[For Cinco de Mayo, a series on a handful of impressive and inspiring Mexican American voices. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an inspiring young scholar and voice!]
On two childhood
experiences that a classic short story cycle gets perfectly right.
I teach the
opening couple dozen short stories from Sandra
Cisneros’ short story cycle The House on
Mango Street (1984) in my Ethnic
American Lit course for a reason: the identity and perspective of young
Esperanza Cordero, first-person narrator of the book’s many short short
stories, are deeply informed by her cultural heritage as the daughter of Mexican
American immigrants. For evidence, I point you to the book’s fourth story (and
the first in which we meet Esperanza by name), “My Name,” which
foregrounds the cultural, linguistic, and immigrant issues and experiences that
will continue to impact and influence Esperanza’s childhood across the cycle.
Yet precisely because Esperanza is a child and then young adult throughout the
book (which begins when she’s about 9 and ends as she prepares to leave for
college), Cisneros’ stories also engage consistently—and about as well as any
American literary works ever have—with some of the most shared and foundational
aspects of childhood.
One of those is
childhood friends. From Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in their respective Mark Twain
novels to Scout and
Dill in Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird, there have been plenty of childhood friendships in classic
American literature, but to my mind none have captured the rhythms and rituals
of childhood play among peers nearly as well as does Cisneros in stories like
“Our Good Day” (set at a moment when Esperanza and her friends Rachel and Lucy
are inseparable) and “And Some More” (when they and Esperanza’s sister Nenny
are in the middle of an argument and hate each other). Partly what
distinguishes Cisneros’ stories and depictions of friendship from those others
is her use of pitch-perfect dialogue, creating the voices and conversations of
these young girls in a way that’s both thoroughly natural yet helps advance her
book’s themes at the same time. But those dialogues, like everything in House on Mango Street, are framed by
Esperanza’s narration and voice, and the closing paragraph of “Our Good Day”
reflects how wonderfully that narration shapes these moments of friendship:
“Down, down Mango Street we go. Rachel, Lucy, me. Our new bicycle. Laughing the
crooked ride back.”
If such moments
of friendship (at its best and at its worst) represent one way to define
childhood, another way would be to see it as a series of small realizations,
seemingly minor epiphanies about the world through which our perspectives
gradually expand and mature. One of the best examples in House on Mango Street is in “Darius & the Clouds,” in which
Darius, “who doesn’t like school, who is something stupid and mostly a fool,
said something wise today.” The kids are looking up at the clouds and naming
their shapes, and Darius, pointing to “that one there,” says, “That’s God. …
God? somebody little asked. God, he said, and made it simple.” Like many of the
characters in individual Cisneros stories, Darius will largely disappear for
the rest of the book—but clearly the character and moment were meaningful for
young Esperanza, and they become one of many such stories in which her
perspective shifts and grows, often directly impacted by those same childhood
peers and neighborhood friends. By the end of Cisneros’ unique and wonderful
short story cycle, Esperanza has been profoundly changed by all those moments
and stories—and so have we.
Last Cinco de
Mayo post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Mexican American figures, voices, histories and stories you’d highlight?
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