Chapter 1
They always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn't have to move each year. […] Our house would be white with trees around i...
Chapter 2
But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holdi...
Chapter 3
The boys and girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They've got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can't be...
Chapter 4
In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sund...
Chapter 5
That's when we move away. Got to. Then as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is getting bad. (5.3)
Chapter 6
Don't talk to them, says Cathy. Can't you see they smell like a broom? (6.6)
Chapter 7
Nenny and I don't look like sisters…not right away. Not the way you can tell with Rachel and Lucy who have the same fat popsicle lips like everybody else in their family. But me and Nenny, we...
Chapter 9
Meme Ortiz moved into Cathy's house after her family moved away. His name isn't really Meme. His name is Juan. But when we asked him what his name was he said Meme, and that's what everybody calls...
Chapter 10
Her name is Marin or Maris or something like that, and she wears dark nylons all the time and lots of makeup she gets free from selling Avon. She can't come out – gotta baby-sit with Louie's...
Chapter 11
She is the one who told us how Davey the Baby's sister got pregnant and what cream is best for taking off moustache hair and if you count the white flecks on your fingernails you can know how many...
Chapter 12
All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight. (12.3)
Chapter 13
They are bad those Vargases, and how can they help it with only one mother who is tired all the time from buttoning and bottling and babying, and who cries every day for the man who left without ev...
Chapter 14
Alicia, who inherited her mama's rolling pin and sleepiness, is young and smart and studies for the first time at the university. Two trains and a bus, because she doesn't want to spend her whole l...
Chapter 16
My mama? You better not be saying that, Lucy Guerrero. You better not be talking like that…else you can say goodbye to being my friend forever. (16.30)
Chapter 17
Do you like these shoes? But the truth is it is scary to look down at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached a long long leg. (17.7)
Chapter 18
That one? She said, pointing to a row of ugly three-flats, the ones even the raggedy men are ashamed to go into. Yes, I nodded even though I knew that wasn't my house and started to cry. (18.11)
Chapter 19
All night the boy who is a man watches me dance. He watched me dance. (19.8)
Chapter 20
One day you wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition. Ready to take you where? (20.2)
Chapter 21
He said it was his birthday and would I please give him a birthday kiss. I thought I would because he was so old and just as I was about to put my lips on his cheek, he grabs my face with both hand...
Chapter 22
Your abuelito is dead, Papa says early one morning in my room. Está muerto, and then as if he just heard the news himself, crumples like a coat and cries, my brave Papa cries. I have never see...
Chapter 23
I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I'm me. One day I'll jump Out of my skin. I'll shake the sky like a hundred violins. (23.14)
Chapter 25
But what difference does it make? He wasn't anything to her […] Just another brazer who didn't speak English. Just another wetback. You know the kind. The ones who always look ashamed. (25.5)
Chapter 26
Only thing I can't understand is why Ruthie is living on Mango Street if she doesn't have to, why is she sleeping on a couch in her mother's living room when she has a real house all her own, but s...
Chapter 28
Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under...
Chapter 29
They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here. (29.1)
Chapter 30
All at once she bloomed. Huge, enormous, beautiful to look at, from the salmon-pink feather on the tip of her hat down to the little rosebuds of her toes. I couldn't take my eyes off her tiny shoes...
Chapter 31
And then Rafaela, who is still young but getting old from leaning out the window so much, gets locked indoors because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look...
Chapter 32
Sally is the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke. The boys at school think she's beautiful because her hair is shiny black like raven feathers and when she laughs, she flicks he...
Chapter 33
Minerva is only a little bit older than me but already she has two kids and a husband who left. Her mother raised her kids alone and it looks like her daughters will go that way too. (33.1)
Chapter 34
I am tired of looking at what we can't have. When we win the lottery…Mama begins, and then I stop listening. (34.1)
Chapter 35
My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting...
Chapter 36
I could've been somebody, you know? Esperanza, you go to school. Study hard. That Madame Butterfly was a fool. (36.3)
Chapter 37
But Sally doesn't tell about the time he hit her with his hands just like a dog, she said, like if I was an animal. He thinks I'm going to run away like his sisters who made the family ashamed. Jus...
Chapter 38
Who was it that said I was getting too old to play the games? Who was it I didn't listen to? I only remember that when the others ran, I wanted to run too, up and down and through the monkey garden...
Chapter 39
Sally, you lied. It wasn't what you said at all. What he did. Where he touched me. I didn't want it, Sally. The way they said it, the way it's supposed to be, all the storybooks and movies, why did...
Chapter 40
Sally says she likes being married because now she gets to buy her own things when her husband gives her money. She is happy, except sometimes her husband gets angry and once he broke the door wher...
Chapter 41
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. (41.32)
Chapter 42
No, this isn't my house I say and shake my head as if shaking could undo the year I've lived here. You have a home, Alicia, and one day you'll go there, to a town you remember, but me I never had a...
Chapter 43
Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem. (43.2)
Chapter 44
I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes. I say, "And so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked." (44.2)