The House on Mango Street

In Sandra Cisneros’s The House On Mango Street the author’s use of leimotif shows the reader that where your feet take you and how you look establishes who you are.

Throughout the book Cisneros uses leimotif many times. In chapter six, “Our Good Day”, Esperanza is explaining how rugged Lucy and Rachel look. She says “They are wearing shiny Sunday shoes without socks. It makes their bald ankles all red, but I like them.” (15). Rachel and Lucy are two kids that come from poor families. They only wear their Sunday shoes because their other shoes have become too small to wear and since they don’t have any money to buy new shoes they have to wear their Sunday shoes although they hurt.

“I’m wearing the new dress, pink and white with stripes, and new underclothes and socks and the old saddle shoes I wear to school, brown and white, the kind I get every September because they last long, and they do. My feet scuffed and round, and the heels all crooked that look dumb with this dress”, says Esperanza while at her cousin’s baptism party, where all she can think of is how horrible she looks (47). Esperanza has all new clothes, but the only thing she explains in detail is her shoes. To her, her shoes mean everything to her, she has everything new on, and she looks beautiful, but if she still has her everyday shoes on which brings down the whole outfit because it’s not everyday that she gets to go to a party, and because she has her old shoes on she carries all her troubles with her. Also her shoes take her where she needs to go, they are what she sees every day, when she is depressed, which many times she is, she looks down, at her feet, and the sight of her ugly brown and white saddle shoes only makes things worse, at that time she feels depressed and ugly all because of a simple part of her outfit, her shoes. Also in chapter thirty-two, “Sally”, Esperanza expresses that she wants things to change, “I want to buy shoes just like yours, like your black ones made out of suede, just like those” (82). Esperanza wants to dress, act, and be like Sally. She doesn’t just want Sally’s shoes, but the overall beauty that sally has and Esperanza doesn’t. Esperanza is jealous, Sally’s father doesn’t like her being beautiful but she doesn’t listen to him, she just does it behind his back, and Esperanza looks up to Sally because of the way she dresses, and is starting to think like Sally also; Esperanza doesn’t care what her mom thinks about wearing black at a young age, she still has the yearn for black suede shoes just like Sally’s, she is even tempted