Sandra Cisneros'The House on Mango Street

If you forgot your book today, load up this electronic copy of The House on Mango Street.

Chapter Questions
This is our first novel in the class. This is not reading with the goal of finding your own interests and enjoying yourself. This is reading with the purpose of learning how to process and decode challenging information. This is reading to expand your hometown bubble and make you a citizen of the world. This is the vegetables of reading instead of the desserts of reading. It is time to eat some vegetables. This will feel like work.

Activity: Judge A Book By Its Cover

Every word of a story is an act of creation. A choice. An author did that on purpose. The English business calls this “authorial intent” or what the author intended to create by making all of these choices. There is no natural or physical force involved in the creation of a fictional story. There is only the product of the mind.


Because the author is human, the author can be predicted. We can guess and infer what she really means to say by examining all of her choices as evidence. Even the art of a book cover is deliberate. The words, the style, the colors, the images, the symbols, all screaming hints to those who want to look and listen.

Activity: Walk A Mile In Her Shoes

Setting is a major part of a novel. The place and time can be a major part of creating the person.

Mango Street is not real, but if you look into the past of the author, you might just figure out everything you need to know about Mango Street as if it were real.

Activity: The First Thing Worth Knowing

Today we will connect the book to real life. Every day we meet people and they get introduced to us. What is the first thing you would say about a person? What is the first thing that we want to know? What kinds of things are we actively looking for? What does this search pattern say about us as a person? What does this search pattern say about us as a cultural whole?

Activity: Weight Class
This assignment is designed to make students realize the differences in comparative weight and size (and ability to affect, force, and harm others). This is the assignment where we talk about the bad stuff.

Activity: Looking In All The Windows

This time around, instead of looking for the first thing we learn about a character, we will focus on their life as a whole. In groups (choose wisely!), examine the characters in the list.


They are all women who are trying to make it in the world in their own way. Examine their decisions. Examine their results and place in the world. Examine their next steps.


Later on, we will combine the data and ask: What can a woman become in Esperanza’s world?

Catcalling Video Studies

  • 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman - Rob Bliss - October 18, 2014 - Actress Shoshana Roberts walks around Manhattan for 10 hours and records the interactions. There were 108 instances of catcalling, street harassment, and creepy people following her.