Mamacita is what Esperanza and her friends call the wife of a neighbor in “No Speak English.” This man saved to bring his wife to the U.S., and one day she arrived with her baby boy and lots of luggage. Since then she hasn’t come out of their apartment; some say it’s because she’s too fat or because she’s afraid of the stairs, but Esperanza believes it’s because she can’t speak English. The woman is homesick and cries for the house where she used to live, but her husband says they are home. He tells her to speak English, but she won’t or can’t; now her baby is learning to talk, and he talks English.
In “Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays,” Esperanza tells of a young woman whose husband goes out every Tuesday night with his friends and locks her in the apartment. She leans out the window watching the children in the street, listening to the music from the bar where she wishes she could go to dance. Rafaela lowers a dollar from her window on a string and asks the girls to go get her a fruit juice drink.
“Sally” is a girl Esperanza knows. At school Sally dresses seductively; before she goes home, she changes her style so that her strict father will not notice how she has looked. Sally and her best friend had a bitter fight, and now she has no friend. Boys laugh and tell stories about Sally that Esperanza says are not true.
Another girl, Minerva, not much older than Esperanza, has two babies and a husband who keeps leaving but coming back. In “Minerva Writes Poems,” Esperanza says that she and Minerva talk and show their poems to each other. Minerva is always sad, always in some kind of trouble. One day she tells her husband to get out and stay out, but he comes back, she lets him in, and then he beats her up again. Minerva asks Esperanza what she can do.
In “Bums in the Attic,” Esperanza describes the house she wants to have someday. Her father is a gardener in a wealthy district, and on his day off he used to take his family to look at those places where he works. Now Esperanza refuses to go with them. Still, she wants a house like one of those; she says she’ll let passing bums stay at her house, and they can sleep in the attic.
