Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street: (Collective) Memory Resonating from “the Barrio”

Abstract

 “The people I wrote about were real, for the most part, from here and there, now and then, but sometimes three real people would be braided together into one made-up person… I cut apart and stitched together events to tailor the story, gave it shape so it had a beginning, middle, and end, because real life stories rarely come to us complete. Emotions, though, can’t be invented, can’t be borrowed. All the emotions my characters feel, good or bad are mine.†(xxiii) Although Sandra Cisneros draws on autobiographical elements in The House on Mango Street (1984), her novella does not stand for an autobiography, but it rather represents a collage of events, characters, and places that independently from one another constitute vignettes. These vignettes are not necessarily chronologically related, yet they make up a whole of voices, stories, colors, and movements that once reverberated along Mango Street. Through her (Cisneros’s) stories, Esperanza Cordero’s stories, and Esperanza’s neighbors’ stories, Cisneros conveys the Southwestern Latino experience of the big city and the streets, of the barrios that is. Taking my cue from Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street,†I will try to examine how personal experiences become memories and those memories transcend into stories. Is what comes from experience and memory that makes writing strong, powerful, persuasive, and to a certain extent relatable? Have Cisneros’s memories, reflected in Esperanza’s living experience and language contributed to the Latino’s collective memory of the life in the barrios coupled with racism, poverty and shame? On that note, I shall see how Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory applies to Cisneros’ story and the Latino experience, where Latinos’ memory is dependent upon the life in the barrio within which the majority were/are situated.