The Elusive American Dream: An Ecofeminist Reading of Race and Identity in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1984)

Everyone knows the story of the big brick house with the white picket fence and the quiet subdivisions of identical houses and families. Regardless of race, class, religion, or gender, the lure of the ideal home appeals to the masses. Told with a fairytale quality, the American Dream possesses a magic that transcends space and time. For some groups, however, white fences are not the obvious boundaries. Instead, boundaries exist in the pigments of these people’s skin, the block they live on, or how many letters fill up their last name. In Sandra Cisneros’ novella The House on Mango Street (1984), the American Dream appears again, this time on a poverty-stricken, Hispanic street in Chicago, narrated by an adolescent, Mexican-American girl named Esperanza Cordero. Through the ecofeminist and ecocritical lenses, Cisneros utilizes Esperanza’s readings of houses and homes to comment on the commodity culture of dwellings, revealing how Esperanza’s perception of identity and selfhood is directly connected to the house of the American Dream, and further explores the function of “place,” the boundaries of space, and the power of penning new boundaries