Summary: “Bums in the Attic”
Esperanza wants a nice suburban house with a garden, like
the ones where her father works. On the weekends, the family visits
these houses and dreams about moving there. Esperanza has stopped going
with her family. She, too, would like to live in one of those houses,
but she is tired of looking at what she cannot have. She imagines
that when she owns one of these houses in the future, she will not
forget where she is from. When bums pass her house she will invite
them in and give them a place to live in her attic, because she knows,
she says, “how it is to be without a house.” When people think that
the squeaking in the attic is rats, she will shake her head and
say it is bums.
Summary: “Beautiful & Cruel”
Esperanza worries that she is unattractive and that her
looks will leave her stuck at home. Her sister, who is more attractive,
wants a husband to take her away, but she doesn’t want to leave
by having a baby with just any man, as Minerva’s sister did. Esperanza’s
mother comforts Esperanza by saying she will be more beautiful as
she gets older, but Esperanza has decided not to wait around for
a husband to take her away. Instead, she wants to be like the femme
fatales in movies who drive the men crazy and then refuse them.
These women do not give their power away. Esperanza’s way of beginning to
be like this is to leave the dinner table like a man, without pushing in
her chair or doing her dishes.
Summary: “A Smart Cookie”
Esperanza’s mother complains that she could have done
something with her life. She has many skills—she can speak two languages, sing,
draw, and fix a television—but she does not know how to use the
subway. While making a family meal, Esperanza’s mother sings along
to a Madame Butterfly record she has borrowed from
the public library. She tells Esperanza that she needs to be able
to take care of herself and not just rely on a man. She gives as
examples two of her friends, one whose husband has left and the
other who is a widow. Then she describes how when she was younger
she dropped out of school, not because she lacked intelligence,
but because she was ashamed about not having nice clothes. She seems
disgusted with her young self and tells Esperanza not to be like
she was.
Analysis
Esperanza finally matures and realizes that she needs
to change her strategy in trying to get what she wants. She separates
herself from her family, refusing to go with them to visit houses
in the suburbs because she no longer wants to dream about a house.
Rather, she wants to go and get one. She resolves not to forget
her origins. Until this point, Esperanza has expressed nothing but
a desire to leave her neighborhood, never to return. Now she dreams
of letting homeless bums from the neighborhood live with her in
her imaginary home away from Mango Street. She has begun to understand
that her perfect suburbs on the hill are flawed because they have
no system for including people like her. Esperanza suspects that
if she escapes the barrio, she will not be satisfied by a suburban
world that ignores the existence of less privileged people.
Esperanza decides how she’ll approach her future in “Bums
in the Attic,” while in “Beautiful & Cruel,” she decides how
she will define herself sexually. Her new thoughts, however, introduce
new problems. Tragic women like Minerva and Rafaela in the previous sections
have reaffirmed Esperanza’s desire to be independent. As a femme
fatale, Esperanza can be independent without ignoring her new sexual
awareness. She understands that adult sexuality is tied up with
independence, and that to accept men is to give up her autonomy.
She also decides she will not spend her time doing petty tasks like
washing the dishes, tasks she could spend time doing every day without
ever really accomplishing anything. However, Esperanza’s
solution presents a problem. By standing up and leaving her dishes
on the table, she is creating more work for another woman. Yet there
is no room in Esperanza’s imagination to make society fairer by asking
that men and women share tedious tasks like doing the dishes.
In the opinion of Esperanza’s mother, to be a “smart
cookie” is not a positive attribute. She gives the example of dropping
out of school because her clothes were not nice as an example of
being a “smart cookie.” If you think you are too smart for school
or too smart to take your mother’s advice, her mother is saying,
then you’ll end up with a husband when you’re too young and will
have no way to escape. Esperanza has to realize that she is not
smarter than the women around her. Surrounded by clever and creative
women, Esperanza can view none of them, including her own mother,
as role models because they are stuck on Mango Street. Her mother
knows how to do everything except take the subway—that is, she knows how
to do everything but leave. Esperanza finds her mother’s frankness
about her regrets surprising, which suggests that their relationship
is not usually so open and honest. Her mother compares her friends
to Madame Butterfly, a character in an opera who spends her life
waiting for her lover to return. This observation plays on Esperanza’s
earlier thesis that the Chinese and the Mexicans do not like their
women strong.
