As the only daughter in a family with five brothers, Sandra Cisneros took refuge in gathering the details of her life. In her 1983 debut novel "The House on Mango Street," Cisneros adopts the language of her 12-year-old protagonist Esperanza Cordero to tell a story about poverty and patriarchy from the viewpoint of seeing the years of status quo needlessly continuing around her.
Her family's down payment on a modest home in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood is the centerpiece of her story. To hear Esperanza tell it, much like what history teaches us, the dream of the 20th Century was home ownership. Over a single year of her life, we are with her as myriad small experiences (told in vignette-like chapters) combine to spell out a huge lesson.
First and foremost, after years of moving from place to place (loosely based on her father's peripatetic lifestyle), the children thought that stability would result from owning a home where the water pipes were not broken or you had to scale an outside stairwell. Even when they move into the deeply red-colored house, there is still no privacy and there is still another Puerto Rican family who wants to rent the basement.
Cisneros tempers this harsh reality with Esperanza's adaptation to the neighborhood. Other houses on the street are also fully occupied where other young girls' only taste of freedom is standing in the doorway singing. The other escape for these adolescent women is their discovery of themselves and by the men who too often circle the neighborhood like vultures. The essence of male control and abuse is the saddest reality of all in the novel. Esperanza writes poetry to cope with her loneliness (as Cisneros did as well thanks to the encouragement of a high school teacher) but cannot escape the waves of trauma that nearly envelop her small circle of female friends.
In the beginning, "Mango Street" is carefully collecting the events of daily life in the neighborhood. We see that Esperanza has an innate sense of right and wrong (the implication of admiration for the bright yellow Cadillac leads to a neighbor's arrest for car theft provides an early lesson) and Cisneros lets in hints of the beauty that she and Esperanza found in this world:
Then he starts it up and all sorts of things start happening. It's like all of the sudden he let go a million moths all over the dusty furniture and swan-neck shadows and in our bones. It's like drops of water. Or like marimbas only with a funny little plucked sound to it like if you were running your fingers across the teeth of a metal comb.
In passages like this, Cisneros speaks through Esperanza in finding the right words like both author and character had found the poetry within everyday life. It is this sense of identity that sneaks up on you over the forty-four small chapters. Cisneros lulls you into her world with typical behavior and then shows you how those who cross the line, actually change Esperanza's perspective.
In the end, "The House on Mango Street" is most significant because of its vivid portrait of Latin culture (and in the Midwest, which is atypical). A simple street, like any one in nearly any place, is not the "rich tapestry" most writers would want to erect. To Cisneros, these are the pieces of her world that she seeks to get away from. Yet just like Joyce, Crews, Nathan McCall, and countless others - the world that one wanted to leave behind to find a better life actually made the author and will always be part of their writing.
Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
New This Week
SPEED ROUND
U2 - Songs of Surrender [2LP/2CD/DLX/SUPER DLX](Island)
For the first time ever, U2 is giving us re-recorded (and even some acoustic) versions of 40 songs in their lengthy catalog. To coincide with Bono's soon-to-be-published memoir, "Songs of Surrender" was how U2 spent the lockdown.
JULIAN LAGE - The Layers [LP/CD](Blue Note)
Guitarist extraordinaire Julian Lage is more quiet and intimate than "View With A Room," as Lage sits down with his drummer and bassist separated to record "duets" that are actually far denser (the title cut and the streams of notes in the middle of "This World") and more like the ECM records of the Seventies.
M83 - Fantasy [LP/CD](Mute/Elektra)
For their ninth record, M83 goes back to their most beloved ("Before The Dawn Heals Us" from 2005) and most successful (2011's "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming") for a record that is more like their dazzling days as a band. "Waters Deep" is highly uncharacteristic of anything they have done previously and generates real interest in this album (compared to the last two).
UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA - V [2LP/CD](Jagjaguwar/Secretly/AMPED)
Since the triumph of their "IC-01 Hanoi" EP in 2018, Ruban Nielson and the other members of this band still scattered over continents have been amassing a wealth of songs that range from Pop, to crunchy Rock to Hawaiian music (where it was recorded).
100 GECS - 10000 gecs [LP/CD](Dog Show/Atlantic)
The interregnum of the early Twenties was not kind to the HyperPop wizards Dylan Brady and Laura Les. While they did release singles (which are collected here), their glitchy, overdriven jams lost a lot of indie heat. As a result, the most identifiable tracks here are starting to sound like Alt.Rock from the Nineties ("Doritos and Fritos") which may not be the best thing.
