House on Mango Street Educating Role Models
Esperanza learns that education is the route to feminist liberation.
The characters Alicia and Aunt Guadalupe influence Esperanza's desire to grow from education.
Alicia's Effect
Alicia struggles over inheriting her mother’s role of nurturing the family or continuing her college education. She is pressured to drop out of school, when her father reminds her that “a woman’s place is sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star” (31). The “tortilla star” is a glass-ceiling that the barrio places above its women, only allowing them to reach for a certain aspiration, like motherhood or working in the kitchen or factory---one particular star, but nothing different. “Alicia, who inherited her mama’s rolling pin and sleepiness, is young and smart and studies for the first time at the university” Esperanza says, acknowledging that Alicia refuses the typical domestic life (31). She enters a new world of academia, shattering the glass ceiling with the hammer of an alternative mindset. Alicia demonstrates to Esperanza that the decision to learn can provide her opportunities to reach for the stars, other than that “tortilla star”.
Aunt Guadalupe's Effect
Like Alicia, Aunt Guadalupe encourages intellectual growth and emancipation from her incarcerating community. On the brink of death, Aunt Lupe’s words hold authority; she sees things in perspective of what is most important. Aunt Lupe fosters Esperanza’s love of reading as Esperanza would take “[her] library books to her house” and reads her own poem to her Aunt (60). Reminding Esperanza that freedom’s source is in the mind and that Esperanza can dictate her own fate through her writing, Aunt Lupe tells Esperanza “You just remember to keep writing…It will keep you free” (61). Esperanza’s confidence sprouts when Aunt Guadalupe encourages her to write: “[Aunt Lupe] listened to every book, every poem I read her.” (60) supporting Esperanza and bolstering the idea that what Esperanza has to say is important. So Esperanza writes poetry.
Esperanza's Poetry
Esperanza laces her personal identity with nature. She wants to have the perpetual and unstoppable power of “the waves on the sea” (60). Responsive to the gravitational pull of the moon, an unchanging and constant law of nature, the waves reflect Esperanza’s desire to have the same source of power through her confidence. Significant as a symbol of womanhood, the moon, or in Hispanic culture, the feminine word la luna, controls the waves. Through Esperanza’s poetry, Cisneros evokes not only the natural world, but also feminist perspective through the female symbol of la luna that hangs above the earth as a constant and omnipresent manifestation of power. Esperanza also yearns to be “like the clouds in the wind” free to do as she pleases, similar to how the clouds waft easily without restraint in the atmosphere (60). She predicts that in the future she will “jump out of [her] skin. [She’ll] shake the sky like a hundred violins” (60). Esperanza will rebel if she cannot obtain the freedom to be like the waves and clouds as she rattles the heavens with fury sounding like the screeches of instruments. Exploring language as a tool for feminist expression, she uses the natural world to find words to describe herself. Esperanza delves into language, uncovering definitions and words beyond the vocabulary her community uses.
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