¶ … Esperanza's community have on her identity? Esperanza comes from a poor Latin family. She is Chicana and her friends Lucy and Rachel are both Chicana-American as well. Although she tries to socialize and connect with her community, that community creates the urge to leave for Esperanza. The house Esperanza moved to alongside her family is small. She has no privacy and she lives in a racially segregated neighborhood.

This may be helpful for someone moving into the country, but for someone like Esperanza, it creates further divide. On top of that, she feels shame for the condition in which she has to live in. She tries to cover up the fact that her family is working class. This is very typical for children living in recent immigrant families where the parents may have immigrated and the child was born in the country. Children like this experience a sense of disconnect from both the community and the self.

The house on Mango Street is not a place of home for Esperanza. It just reminds her of what she does not have. The issue of privacy is also a hurdle for Esperanza. She feels a bit lost as she tries to find herself amidst an environment that does not let her have too much freedom....

Restricted in a financial and cultural sense, her identity takes a turn for the worse as she sexually matures.
Esperanza befriends a girl named Sally. In befriending her, she gets into a tragic situation where a group of boys sexually assaults her. Her transformation from innocent girl, to mature woman, is also augmented by the stories the women in her neighborhood tell her and the kiss she received from an adult man at her job. These things create a heightened sense of urgency in her to leave her community, while at the same making her realize she wants some of the women in her community like when she needed help.

Surroundings do have an effect on people and their choices. Ultimately, her surroundings shaped her identity. Most of it was decidedly negative, but it gave her a sense of resilience that she otherwise would not have. It is very difficult for girls like Esperanza to find herself. That was shown in the bad choice of friendships she made with Sally. Many children in poor communities often make friends with bad people simply because they are only ones around.

Those mistakes and the consequences of such mistakes are what made Esperanza who she is at the end of the book, a writer. She writes down her suffering and her hopes in order to feel that connection that she was longing for before. Although she received some of that from the stories the women told, she…