'This Bridge We Call Home': Crossing and Bridging Spaces in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street

The idea of the border has proved a most fertile one in articulating the conflicting principles that constitute Chicano/a subjects. Shaped by complex intercultural dynamics, Chicanas learn ‘to juggle cultures’ and to develop ‘a mestiza consciousness or consciousness of Borderlands’. Sandra Cisneros’s first novel, an amalgam of prose and poetry that portrays female development, participates in the process of creating such ‘a third space’, which encompasses competing territories, discourses and narratives. Though the novel’s action is physically removed from the geopolitical boundary that divides Mexico from the United States, and there is no physical border crossing, the idea of the border(land) is crucial to The House on Mango Street (1984), informing both its thematic and structural concerns. Cisneros’s text creates tension between discourses of gender loyalty and ethnic solidarity, but, through the juxtaposition of a series of vignettes that transcend linear and hierarchical readings, refuses primacy to any of the forces at play in the process of fashioning the ethnic American and female self. In the end, the protagonist selectively integrates the diverse spaces she inhabits, and through her writing claims a home of her own, which blurs distinctions and merges dichotomies. The paper explores this harmonious coexistence by relating it to the mediating function of the traditional Bildungsroman. It also associates it with the feminist project undertaken by women of colour in the United States, in particular with the need to recognise ‘the matrix-like interaction’ of categories such as gender, race, class, and ethnicity when it comes to questions of identity formation.