Crowding Out Latinos

9. Rape and Barrio Education in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street

Rape and Barrio Education in Sandra Cisneros's 'lte House on Mango Street hinking about the connection between Esperanza Cordero's education in her barrio neighborhood and her rape in Sandra Cisneros's 1984 novel The House on Mango Street can be a disturbing and enlightening experience.! When this most popular of Chicano novels is discussed, invariably some reader will inquire if a rape actually occurs in the text. That such a serious violation requires several looks at the book is significant , for this traumatizing experience ordinarily shapes the form and the content of a narrative as much as rape affects a person in real life. The fact that readers feel the need to ascertain whether Esperanza is raped in Mango Street invites attention because that is not the case in other American texts. In Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), for example, rape shapes the protagonist's life. The incest rape of Pecola by her father Cholly in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) also ushers in and determines not only Pecola's insanity but most of Claudia's memories about growing up in Medallion, Ohio. Much the same can be said for the textual importance of the sexual assault that is rendered in Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982). These books, all by leading African American women writers, locate rape at the center of the experiences narrated. Once the rape has been dramatized, these novels understandably deal with the stages of recovery that the violated characters endure. 121 Copyrighted Material 122 Chapter 9 Cisneros's Mango Street is different. This multifaceted novel deals with so many important barrio issues that even normally careful readers can miss the fact that Esperanza Cordero, Sandra Cisneros's firstperson narrator, is raped toward the end ofthe book in the vignette entitled "Red Clowns." Why her rape is tumultuously presented and then abruptly dropped from further consideration in the text is one of the more interesting issues in the novel. I suspect the event is glossed over because reporting such a violation appears futile in Esperanza's world. There are also more than enough elements in Cisneros's novel work to draw attention away from an act of violence that enormously upsets readers more interested in seeing Esperanza succeed. Discussing such a vile act in one of the most popular American ethnic books is difficult. Most readers are so excited by the young Esperanza 's wonderfully engaging language that it is not easy to talk about the violent experience that occurs to the most attractive Hispanic girl that many readers have ever met in print. How readers react, ofcourse, depends very much on the knowledge each brings to the text-that is, what readers have been taught to think about Latinas and the Hispanic community and culture in the United States. Mango Street appears deceptively innocent, for Esperanza's narrative is written using the pleasing voice of a young girl who is alternately full of verve, self-reliance, compassion, loneliness, confidence, fear, strength, anxiety, and interest in her future. Esperanza's voice, in fact, is so beguilingly charming and so much more attractive linguistically than most of the voices found in other ethnic narratives that it innocently illuminates the violence against the other women in the novel while strangely glossing over Esperanza's own rape, her miseducation, and the inferiority complex that she has regarding her name and image. Women in the book are represented as the property of men, a fact dramatically communicated at the beginning ofthe novel when we learn that Esperanza's great-grandfather "threw a sack over her" greatgrandmother 's head and carried her off to be married against her will, "Just like that, as ifshe were a fancy chandelier" (11). Continually seeking escape and a better life, the women in Mango Street invariably end marrying into similar kinds captivity. Most exchange the overly and unnecessarily protective, watchful eyes oftheir fathers for possessive, jealous husbands and lovers, who are too anxiously concerned that their women might be out with other men while they work. Since much of the novel examines the generally sad lives of the Copyrighted Material Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street 123 women in Esperanza's world, the women in the novel clearly serve as female models that Esperanza is expected to avoid. Like Ana Castillo's Massacre ofthe Dreamers, Mango Street seeks to get...