The House on Mango Street and Immigration Line

 The House on Mango Street is written by the Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros which is a Very interesting novel. The center character of the novel is a twelve years old girl, Esperanza. She lives in the house on Mango Street Which is one of poor areas of Chicago a lot of immigrants are present there, but she is unhappy with the way life it is there and dreams of another house where her life will be different. The author shows the growing  process of a girl  while she steps into Puberty While on the other hand line becomes river is written by Francisco Cantu Who Works as a Border Patrol Agent in the First Part, the main purpose of Joining was to study the immigration process and to study the perspective of humans on both sides of the Border as he himself is the grandson of the Mexican immigrant, he works in the Field initially but then starts Working as an officer of immigration in the office , away from the field work and One Day he decides to continue his education and leaves for college,  Cantu becomes friend with a Mexican named ‘’Jose’’ who lefts for Mexico to say goodbye to his dying mother and gets detained while coming back ,Cantu writes that these are just normal people who are willing to cross border just to live a better life , they are a some criminals as well but they are a small fraction while more of those who just want to have a better life for themselves and their families but they are being treated like criminals for having such aim. 

Line Becomes river and The House on Mango Street both are marvelous pieces of writing by their respective writers with kind of some comparable ideas but there are some differences in the type of languages both used and the Characters as well so it is necessary not to just compare the themes developed by the authors of the both literary works but also compare and contrast the minor character’s role and writing style of both and it is going to reveal how different and similar the two are. 

The House on the Mango Street as well as the line becomes river both are novels but there is some kind of autobiographical feel in the they are written if we think critically while house on the mango street is somehow family focused while line becomes river makes us aware of the different perspective of seeing immigration.  

’The House on Mango Street isn’t a very good story. It’s a novel, of sorts, (though it’s somewhat autobiographical) that’s broken-up into “vignettes” all of which are told from the perspective of Esperanza, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago’’ (Andrew Geary) 

The writer of house on mango street shows Esperanza’s family that includes her father, who is trying hard  to do all that is possible to earn a good food and a good life for his family; her mother, an intelligent woman who understands two languages but never went to High School for education so that she could have got a stable job; her brothers named Carlos and Kiki, her younger  sister whose name is Nanny. 

Family Relations are described in a symbiotic way in the Novel. Esperanza wants her family to have their own house which will be give her family a lot of benefits such as absence of the rent payment, sharing with no neighbors. However, the girl is not satisfied with the house on Mango Street which did not correspond to the characteristics of their dream house with a yard, running water, working pipes and so on. (Cisneros, 1984, p.61), and if we compare it to the line becomes river the theme is not that Family Oriented, maybe a little bit family orientation can be seen but it aims at the bigger Picture and Cantu sheds light on the Universal issue of Immigration, while he was working as a border patrol officer he saw and understood the perspective of a man whose job is to stop illegal movement on the border irrespective of all and Cantu writes very well about it , he writes how he feels inside while doing his job in a way it needs to be done and after leaving the job he see the emotional perspective of it as well when his Friend gets detained , Cantu feels that it not just the name of the country , and the land that gets different , when you move from one place to another , it changes everything. In Contrary to house on the mango street which describes the crossing of border inside us, the kind of circle we all build around us and different phases and scenario of one’s life, while the line becomes river makes us aware of the crisis that take place inside the life of an individual who goes through the process of discrimination and alienation. 

In case of writing Style, line becomes river uses different kinds of language to convey the hidden message, Once Cantu even used a fictional story to convey the message hidden beneath, the story of  Saint Francis and the wolf who was quite destructive and the saint had a deal with him and tamed him so that livestock could be saved and in return the villagers agreed to feed the wolf, this story hides a deep meaning underneath , it tells us why we do what we do , a person commits a bad deed but what makes that person do it while on the other hand , In The house on the Mango Street , Writer uses a poetic and some kind Rhyming words to describe the innocence of the girls  , their immaturity and to show the youngness.