1. House on Mango Street By Sandra Cisneros

2. Background Information on Sandra Cisneros -Born in 1954 in Chicago, IL -Father is Mexican and mother is Mexican- American -She has 6 brothers -During her childhood, her family moved frequently between Mexico City and Chicago -She recalls a great deal of loneliness from the constant moves and not having a sister

3. Cisneros Continued…  She was very shy and spent a great deal of time reading  Her favorite book was The Little House because it described the kind of stable family she longed for  She wrote in secret during her elementary school years  In high school, she wrote poetry and edited the school literary magazine

4. Cisneros in College  While in a creative writing class in college in 1974, she began writing seriously and developing her own unique voice  She received a B.A. in English from Loyola University in Chicago and her M.A. from the writing program at the University of Iowa  She was the only minority female in the class so she felt like an outsider.  This feeling led her to develop her own unique voice

5. Cisneros’ Writing  House on Mango Street was her first book written in 1983  Some of her other works are: My Wicked Ways (1987), Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), and Loose Woman: Poems (1994)  Sandra Cisneros currently lives and writes in San Antonio, TX

6. Voice  The quality of a piece of writing that makes it the author’s own  Writers work to develop a distinct, individual voice  When Sandra Cisneros was enrolled in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the late 1970’s, she was the only Mexican-American woman in the group  She realized that she could not write in the same way as her classmates because her life experiences as a poor girl living in a barrio were so different from what they had experienced  She began to write about things she knew and developed her own unique voice

7. Figures of Speech  Literary devices that give the writer a non- literal way to describe images and events  Example: “My papa’s hair is like a broom, all up in the air.”  Simile (Esperanza uses this description of her father’s hair in “Hairs” on page 6)

8. Character Notes  An author creates a character, in this case Esperanza Cordero, by giving her traits such as physical attributes, thoughts, and feelings  The author develops these traits by telling what the character says, does, and thinks  Writers usually base their characters, at least in part, on a real person or persons, and then elaborate  The life of the narrator, Esperanza Cordero, is in many ways similar to that of Sandra Cisneros

9. Character continued…  A good writer will make the characters believable for the readers.  House on Mango Street is a “coming- of-age” story where the central character becomes more aware of herself because of events that occur.  In this memoir, the awareness comes because of Esperanza’s experiences growing up in the barrio neighborhood in Chicago.