How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
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 #2
Them are dangerous, he says. You girls too young to be wearing shoes like that. Take them shoes off before I call the cops, but we just run. (17.13)
The high-heeled shoes act as a sort of magic talisman that transforms the little girls into women – a dangerous transformation, as Mr. Benny notes, because the little girls aren't ready for the sexualized world of adulthood.
Quote #3
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 #4
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 #5
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 #6
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 #7
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 #8
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 #9
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 #10
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.