SANDRA CISNEROS
1525 N. Campbell Ave.
Chicago, Illinois
By Olga L. Herrera
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in the Little Village neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago. At the time, the area was in transition between Eastern Europeans leaving for the suburbs ahead of the incoming Mexican immigrant families, who bought up the neighborhood’s turn-of-the-century working-class homes. If I had read The House on Mango Street when it was published in 1984, I would have been convinced that Sandra Cisneros was writing about Little Village. That’s how real it felt, with versions of Lucy and Rachel from Texas living down the street, and Cathy Queen of Cats who is moving away because she says “the neighborhood is getting bad.”
The House on Mango Street, however, was based on Cisneros’s childhood in Humboldt Park in the 1960s on the near north side of the city. Even though our two neighborhoods felt similar, they have distinct characters. A tiled archway over the eastern end of the neighborhood symbolizes Little Village’s Mexican identity, while in Humboldt Park, enormous metal Puerto Rican flags arch over a diverse mix of eateries on Division Street, including a Mexican taqueria and a Colombian cafe. Recently, gentrification has been changing the demographics and character of Humboldt Park more swiftly, making a significant change on Cisneros’s old street.
The House on Mango Street was partly inspired by her memories of the house her family bought when she was a young girl, at 1525 N. Campbell Ave. If you do an online image search for the “real” house on Mango Street, you will find images of a red brick two-story house with a flat roof and a small front yard bordered by a black wrought-iron fence. It looks just as Esperanza describes. But it’s not a picture of the original house.
At a symposium I attended in 2017, Sandra Cisneros explained that this image had circulated for years but was, in fact, a photograph of the house directly across the street. The red house in the picture is 1524 N. Campbell Avenue, and it is a mirror image of her house, with the front door on the reverse side. Her childhood home had been demolished in the early 2000s, and a new condominium building was constructed in its place in 2005. You couldn’t see her original home anymore, she said, but the one across the street would give you a good idea of what it looked like.
These two houses tell the story of gentrification in Humboldt Park. One is a modest two-story house with painted brick, a metal awning, and narrow windows. The other is a sleek three-story building with large windows that open to balconies on each floor, with a garden level below. Located between two larger, older apartment buildings, it bears elements of their style, but because the footprint of the plot belonged to that smaller house, the new building at 1525 N. Campbell is wedged into the space, with the northern exterior wall angled away to make room for a narrow gangway. Ceilings have swept upward, and bay windows and a new third floor have sprouted. It has an attenuated look, seeming to both belong and not belong.
The differences represent not only changes in architecture but also in affordability and the families who can live in this building. Gentrification reverses the mid-century trend of white flight to the suburbs. Now wealthy families move in, and less affluent immigrants and families of color have fewer chances to live in this culturally significant neighborhood. In a city notorious for segregation, the Humboldt Park neighborhood has been home to a diverse community that includes Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Eastern Europeans, and African Americans. The House on Mango Street brings that rare diversity to life. Since the mid-1990s, residents have fought to preserve the neighborhood’s character by organizing around issues of affordable housing, community development, and park use. Now, when I walk over to Division Street in Humboldt Park and see El Paisano Tacos across from Nellie’s Puerto Rican restaurant, I see that the community has held on to those cultural differences that make this a special place.
Olga L. Herrera is associate professor in English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. Her research and teaching interests include Latinx and Chicago literature, and she thinks that she will always be fascinated with the complexities and contradictions of cities.
Photo by Marie Villanueva, who was born in Quezon City, Philippines, but has lived in Chicago since her family landed in O’Hare Airport in 1979. She is the author of “Nene and the Horrible Math Monster,” a children’s book loosely based on her experiences growing up as a Filipino immigrant in Chicago’s West Side. She is also a contributor in the anthology, “Children of Asian America.” Marie lives in Chicago and continues to write adult fiction. Photography is one of her many artistic pursuits.
