House On Mango Street Role Model

Role Models House on Mango Street is a book containing vignettes, instead of chapters, written by Sandra Cisneros. The main character is a girl named Esperanza who is living in Chicago in the mid to late 1960s and 1970s. This was a time when the American Feminism Movement was gaining momentum and changing the way people viewed the traditional roles of women in the family, the workforce, and society. Choosing appropriate role models to explore and possibly break the traditional roles of women is a major theme in The House on Mango Street. In the beginning of the book, as a young girl, Esperanza struggles with the reality that she does not yet know who she wants to be when she is older. Through each vignette, she becomes older and encounters problems like many other people her age: being embarrassed often, wanting to fit in, and trying to decide who she wants to be. The reason she feels these emotions is mainly because of her culture. Esperanza is Latina, and her culture plays a big role in what she does or is meant to do as she grows up. To compensate for these feelings, she chooses several female role models throughout her life, who also live near her, to give her some idea of what she could do with her life, and how to change her life so she can become something …show more content…
Alicia’s mother died when Alicia was young, so she was given the task of doing all the things her mother would have done. Esperanza looks up to Alicia because she is studying at the university and trying to escape their cultural expectations. “Two trains and a bus because she doesn’t want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin” (Cisneros 31-32). Esperanza wants to follow in Alicia’s footsteps because Alicia does not want to follow her role in her culture, but instead, do something greater. Esperanza feels that she too should break away from her culture and become something more than what her culture expects her to