ORIGINALITY AND AUTHENTICITY STILL AN ISSUE [303201]

CONTENTS

Introduction 3

Chapter 1. Multiculturalism 6

1.1. Definitions 6

2.1. Multicultural Education in the United States 7

3.1. Multicultural Literature 10

4.1. Multicultural Literature for Children 11

5.1. Contemporary attitudes towards multiculturalism 14

6.1. Breaking Boundaries/ Derrumbando fronteras 15

Chapter 2. Elements of multiculturalism in “The House on Mango Street” 22

1.1. Structure 22

2.1. Setting 23

3.1. Imagery 27

Chapter 3. Bilingualism 30

1.1. Bilingual speakers in the United States of America 30

2.1. Spanglish 30

3.1. Bilingualism in Sandra Cisneros’ work 30

Conclusions 31

REFERENCE LIST 33

Introduction

“America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true and the opposite is probably equally true.”

(James Farrell)

America is the country which has been known as the land of opportunities for decades, a [anonimizat], a [anonimizat] a land where all the fantasies can be transformed into real life. Millions of immigrants go to United States and those who don’t go are only because they were not given the visa.

[anonimizat] a cultural mosaic. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2013), current resident population of the US is 315,714,819. There are six officially accepted ethnic groups in the US. [anonimizat], [anonimizat], [anonimizat].

[anonimizat], and North Africa. This group also includes people who indicate their race a “White” [anonimizat], Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian. White Americans are the racial majority with a rate of 72 % of the total US population with 223 million people (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).

[anonimizat], refer to people who have their origins from any district in Africa. [anonimizat], Nigerian, and Haitian people. African Americans are the second largest minority group with a percentage of 13.6 of the total US population with 43.9 million people (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011).

[anonimizat], and Central America. This group of people maintains their lives through tribal affiliations and community attachments. Navajo, Blackfeet, Inupiat, Yup’ik, Central American Indian groups and South American Indian groups belong to this racial category (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). American Indians comprise 6.3 million of the total US population according to 2011 demographics (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).

[anonimizat], [anonimizat], India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, [anonimizat], and Vietnam. Asians represent a population of 18.2 million and are the second fastest growing minority group in the US (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).

Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander is a [anonimizat], Samoa, and other Pacific Islands. Native Hawaiians had a population of 1.4 million in 2011 and have grown by 2.9 % since 2010 (Humes, Jones, & Ramirez, 2011).

[anonimizat], [anonimizat] America, and Spain. Hispanics make up the 16.7 % of the total US population. Hispanic and Latinos are the most populous group in the United States, and numbered around 52 million people in 2011. In addition, they are the fastest growing ethnic group in the US. Their population has increased 3.1 % since 2010 (Humes et al., 2011).

Each category of immigrants brought more than their simple presence there, they also brought their culture, this way The United States of America became a multicultural country.

The traces of multiculturalism influenced also other aspects of the American system such as the Constitution, the scholar system or the literary world.

Chapter 1. Multiculturalism

Definitions

Encyclopedia Britannica describes multiculturalism as “the view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgement of their differences within a dominant political culture.” More than that, multiculturalism seeks the inclusion of the views and contributions of diverse members of society while maintaining respect for their differences and withholding the demand for their assimilation into the dominant culture.

The Cambridge dictionary defines the term as “the belief that different cultures within a society should all be given importance” while the Oxford dictionary defines it as “the presence of, or support for the presence of, several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society.”

In modern democracies the multiculturalism comes as a response to the fact of cultural pluralism  and as a solution to compensate cultural groups for past exclusion, discrimination, and oppression. Most modern democracies comprise members with diverse cultural viewpoints and contributions.

Some examples of how multiculturalism has affected the social and political spheres are found in revisions of curricula, particularly in Europe and North America, and the expansion of the Western literary and other canons that began during the last quarter of the 20th century.

Curricula from the elementary to the university levels were revised and expanded to include the contributions of minority and neglected cultural groups. That revision was designed to correct what is perceived to be a falsely Eurocentric perspective that overemphasizes the contributions of white European colonial powers and underemphasizes the contributions made by indigenous people and people of color. In addition to that correction, the contributions that cultural groups have made in a variety of fields have been added to curricula to give special recognition for contributions that were previously ignored.

The establishment of African American History Month and of National Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States is an example of the movement. The addition of works by members of minority cultural groups to the canons of literary, historical, philosophical, and artistic works further reflects the desire to recognize and include multicultural contributions to the broader culture as a whole.

Multicultural Education in the United States

Education is one of the most important public issues in the U.S. It has a complicated structure, and hinges primarily on the standards determined from state to state. In other words, the federal government has an influence on educational quality and standards through education-related legislation and programs, but every state has a separate strategy plan it applies towards its educational systems (U.S. Department of Education, 2003; Yanusehvsky, 2011).

To understand what exactly multicultural education is for Americans, it is important to examine the educational history of the United States. As the early settlers of America were from Europe, they had brought a westernized model of education that meant that wealthy children had the initial access to education. Their purpose was to provide a fundamental education to their children. Ultimately, each colony differed in its manner to set up an educational system the first efforts to create a framework for American education system can be categorized as Colonial Education (Banks, 1991).

As the settlement in the U.S lands began on the Atlantic coast, three colonies initially began their educational systems. The Southern Colonies were centered in Virginia, the Middle Colonies centered in New York, and the Northern colonies centered in New England. The Colonial Education system did not have strong bonds between each colonial region, and each colony had a unique system of education (Johnson, Musial, Hall, Gollnick, & Dupuis, 2005).

As an important step in American education, as Johnson et al. (2005) states, compulsory education became a law in Massachusetts in 1852.

After the legislation of compulsory education, every child had the right to receive education, which accelerated the process of equal education according to gender.

The years after American Revolution were the enlightening for women, whose role as mother educators were given utmost attention after that time. Because of the fact that they grew up the leaders or members of the society, the movement was conducted in an attempt to raise awareness of women about world events, geography, and political concerns (Mays, 2004). Although the main purpose was not educating women merely for their personal development, this movement brought a new viewpoint in American education system.

As American Revolution’s being a milestone for women’s education, the American Civil War, which lasted between 1861 and 1865, became a milestone for black children. The tendency to educate upper class and white boys rather than slaves and the blacks was demolished as blacks struggled for equality in every aspect of their lives during the Civil War. The new federal government established after the war brought new funding, reshaped the curricula and made efforts to standardize the American education. After the war, colleges like Harvard, Yale or Princeton developed their relationships with the new government and renewed themselves to provide educational opportunity to previously ignored American citizens (Cohen, 2012. Hodges, 1998).

Providing education only for boys and efforts to ignore and exclude the students of color, girls, or students with disabilities from the system of education despite the laws created unrest in the society. Therefore, the 20th century became the highlighter of multicultural education efforts, in which African American scholars started expressing their concerns (Hilliard, 1978). The Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) fuelled this unrest even more as African Americans, minority groups such as Mexican Americans, Indians Americans, and Asian Americans started fighting for racial desegregation. As part of this struggle, The Intergroup Education Movement was developed as a kind of act to diminish this segregation and set up a harmonious interracial learning atmosphere.

Multiculturalist scholars emphasized that multicultural education went through a painful process until the establishment of a well-accepted system for all people, which witnessed major developments and significant changes. Multicultural education is maintaining its journey to become more consolidated and widely accepted in the world, and especially in the U.S.

Multicultural Literature

There has been a great amount of discussion about the meaning of multicultural literature, but no consensus has been achieved. "Like the term 'postmodern’ Marilyn Levy (1995) observes, "'multicultural literature' seems to have taken on a life of its own, meaning different things to different people. To some, it's all inclusive, to others, it's all exclusive. To still others, it's simply confusing" (p. 11).

I will exemplify only few definitions of the phrase “multicultural literature”, definitions that in my point of view are the most representatives. Dasenbrock (1987) offers a literary definition: multicultural literature consists of literary works "that are explicitly about multicultural societies" or "are implicitly multicultural in the sense of inscribing readers from other cultures inside their own cultural dynamics" (p. 10). Multicultural works are also considered works that focus on "people of color"(Kruse and Horning, 1990, p. vii) or literature by and about people who are members of groups considered to be outside the sociopolitical mainstream of the United States (Sims Bishop, 1987, p. 69) or simply books other than those of the dominant culture (Austin and Jenkins, 1973, p. 50). Norton describes this kind of literature as being about racial or ethnic minority groups that are culturally and socially different from the white Anglo-Saxon majority in the United States, whose largely middle-class values and customs are most represented in American literature ( 1999, p. 580)

The rise of multicultural literature is a political, rather than a literary, movement. It is a movement to claim space in literature and in education for the historically marginalized social groups, rather than one to renovate the craft of literature itself. It has grown out of the civil rights movement and feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s (Cai and Sims Bishop, 1994; Taxel,1997).

Since the day it came into existence, multicultural literature has been closely bound with the cause of multiculturalism and confronted with resistance from political conservatives.

Multicultural Literature for Children

In the United States, people of color were virtually invisible in children’s literature prior to the 1960s. When they were rendered in text, for the most part, they were stereotypically represented. The literary category of multicultural children’s literature developed out of this historical and sociopolitical context.

Charlemae Rollins, a librarian with the Chicago Public Library, compiled We Build Together, an annotated bibliography of books about African Americans. The recommended books were for elementary and high school students. The National Council of Teachers of English published the first of three editions in 1941.

Reading Ladders for Human Relations, first published in 1947, is a booklist that grew out of an American Council on Education sponsored project to find materials and techniques for improving human relations, a goal of intergroup education, with an emphasis on interracial harmony and interpersonal relations.

The ladders include: growing into self, relating to wide individual differences, interacting in groups, appreciating different cultures, and coping in a changing world. Several editions were published over a 35-year span. These booklists, used by teachers, librarians, and parents, promoted better human relations dislocated from a historical, sociopolitical context. Reading Ladders for Human Relations was largely informed by intergroup education which devotes little attention to power relations.

In 1954, the social climate after the Supreme Court desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education forced mainstream publishing houses to confront the prevalence of ethnic stereotypes in children’s literature (Wader, 1997). African Americans were recruited to join the field of publishing as authors, illustrators, and editors. The New York Public Library began publishing an annual annotated bibliography, Books About Negro Life for Children. In 1963, the title was changed to The Black Experience in Children’s Books.

This bibliography was published intermittently until 1994, highlighting the expansion of multiethnic voices in children’s literature. It was not until after Nancy Larrick’s (1965) article, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” which called national attention to this underrepresentation, that publishers took note of their practices of exclusion and stereotyping. The increase of multicultural representation in children’s literature was a direct response central to the historical and sociopolitical reality of American children’s literature.

Multicultural children’s literature as a literary category emerged in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement and the growing attention to multicultural education and teaching. During the late 1960s and early 1970s activists in ethnic studies, multiethnic movements, and the African American community, frustrated with the slow pace of desegregation, demanded more community control over their schools with a goal of infusion of Black history into the curriculum (Banks, 1995).

As schools responded to the African American community’s demands, groups such as Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, who also experienced institutional racism and classism, put pressure on schools for representation in the curriculum and school life as well.

According to James A. Banks (1995), it was during this time that “a rich array of books, programs, curricula, and other materials that focused on the histories and cultures of ethnic groups of color was edited, written, or reprinted”.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, several organizations and awards promoted children’s literature that reflected underrepresented cultural groups. In 1967, the Council on Interracial Books for Children was founded by a culturally diverse group of writers, librarians, teachers, and parents to advocate for anti-racist children’s literature and educational materials, and to create a forum for the sociopolitical analysis of children’s books. They sponsored a contest for “Third World Writers.” Walter Dean Myers, an African American writer, won this contest in 1968 and published his first children’s book with Parent Magazine Press, a mainstream publisher.

In the meantime, writers and illustrators of color were recognized for their work through mainstream awards: Tom Feelings became the first African American artist to win a Caldecott Honor Award in 1972. Nicholasa Mohr became the first Puerto Rican writer to win the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1974. Virginia Hamilton was the first author of color to win the Newbery Medal award in 1975.

Contemporary attitudes towards multiculturalism

Recently there has been a "backlash against the multicultural movement" (Taxel, 1997, p. 417) in general literature and in multicultural literature in particular.

John T Marohn notes on his blog that the group most often under attack, particularly in the Southwest and now the South, is the Latino community.

He also says that Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia have now passed their own state-specific immigration laws in reaction to what many perceive as the out-of-control number of undocumented Latinos in their states (the most recent figures put the number of undocumented Hispanics at around 12 million).

An example he brings is the banning of K-12 courses designed specifically for an ethnic group which was a step even further in this process of reducing the multicultural phenomenon.

But multiculturalism is not just about immigration, secure borders, social-services and educational systems. Marohn considers that because of some Islamic extremists and because of the economic crises in the United States and the EU, multiculturalism appears to be under a severe threat throughout many of the Western countries.

He finds he drug demand as another big problem in the United States and it has caused more and more violence on the border towns between Mexico and the United States. This problem has only increased the unemployment issues on both sides of the borders.

“When a culture begins to feel threatened because of conflicting values, language barriers, or economic hard times, there is a natural tendency to close ranks. And it is not unusual for those threatened societies to become more nationalistic, exclusive, and legalistic.” (Marohn, 2017)

This is the context of the books written by Sandra Cisneros, and the problems that she faced being a Mexican-American female in the United States represent the main theme of her books.

Breaking Boundaries/ Derrumbando fronteras

For a better understanding of Sandra Cisneros’ work we need to have a look at her biography. As we can read in the online Encyclopedia, Sandra Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954 in a poor neighborhood of Chicago, populated mainly by Hispanic immigrants and hyphenated Americans. Cisneros and her family were of the latter category, Mexican-Americans or Chicanos. She was the only daughter of seven children and the family, for whom money was always in short supply, frequently moved between Chicago and the areas of Mexico where her father’s family lived.

In 1966 her parents have succeeded to buy a house in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. It is the place where she spent a great part of her childhood and which became a source of inspiration for her stories.

Her parents knew the importance of education and they acted according this belief. “Library cards were mandatory in the family and Cisneros, without sisters to play with, too shy to make new friends, lost herself in the library's riches. Though she wrote a few poems as a child and served as the editor on her high school's literary magazine, it would not be until graduate school that Cisneros would finally become a writer.” (Encyclopedia,2017)

When she started to write, she had the tendency to repeat the style of her favorite authors or of her professors. Finding her path came during a class discussion about houses as metaphors for writing. While her classmates were describing how beautiful their houses were, how many hallways they had or how great their kitchen were, she realized how different she was, how different the house she had in her memory was. “It was not until this moment when I separated myself, when I considered myself truly distinct, that my writing acquired a voice," she told Publishers Weekly. "That's when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn't write about."

Her topics, such as poverty, cultural differences or male dominance over women’s lives, were experiences from her childhood. "If I were asked what it is I write about, I would have to say I write about those ghosts inside that haunt me, that will not let me sleep, of that which even memory does not like to mention," she wrote in "Ghosts."

The fellowships that she obtained allowed her to travel to Europe and to other parts of the United States. In Austin, Texas she found a fertile ground of Latin American culture. Besides that, she taught creative writing and worked with students at the Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago.

Sandra Cisneros is not just an author who writes about her dual Mexican American heritage, but she is also a defender of her culture.

Despite all the awards she received for her writings,  MacArthur Genius Award in 1995; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982 and 1988; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation in 1985; Paisano Doble Fellowship, 1986; First and second prize in Segundo Concurso Nacional del Cuento Chicano, Lannan Foundation Literary Award, University of Arizona in 1991; Honorary Doctorate of Literature, State University of New York at Purchase in 1993 (Encyclopedia), and despite the fact that The House on Mango Street was introduced into university syllabuses, most notably on the required curriculums of Yale and Stanford, after almost thirty years after its publishing, the book was banned in Arizona according to  HB 2281. Not only her book was in this situation; the state law in Arizona banning ethnic studies was used by politicians to shut down a Tucson Mexican-American Studies Program and literally box its books away.

According to New America Media, Tony Diaz, known as “El Librotraficante” (or book smuggler) arrived in Tucson on March 12, 2012, with a truckload of Mexican-American books that were effectively banned from the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) to distribute to a network of “underground libraries.”

Tony Ortiz gives Arizona the run down on the Libro-Traficante Caravan. Digital Image. The Texas Observer. Web.17 August 2017

“Every great movement is sparked by outrage at a deep cultural offense,” said Diaz, founder of Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, a group that promotes Latino authors and culture. “Latinos are not the sleeping giant; we’re the working giant. When any state in this nation passes an anti-Latino law they’ll know we’ll respond together,” he said. ( Fernandez, 2012)

Authors and publishers joined this cause and donated or re-printed books, some authors went with the caravan through the country and had lectures and discussions with the public. Among other authors that were implied in this project, such as Luis Alberto Urrea or Carmen Tafolla, Sandra Cisneros gave her support to defend her heritage against a law of a country that calls itself as multicultural. She travelled with the caravan reading The House on Mango Street and ran workshops about Chicano literature. She brought numerous copies of the book with her, distributed them, and discussed thematic implications of her novel as well as talked about the book’s autobiographical elements. (Fernandez, 2012)

As a result of their effort, in August 23, 2017, Judge A. Wallace Tashima called the statue racist. The ruling stated,” The Court concludes that plaintiffs have proven their First Amendment claim because both enactment and enforcement were motivated by racial animus.” as we can read in the Libro Traficante Press Release.

Another border she successfully passed was becoming the first Chicana author to receive the backing of a major publishing house when Random House published Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories in 1991. (Encyclopedia,2017). The stories describe the lives of women living in the San Antonio area and its publication brought a substantial financial improvement for Cisneros, who was now able to concentrate on writing only.

A different kind of border appeared in the moment she afforded to buy a house and she wanted to express her identity through that house. In 1997, after she bought the house in San Antonio, Texas, she wanted to paint it in purple because that color was representative for her Mexican heritage. The San Antonio Historic and Design Review Commission didn’t allow her to paint it that way because it wasn’t historically appropriate. Sandra Cisneros was determined to sustain her cause so she searched her best weapon: writing. She wrote an open letter to the Commission, to the readers in which she raises the problem of the tejano identity that has been erased from San Antonio’s history.

My history is made up of a community whose homes were so poor and unimportant as to be considered unworthy of historic preservation. No famous architect designed the houses of the tejanos, and there are no books in the San Antonio Conservation Society library about houses of the working-class community, no photos romanticizing their poverty, no ladies' auxiliary working toward preserving their presence. Their homes are gone; their history is invisible. The few historic homes that survived have access cut off by freeways because city planners did not judge them important. (Cisneros, Color is a Language and a History, 1997)

Sandra Cisneros sells King William home. Digital Image. PhyllisBrowning. Web 20 August 2017

Multiculturalism is very often promoted only at a general level. From an official point of view America is for everyone who has a dream, is open to everyone, no matter where it comes from, but cultures with hundreds of years of tradition and implication in that country seem to have no history there. This is what hurts and bothers Cisneros, not the fact that she wasn’t allowed to choose the color of her house.

The issue is bigger than my house. The issue is about historical inclusion. I want to paint my house a traditional color. But I don't think it unreasonable to include the traditions of los tejanos who had a great deal to do with creating the city of San Antonio we know today.[…]  But we are a people sin documentos. We don't have papers. Our books were burned in the conquest, and ever since, we have learned to keep quiet, to keep our history to ourselves, to keep it alive generation to generation by word of mouth, perhaps because we feared it would be taken away from us again. Too late – it has been taken away. (Cisneros, Color is a Language and a History, 1997)

She considers colors as being language, and stories that tell the history of a people. For her and for people from her culture generally, bright, powerful colors are important because they lift the spirits. Eventually there was a compromise between Cisneros and the authorities and the house was painted in a more pale color that was revived few years later. She dared the people from the community that had any evidences about the local history of tejanos to send them to her, and this way to rebuild an identity that has been consciously erased.

Chapter 2. Elements of multiculturalism in “The House on Mango Street”

Structure

When Sandra Cisneros began writing her book, she had in mind the fact that writing was the only way to escape and resist the suffocating reality, where she couldn’t find her place, her identity. But in the end she realized that the book is not only for her, is also for the ones in the same situation with her, for the ones that don’t know how to escape from their prison. Mango Street wasn’t about a house but about houses. The book is not a story, but stories.

This multitude of voices that began to cry among the book needed a different frame, a different shape. This way appeared the short vignettes that together build the story of el barrio. Some have the shape of an essay, others look like autobiography and others seem to have the emotion of poetry. Each vignette tells a story, each vignette transmits a feeling without an obvious connection between them. But the apparent randomness disguises: the book embodies “Cisneros’s artful exploration of themes that include individual identity in contrast to communal loyalty, estrangement and loss, escape and return, and the lure of romance set against a dead end of sexual inequality and oppression.”(Angel,2010)

This collage that Cisneros created serves as support for the microcosm of Latinos that don’t want to loose themselves in the macrocosm of America. So even the structure, the form of the book creates in our mind the image of a mosaic of stories, characters and even cultures.

Setting

The stories in The House on Mango Street are set in a place that has become multicultural, even if the two cultures seem to be quite separated. There is a Latino neighborhood but from an American city: Chicago. Inevitable, there appears a sort of rapport between the two: one is from inside the neighborhood towards the rest of the city and one from outside of el barrio towards it. There is also a moment when the barriers close and the focus is on a well delimited place, with a very clear identity.

We see these relations especially through the characters. In the beginning of the book we meet el barrio, the neighborhood seen through the eyes of Esperanza. The impact of the image she faced when they moved there made something inside her to move.

But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in.(6)

The rest of the neighborhood wasn’t in a better situation. The junk store seems to be a sort of a creepy labyrinth:

The store is small with just a dirty window for light. He doesn’t turn the lights on unless you got money to buy things with, so in the dark we look and see all kinds of things, me and Nenny. Tables with their feet upside-down and rows and rows of refrigerators with round corners and couches that spin dust in the air when you punch them and a hundred TV’s that don’t work probably. Everything is on top of everything so the whole store has skinny aisles to walk through. (13)

The house of Meme Ortiz seems to fit the place too:

Cathy’s father built the house Meme moved into. It is wooden. Inside the floors slant. Some rooms uphill. Some down. And there are no closets. Out front there are twenty-one steps, all lopsided and jutting like crooked teeth (made that way on purpose, Cathy said, so the rain will slide off)[…] Around the back is a yard, mostly dirt, and a greasy bunch of boards that used to be a garage.(16)

She knew from that moment that there must be more than that, that she didn’t belong there and that there must be a way to break free.

She is not the only one who wants to leave in the search of a better life, other characters have this desire too, it only differs the manner to do it. Marin, for example, dreams to get married, to have a perfect happy life and to leave el barrio:

Marin says that if she stays here next year, she’s going to get a real job downtown because that’s where the best jobs are, since you always get to look beautiful and get to wear nice clothes and can meet someone in the subway who might marry you and take you to live in a big house far away.(19)

Another option to leave the neighborhood is through hard working. Esperanza’s father is an example of hard working man, who takes care of his family, who makes efforts to take his children at private schools, who searches the best for his family, even the best house:”My Papa, his thick hands and thick shoes, who wakes up tired in the dark, who combs his hair with water, drinks his coffee, and is gone before we wake […]”(38)

But Esperanza found her own way to release herself from el barrio: through writing. The person who first suggested that this could be her salvation was her Aunt Lupe. After Esperanza read to her the poem she wrote, Aunt Lupe said “That’s nice. That’s very good, she said in her tired voice. You just remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free […] (41)

There is also an attitude from the outside of the neighborhood. In the story Those Who Don’t we can feel the hostility and the prejudice of strangers, of those who don’t belong to that place but think they know everything about it.

Those who don’t know any better come into our neighbourhood scared. They think we are dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake. But we aren’t afraid. We know the guy with the crooked eye is Davey the Baby’s brother, and the tall one next to him in the straw brim, that’s Rosa Eddie V., and the big one that looks like a dumb grown man, he’s Fat Boy […]. All brown all around, we are safe.” (20)

Tina Vasquez published in The Guardian an article about a phenomenon that begins to spread among the white Americans. It is about a fear that was inspired tremendously by the man who is now the President of the United States. He expressed in his speeches an open hate towards Latinos and presented them as the “most unwanted people,” calling them “criminals, drug dealers,” and “rapists”.(Vasquez,2015) The consequence is the fact that white Americans begin to be suspicious when they see a Mexican, to ask them if they speak English and to stay away from their neighborhoods.

A couple of weeks ago, while I was running errands in my neighborhood, a stranger asked me if I was “illegal”. Around 10 minutes earlier another stranger asked me if I spoke English. Both were white and one of them even called me “senorita.” Then, late last week, I was standing in line to use the ATM when a white man approached me cautiously, asking if I spoke English. He was lost and said he didn’t want to be in a “bad area” longer than he needed to. He was holding a King Taco cup in his hand. I’ve seen white guys like him at the neighborhood taco spot. Stay for the tacos, leave before you have to interact with Mexicans who aren’t serving you. (Vasquez, 2015)

Unfortunately the idea of multiculturalism as tolerance towards other cultures seems to take the path of gathering all the other cultures together and send them somewhere else.

This is the world Trump wants when he says he’s going to “make America great again.” It’s the America of 1950s TV shows, where people of color don’t exist in the lives of white Americans unless they’re being served or entertained by them. (Vasquez,2015)

It is the type of attitude we can recognize in The House on Mango Street, an attitude that instead of being endangered, is becoming a habit among the white Americans. There are many other similar experiences that come to support the concern of this journalist and not only.

To continue with the types of attitudes towards el barrio, I move on to another type of character. This one doesn’t want to escape the neighborhood, doesn’t want to adapt to the new society he is part of or he is not allowed to do it.

An example of such character is Mamacita. Since she arrived in Chicago with her baby, she didn’t leave the house. She doesn’t speak English, she doesn’t want to speak English, she is afraid that if she speaks it, all her heritage will be lost and then nothing will remain.. She doesn’t want her baby to learn English. She only wishes to go back to her pink house.

And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on TV. No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can’t believe her ears. (52)

If this character is even encouraged by her husband to adapt, to be open to the new country, in the case of the following character, the husband is the one who wants his wife to remain there, at home, forever. He is the one who cannot adapt his mentality to the new country, where women, besides having a family, can also work, have a social life or do what they want to do. Rafaela stays all the time indoors and observes from her windowsill “because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at.” She stands as a symbol for the interior world of women on Mango Street, whose lives are circumscribed by the structure of home and family.

I can say that the setting has a great importance in Sandra Cisneros’s book, it is the heart of it, the bound between all the little pieces of the puzzle.

Imagery

To summarize The House on Mango Street, it presents the story of Esperanza Cordero, a preadolescent Mexican American girl (Chicana) living in the contemporary United States. The focus of this book is on the experience of being a poor, female, Chicana in America. If is to say that the book is essentially multicultural, an argument could be the main subject itself.

Between the two cultures presented in the book, the American and the Mexican culture, seems to be two types of connections: a divergent one and a convergent one.

In the first situation enter all the moments Esperanza feels she doesn’t belong to the place. The symbol for this feeling is the house: on one side is the house they moved in, that wasn’t at all the way she imagined, that made her feel ashamed.

Where do you live? she asked. There, I said pointing up to the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden bars that Papa has nailed on the windows so we wouldn’t fall out. You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there, I nodded. I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it. The house on Mango Street isn’t it. (7)

This house represents the situation of most Mexican immigrants, who don’t feel at home in the new country, who find it difficult to trade their tradition, their heritage for a better financial situation.

But the metaphor of the house is more than pure materialism. The house represents everything that Esperanza does not have- financial means and pleasant surroundings- but more importantly, it represents stability, triumph, and transcendence over the pressures of the neighborhood. (Angel, 121)

Shame is such a strong feeling that it can be either destructive, and the results could be giving up or retreatment, either constructive. Esperanza succeeded to transform shame into an impulse, into a vivid desire to leave el barrio behind: “One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away.” (70)

In the other situation, when the two cultures converge, enter the moments when Esperanza realizes that after she will go away, she will have to come back. Even when her shame will be erased, even when she will succeed in this new country, even when she will have the house “With [her] porch and [her] pillow, [her] pretty purple petunias. “ (69), even then, she will remember to come back. She will remember her culture, she will remember that pink is a color that raises up the spirit, she will remember that there are many others who remained on Mango: “They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out” (70).

Chapter 3. Bilingualism

Bilingual speakers in the United States of America

When I had a look on United States Constitutions’ website, I had the surprise to find out that this country has no official language. As many others, I assumed that English is the official language. It seems that there were big efforts to establish an official language but they remained unsuccessful:

Almost every session of Congress, an amendment to the Constitution is proposed in Congress to adopt English as the official language of the United States. Other efforts have attempted to take the easier route of changing the U.S. Code to make English the official language. As of this writing, the efforts have not been successful. (Mount)

What is even more surprising is the fact that the most recent efforts to promote English as the official language increased as more and more immigration from Spanish-speaking and Eastern nations (such as China and Vietnam) has brought an influx of non-English speakers to the United States. Instead of opening the way to the new-coming people and adapting society’s structure, which includes also languages, Americans try to defend their language, as unofficial as it is.

There is a fear that other languages will erode the function of their most familiar tongue. But the reality is quite different of what they imagine. Most of immigrants that come in U.S., although they come as non-English speakers, in the end they get to be bilingual speakers because the need of integration, the need of finding a working place determines them to learn English.

But what does it mean to be bilingual? It is the ability of using two languages: some people can speak the two languages at the same level of correctness, others feel more comfortable in using one of the two languages and others speak one language at home, or in smaller communities while the other is used at school, at work or other public places.

Bilingualism in the United States, however, is a perplexing proposition. At best, it is often incorrectly correlated with English as a Second Language (ESL), an educational identification to assist beginners or new immigrants, and a support service available in many school districts. At worst, speaking other languages, besides English, is regarded suspiciously as perpetual foreignness, represented in heavily-accented caricatures. (Quach)

But the tendency is straight in the opposite direction. About six-in-ten U.S. adult Hispanics (62%) speak English or are bilingual, according to an analysis of the Pew Research Center’s 2013 National Survey of Latinos. From this analysis also results that Latino adults who are the children of immigrant parents are most likely to be bilingual. Among this group, 50% are bilingual, according to their 2013 survey.

Widespread bilingualism has the potential to affect future generations of Latinos:

Our 2011 survey showed that Latino adults valued both the ability to speak English and to speak Spanish. Fully 87% said Latino immigrants need to learn English to succeed. At the same time, nearly all (95%) said it is important for future generations of U.S. Hispanics to speak Spanish.(Krogstad and Gonzalez-Barrera)

The result on long term will be the following: as more Hispanics will be born in the U.S., more young Latinos will speak English. According to Census Bureau projections, the share of Hispanics who speak only English at home will rise from 26% in 2013 to 34% in 2020.

Besides of facilitating cross cultural communication, bilingualism also positively affects cognitive abilities.

Researchers have shown that the bilingual brain can have better attention and task-switching capacities than the monolingual brain, thanks to its developed ability to inhibit one language while using another. In addition, bilingualism has positive effects at both ends of the age spectrum: Bilingual children as young as seven months can better adjust to environmental changes, while bilingual seniors can experience less cognitive decline.(Marian and Shook)

Despite the benefits involved with bilingualism, the use of Spanish in the U.S. is often a political landmine, from English-only laws to California's Proposition 227, a ballot initiative in 1998 which largely eliminated bilingual classes in public schools.(Glickhouse)

Spanglish

Spanglish is an informal hybrid of both English and Spanish, combining words and idioms from both languages, and is widely used among Hispanics ages 16 to 25. Among these young Hispanics, 70% reported using Spanglish (according to an analysis made by Pew Research in 2009).

It has many varieties and each of these varieties is infused with a unique lexicon, accent and even style.

How did this hybrid language appear? The answer is quite logic: children who have Spanish speaking parents but grow up in the US are somehow determined to speak Spanglish. At home, they most likely speak only Spanish, while at school they speak only English. Of course, thanks to the closeness of the Latino families and communities, they are bound to be thrown together with plenty of other kids in the exact same situation. This allows them to switch between Spanish and English as much as they want. They get to choose the best of both languages. Even their parents use this mixture of languages when they speak in Spanish and they say certain words in English because they are shorter or they don’t have a correspondent in Spanish.

Spanglish is a big trend also in music. Spanish mixed with English in music has been around for decades. At least since Doris Day’s 1956 singing of Que Será Será  the two languages have mixed. More recently the two languages have become intertwined in song.

Popular singers have drawn on Spanglish lyrics to appeal to both the Hispanic and American markets and gain more recognition.

Bilingualism in Sandra Cisneros’ work

The corpus of Chicana literature written primarily in English, but frequently in Spanish or bilingually, were, until recently, ignored by scholars of US and Latin American literatures as well. The language issue, besides the fact that these writings often have a working class character or that many books are published by small ethnic presses (in Cisneros‟s case: Third Woman Press, Arte Publico Press, Mango Press), further limit their possibilities for critical acclaim. Nonetheless, Cisneros has acquired a quasi canonical status. Her novel The House on Mango Street has been adopted in several schools in the US and many poems and short stories from her books have reached a more mainstream readership.

The voices of writers as Cisneros are powerful examples of how geographic, cultural, and language borders are being transgressed, perhaps until they become meaningless.

My interest in her work is the way she mixes the two languages, the reasons for her choice and the results of the mixture.

Adriane Ferreira Veras describes the language used in Chicano fiction as

A representation of language in general, which consciously or unconsciously, chooses a way in which to represent a complex linguistic reality consisting of Chicano discourse. Thus, language, in this discourse, can be seen as a symbolic marker of identity that, among other things, allows a specific group to distinguish itself from others.(233)

So, if the language functions as a symbolic tool, we can say that it can be also an instrument of power. Esperanza speaks, telling us her story, not only to be understood, but also to be known, respected, believed.

She attempts to construct herself as a subject through language; and in order to do that, she first analyzes the meaning (significance) of her own name, as symbolic of her identity. Her effort to decipher the meaning of it turns into an attempt to come to terms with her identity:

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means sadness, it means waiting. […] It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing […] At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something like silver. (10)

Esperanza views her name as a conduit of opposing significances: hope and sadness, waiting and longing; likewise the phonetics of it, which changes when pronounced by her schoolmates and teachers. Her name becomes then a sign of a hybrid cultural context which she needs to find among opposing cultural meanings to come to terms with her own identity.

Conclusions

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Tina Vasquez 2015 the guardian 2017

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Will Hispanic bilingualism survive in the United States?

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