents she does tell us, at least not in such a way that would show she is somehow aware of their relationship and meaning. That selection and ordering is up to the clever writer, Sandra Cisneros, and its interpretation as plot is up to us—the clever readers.
The book’s structure, as we have noted, seems to be more or less linear; that is, the incidents and Esperanza’s reflections seem to be taking place in more or less chronological order, or at least there is no reason to believe they are not told at least more or less in the order of their happening. But while some chapters seem to follow in direct succession, there seem to be relatively long periods of time between other chapters. At this point, it seems safe to say that Esperanza’s family moved into the house on Mango Street during the summer before Esperanza entered the seventh grade. The first 14 chapters take place during that summer, while Esperanza is still getting acquainted with the neighborhood. Beginning with “Darius and the Clouds,” Esperanza is in school, but it seems that “Hips” may be the last chapter whose incidents take place during the school year. Will Esperanza enter the eighth grade in the next fall? She will say specifically, near the end of the book, that Sally (a classmate) is not yet in the eighth grade. And she will say, also, in one of the final chapters, that she has lived in the house on Mango Street for just one year.
Whatever the exact timetable of these incidents, the chapters from “The First Job” through the end of the book seem to recount the events of only one summer—the last summer of childhood for Esperanza, and, as such, one of those long, long seasons that seem in retrospect to have gone on forever. Although it has its idyllic moments, it is not a happy summer for Esperanza. Still keeping her own counsel for the most part, she is not given to rehearsing her worries, but we know that she has them when she tells us she has gone to a “witch-woman,” a fortune-teller, to learn her future. What Elenita tells her is a conventional, canned sort of fortune. Esperanza wants to believe—at the same time that she wants not to know (she must force herself not to run into the other room to watch Bugs Bunny)—but at last, she must tell the fortune-teller what she wants to hear.
