From Mango Street to Alma Street
Memoir by Alejandro Ramirez
“You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing.
There. I live there.”
—from Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street
In my sophomore English class, back in high school, Ms. Ward had us describe our summer vacations. I shifted in my seat uncomfortably. Half the class described lake houses and summer homes, and showed pictures of houses much nicer and much bigger than my family’s second-floor apartment in our beat-up, gray three-decker. Some described summer camps. I tried to play down the fact that my family hadn’t taken a real vacation since I was in seventh grade — a trip spent mostly visiting family in Nicaragua, bouncing from town to town. I skirted around how I spent most summer days playing video games at home or bumming around with friends. I didn’t lie or make up anything; I just tried to sound really excited about travel-less summers.
I’ve since met people who barely leave their home states, let alone the country, so I’ve realized my world wasn’t so small and boring. But I didn’t have that kind of reassurance in high school, a place populated with kids from richer, whiter towns than Lawrence, Massachusetts. Luckily, that same year, Ms. Ward introduced the class to The House on Mango Street.
I tucked the book in my backpack and walked home through a few short Lawrence streets. The Spicket River rolled to my right as I walked down Erving Avenue; garbage, a shopping cart, and a rusty bike usually poked out of the shallow water. The soundtrack to my daily walk home, if I wasn’t playing some throwback ‘90s hip hop on my iPod, were the cars that drove by blasting reggaeton and bachata. I passed by two autoshops and I was home, at my dreary, gray three-decker on Alma Street. At least we had a big, green yard. It made the house look a little nicer; it was fun to play in as a kid, and it gave the dog somewhere to run around.
I always preferred to read at night. The night I brought The House On Mango Street home, I would’ve read it around 9 or 10 in the evening. The chapters in the book are short, almost like poems or flash fiction. We would’ve been assigned three or four chapters. I’m pretty sure I read twice that many, sucked into Esperanza’s world: her melancholy voice that describes having a home you’re not proud of, her innocence when learning to ride a bike, her descriptions of how family members are too different to be related. As a kid named Alejandro Ramirez, a name I was often told was long as hell, I related completely to her observation that: “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters.”
I didn’t know you could write about Latinos in the city until I read that book. It wasn’t the first on the subject, but it was the first I had ever read. I still wonder why my grammar school, full of inner-city Latinos, didn’t assign it.
Esperanza had more to say between those pages. She notices how adults act, how older and younger kids act; she talks about kids discovering their bodies, about how boys and men won’t respect boundaries, about how most people don’t respect anything or anyone, especially little brown girls from the ghetto. The book has a lot to say about being a young girl, and it probably isn’t my place to talk on that, except to say literature like this can really help open men’s eyes to the struggle, even if only partially.
What really struck me was what the book has to say about leaving the hood. Lawrence — or Lawtown, as locals nicknamed it — isn’t an inspiring place to live. High crime rates, litter everywhere, loud city noises, bad news in the paper, on your block, in your home. I usually tried to take pride in my city, defend it from the people who talk bad about it, whether they were white kids from Andover or other Lawrence kids like me. But deep down, I never wanted to stay.
From the first chapter, we know Esperanza is looking to leave and find something better in the world. After a nun shames her over the poor apartment her family lives in, she says, “I knew then I had to have a house. A real house.” Her family gets one — a small, red house on Mango Street. Esperanza hates it. She wanted a house, but: “This isn’t it. The house on Mango Street isn’t it.” She spends the rest of the book alluding to far-off places like Egypt and Tennessee; to sad, mystical women who enter and leave her life; to a house on the hill where passing bums can stay the night in her attic.
I’ve never thought about my ideal house. For a long time, living in a three-decker seemed totally normal. A lot of homes in Lawtown are three-deckers and duplexes. Some one-family houses have been converted to fit three or four families. Even though sitcoms and movies kept flashing these white picket fences and houses where upstairs and downstairs weren’t different apartments, things felt normal in Lawrence. But when I realized that some kids in the area really do live like those white families on TV, I grew embarrassed about our family’s home. Unlike Esperanza, I never knew what kind of house I wanted, whom I’d let stay there, whether it’d be on a hill or have an attic. But I knew I had to leave Lawrence.
What haunts me most in the book is the idea that Esperanza will leave, only to return to Mango Street. It’s a message both scary and inspiring. When you’re a smart kid in a poor environment (and full disclosure, my parents made more money than the average Lawrencian), people either expect you to soar or want you to stay put. I’ve been lucky enough that most people wanted to see me leave the little mill city; I know plenty of bright kids who weren’t so lucky.
Some of us don’t realize how much we can accomplish. We don’t pursue college or opportunity. Some of us turn to the military, thinking we’d never get a shot any other way. My friend Hector, in eighth grade, told my parents and me that he planned on joining the military — specifically the Air Force — after high school, because that was his only way into college and out of Lawrence. I was usually the smartest kid in class, until Hector transferred to my school. The military wasn’t in my plans; college was going to happen somehow, I knew it. I didn’t really get his attitude — if I didn’t need the military, why would he? When he spoke, we nodded, but later that night, after he left home, my Mom had an outburst: “Who the hell is telling him those things? Does he think because he’s Latino he can only make it out one way?!”
I visited a new boxing gym in Lawrence in the summer of 2012, hoping to write an article about it. The gym had recently expanded and was notable for taking in a lot of kids. I spoke with the head trainer and a couple of board members in the gym’s small office. Lining the walls were pictures of Lawrence youth lost to street violence. Many of the kids in the gym were in grammar school. Of course, the gym had older clients, too — teenagers and adults. But the kids were where the passion was. The gym effectively wanted to double as a youth center. They wanted to bring the kids to Golden Glove tournaments in other cities, or even just to the beach. “We want to show them there’s a world outside Lawrence,” one of the board members told me.
Hector didn’t join the Air Force, nor any other military branch. He ended up getting accepted to Phillips Academy, a prestigious high school in Andover. And after that, he got into Johns Hopkins. He learned about a world outside of Lawrence, met international students, and went on a school trip to Germany. He was hungry for something in the world that Lawrence couldn’t offer him, and it took him out of the state, took him to a decent post-college job. As of this writing, he’s married and living in the D.C. area, still trying to balance professional goals and artistic pursuits.
Hector tried to push that ambition onto his little sister, and often encouraged her to pursue better schools and opportunities when she was in high school, not to settle for whichever schools her friends or cousins were attending. “I just want her to know there’s more out there,” he said.
The way he says it, it sounds like she’d have to leave her family and friends behind. Hector did that, to an extent. He only comes back to Lawrence once or twice a year. Escaping Lawrence comes with a price. You’re losing your home — not just in the physical sense, but also home in that abstract sense of where your loved ones live, where your identity is shaped, where everything feels familiar. We don’t all put the same weight on that price. Some people can pick up and leave without a second thought; others wouldn’t dare leave everyone behind. Many enter the cycle of leaving and returning.
“I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free [. …]
They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.”
(from the chapter, “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes”)
In some ways, I belong to Alma Street, to Lawrence, less than Esperanza does to Mango Street, even though I grew up in Lawrence practically my whole life. I know fewer people in town than most do; I’m not someone who can walk down the street and see someone I recognize. At 25, I moved away to Boston, only 45 minutes away by train, and while I think about Lawrence a lot, I doubt the town misses me. I’m an outsider in an outsider town. Or maybe an outsider in an insider town — an outcast in a town full of extended families, of kids who grew up roaming the same blocks, playing the same teams. I never really fit in — too geeky, unathletic, didn’t know enough Spanish, didn’t talk to enough people. Why should I miss it?
When I visited home for Easter, my first return home in months, I felt lightheaded, almost like I weren’t really there; my brain couldn’t keep up with the images I saw. Everything was wavy. There was nothing unusual or traumatic in the sights: shoddy bodega fronts, bare trees despite it technically being spring, crumbly streets, sad-looking houses. Hell, you can see that all over certain sections of Boston, if not worse. But there was a feeling like I was stuck. Back to the old routine, the old sights, back to a city that won’t let go. Even the house I grew up in felt more like a box, or a cage, closed around me.
And yet I still feel like I need to go back. I feel the need to write about it. I don’t know if it’s so Lawrence will let me go, or so I can hold it closer, or so I will always remember to return for those who cannot out. I guess that’s why I wrote this essay; it’s one way of going back. It’s certainly not an escape guide. It’s just a way of looking back, making meaning out of Lawrence. My little city has been forgotten by so many, especially those with money or political power, people who want to keep their distance. I have distance from Lawrence, but I won’t forget it, never can, never will. I don’t really feel like I’ve escaped Lawrence or left it behind. The mill city by the Merrimack River dominates much of my writing. When I moved to Boston, it felt less like walking away entirely and more like taking a step back to get a clearer view of a large picture. Maybe if I understand the big picture, I can better appreciate the small details, textures, characters within that mural, everything that brings it all to life, that makes it beautiful, ugly, dynamic — everything that makes it Lawtown.
