Quote 1
In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing. (4.1)
Esperanza hates her name. Meaning "hope" in Spanish, her name carries a lot of connotations – it expresses her Mexican heritage as well as a sense of waiting or expectation. And it's long and difficult for her teachers at school to say, to boot. Esperanza's name just contributes to her sense of not belonging.
Quote 2
I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do. (4.6)
Esperanza's desire to baptize herself as Zeze the X gives us an idea of her playful and adventurous nature. It also suggests that Esperanza doesn't consider herself to be easily known – just like the X suggests, there's something hidden or unknowable about her identity.
Quote 3
All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight. (12.3)
How much does ethnicity play into Esperanza's sense of identity? She makes fun of white people who are afraid of her Latino neighbors, but she admits that the residents of Mango Street are just as scared to go into a white neighborhood. Do Esperanza's observations suggest that people are all really basically the same, despite ethnic and cultural differences?
Quote 4
I want to be
like the waves on the sea,
like the clouds in the wind,
but I'm me.
One day I'll jump
Out of my skin.
I'll shake the sky
like a hundred violins. (23.14)
The poem that Esperanza reads to her Aunt Lupe is a simple and beautiful expression of how the young girl sees herself – right now she's trapped and itching to be free, but some day she'll explode into her full potential.
Quote 5
They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here. (29.1)
Esperanza's personification of the trees outside her bedroom window is an expression of her loneliness. Not only does she feel she doesn't belong on Mango Street, but she feels like she's alone in feeling that way.
Quote 6
My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. (35.3)
We're beginning to understand what it is that makes Esperanza feel so different from everyone else on Mango Street. For one thing, she's unwilling to conform to the expectations placed on her by her gender.
Quote 7
You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are. (41.32)
Like it or not, Esperanza has to face the fact that her experiences on Mango Street have shaped her identity. Somehow, the place that Esperanza has lived for a year has become part of who she is.
Quote 8
I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes. I say, "And so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked." (44.2)
We love the ambiguity of the phrase "I make a story for my life." Yes, Esperanza is a character who takes her life and makes a story for it – her storytelling makes her life more bearable. But she's also a fictional character in a story we're reading – her life is a story. Here, Esperanza's story about her sad brown shoes, a story within a story, highlights her identity as both storyteller and fictional character.
Quote 9
I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. (44.5)
Esperanza has really embraced her identity as a writer in the last chapter of the novel. When Esperanza describes Mango Street as "the ghost," it's as if she's already projecting herself into a future in which she's moved away from her childhood home, and Mango Street is merely a memory whose pain is eased by writing.
Quote 10
One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. (44.6)
There's no questioning Esperanza's confidence in this statement. She's sure of herself and her calling in life – she's a writer, and she's going places.
Quote 11
They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn't have to move each year. […] 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. (1.4)
The fantasy of owning a beautiful white house is first presented as a family dream – later Esperanza internalizes her Mama and Papa's dream and makes it her own.
Quote 12
Alicia, who inherited her mama's rolling pin and sleepiness, is young and smart and studies for the first time at the university. Two trains and a bus, because she doesn't want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin. (14.2)
The images that are used here are a great way to visually express Alicia's determination to achieve her goals. What's she running away from? A life of servitude or industrial drudgery, expressed by a rolling pin and a factory. What's she willing to do to avoid that kind of life? "Two trains and a bus" illustrate the distance she travels, just to get to school.
Quote 13
When I am to sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. […] Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be. (29.4)
When Esperanza personifies the trees outside her house, she thinks of them as reaching. Esperanza, who likens herself to the trees, must also be reaching for something – what is it? Does she even know, or is her only reason "to be and be"?
Quote 14
Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a room is waiting for you. […] There'd be no nosy neighbors watching, no motorcycles and cars, no sheets and towels and laundry. Only trees and more trees and plenty of blue sky.
Esperanza's dream for Sally sounds an awful lot like what Esperanza wants for herself. This is the first house that Esperanza envisions and describes, but later she'll dream up others for herself. It's as if Esperanza were letting Sally share in her secret wish.
Quote 15
And you could laugh, Sally. You could go to sleep and wake up and never have to think who likes and doesn't like you. You could close your eyes and you wouldn't have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you're strange because you like to dream and dream.
Esperanza tends to think of herself as being different – as not belonging in her environment. It's interesting that here she uses the phrase "never belonged here" to describe Sally. It's further evidence that Esperanza's house fantasy is related to her feelings of not belonging; it's an escape from the environment that she doesn't feel like she belongs to.
Quote 16
One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house. (34.3)
In the future that Esperanza is fantasizing for herself, she says she won't forget who she is or where she came from – even though she will later deny that Mango Street is her home, and say that she doesn't want to come from there. Esperanza's feelings of embarrassment and shame at her origins aren't always consistent.
Quote 17
Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumbles.
Rats? they'll ask.
Bums, I'll say, and I'll be happy. (34.4)
The second house that Esperanza envisions is a social space – a place for friends to gather and dine in, with an attic to offer to bums who have no other shelter.
Quote 18
Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem. (43.2)
This third house that Esperanza dreams up is a writer's retreat – a clean, quiet space for thinking and writing.
Quote 19
Out back is a small garage for the car we don't own yet and a small yard that looks smaller between the two buildings on either side. […] The house has only one washroom. Everybody has to share a bedroom – Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny. (1.5)
The description of the Cordero family's new home contains clues about their economic status – the smallness of the house, not really big enough for a family of six, tells us that the family is poor.
Quote 20
You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there. I nodded. (1.10)
Esperanza feels judged by the nun from her school. It's all in the intonation – the way she says the word "there" tells Esperanza that there's something wrong with her home.