House on Mango Street

As an English teacher, I feel that it's always important to expand your gamut of texts and styles of texts. House on Mango Street, with its lazy poems and strange way of bopping around to construct a story was new and intriguing to me. Aside from just the format of the book, I feel that it gave insight into a bevy of important themes that students would be well off to be informed about.

Defining oneself is a very important concept for a majority of teens. This is seen in HoMS when Esperanza contemplates how to make herself stand out from her family and culture so as not to be caught up in it. She gestures about changing her name. This is likely a way to get away from her culture and separate herself. She also tries to define herself as both a woman and an artist. Throughout the book, she tries to figure out who she is through her poetry and female role models. In the end, she realizes that it is better to embrace her culture and her family because they will support her. She sees that her writing will take her away from Mango Street and the bad aspects but that she will always have a place in the community. This relates to an issue with students and showing them that you don't have to abandon where you come from to define who you are. It also shows that if you work hard to foster your talents, you can rise in life and be the person you desire to be.

Additionally, there is a big issue presented in this book dealing with race. Several times it is noted that people who don't speak English are neglected or mistreated. This is a huge issue with the young man who is struck by a car and dies waiting for help from doctors who refuse to come help him. This is a blatant recognition that not speaking English in America makes you a second-class citizen. This is a huge deal as it could be highly relatable to ESL students and what they might be going through. It becomes apparent that not knowing how to connect with students with these concerns and then ignoring them can lead to serious problems with long lasting repercussions that we, as responsible teachers, must strive to prevent.

The idea of identifying one's heritage is obviously important to debriefing this book. Knowing where you come from is essential to moving forward. Seeing where support can be found and what traditions your culture celebrates can help shape a person. The tricky part to this dance is in acknowledging both the positive and negative aspects of a heritage and then encouraging the indoctrination of the good aspects while recognizing that it is possible to rise above the negative ones. This holds true to all heritages and cultures, not just Hispanic heritage or even minorities. Showing students that they can benefit from their background but not be held down by it is an extremely useful topic to cover and one that would most likely be the focus if I personally used this book for a unit.