Summary
Marin goes to dances whenever she can. One night, she danced with Geraldo, a young man from Mexico who didn't speak English. Later Geraldo was struck by a car, and Marin went with him to the hospital and waited while he died. He had no identification.
"Edna's Ruthie" is the daughter of a woman who owns the apartment house next door. She is odd (the only adult, Esperanza says, who likes to play), dresses strangely, and can't make decisions. She is living with her mother, although she is supposedly married and has a home of her own. Esperanza shows Ruthie her library books and once recited a poem for her.
"The Earl of Tennessee" is a man who lives in Edna's basement apartment, near where Esperanza and her friends gather. Sometimes he tells them to be quiet, because he sleeps days and works nights. He speaks with a southern accent, has two little dogs, and is said to have a wife who occasionally comes to visit him in his musty basement; several people have seen her, but they cannot even come close to agreeing on what she looks like.
A boy called "Sire" stares at Esperanza whenever she passes his house, but she refuses to act scared. Once she stared back. Sire fascinates Esperanza; her parents tell her to leave him alone. He has a girlfriend called Lois, and their relationship also fascinates Esperanza. She leans out her bedroom window at night and tries to imagine what it would be like if Sire held her and kissed her.
In "Four Skinny Trees," Esperanza describes the four trees that grow in front of her house. Esperanza identifies with the trees and says they too don't belong where they are, but that they use their anger to survive. She learns from them, she says, to keep going.
Analysis
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.
The "Earl of Tennessee" is another adult neighborhood character, almost as sad in his own way as Ruthie in hers (and Esperanza, who sees Rosa Vargas' sadness clearly because Rosa herself sees it so well and with such vehemence, is only beginning to recognize sadness in these other adults). Earl is a lonely man, living alone in a damp basement, where he listens to country-and-western records that have been discarded from the jukeboxes he repairs for a living. He works nights — a standard shift for men in his trade, who get calls from bars where the patrons complain loudly and bitterly if their jukebox is out of order — and takes his two little dogs with him for company. He is kind to the neighborhood kids, giving them records and only occasionally coming out in the daylight and telling them to pipe down. And, on occasion, he brings a woman home during his off-duty hours, hurrying her into his apartment and not staying long. Esperanza, assuming the woman is his wife, is puzzled that no one who sees them together can agree on what the woman looks like. It has not yet occurred to her that each of them has seen a different woman.
Sire is an older neighborhood boy whom Esperanza is attracted to. She has been afraid of him, as young girls often are of the boys who stare at them; this is not fear of what he might do to hurt her, but rather the intimidation one feels when one is looked at in the way that Sire looks at her. "Sire" is probably a nickname — perhaps taken from a movie, for the word is an archaic form of address for a man of authority. It is also a word that means father. Characteristically, Esperanza refuses to be intimidated; still, Sire bothers her, and the fact that her parents don't like him probably has an effect opposite to their intent. On the other hand, she doesn't seem to be jealous that Sire has a girlfriend, a dainty girl who lets Sire tie her shoes. Esperanza fantasizes what it would be like to be that girl, what it would be like if Sire were to kiss her. Since Esperanza's first kiss from a man was forced upon her and must have been unpleasant in the extreme, her interest in Sire is a hopeful sign that she has recovered — or will soon recover — from that insult to her young womanhood.
A recurring image in The House on Mango Street is that of a woman at a window, leaning on her elbow, watching the world outside her house or room. We see it first in "My Name," where Esperanza says she doesn't want to "inherit" this position from the great-grandmother whose namesake she is. It is the image of a captive, someone inside looking out, someone taking the world in through her eyes. Later Esperanza will associate this image with "Rapunzel," the fairy-tale princess whose lover reached the tower where she was imprisoned by climbing up Rapunzel's long hair. The women in Mango Street who assume this position are sometimes married, but they all seem to be, like Rapunzel (and like Marin, who stands in her family's doorway), waiting for someone to come and change their lives. Now, in "Sire," Esperanza herself leans out her window, wishing she were older and could stay out at night. She wants to be rescued from her tower, taken away from the parents who think boys like Sire are "punks" and girls like Lois, his girlfriend, sluts. Traditionally, that kind of rescue is by a young man; this is the way Esperanza's thoughts are now turning.
And, in "Four Skinny Trees," still leaning out her window, Esperanza is overtaken by a wave of adolescent angst, which she survives by almost literally seizing the branches of the four trees growing from the sidewalk in front of her house. As a poet, Esperanza may feel more than others a need to associate with natural beings; she has spoken of this need in "Darius and the Clouds," and it is true that in many cultures trees are special creatures, full of spiritual meaning for human beings. This too seems to be a sign of Esperanza's emotional health, for she is able to project her feelings of alienation, anger, intensity, and need for secrecy onto the trees, while taking from them their strength, determination, and deep-rootedness.
Glossary
"Pretty, too, . . . " i.e., good to look at; in Latino dialects, "pretty" is an acceptable adjective to be applied to a young man.
"cumbias, salsas, . . . rancheras . . . ." Latin dances fashionable in the middle 1960s.
kitchenettes i.e., "efficiency" apartments; small apartments consisting basically, apart from a bathroom, of a single room with a kitchenette.
babushka a headscarf folded into a triangle and tied under the chin.
Marlon Brando an American movie actor, first popular in the 1950s.
"The Walrus and the Carpenter" a "nonsense" poem from Through the Looking-Glass (a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) by Lewis Carroll (1832–98).
45 records seven-inch recorded vinyl disks to be played on a phonograph at 45 rpm (rotations per minute); each usually has a three-to-four minute song recorded on each side.
