The chapters in this group might be said to have a common theme—mystery, or perhaps ambiguity. The first four are concerned with people, incidents, and feelings that are mysterious to Esperanza in various ways. The fifth epitomizes the emotional ambiguity of adolescence, the feelings of anger and longing that Esperanza usually keeps within herself.
Geraldo “No Last Name” is himself a mystery that will never be solved, because he is dead and no one knows anything about him except that he was from Mexico. His family will wonder what became of him—probably they were depending upon money he was sending home—but there will be no way for them to find out. Marin, although she had danced with him, knew nothing about him and couldn’t remember where he said he worked. And why was Marin with him at that hour? Had he seemed likely to take her to a fine house far away? Whatever the case, he had touched her deeply enough that she waited at the hospital, where he was not saved—although he might have been, had he been luckier in several regards (including, Esperanza implies, luckier in his color, language, profession, and economic status—but then he might not have been walking at 3 a.m. with Marin).
In fact, there is probably only one place where a young man who rents a sleeping room in the city might have been going with Marin at 3 a.m. Whether they were going to his room or leaving it, walking to where Marin might catch a train or bus home, we will never know, as Marin is not heard from again in the book. But we know that Marin, surely no older than 15 and probably not quite that, would not go to a young man’s room without being “in love” with him, even if that love was of only a few hours duration, even if she had never learned his last name. Of course she would not be cold enough to leave him dying alone, although her presence in the waiting room could not help him.
In the last few paragraphs of “Geraldo,” Esperanza’s voice seems to change slightly, to become older, less puzzled about who Geraldo was and what Marin was doing with him. As elsewhere in the book—for example, in the last paragraph of “Marin”—Cisneros here seems to shift almost imperceptibly from Esperanza’s 12-year-old voice into the voice of the woman whom Esperanza will become. Perhaps, of course, these are merely instances of Esperanza’s jumping forward to age 25 or so, as she sometimes seems to jump backward to 9 or 10; such time-travel is rather common in early adolescence.
What Esperanza does not understand about Edna’s daughter Ruthie is why, if Ruthie has a house and a husband of her own, she would choose to stay on Mango Street. In fact, as Esperanza’s description of Ruthie and her behavior makes clear, this grown-up woman who likes to play is what adults might call “crazy”; unable to deal with whatever demands her adult life made of her, she has come back to the country of childhood where she is more comfortable. Ruthie, like Geraldo, is someone who might arguably have found help in the “system” had she lived in a middle-class neighborhood (and certainly had she lived in an upper-class one), and/or had her family and friends thought of her problems as the kind that professionals ought to deal with. But, as typical in working-class neighborhoods—at least in earlier years, and probably as late as the 1960s—the “crazy” person, whether seriously delusional or merely eccentric, is seen neither as someone who needs to be “cured” nor as someone who ought to be hidden away, kept out of “normal” society. Ruthie will fare better than Geraldo, of course; her condition is not going to kill her, at least not immediately, and she is almost certainly happier than, say, a wealthy industrialist’s daughter with similar deficiencies, who would probably be institutionalized. But her teeth are rotting, her eyesight is bad, her mental condition may deteriorate and her mother will surely grow old and die, leaving Ruthie to become a neighborhood “character,” uncared for by a future generation of children, unable finally to care for herself.
In Ruthie—as in similar women and men she encounters in the streets of her city—Esperanza sees yet another possibility for her own future. What would bring a cheerful, apparently once-capable woman to such a pass? Why, if she had a husband who loved her, would he not still love her and care for her? Ruthie tells Esperanza that she used to be a writer, and if this is true Esperanza has a reason to feel a degree of closeness between herself and Edna’s daughter. Ruthie’s creativity has not saved her. Esperanza memorizes a longish poem to recite for Ruthie—a fantastic, “crazy” poem by a man who wrote children’s books and who played with children, preferring them apparently to adults.
