[1] Because the novel deals with sensitive subject matters, such as domestic violence, puberty, sexual harassment, and racism, it has faced challenges and threats of censorship.

Cisneros stated that during her graduate studies, when she began writing The House on Mango Street, she found the academic atmosphere highly discouraging.

[citation needed] The House on Mango Street covers the formative years of Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl living in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood with her parents and three siblings.

[6] While a significant improvement from her family's previous dwellings, Esperanza expresses disdain towards her new home because it is not a "real" house like the ones she has seen on TV.

Pining for a white, wooden house with a big yard and many trees, Esperanza finds her life on Mango Street suffocating and yearns to escape.

Esperanza begins the novel with detailed descriptions of the minute behaviors and characteristics of her family members and unusual neighbors, providing a picture of the neighborhood and examples of the many influential people surrounding her.

Esperanza highlights significant or telling moments both in her own life and those in her community, mostly explaining the hardships they face, such as her neighbor being arrested for stealing a car or the death of her Aunt Lupe.

She befriends Sally, an attractive girl who wears heavy makeup and provocative clothing, and who is physically abused and forbidden from leaving her home by her strongly religious father.

Esperanza's traumatic experiences and observations of the women in her neighborhood, many of whom are controlled by the men in their lives, only further cement her desire to leave Mango Street.

It is only when she meets Rachel and Lucy's aunts, who tell her fortune, that she realizes her experiences on Mango Street have shaped her identity and will remain with her even if she leaves.

In the afterword for the 25th-anniversary publication of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros commented on the style she developed for writing it: "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.

Esperanza is intrigued by the idea of being a Mexican American woman in Chicago, which reflects the author herself just 15 years prior to publishing this book.

Returning to the neighbourhood from school, Alicia seems to have developed a disrespect for the cultural community of Mango Street and Esperanza notices that she is "stuck-up".

Esperanza's discovery of her own feminist values, which contradict the domestic roles prescribed for Chicana women, are a crucial part of her character development throughout the novel.

[36] Critic María Elena de Valdés argues that gender plays a large part in the suppression of women; it forces them to diminish themselves to the service of others, particularly in domestic life.

We see this in the vignette entitled "The Family of Little Feet," which tells of a mother who introduces her daughters to high heels, leaving the girls with an initial glee, as if they were Cinderella.

And yet, as Burcar observes, "presented with a lesson on what it means to be a grown-up woman in American contemporary patriarchal society, the girls decide to cast away their high-heeled shoes.

[citation needed] Episodes of patriarchal and sexual violence are prevalent in demonstrating women's issues in the Chicano community in The House on Mango Street.

[48] McCracken argues that "we see a woman whose husband locks her in the house, a daughter brutally beaten by her father, and Esperanza's own sexual initiation through rape.

"[49] The House on Mango Street offers a glimpse of Esperanza's violent sexual initiation and also portrays the oppression and domestic abuse faced by other Chicana women.

[51] We see her transition from a naive child into a young adolescent woman who acquires a graphic understanding of the "sexual inequality, violence, and socioeconomic disparities.

"[51] Esperanza is often torn between her identity as a child and her emergence into womanhood and sexuality, especially when she witnesses her friend, Sally, enter into the Monkey Garden to kiss boys.

[54] María Elena de Valdés argues that Esperanza's "search for self-esteem and her true identity is the subtle, yet powerful, narrative thread that unites the text.

The main character uses this world as a mirror to look deeply into herself as, in de Valdés's words, she "comes to embody the primal needs of all human beings: freedom and belonging.

[60] In other words, Esperanza's sense of belonging is absolutely dependent on separating herself from her Spanish native tongue, community and ultimately away from Mango Street.

Through Esperanza Cordero, the heroine of this novel, Sandra Cisneros demonstrates that the "patriarchal Chicana Chicago community that raised her will not permit her development as a female writer".

The piece was commissioned for the Chautauqua Institution by Francis and Cindy Letro, in honor of Tom and Jane Becker, and had its world premier on July 22, 2017.

[70] Despite its high praise in the realm of Latino literature, The House on Mango Street has also received criticism for its sensitive subject matter and has been banned from several school curriculums.

[71] For example, in 2012 the St. Helens school board in Oregon removed the book from its middle-school curriculum, expressing "concerns for the social issues presented.

[75] This law "forbids classes to advocate the overthrow of the United States, promote racial resentment, or emphasize students' ethnicity rather than their individuality."