The first four chapters have little or no plot action and minimal—although valuable—exposition: We learn the names of the speaker and her siblings and something about their ages and birth order (Kiki is the youngest of the four, he and Carlos are “best friends”—so it’s a safe guess that Carlos, too, is younger than Esperanza—and Nenny is younger as well, so Esperanza must be the eldest). We learn something about the family’s ethnicity and socio-economic status. But most of what happens in these first four chapters is our introduction to Esperanza.
As the narrator, Esperanza speaks to her audience (the reader) with a total absence of self-consciousness. To whom is Esperanza speaking/writing? Although sometimes she records feelings and impressions in a manner that suggests a private journal or diary, more often she includes information that a diarist (especially a child) would probably deem unnecessary. She will occasionally address other characters directly, but for the most part, what she says and the way she says it suggests that the hearer/reader she has in mind is someone like herself, a girl her own age who does not know her but who understands what she is saying because the two are simpático. In other words, she seems consciously or unconsciously to be addressing the “best friend” she has not yet met.
What Esperanza tells directly about herself here is relatively little; what she tells indirectly is a good deal more informative. First of all, she is at this point a child, although in certain ways, she is older than her years. She still gets in bed with her parents for comfort; she enumerates small differences among family members that prove each is an individual. Part of her self-identity is as an older sister. She feels responsible for guiding Nenny, although there is a lack of sympathy between her and her sister.
Esperanza is also childish in what she selects to tell: not her parents’ names, for example, but only Papa and Mama; not their occupations (something only adults consider important), but how their hair looks. Her disappointment in the “new” house is childish; she tells us very little about it but does not hide her resentment that it is not something better. She is naïve enough to have hoped for her parents’ dream house and childish enough to reveal her disappointment, despite her realization that this is probably not just a temporary move for the family and her attempt to sound sophisticated about that realization.
In at least one way, however, Esperanza is already the woman she will become. She values her strength and her independence (her identification with her great-grandmother); she is someone who makes her own decisions and refuses to be a follower (unlike Nenny, who will become just like the Vargas kids if allowed to play with them). Even the fact that she volunteers very little about herself is indicative of her independence: She keeps her own counsel. Esperanza sees herself as somewhat mysterious. If she could, she would re-baptize herself as “something like Zeze the X,” someone unusual, exotic—and masked.
As readers, we should remember that Esperanza’s real name (chosen by her parents, fictionally, but chosen by Cisneros actually) has value not only as a device for revealing what this protagonist doesn’t like: the sad, old-fashioned Mexican associations it has for her; its passive, “feminine” sound (unlike “Zeze the X”); its harsh consonants when spoken in English; the impossibility of its being shortened into a nickname. Translated into English, Esperanza tells us, her name means “hope,” and of course that is basically what it means. But it shares its Latin root with the English words “spirit” and “aspiration” (something more than mere “hope”: ambition, daring, strong desire), both of which, like the Spanish word “esperanza,” derive from a word meaning breath. The spirit that animates this protagonist is what distinguishes her. Until she has a “best friend,” she says (meaning, until she is able to choose a friend, as she cannot choose her family, for being a child is by definition being unable to choose), she will be like a balloon on a tether, unable to rise with the spirit that fills her.
