Landscapes of Writing in Chicano Literature

I. Martín-Junquera

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137293602
• eBook ISBN: 9781137353450
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Adding nuance to a global debate, esteemed scholars from Europe and North and Latin America portray the attempts in Chicano literature to provide answers to the environmental crisis. Diverse ecocritical perspectives add new meaning to the novels, short stories, drama, poetry, films, and documentaries analyzed in this timely and engaged collection.

1

Home, Streets, Nature: Esperanza’s Itineraries in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street

Elisabetta Careri

Istituto Comprensivo “Marcello Mastroianni,” Roma

Introduction

The representations of the spaces in the novel The House on Mango Street play an evidently primary role in the author’s narration project. In this case, the represented spaces are not a mere backdrop for events, but rather, the places in the story form a real system of signs, a language that communicates meaning and themes that are not directly connected with the spaces themselves.

Cisneros constructs this system parting from Esperanza’s perspective, who is in the role of observer and introduces us to urban places, the familiar interiors, and the natural settings that surround her. With respect to the relationship between subject and space, the comparison made by Sandra Cavicchioli (2002: 160–161), who studies semiology, between “global space” and “local space” is useful. On the one hand, the body is introduced within an objective outline, universal, with exact coordinates, a space that she defines as “global”; on the other hand, it is the body itself that functions as an axis around which a more subjective vision of the space is developed, which is defined as “local” space. If the global outline provides us with a Cartesian plane that sections off and organizes the space according to neutral categories, then the intersection between the subject and this plane fills these categories with meaning. It is in the intersection of the two special systems, local and global, that forms our perception of the world. Esperanza’s body is engraved in the space that she inhabits and covers, but at the same time, her gaze, the directions she chooses, her movements inscribe these places and attribute value and meaning while constructing them that result from the relationship between space and subjectivity.

Merleau-Ponty (1995: 190–191) calls the specialty of the subject “specialty of situation,” and considers “specialty of position” that characterizes the relationship between space and the objects as different.¹

The philosopher affirms that when we make our bodies correspond to a place we are not tracing a map of positions, a reticulated geometric to which we situate ourselves, but instead we are referring to the connection of the active body in that place, to the body’s position before its intentions and objectives. According to this theory, what allows space to have meaning is the tension that exists between the subject and the space that surrounds it.

The analysis of the representation of space in The House on Mango Street will be based on the relationship between the places of the story and the characters that act within those places, and in the itineraries that these characters follow along the two main spatial directions: horizontality and verticality.

Although the theater of the story is the limited urban space of a city loosely defined as American, the trajectory traced by the protagonist’s displacements and her attitude with respect to frequented and familiar places give the main character “traveler” characteristics. From the home-space—given that Esperanza reveals early on her disharmony—a horizontal movement drives the adolescent to distance herself from the initial situation of conflict—like the heroes in the outline functions elaborated by Propp in his studies about the stories (Propp 2000). The stages of the girl’s urban adventure—exit, transition, and arrival—correspond to topoi traditions of the old literature. Leed classifies the first stage, the exit, as the loss of unity with the environment; second, the transition, as a period of movement, of restlessness and imbalance, that produces particular types of reflection in the characters; and the final one, the arrival, as the attempt to establish a new union and cohesion between subject and context (Leed 1991: 36). In the case of The House on Mango Street, the narrative structure is accompanied by the contents and typical themes of the formative novel, so these three stages ascend in the evolution of the protagonist’s level of knowledge of the world and of her own self. In the voyage that Esperanza begins in search of better living conditions, she is willing to cross borders and break bans, passing through familiar and foreign spaces and relating with those who inhabit the places she comes across. Spatial images synthesize the relationship between the subject and her surroundings, with which the protagonist seeks an identity, a recognition, that will allow for reconciliation.

On other occasions, the characters’ movements assume a vertical direction. Images of natural spaces are associated with this type of displacement, as opposed to the predominant urban environment, and between all of them, the image of the tree stands out. If horizontality places Esperanza face to face with the Other, her descending or ascending movements represent moments of interior elaboration, where she confronts herself, her past, and her cultural identity, and also her future aspirations.

Itineraries

Esperanza presents herself as a nomad who wanders with her family from home to home, forced into urban nomadism out of necessity. Fed up with seeing herself as a vagabond she searches for a real home. According to Mircea Eliade, the concept of the home represents, for many cultures, the center of the world, not only in the geographic sense as a point of spatial reference for the perception of the surrounding space, but also in the ontological sense (Lacecla 1988: 24). The home, as a universal spatial category, is a physical and mental place from which a world can be constructed; it represents the universe’s philosophical center for those who inhabit it. Not having a place to identify as home implies not being able to construct one’s world of reference. From this point of view, Esperanza’s search becomes one seeking a system of shared values, an opinion about the world, an identity.

Esperanza’s reasons for wishing to flee, and the ones for the irreconcilability between subject and the home-space, are different. The home is a socially defined space, a place that represents a sign that refers to a class identity within the social fabric in which it is placed. For the Anglo-American culture, in particular, “the home is more than just a shelter, it is a national institution almost as sacred as the American flag. In home ownership, the American Dream and the American Way are manifest: the civic values of individualism, economic success, and self-sufficiency are asserted,” as Monica Kaup puts it (1997: 361). When the gaze of a nun, directed toward the decrepit façade of the house, asks Esperanza, “You live there?” (Cisneros 1991: 5), it forces the young girl to detach herself and to see her own room from the outside. The discomfort of living in a small house, to the feeling of class shame is added, generates in Esperanza the typical dreams of a “single-family detached ‘dream home’ on a separate plot of land” (Angotti 1998: 17)—“white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence” (Cisneros 1991: 4)—a denied space, whose image returns time and again in the story, like an obsession.

The house is presented as a gendered space, as well; it is primarily the stories of female characters that are narrated within the houses of Mango Street. However, the place within the homes that best describes the conflicts and relations between them and their homes is the threshold; windows, doors, and staircases appear in the novel as fully existing stages.

Esperanza’s grandmother “looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow” (Cisneros 1991: 11); Ruthie “stood on the steps wondering whether to go” (Cisneros 1991: 68); Marin is locked up in her house “until her aunt comes home from work, and even then she can only stay out in front” (Cisneros 1991: 27); and Rafaela is growing old “from leaning out the window so much” (Cisneros 1991: 79).

Given that interior spaces are a place of reclusion, since husbands and fathers deny women the possibility of going out into exterior spaces, if the border leading to the outside cannot be crossed then it will come to signify a home onto itself as it provides access, if only for sight and imagination, to life on the streets.

As Franco Lacecla (1988: 112) puts it, being a man or woman is constituted and organized within inhabited spaces, in the way they are constructed, occupied, and used. Growing up as a man or woman is to reproduce forms, movements, and customs of two different environments, the masculine and the feminine. Therefore to remain in the threshold represents a symbolic crossing, an initial rejection of a way of being a woman that implies submission to the power dynamics that intersects in the space/home and that is maintained in part by that space-home.

The women’s always unfulfilled desires are represented in the reiteration of images that express the tension in their gaze and bodies toward the exterior space. Parting from the female subjects’ perception of space, the street is defined as a pole of attraction and is characterized as a territory of opportunities, of the possibility of a different life, of freedom. The laying bodies and gaze of all the women encountered serve Esperanza as signs, and they will be a trail for the path that guides her into crossing the forbidden borders between home and neighborhood, between neighborhood and city, from the interior to the exterior, and that will eventually lead her to finally experience those places of risk and attraction.

Following the distinction made by Lotman (1975: 152–154) between immobile and mobile characters, Esperanza is classified within the latter; she is the heroin in the story, the dynamic character. Following Lotman’s theory, the immobile characters are responsible for the cosmogony, the geographic and social structures of the world, the ones who make up part of the heroes’ environment and that move in interior or exterior spaces, on either side of the border, where no event that could be considered significant ever takes places. The mobile characters, on the other hand, are the ones who cross borders and produce revealing events. Breaking through limits, the hero/heroine determines a path and his or her movement between spaces carries with it the potential to destroy a determined classification and to establish a new one.

Alongside Esperanza there are other female characters that the author places inside and outside the home that travel a similar path throughout the novel. Marin and Sally’s journey, who are among the few women whose presence is not limited to a special vignette, goes from the home to the neighborhood and from the neighborhood to its external space that can be defined as the “city.” However, its dynamism, whose impetus is without a doubt the suffering under oppressive conditions, is not characterized by a will to oppose the organization of the world they live in. The city space, that Marin dreams of as an emancipatory place, is not a space of real independence and autonomy, but rather the place in which one can find somebody: “in the subway who might marry you and take you to live in a big house far away” (Cisneros 1991: 26). Her trajectory in the novel follows a closed circle: from the father’s home to that of the husband’s, without affecting the sexist structures that guide her choices. The handling of their female bodies is an issue for men to decide.

Sally’s journey ends tragically as she finds herself in the end with an even more limited freedom of movement. In fact, her husband “doesn’t let her look out the window” (Cisneros 1991: 102). She is denied the same threshold, with its potential for rejection and rebellion. Sally stays home; her only refuge seems to be the complacency for fulfilling her dream of class emancipation, made real by a very well furnished home. Through the parable traced by this character, Cisneros reveals the falsehood of both the American dream of owning a home and the romantic notion of love between men and women. Running behind a white and affluent model, without criticism, in order to flee class shame, there is the risk of forgetting gender conflicts. The failed project of Sally’s character is represented using, once again, the relationship between the subject and space. We leave Sally trapped by the borders she attempted to cross, observing the walls that eclipse her view. In a landscape that proofs claustrophobic, the eyes gaze the space in all possible directions—floor, ceiling, walls, and corners—without finding any opening. “She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake” (Cisneros 1991: 102).

Sally’s move to go beyond borders does not constitute a subversion of the status of things, even though she travels and goes beyond the threshold, her status—with regard to Lotman’s model—is still that of a immobile character whose relationship to the space is completely determined by the principles that classify the world in which she lives.

The threshold as a spatial figure and the concept of itinerary as the moment in which space, merging with time, is narrativized are so substantial to this work that they are not only part of the content but actually determine the structure that the author has chosen for her story. The many vignettes—each one dedicated to a character or a situation facing Esperanza, and that for the most part we don’t get to see again—are nothing other than “windows,” “doors” that open and close for the reader, revealing different worlds. And the reading process is a stroll alongside Esperanza through the street in which she lives and beyond its confines.

The space that makes up the barrio is revealed to Esperanza as a microcosm of vague characteristics, much like the house. It is both the place of solace where Esperanza feels most secure and at the same time a universe governed by suffocating laws. Mango Street is an extension of the space/house, a familiar place, in which Esperanza belongs, even though she rejects it. According to Monica Kaup, the street is the novel’s protagonists’ home; she argues that Cisneros “expanding the focus from a single, isolated house to the street … diminishes the status of the individual and reintroduces the communal perspective” (Kaup: 360). The street is “a collective Latino public space, the urban equivalent of the homeland” (Kaup: 360).

A perception of the barrio space as a shared common place, that the inhabitants see as their own, can be clearly gathered in the representations of the ways in which the inhabitants orient themselves in it. An “areola” conception of the inhabited space, as defined by Lacecla (1988: 32), is evident. It is a mental map of the place that only the inhabitants pose, a vision of the space constituted by distinct and adjacent areas and the margins between them, which allow those who live there to orient themselves according to “local” coordinates that are incomprehensible to strangers: “She lives upstairs, over there, next door to Joe” (Cisneros 1991: 12). A capacity to orientate that disappears when the confines of the barrio are crossed. Esperanza says of her mother: “She has lived in this city her whole life. … But she doesn’t know which train to take to get to downtown” (Cisneros 1991: 90).

On the other hand, living on Mango Street indicates a cultural and racial belonging that protects and excludes at the same time. Outside the confines of the barrio, the city is an unknown and often hostile place, a collection of confined ghettos whose inhabitants show mutual distrust: “All brown around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake” (Cisneros 1991: 28).

The journeys outside the barrio by the protagonist, into the city/space, are always marked by the suffering of racial or sexual violence. Every time that Esperanza steps outside the confines of Mango Street, she suffers aggressions at the hands of men, in a crescendo of violence that goes from the annoyance of a drunken man—“If I give you a dollar will you kiss me?” (Cisneros 1991: 41)—to the forced kiss from a coworker—“he said it was his birthday and would I please give him a birthday kiss. … he grabs my face with both hands and kisses me hard on the mouth and doesn’t let go” (Cisneros 1991: 55), up to the real sexual violence that Esperanza suffers one night at a theme park while waiting for Sally.

Even if Esperanza seeks her freedom outside the house, the barrio and the city, likewise, reveal themselves as spaces in which complex relationships of power are at play.

Verticality

For the protagonist and the other characters, nature represents a cover from the confusion of a conflictive reality.

In the majority of cases, nature is associated with a vertical ordering of the characters. The tension from the gaze looking upward and the sky as horizon to flee from the heavy urban atmosphere are found in different vignettes. “You can never have too much sky” (Cisneros 1991: 33), Esperanza says, who along with her friends, spends entire afternoons watching the clouds and naming them. Lececla (1988: 51) considers that naming the world around us, defining the spaces we encounter, is an act of orientation. Choosing a name for unknown and mysterious realities, that in many cases frighten us, is to normalize them, to transfer them within a familiar universe, to make them our own. “That’s cumulus too. They’re all cumulus today. Cumulus, cumulus, cumulus. No, she says. That there is Nancy, otherwise known as Pig-eye. And over there her cousin Mildred, and little Joey, Marco, Nereida and Sue” (Cisneros 1991: 36). Each cloud is a friend from the barrio and the sky a sanctuary that the children imagine to live in.

Another figure that tends to reach toward the sky is the tree. The four anthropomorphized elm trees that reside in front of Esperanza’s house, whose bodies seem to fuse with that of the girl, unite both subjects in a common fate. The difference in expectation between the protagonist and the other women in the story destines Esperanza for a profound existential loneliness. The tree is the only subject that she recognizes as being similar to her. This distinction allows a friendship, which had bee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Home, Streets, Nature: Esperanza’s Itineraries in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street
• 2. Harvesting a Chicana Cultural Landscape: The Manipulation in Sandra Cisneros’ “Women Hollering Creek”
• 3. Performance and Linguistic Spectacle in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 4. Thresholds of Writing: Text and Paratext in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo or Puro Cuento
• 5. Chicana Poetry: Writing the Feminine into the Landscape
• 6. Reading Los Angeles costureras in the Landscape of Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves
• 7. Changing Landscapes in Chicano Countryside
• 8. Memory and Trauma: Chicano Autobiographies and the Vietnam War
• 9. Barrio Vistas: Urban Milieu and Cultural Visibility in Mario Suárez’s Short Story “Tuscon, Arizona: El Hoyo”
• 10. “We Are All Serafina’s Children”: Racial Landscapes in Rudolfo Anaya
• 11. Landscaping a Poetics of Belonging: Maps of the Imagination in Chicana/o Literature
• 12. Devotion and Transnationalism: Simultaneous Guadalupan Landscapes
• 13. The Space of Disease in Alejandro Morales’s The Captain of All These Men of Death
• 14. Rudolfo Anaya’s Shifting Sense of Place
• 15. Sitio y lengua: Chicana Third Space Feminist Theory
• 16. “In Spanish, mi hermano, in Spanish.” It Is Good to Speak in Español in USA
• 17. (Too) Changing Landscapes: The Translation of US Hispanic Literature into Spanish
• 18. Writing on the Border: English y español también
• Index