Identity and Space in The House on Mango Street

Introduction: Surface Simplicity and Hidden Meaning

The House on Mango Street is a brief and apparently simple story, told in the innocent voice of a schoolgirl who describes the house into which she and her family have recently moved. However, beneath its simple surface the story hides important meanings about identity and society, and the way in which the self relates to the outer world. The text has no plot and is, at first sight, merely a little girl's naive report on the basic facts of her life as she understands them — her family and her house especially — but it is precisely because of its form and point of view that it manages to convey its message so effectively.

The schoolgirl describes the new house on Mango Street, which will be the new residence for herself and her rather numerous family of six. As she informs us, this is the first house the family has really owned, after having moved around for a long time from one rented place to another. She talks about the old, dilapidated buildings in which her family lived before, and about the new house, which, though now theirs, is again a disappointment. The main character is of course the little storyteller, and the tone and style are appropriate for the age of the narrator: the text is made up of short sentences that a child would use. The setting and the theme can be taken together, since the new house and the older houses are the central issues around which the story revolves. It is through these elements that the writer conveys her meaning, especially since the message could not have been directly articulated by the child narrator. The story of the old rented houses and the new, finally owned but still unsatisfactory house becomes relevant when we view it through the eyes of a child who is just beginning to grow aware of the world around her. We discover the girl's own world and reality at the same moment that she does: the ramshackle houses speak of the poverty of her family, and consequently of their place in society. The central theme of the story is therefore identity — or self-awareness in the social world — and more specifically, the interplay between the personal and the public space. This opposition is indicated in the story through the contrast between the rented and the possessed house.

Displacement, Memory, and the Enumeration of Streets

The story starts out simply, by stating that the family has not always resided on Mango Street, as the girl enumerates the places she remembers having lived in:

"We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before that it was Paulina, and before that I can't remember."

The first sentence, although simple, surprises through its abruptness and thus already introduces the ideas of displacement and instability into the story. While trying to tell us about herself and her life, the girl begins by saying that her family has not "always" lived on Mango Street, and this statement already translates as a rupture behind which the reader senses previous displacement. From the start, therefore, the importance of location and address are emphasized as the girl enumerates the names of the other streets she remembers having lived on. Her memory cannot go further than the fourth address, as she must have been too young to recall anything earlier.

This is highly significant for the way it affects the main character: what the girl remembers about her life is "moving a lot," going from one place to another, and having to almost flee from some former places — such as the one on Loomis Street — because of the very bad condition of their houses. The life of the child narrator has almost resembled that of a caravan perpetually on the road. This is further emphasized when the girl observes that each time they moved, the family seemed to grow larger:

"Each time it seemed there'd be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six: Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me."

The girl thus experiences a strong feeling of displacement, though she is not yet fully aware of it. The displacement caused by moving around is doubled by her intuitive realization that her family is very poor and lacks a clear social identity. The identity theme of the story is directly related to the possession of the dream house that the family aspires to. The geographical space they occupy is here an equivalent of the place the family holds in society. The main character the author focuses on, however, is the girl narrator, whose development is the central concern of the story. The girl is at first entirely tied to her own family — her identity is determined and defined by the social position that her relatives hold.

The Dream House as Social Fantasy

The fact that the girl begins her narrative in the plural — using the first-person plural pronoun "we" to designate herself and her family together — indicates that she is not yet fully aware of her own self, but only of her being part of a family that moves from one place to another. The sense of displacement is shared by the entire family and is symbolized by their dream of the perfect house that they would no longer rent but actually possess. The contrast between renting and owning a house becomes the means by which the self is inscribed in the social world:

"The house on Mango Street is ours and we don't have to pay rent to anybody or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn't a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it isn't the house we thought we'd get."

Possessing a house is almost the equivalent of having one's own established and recognized identity within society. The house delimits the personal space that a family or person occupies and stands in opposition to the space of others. The dream house the family imagines is almost a fantasy, as it is supposed to resemble the houses they see on television. The author thus emphasizes not only the family's desire for material comfort — they want a house with running water and functioning pipes — but also the aesthetic dimension of the house they long for, which indicates that their fantasy aims at a different social position. The stairs they all dream about, which would imitate those seen on TV, suggest that the family members desire a different place in society; they want to be part of the prosperous world they see on their screens. The house fantasy is therefore, at its core, a social fantasy:

"And our house would have running water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs, not hallway stairs, but inside stairs like the houses on T.V."

The idealized image of the house they all long for indicates that what they truly desire is not material comfort but rather an identity and a recognized place in the world. The things they dream of — the big stairs, the big yard, and "grass growing without a fence" — are all symbols of their wish to possess a great, almost unlimited space all their own:

"Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence. This was the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket and this was the house Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed."

The fact that the house figures both in the mother's bedtime stories and in the father's lottery-ticket daydreams points to the profound significance of this ideal home: the "real" house they all fantasize about is a dream world that could accommodate them and make them feel they truly belong. It is important to keep in mind that all of this is recounted through the perspective of a little girl who actively shares in the dream, all the more so because she is too young to do anything but wait for her expectations to be fulfilled.

Conclusion: A Newly Acquired and Inescapable Identity

The last paragraph, where the girl reproduces her parents' assurance that the house on Mango Street is only a temporary residence for them, seems to bring the story full circle and complete the first sentence. The girl had begun by saying that the family had not always lived there, but now recognizes that they will probably stay there always, or at least for a very long time:

"I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn't it. The house on Mango Street isn't it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how these things go."

The new house is their newly acquired identity, and although they are not content with it, they cannot escape it. The House on Mango Street is therefore a story about the beginning of a girl's self-awareness in a world in which she feels she can choose neither her own space nor her own identity. The conflict between the personal, private world and the social world is sustained throughout the story, and the child narrator serves this purpose exceptionally well, allowing the conflict to be captured precisely at the moment it begins. As Sandra Cisneros constructs it, the house is never merely a building — it is the material form of an identity that the girl has been given, but has not yet chosen for herself.