In these chapters, we get to know Esperanza a little better, and we feel her relax a bit, allowing her language to become slightly more informal and at the same time more colorful.
How old is Esperanza? About a year later, she will imply that she is about to enter the eighth grade, so we may guess that she is now eleven or twelve. But (as another Cisneros protagonist will remind us) "eleven" contains ten, and nine — and three, for that matter; each "age" remains within the person, layered over with the added years like the inside of an onion. In these chapters, "ten" or even "nine" seems to predominate in Esperanza, who rides triple on a bike and jumps through (or from?) a tree.
As everyone who has ever been eleven or twelve ought to remember, no one moves suddenly and irrevocably into adulthood or even adolescence — nor is the move a smoothly gradual one. Throughout Mango Street, Esperanza provides a superb illustration of this sometimes-uncomfortable truth: Sometimes she seems to look backward into childhood, sometimes forward into womanhood. Part of the reason for her looking backward, in this group of chapters, is that she has become acquainted with some neighborhood children, most of whom seem to be younger than she. Socialization seems to be easy for Esperanza, and she naturally gravitates into the familiar relationships and activities of childhood. She accepts Cathy as a short-term "friend" but quickly changes this allegiance, which means little to her, for another "friendship" with Lucy and Rachel (who tells Esperanza that for five dollars she'll be her friend forever); she knows none of these is the "best friend" she has wished to have. Esperanza is not the kind of girl who hangs out with younger children so she can boss them around, but she and Lucy both have younger sisters whom they cannot ignore, and there seems to be only one older girl in the neighborhood — Marin, about whose name Esperanza is not even sure at first, and whose makeup and dark hose signify that she has already made the short crossing out of childhood.
