To understand the concept of home, I need to clarify and define what the word means in reference to the curriculum unit I am writing. Home is a deeply personal and meaningful word for many people. A home is defined as a place where a person or family lives, offering a sense of refuge, belonging, and comfort. A home carries emotional weight. It differs from the definition of a house that refers to the physical building, a structure that serves to protect its dwellers from the elements. 1
It is also important to know the student population that exists in the district. In New Haven, Connecticut, we serve a large minority population. The student body consists of over 18,000 students. 9.8% of the student population is white. 33.1% black, 3.9% Asian/Pacific Islander, 49.3% Latino, and .2% American Indian or Alaska Native. In addition, we have 3.5% of students who have identified two or more races.2 It is difficult to determine how many of these students are migrants, immigrants, or transplants, but it does tell us that we are dealing with a culturally diverse population.
Cultural diversity has a lot to do with the sense and feeling of "home." It is closely connected to how people understand and experience home. Cultural background shapes the traditions, languages, memories, values, and family expectations that give a place emotional meaning. For students shaped by migration, home may be connected not only to a current residence but also to ancestral roots, community ties, and inherited cultural identity.
Scholars have argued that cultural identity and belonging are central to the meaning of home. As Avtar Brah explains, home is both a lived locality and a broader sense of belonging shaped by histories of diaspora, identity, and location.3 This perspective helps explain why home cannot be understood as only a physical space, especially in communities marked by cultural diversity and migration.
New Haven is a sanctuary city and many of our students come to New Haven from somewhere else. Some families immigrate by choice, and others are forced by circumstances to immigrate to a place that differs from their homeland. While many students are native to New Haven, a sizable portion are immigrants who come from other countries or they are transplants. A transplant is a person who moves within the country, state, city, or town. Their relationship to "home" is shaped by migration and cultural displacement.
Migration can complicate the sense of home by creating layered identities. Someone may feel more attached to more than one place or that they belong to either. Movement across places can intensify questions about who we are, where we belong, and what it means to feel at home. It is important to explore how "home" is shaped by migration. Migration fundamentally detaches the concept of "home" from a fixed physical structure, transforming it into a dynamic, ongoing process of negotiation. For migrants, home becomes an emotional and psychological balancing act between mourning what was left behind, adapting to the present, and building future aspirations. Migration does not limit itself from country to country. It can also be from state to state, city to city, even neighborhood to neighborhood.
For students in our diverse community, the meaning of home is not universal. Some students identify home as the place they left behind—the country or city of their origin. Others identify home as their new city or the city where their family currently resides. Still others hold both places in their hearts simultaneously. A sense of home shapes who we are as people because inside of the home, we express who we are and share in commonalities with our family, whether nuclear or extended.
Anchor Text: The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street is a lyrical, coming-of-age novel that is required reading for our eighth-grade students. This novel utilizes a series of vivid vignettes to explore a young Latinx girl's quest for identity, independence, and a space of her own in a segregated Chicago neighborhood.
At the opening of the novel, we meet 12-year-old Esperanza Cordero and her family. They move into a small run-down house on Mango Street. Though her family finally owns the property, it does not live up to Esperanza's expectations of what a house should look like. The house does not live up to her grandiose ideas and seems much like the apartments they had rented over the years. Esperanza was sure that once they owned a home, things would be different, but she does not feel that way. The house is situated in a crowded poor Latinx “barrio” (neighborhood) in Chicago. Poverty and social isolation surround them. But despite this, Esperanza makes friends and experiences childhood adventures with them.
As time progresses, Esperanza goes through puberty and begins to experience the harsh complexities of adulthood. She has a traumatic experience at a carnival and that changes her outlook on life. She is disillusioned and fearful of what life has in store for her as she matures into womanhood. Because of these traumas and the shame of poverty and racism, Esperanza begins writing poetry and stories. Writing becomes her way to emotionally escape and begin to define who she is.
By the end of the novel, Esperanza accepts that Mango Street has shaped her identity and made her who she is. While she decides that she will eventually leave the neighborhood to achieve her dream of owning her own home, she vows to return one day for the women she is leaving behind because like herself, she knows they deserve better. She feels it is her responsibility to others because she is part of the community no matter where life takes her.
Historical Context of the novel
Published in 1984, The House on Mango Street was heavily shaped by the urban, working-class landscape of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. Cisneros, writes the novel drawing directly from her youth in East Humboldt Park, a historically Puerto Rican and Mexican neighborhood that experienced racial segregation, economic hardship, and tensions with police. 11
During this time, Cisneros was one of the first Latina writers to gain widespread mainstream recognition. During the early 1980s, the Mexican American community in the United States was pushing for greater representation in the face of widespread marginalization. The House on Mango Street emerged from these civil rights and feminist pushback, specifically aiming to chronicle the marginalized female experience in the barrio, rather than the male-dominated narratives that were traditionally available.
Cisneros takes pride in being Latina and Chicana. As a woman of Mexican decent living in the United States, being Chicana is a specific identity that often carries a strong political meaning connected to community strength and a resistance to discrimination. The term Chicana carries the acknowledgement of a strong Mexican cultural heritage that can co-exist with the American culture creating a new space, honoring the “wholeness” of a person's identity. The term is also a clear rejection of the idea that people must deny their Mexican heritage to be real Americans.
To understand why it is so important for Cisneros to write from her personal experience growing up in Chicago, we must understand how and why Mexicans arrived there and what their life was like as immigrant members of the broader society. It all began with early migration and labor opportunities beginning around 1910 until about the 1930s. During this time there was a wave of Mexican workers brought in to work on the railroads and steel mills. They were drawn in by labor recruiters. Once here to work, they were housed in temporary settlements that consisted of converted railroad boxcars along the tracks in areas like South Chicago and Englewood. By the 1920s distinct Chicano and Mexican communities were taking root in neighborhoods like South Chicago and the Near West Side among others.
During the 1940’s, World War II created a labor shortage, leading to another surge of migration from the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. This prompted the creation of the Bracero program. It was an agreement between Mexico and the United States allowing Mexicans to work under a short-term work permit in the United States. The program ended in 1964 and because of the large influx of Mexican laborers, it helped lay the foundation of Chicago’s permanent Mexican Communities.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Chicago began an urban renewal and highway construction effort that managed to displace Mexican communities from the Near West Side. Because of this, these families shifted and settled heavily into neighborhoods like Pilsen and Little Village. These displacements were blatant examples of systemic racism and marginalization. Urban renewal crises prompted Mexican American youth to reject older, assimilationist approaches to integration. Instead, they embraced radical, visible identities such as the Chicano movement to explicitly demand geographic stability and municipal representation.
Moving into the late 1960s and 1970s, Civil Rights movements began to take hold, and the rise of the Chicano activists was felt. During this time Chicano activists organized and demanded better living, medical, and educational conditions. It was the fight to claim their ethnic self-determination and cultural autonomy.
In the book, Brown in the Windy City, the author Lilia Fernández argues that postwar urban renewal and racial classification were deeply intertwined forces that actively shaped the geographic and social positions of Mexicans (and Puerto Ricans) in Chicago. Rather than occupying a passive space, these groups engaged in "race-making" through their daily navigation of city politics, displacement, and community activism. Her view on Mexicans (and Puerto Ricans) in Chicago re-enforces how uprising and claiming space was the foundation of the community that exists today.
During the late 20th century, Chicago lost many residents due to deindustrialization. During this time, Chicanos and Mexican immigrants began the task of transforming neighborhoods and revitalizing commercial areas to preserve and make visible their heritage, culture and rich history across the city they helped build and maintain.
Analysis of the novel: The House on Mango Street
Once we understand the historical context of the novel, we can relate themes and concepts of the novel back to history. The House on Mango Street is true to its setting and time period. Instead of focusing on historical facts, we can navigate the human aspect of what is going on in Chicago at the time, during Esperanza’s coming of age. Like many of our students, The House on Mango Street is a novel that reflects the conflict some students may feel about identifying what home means and how to navigate the social complexities of belonging. Esperanza's struggle to define and claim her own home resonates deeply with students navigating related questions of belonging, identity, and displacement. This matters for understanding the themes of The House on Mango Street because Esperanza's reflections show that home is tied to dignity, self-definition, cultural experience, and the desire to belong. Reading the novel through the lens of cultural diversity allows students to see how the search for a home a search for identity and a place within a larger community is linked to who they are as people. Esperanza’s “migration” is not from one country to another but from one house to another. She moves from house to house, always seeing them as temporary dwellings due to the desire that she had of living in a house she visualized as perfect, much different from her current reality.
The House on Mango Street is a novel that explores the complex issues of home and belonging. The main character in the novel, Esperanza, struggles with the concept of home. At the beginning of the novel, her home was a physical space. On page 3 of the novel Esperanza begins by stating that "The house on Mango Street is ours...But even so, it's not the house we'd thought we'd get." 4 Esperanza's concept of home in The House on Mango Street evolves from a physical, permanent dwelling of shame into an abstract, internal sanctuary built on autonomy, memory, and writing.
Home is deeply tied to Latinx identity, community, and the immigrant experience. This novel is a good representation of such. Mango Street itself is a character—representing both cultural richness and systemic disadvantages. Esperanza must navigate loving her community while wanting to break free of the space and all its limitations. We can appreciate that throughout the novel, Esperanza begins to connect to her community and realizes that it is not just something to escape but something that has shaped her.
Rationale
The concept of home is one that I as a teacher can relate to. Being a Puerto Rican born and raised in Connecticut created an internal conflict for many of my formative years. Much like my students, what I lived at home was different from what I experienced in the world, and my world was school during those years. Like many of my students I am the first generation, born on the mainland. That being said, my parents made it their life work to instill in me the language, culture, religious, and moral beliefs they were raised with. My household was very Puerto Rican during a time that it was not cool to be Puerto Rican. I understood at a young age that as a family we were in Connecticut by choice. My father had chosen to migrate to Connecticut because he wanted to escape meddling in-laws who were interfering in the rearing of his two older children. My father reasoned that if they were far enough away from his mother-in-law, he might have an opportunity to create the nuclear family he sought when he married my mom. In Puerto Rico my father worked for himself transporting sugar cane. We were not migrants out of necessity. I think it is important to mention that because it eased the feelings of shame within myself that some of my classmates felt because their circumstances were different. Because we were here by choice, I understood that by choice we could leave at any time. As the years passed, the relatives that were living here returned to the Island. My family always said that Connecticut was not the destination but a stop on our way back to Puerto Rico. At this point it was a feeling of “don’t unpack because we are not staying”. This coupled with the fact that my parents frequently stated that this was not home, that we would be returning home one day, home being Puerto Rico. This sentiment went on for my first 19 years of life. My father’s plan was to return to Puerto Rico upon retirement and that he did. With the move, any sense of self for me went out the window. I moved to a place that was “home,” a home I knew nothing about. The location, a tropical island, was in stark contrast to Connecticut. The heat and the constant summer were confusing because the weather had always been a marker for change. As time went on, I began to recognize and identify with the culture and the people. I began to take pride in my heritage, and I could be unapologetically Puerto Rican. This realization helped me come full circle into an identity and sense of home that my parents worked hard to cultivate for all those years.
Many of my students have lived and/or are living a similar experience to my own. As a middle school teacher, I encounter students caught in the eternal conflict of questioning who they are and what their place is in this world. They are at a critical moment in their development where they are constructing identity. They are beginning to understand how their circumstances and life shape their world. At this age, students are grappling with questions of belonging, autonomy, and self-definition—the exact themes that drive Esperanza's (the main character from The House on Mango Street) narrative.
For middle schoolers, home is not simply a physical location; it is a complex intersection of safety, identity, family expectations, cultural heritage, and personal aspirations. By engaging with The House on Mango Street, my eighth graders can explore these abstract concepts through a relatable protagonist whose struggles mirror their own development. This unit validates students' emerging understanding that home is both a tangible and emotional space, and that their personal narratives matter; their voices matter. It lets our students know that their struggles are real and worthy of attention. When students are given the opportunity to explore and understand who they are, they can come to the realization that their futures are not predetermined but something they can create. Having a sense of “home” is an important part of this discovery. In a diverse urban community like New Haven, where our students navigate multiple cultures, languages, and systems of opportunity and constraint, this unit is not just a literature lesson; it is an exercise in validation, empowerment, and hope.
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