A neighbor who works nights and tries to sleep during the day. Earl sometimes brings women home with him for short periods. The neighbors see these women at different times, and each thinks a different woman is his wife, but the women are probably prostitutes.
They advise Esperanza always to return to Mango Street after she leaves it. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Character List Esperanza Sally Nenny. Themes Motifs Symbols. Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics. Characters Character List. Sally A young girl Esperanza befriends the same year she moves to Mango Street.
Louie The eldest sibling in a Puerto Rican family that lives in the basement of the Ortiz house. The Vargas Kids An unspecified number of poorly raised, vagrant siblings whose father has abandoned them. Elenita A witch woman Esperanza visits to have her fortune told. Geraldo A Mexican man Marin meets at a dance. Mamacita The overweight Mexican wife of another neighbor. Minerva The married woman in the neighborhood who is most similar to Esperanza.
Tito A neighborhood boy who relates to girls in violent and sexual ways. Her assessments of Sally "all you wanted was to love,. They are also signs of an imaginative intelligence that marks Esperanza as something more than average. She is a very bright girl who likes to read, to learn things and put new information together, to show off what she knows. Moreover, her intelligence is specifically creative, as is shown by her poetry, her originality, and especially her characteristic way of describing things in imaginative similes and other metaphors.
Perhaps it is Esperanza's imaginative intelligence that makes her suspect the traditional path to womanhood, through courtship and early marriage, of being a trap. It is a trap that draws her, of course; like most young girls, she feels herself becoming a sexual being, and she is impatient to get away from home, to stop being her parents' daughter and start being her own person. Doing this in the traditional way, she sees, would be dangerous. Finding a new way will be lonely and difficult, for she will have to swim against the current.
Lucy , Esperanza's quiet friend from Texas. Esperanza Cordero and her family had not always lived on Mango Street.
The family of six had lived in a series of run-down apartments before finally buying a small house with crumbling brick. Esperanza was disappointed. It was not a real house , not the house she had imagined they would someday live in. They said this house was only temporary, but Esperanza knew better. Esperanza loved her family but resented having to look after her little sister, Nenny. She hoped someday to have a best friend to play with instead.
She also wanted a new name, because her Spanish name meant "sadness" to her. She made up Zeze the X. She met Cathy, who gossiped about the neighbors and said that her father wanted to move because people like the Corderos kept moving in. Esperanza and Nenny met Lucy and Rachel, newly arrived from Texas. They pooled their savings to buy a bike for ten dollars and took turns riding it. They visited the black man's junk store and heard his music box play.
Esperanza knew that some people were afraid of her neighborhood and called them "Those Who Don't. Esperanza's friend Alicia, the college student, got up one morning and saw a mouse behind the sink.
Her father said there was no mouse. Alicia was afraid of two things in life, her father and mice. She studied at night and, ever since her mother had died, got up with the "tortilla star" every morning to make the lunches for her brothers and sisters.
Esperanza passed the days out in the street playing jump rope with Nenny , Lucy, and Rachel and singing rhymes about their neighbors. One day, the woman in the family of little feet gave them some old high heels, and they wore them through the neighborhood.
The grocery man said they were too young to be wearing such shoes, but they did not take them off until a whiskey bum offered Rachel a dollar for a kiss. Then they all ran away and hid the shoes under a bushel basket on Lucy's back porch. Esperanza often thought she did not fit in. She would have liked to eat in the school's canteen with the kids who bring lunch instead of walking home for lunch, but the Mother Superior yelled at her. She was also embarrassed about her rice sandwich. At her little cousin's baptism, she hated wearing scuffed brown shoes with her pretty new dress, but her Uncle Nacho made her feel great by saying she was the prettiest girl there and dancing with her until everyone clapped.
Esperanza was growing up. The girls gossiped about becoming physically mature. Esperanza got her first job. Esperanza sacrifices her friendship with Cathy by pitching in for a bike that she will share with her two new friends, Lucy and Rachel. Esperanza knows she eventually must share her friends and bike with her sister Nenny, since she took money from Nenny to help pay for the bike, but for now, she decides to wait and keep her new friends to herself.
The three girls ride their new bike together around the block, and Esperanza describes the geography of the neighborhood. Esperanza explains that although she and Nenny do not look alike as Lucy and Rachel do, they do have a lot in common.
They laugh in the same, loud way, and sometimes they have the same ideas. Rachel and Lucy laugh at her, but Nenny tells them she was thinking the same thing as Esperanza. Esperanza and Nenny wander around the store in the dark.
The store is labyrinthine and full of mysterious items, as well as piles of broken televisions.
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