Escaping the Patriarchy of Mango Street

Sally tries to escape her father’s oppression, her life in a home where her family is “very strict in his [her father’s] religion” (81; note that the religion doesn’t belong to the family, but to the father). And she does so by doing things that are in her culture considered dangerous at her age: she wears nylons and black clothing and “paint[s] her eyes like Cleopatra” (81), and she has premarital sex (well, that’s implied in “Red Clowns”). She rebels against her father’s control, and he has shown her how, saying that “to be this beautiful is trouble” (81). But even her rebellion is a product of the patriarchy; she emphasizes her beauty to make herself more enticing to men. Apparently, though, her dress and her behavior don’t help her feel free, so she follows other instructions that the patriarchal society she lives in has given her. The patriarchy says that a woman must get married to be free of her father’s house. So Sally gets married—and young, she’s not even in eighth grade yet. Maybe in marriage she escapes her father, but she ends up just moving from one oppressive patriarchal house to another.

I wonder whether, by telling us Sally’s story, Cisneros is saying that escape from the patriarchy is impossible. And if she is, what should we make of Esperanza’s “own quiet war” (89)? When she “leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate” (89), will her rebellion be as ineffectual as Sally’s is?

Or does Cisneros want us to have more hope? Maybe that’s the point of the episode with the three sisters. They tell Esperanza that “she’ll go very far” (104) and that she will leave Mango Street, and they command her “to come back for the others” (105), which suggests that abandoning the patriarchy is possible for anyone. But they also say something that can be interpreted as denying that idea: “You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are” (105). They might mean that no matter how much we fight, we’ll never win. But they might mean that to succeed in destroying patriarchal thought, we must not forget it, must always fight against it. So maybe Cisneros is telling us that we can escape and is showing us how.