Quote 21
Cathy's father will have to fly to France one day and find her great great distant grand cousin on her father's side and inherit the family house. How do I know this is so? She told me so. In the meantime they'll just have to move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in. (5.4)
When Esperanza lets us know that her only source of information about Cathy's noble heritage is Cathy herself, we know we have reason to doubt the story. Why does Cathy feel it's so important to claim an aristocratic, European heritage?
Quote 22
Don't talk to them, says Cathy. Can't you see they smell like a broom? (6.6)
Cathy's tendency to pretend to be superior to her neighbors suggests that she's very insecure. Do she and the other residents of Mango Street belong to different classes of society, or are Cathy's feelings of superiority an invention to make herself feel better?
Quote 23
Those who don't know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we're dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake. (12.1)
Esperanza notices that no one who doesn't live there comes to Mango Street on purpose – people from other neighborhoods only wind up there "by mistake," when they get lost.
Quote 24
They are bad those Vargases, and how can they help it with only one mother who is tired all the time from buttoning and bottling and babying, and who cries every day for the man who left without even leaving a dollar for bologna or a note explaining how come. (13.2)
The misbehavior of the Vargas children has an explanation that's rooted deeply in social problems – they misbehave because their mother is too poor and overworked to discipline them. She's poor and overworked because her husband abandoned her. The problem is complex, and doesn't have an easy solution.
Quote 25
And anyway, a woman's place is sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star, the one that appears early just in time to rise and catch the hind legs hide behind the sink, beneath the four-clawed tub, under the swollen floorboards nobody fixes, in the corner of your eyes. (14.1)
This sentence combines two social challenges that make life difficult for the women in Esperanza's community – prescribed gender roles that place them in the kitchen doing domestic work, and an environment of poverty and decay.
Quote 26
People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don't look down at all except to be content to live on hills. They have nothing to do with last week's garbage or fear of rats. (34.2)
Esperanza creates a dialectical model of two social classes – those who live on earth face challenges every day, while those who live on hills live in ease and comfort.
Quote 27
Do you like these shoes? But the truth is it is scary to look down at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached a long long leg. (17.7)
Dressing up in grown-up shoes is both fun and scary for Esperanza and her friends. The shoes make their own feet look alien to them. The description of the little girls' "long long leg[s]" is disturbingly sexualized – we get the same creepy feeling that we do when we see toddlers wearing makeup in a beauty pageant.
Quote 28
All night the boy who is a man watches me dance. He watched me dance. (19.8)
For the first time, Esperanza notices a boy watching her, and she seems both mystified and pleased by the experience.
Quote 29
One day you wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition. Ready to take you where? (20.2)
Esperanza seems a bit bewildered by the idea that such a huge transformation as getting hips could occur to her overnight.
Quote 30
What I'm saying is who here is ready? You gotta be able to know what to do with hips when you get them, I say making it up as I go. You gotta know how to walk with hips, practice you know – like if half of you wanted to go one way and the other half the other. (20.10)
Esperanza and her friends don't have hips yet, but they're starting to express interest in the changes they know will happen to their bodies.
Quote 31
Nenny, I say, but she doesn't hear me. She is too many light-years away. She is in a world we don't belong to anymore. (20.34)
Nenny's complete lack of interest in the discussion about hips makes her seem much younger than the other girls – and shows us just how much the other girls are maturing.
Quote 32
He said it was his birthday and would I please give him a birthday kiss. I thought I would because he was so old and just as I was about to put my lips on his cheek, he grabs my face with both hands and kisses me hard on the mouth and doesn't let go. (21.7)
Esperanza's initiation into kissing is by force. This seems like an ominous prelude to her initiation into sex.
Quote 33
Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. (28.5)
Esperanza starts to express her own sexual yearnings. She's still not sure what Sire and his girlfriend do together, exactly, but thinking about it fills her with energy and makes her feel "all new and shiny."
Quote 34
Who was it that said I was getting too old to play the games? Who was it I didn't listen to? I only remember that when the others ran, I wanted to run too, up and down and through the monkey garden, fast as the boys, not like Sally who screamed if she got her stockings muddy. (38.9)
In some ways, Esperanza still considers herself a kid – she still feels like she belongs to a realm in which gender doesn't matter very much. She wants to run and play "fast as the boys." Sally serves as a foil to Esperanza here. By contrast, she seems grown up and fully integrated into the gendered world of adulthood.
Quote 35
Sally, you lied. It wasn't what you said at all. What he did. Where he touched me. I didn't want it, Sally. The way they said it, the way it's supposed to be, all the storybooks and movies, why did you lie to me? (39.1)
In many ways Esperanza is still a child when she's forced to have sex for the first time.
Quote 36
The boys and girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They've got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can't be seen talking to girls. (3.1)
Divisions between gender are present among the characters in The House on Mango Street from a young age.
Quote 37
She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse – which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female – but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong. (4.2)
Even as a child, Esperanza questions gender roles. She also observes that gender roles are cultural.
Quote 38
She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow […] Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window. (4.4)
Esperanza's great-grandmother is the first female character that we see positioned by the window in this novel.
Quote 39
[Hips are] good for holding a baby when you're cooking, Rachel says, turning the jump rope a little quicker. She has no imagination. (20.3)
Esperanza scoffs at Rachel for her observation that hips are good for holding a baby while you're cooking – a task that fits right into the traditional gendered role of women in their society.
Quote 40
But most important, hips are scientific, I say repeating what Alicia already told me. It's the bones that let you know which skeleton was a man's when it was a man and which a woman's. (20.7)
This "scientific" observation about hips suggests that gender is something you're born with. It's biological.