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Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The House on Mango Street, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Language and Names
Gender and Sexuality
Foreigness and Society
Identity and Autonomy
Dreams and Beauty
Summary
Analysis
Esperanza talks about the Vargas family – there is a single mother (Rosa) and her many children, who are wild and uncontrollable. Rosa still cries every day for the children’s father, who left without even an explanation. The children have no concern for themselves, anyone else, or valuable objects. At first people try warn them about their misbehavior, but eventually everyone gives up just like Rosa Vargas, and the children continue to do whatever they like. It gets to the point that no one even looks up when one day Angel Vargas “learned to fly,” and falls from a high place “like a falling star” and dies.
Rosa is another trapped woman, but this time she is helpless in the face of her missing husband (or boyfriend) and many wild children. Angel Vargas is yet another example of the people of Mango Street trying to “fly” and falling instead. It begins to become clear that these vignettes are not necessarily in chronological order, but are connected by Esperanza’s free-association and childlike logic, as Angel Vargas will appear in later story, still alive.
Themes
Literary Devices
