This form also reflects a young girl’s short attention span, flitting from one topic to another, never placing too much importance on any one event. The vignettes are sometimes only two or three paragraphs long, and they often contain internal rhymes, as a poem might. The House on Mango Street consists of what Cisneros calls “lazy poems,” vignettes that are not quite poems and not quite full stories. In The House on Mango Street, Cisneros focuses on the problems of being a woman in a largely patriarchal Hispanic society. Cisneros’s defenders claim that a Mexican-American woman’s experiences are very different from the experiences of a Mexican-American man, and that it’s therefore unfair to expect Cisneros, a woman, to present a unified front with male Mexican-American writers. Such critics have condemned Cisneros for perpetuating what they see as negative stereotypes of Mexican-American men (the wife-beaters, the overbearing husbands), while at the same time contending that the feminism Cisneros embraces was created by white women. Others have criticized the novel as encouraging assimilation, labeling Cisneros a vendida, or sellout.

However, some male Mexican-American critics have attacked the novel, arguing that by writing about a character whose goal is to leave the barrio (a neighborhood or community where most of the residents are of Spanish-speaking origin), Cisneros has betrayed the barrio, which they see as an important part of Mexican tradition.

The House on Mango Street received mostly positive reviews when it was published in 1984, and it has sold more than two million copies worldwide. While many of them had been writing for some time, renewed interest in the issues of race and gender in the 1980s provided a milieu in which their work became a vital part of the dialogue taking place. These women were part of a larger group of American minority women, such as Amy Tan and Toni Morrison, who found success as writers at the end of the twentieth century. Latina is a more encompassing word, referring to women from all the Latin American countries. Chicana refers to a woman of Mexican descent who lives in the United States. Cisneros is part of a group of Chicana and Latina writers who became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, among them Gloria Anzaldua, Laura Esquivel, and Julia Alvarez.

The house on mango street in spanish