The House on Mango Street — Vocabulary
Sandra Cisneros
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...they wouldn't count toward my MFA thesis.1 more

I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees.2 more

Together we publish an anthology-Emergency Tacos-because we finish our collaborations in the early hours before dawn and gather at the same twenty-four-hour taqueria on Belmont Avenue, like a multicultural version of Hopper's Nighthawks painting.†

She experiments, creating a text that is as succinct and flexible as poetry, snapping sentences into fragments so that the reader pauses, making each sentence serve her and not the other way round, abandoning quotation marks to streamline the typography and make the page as simple and readable as possible.

She wants to write stories that ignore borders between genres, between written and spoken, between highbrow literature and children's nursery rhymes, between New York and the imaginary village of Macondo, between the U.S. and Mexico.

They like to stand out in the cold especially if it's raining. They think suffering is good for you ever since they saw that movie 300 Spartans. I'm no Spartan and hold up an anemic wrist to prove it.

The Manor.†

It was just a jar of buttons, like the mismatched embroidered pillowcases and monogrammed napkins I tugged from the bins at the Goodwill.

Lucy hides the lemon shoes and the red shoes and the shoes that used to be white but are now pale blue under a powerful bushel basket on the back porch, until one Tuesday her mother, who is very clean, throws them away.

And, finally, when I was ready, after I had apprenticed with professional writers over several years, partnering with the right agent.†

And maybe if the surgeon would've come, maybe if he hadn't lost so much blood, if the surgeon had only come, they would know who to notify and where.†

She has the idea, though she's having trouble keeping her end of the double-dutch steady.†1 more

Together we publish an anthology-Emergency Tacos-because we finish our collaborations in the early hours before dawn and gather at the same twenty-four-hour taqueria on Belmont Avenue, like a multicultural version of Hopper's Nighthawks painting.†

Win a National Endowment for the Arts award.†

The mother who painted the walls of their Chicago homes the color of flowers; who planted tomatoes and roses in her garden; sang arias; practiced solos on her son's drum set; boogied along with the Soul Train dancers; glued travel posters on her kitchen wall with Karo syrup; herded her kids weekly to the library, to public concerts, to museums; wore a button on her lapel that said "Feed the People Not the Pentagon"; who never went beyond the ninth grade.

Should she be teaching these students to write poetry when they need to know how to defend themselves from someone beating them up? Can a memoir by Malcolm X or a novel by Garcia Marquez save them from the daily blows?

Sally, who taught you to paint your eyes like Cleopatra?†

Nenny found a dollar and a dead mouse between two rocks in the stone wall where the morning glories climbed, and once when we were playing hide-and-seek, Eddie Vargas laid his head beneath a hibiscus tree and fell asleep there like a Rip Van Winkle until somebody remembered he was in the game and went back to look for him.

She didn't have to plan an alternative route to avoid gangs in the school hallway.

She has lived in this city her whole life. She can speak two languages. She can sing an opera.1 more