SOURCE: Olivares, Julian. “Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, and the Poetics of Space.” Americas Review 15, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1987): 160-70.

In the following essay, Olivares examines Cisneros's use of imagery in The House on Mango Street, analysing the metaphor of the house and the dialectics of inside vs. outside, here vs. there, integration vs. alienation, and comfort vs. anxiety.

In some recent essays collectively titled “From a Writer's Notebook,”¹ Sandra Cisneros talks about her development as a writer, making particular references to her award-winning book, The House on Mango Street.² She states that the nostalgia for the perfect house was impressed on her at an early age from reading many times Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House. It was not until her tenure at the Iowa Writers Workshop, however, that it dawned on her that a house, her childhood home, could be the subject of a book...