60 pages • 2-hour read
The House on Mango Street
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Chapters 30-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 30 Summary: “No Speak English”
One of Esperanza’s neighbors worked two jobs in order to save enough money to bring his wife and baby boy to Mango Street from another country. When Mamacita arrives, Esperanza is amazed by her beautiful clothing and fancy shoes. Because Mamacita is very overweight, the neighbors make fun of her. She never comes downstairs out of the apartment, and they assume it’s because “she’s too fat” (77), but Esperanza thinks she stays hidden away listening to sad music because she is afraid to speak English. Esperanza’s father sympathizes, explaining that when he first moved to America, he could only eat ham and eggs because those were the only words he could say in English. Mamacita misses her pink home, so her husband paints the apartment pink, but still she won’t come out. Esperanza can hear Mamacita’s husband screaming at her “all the way down the street” (77) to speak English, but she refuses. One day, her little boy begins to sing the jingle of a Pepsi commercial in English. This makes Mamacita cry and beg him “no speak English […] No, no, no, as if she can’t believe her ears” (78).
Chapter 31 Summary: “Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut and Papaya Juice on Tuesdays”
On Tuesdays, Rafaela leans out of her window, like Rapunzel, dreaming of escaping her marriage and the apartment that her husband doesn’t want her to leave for fear that her beauty will attract another man. She lowers down a shopping bag on a clothesline and a dollar so that Esperanza and the girls will buy her a papaya or coconut juice from the corner market. She drinks her juice while she looks out the window at the nearby dance hall, where she longs to be.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Sally”
Sally is a beautiful girl in Esperanza’s class. She has long black hair and knows how to do her makeup to make herself look older and more glamorous. Sally’s father is strict and religious. He doesn’t allow her to wear short skirts or make-up, or to leave the house except to go to school: “her father says to be this beautiful is trouble” (81). Esperanza notices that Sally and her best friend are no longer speaking after they had a physical fight. Now, Sally spends her time leaning against the schoolyard fence with her eyes closed. Esperanza imagines what Sally is thinking about and begins to project her own fantasies onto Sally. Esperanza imagines that Sally is daydreaming about the same things she does: a beautiful house all to herself surrounded by sky and trees, the ability to leave Mango Street, “to dream and dream […] without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong” (82).
Chapter 33 Summary: “Minerva Writes Poems”
Minerva is just a little older than Esperanza, but she already has a husband and children. Her husband is physically abusive and leaves Minerva repeatedly. When Minerva has had enough, she tells him it is over and locks him out. He throws a rock through her window that night, and the next morning, Minerva is covered in bruises. But she takes him back. She and Esperanza both write poems and read them to each other. Esperanza doesn’t know what Minerva should do or how she can help her.
Chapter 34 Summary: “Bums in the Attic”
Esperanza’s father works as a landscaper for wealthy homes. On Sundays, he takes Esperanza and Nenny for a drive to look at the beautiful houses. Esperanza wants a house like one of those but she doesn’t want to go with them to look anymore: “I don’t tell them I’m ashamed – all of us staring out the window like the hungry. I am tired of looking at what we can’t have” (86). Esperanza says that rich people who live on hilltops “close to the stars” (86) forget about people like her family. She wants to grow up to live like them, in a large house on a hill, but she doesn’t want to forget where she comes from. She imagines a future where she owns a home and allows homeless people to live in her attic. She imagines herself hosting a dinner party where her friends ask what the sound is coming from the attic; “Bums, I’ll say, and I’ll be happy” (87).
Chapter 35 Summary: “Beautiful & Cruel”
Esperanza calls herself “the ugly daughter” (89) and knows that she will not be swept away from her life by a husband. Her sister Nenny says she will choose her own path in life, and Esperanza thinks “it’s easy to talk that way if you are pretty” (88). Esperanza admires the kind of woman in movies “who is beautiful and cruel” (88) because she can use her beauty for power over men. Esperanza, however, is going to have to become powerful in another way: “I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate” (89).
Chapter 36 Summary: “A Smart Cookie”
Esperanza’s mother stirs oatmeal in the kitchen and reflects on her life. She is full of regret for all the things she could have been and wasn’t. She is a gifted opera singer, a handy woman, and is artistic. She attributes her shortcomings to the fact that she left school early. She tells Esperanza to “go to school. Study hard” (90). She mentions her girlfriends who are all alone now that their husbands have left or died. She explains that she quit school prematurely because she was so ashamed of her clothes. She says sarcastically that she was a “smart cookie then” (91).
Chapter 37 Summary: “What Sally Said”
Sally continues to show up to school with bruises all over her face. She says they are from falling down stairs. Everyone knows they are from her violent father. She says, “he never hits me hard” (92). He beats her because he is afraid she will turn out like his sisters, who were beautiful like Sally and brought shame to the family by running away with boys. Sally comes to stay with Esperanza for a while, carrying her belongings in a paper bag. When night falls her father arrives, crying, and he begs her to come home. He says he will never hit her again. For a long time, he keeps his word, but when he sees Sally talking to a boy, he loses control and “just went crazy, he just forgot he was her father between the buckle and the belt” (93).
Chapter 38 Summary: “The Monkey Garden”
After the neighbors with a pet monkey move away, the children of the neighborhood are able to use the garden again. The monkey used to scare them away from it, but now it is their own secret oasis away from their mothers. There are peach and pear trees, tall flowers, and deep weeds. The children play games there together and create a clubhouse out of an old, abandoned car left in the garden.
One day, Sally is talking to Tito and another boy. Esperanza wants to run and play with the kids, but Sally says they are too old for those games. She wants to stay and flirt with the boys. Esperanza doesn’t fully understand the dynamics of flirting, and she’s offended by Sally’s refusal to play. Tito steals Sally’s keys and tells her she can only get them back if she kisses the boys behind the broken-down car. Sally agrees. Esperanza is angry and thinks Sally needs protection. She runs up to tell Tito’s mom what is going on. His mom says, “those kids” (96) and does nothing to stop them. Esperanza decides it is up to her to save Sally, so she takes some sticks and a brick and goes back to the garden, but when Tito and Sally see her, they tell her to leave: “they all looked at me as if I was the one that was crazy and made me feel ashamed” (97). Esperanza runs away and hides in the garden, hoping to disappear forever. She cries for a long time, and when she gets up to leave, she no longer feels that the garden belongs to her.
Chapters 30-38 Analysis
This group of vignettes plays with contrast. Esperanza compares and contrasts the women in her community, language, and sexual power. She is dissecting the ways that women use sexuality, the way that the English language gives or obstructs power, and the difference between dreams and reality.
In “No Speak English,” Esperanza highlights the importance of the mother tongue. As a first-generation child, Esperanza speaks English and Spanish. Her ability to read and write fluently in the mother tongue of the country she lives in gives her immense power that her parents and neighbors lack. When her father first came to America, he only spoke Spanish. He tells her that “[H]e ate hamandeggs for three months. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Hamandeggs. That was the only word he knew. He doesn’t eat hamandeggs anymore” (77). In this simple anecdote, Esperanza reveals the struggle to survive in a country where you don’t speak the language. Her father felt powerless without the ability to speak English, and his options were subsequently limited. We can see that mastering the English language helped him feel empowered, reinforced by his assertion that he does not eat “hamandeggs” anymore.
In contrast to Papa, the character named Mamacita refuses to speak English in order to assert some power over her husband. She does not want to live in America with their baby. She would prefer to live at home and raise their son speaking their native language: Spanish. Mamacita is homesick not just for her country, but for her culture which is represented by the Spanish language. She is afraid that if she acquiesces and begins to speak English, her culture will disappear. This is why she is so devastated when her son begins singing in English. The fact that his first English words come from a Pepsi commercial highlights her fear of assimilation: English surrounds them in America, and if her son grows up here, he will certainly become an English-speaking American child. The vignette about Rafaela explores a similar theme. She is also trapped upstairs in an apartment, only it is her husband that keeps her inside for fear of losing her to another man. Both Mamacita and Rafaela come to America only to live out their days in a cramped apartment, which is far from the American dream.
Like Rafaela, Sally is under the strict rule of her patriarch. Her father is afraid that her beauty will attract boys and get her into trouble (he most likely means getting pregnant out of wedlock). However, unlike Mamacita and Rafaela, Sally finds ways to escape her father’s harsh rules, even though she suffers physical and emotional abuse when he catches her. Esperanza recognizes herself in Sally: They both want to escape Mango Street to explore their desires “without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong” (82).
Esperanza observes and describes Sally’s sexual encounters, rather than try anything herself, as she does when Sally experiments with two boys in the neighborhood garden. Esperanza is not ready for this kind of sexual play, and she finds it offensive. Rather than shift her imaginative play toward sexual play like Sally, Esperanza embarrasses herself and cries in the garden until she feels that “she wanted to be dead” (97). Esperanza’s shame and discomfort with Sally and the boys’ sexual behavior, along with her hidden position in the garden, affirms her role as the observant writer.
Esperanza continues to witness the attempts and failures of women who try to escape Mango Street and listens to the advice of her mother in “A Smart Cookie.” Her mother describes her decision to stop going to school out of a sense of shame in sarcastic terms: “I was a smart cookie then” (91). Her mother’s regrets about not getting an education, along with her observations about women who try to use their beauty or marriage and children to escape their family homes, deeply affects Esperanza. She decides that she will not “grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain” (88). Instead, she begins to focus on getting an education and pursuing a writing career. She ascribes a masculine identity to these pursuits, declaring: “I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate” (89). Esperanza here rejects the trappings of stereotypical femininity. She rejects the ideals of the American housewife. She rejects the role of the subservient woman.
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