Topics & Themes
The central idea or message that is expressed throughout a literary text (ex: home, culture, growing up). It provides an answer to the question, “What is the work about?”
What is Theme?
A literary device that uses tangible objects, colors, or characters to represent abstract ideas & deeper meanings.
What is Symbolism?
A genre of literature, theater, film, or video game that focuses on the growth of a protagonist from childhood to adulthood.
What is A Coming of Age Story?
A writing response format that includes restating the question, answering the question, citing evidence, and an explanation.
What is A RACE Paragraph?
Esperanza's cultural identity.
What is Mexican or Mexican-American?
The main subject of the literary work that is highly specific and explains what the story is about; often the title of the work (ex: my neighbor Rosie, my house on Mango Street).
What is Topic?
A literary device used in "Hips" to create a contrast between the childlike nursery rhymes and jump roping of Esperanza and her friends, and the process of growing up and developing hips.
What is Juxtaposition?
A short, well-written sketch or descriptive scene that doesn't follow a narrative structure of beginning, middle, end.
What is a Vignette?
A conclusion you come to based on clues in the text & your own knowledge about the world.
What is an Inference?
The author of The House on Mango Street.
Who is Sandra Cisneros?
An ethnic identity and term for Mexican Americans, often connected to empowerment and independence.
What is Chicano or Chicana?
A recurring image, character, or pattern in literature and thought that represents a universal situation or concept (ex: sidekick or hero).
What is an archetype?
The shape or appearance of something; the genre or type of a literary text (ex: poem or short story).
What is Form?
What is 1) introduce the quote, 2) cite the text word-for-word in quotation marks, and 3) put the page number in parentheses at the end of the paragraph.
Who the author wanted the audience of The House on Mango Street to be.
What is An Average Person (ex: her father or a person working at Dunkin' Donuts)?
The gradual development of moral concepts, conscience, religious values or views, and social attitudes as a part of personality growth.
What is Character Development?
A literary device that involves putting two or more contrasting elements (ideas, characters, images, scenes, etc.) side-by-side or in similar narrative moments. With this device, the relationship created by the contrast is what matters.
What is Juxtaposition?
A specific sub-genre of the coming-of-age story genre, meaning a novel of formation or education. In it, the protagonist grows, learns, and changes in order to take his or her place in the world.
Type of writing that involves using descriptive language to make the reader visualize the thing you're describing, rather than explaining directly what the thing might be.
What is "showing and not telling"?
Reason why The House on Mango Street was banned.
What is Promoting the Overthrow of the Government.
Due date of the final draft of the Vignette Project.
What is Monday, September 28, 2026.
Identify a literary device at work in the quote, "Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition” ("Hips," 49).
What is Simile?
The form that the author refers to in the following quote: “I was cross-pollinating fiction and poetry and writing something that was the child of both. I was crossing borders and I didn't know it."
What is the Vignette?
When responding to a question that asks you to cite evidence to support your answer, what is the FIRST thing you should be doing?
Looking for evidence to support your answer before beginning the writing process.
The typical future for a woman living on Mango Street, as Esperanza observes in many of her female neighbors who sit by the window.
What is Marriage, Motherhood, and Feeling Unable to Follow Your Draems?