Mango Street

One instance where Esperanza is having trouble with gender roles is when she, Lucy, and Rachel wear the pretty shoes and Rachel almost kisses the bum man for a dollar. When they make it back to Mango Street, the girls hide the shoes and Esperanza says, “We are tired of being beautiful.” This is also an example of sexage. Because of sexage, and the ways in which women are conditioned, women may feel a need to always look their best and be beautiful. After Esperanza has this troubling experience, she is tired of being beautiful because she knows what can come of it. And later in that same passage, Lucy’s mother throws the shoes away and “no one complains.” Even at a young age, the girls have seen the way men, even a lowly bum man, are given power because of “the male gaze” and how close one of their friends comes to falling under it.

Esperanza also shows huge defiance towards gender roles in the passage “Beautiful & Cruel.” She says she has decided “not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold of waiting for the ball and chain.” She doesn’t want to be imprisoned in the female gender role. She doesn’t want to be the tame woman that does whatever she is told. She looks up to the “beautiful and cruel” woman in the movies who laughs all the men away, whose “power is her own,” and won’t give her power away. Esperanza sneakily starts her rebellion against socially-constructed gender roles by leaving the table “like a man.” She does what is unexpected of her gender in hopes that one day she will be totally free of those gender roles.