The Politics of Be(long)ing Home: Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home

This paper examines the question of home in two novels by two Latina writers: The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros of Mexican descent and Geographies of Home (1999) by Loida Maritza Pérez of Dominican descent. Despite the fifteen-year gap between the two novels, they are closely linked in the sense that they are concerned with the complicated notions of home constructed by the shared history of Spanish rule and experiences of transnational migration. To read a Chicana writer along with a Dominican woman writer is to look at interconnections across the Americas, displacing the term “America” from its hegemonic U.S. designation and relocating it in broader and more complex dynamics among nations and cultures in the Americas. Both novels interrogate the contesting notions of home played out in the (re)construction of female subjectivity at the crossroads of race, gender, and nation. The two female protagonists’ estrangement from their current home opens up a space for exploring how the migrant notions of home are overdetermined by social relations of gender and race that encompass their old country and new country. By foregrounding the multiply difficult situations of poor Latina immigrants vulnerable to economic deprivation, racial discrimination, patriarchal oppression, and sexual violence in and outside home, the two novels critique the persistence of home as one of the principal sites of domination and conflict for women in Latino/a cultures. The two novels emphasize the contradictory sense of home that not only provides a feeling of security and connection to one’s past but also creates anxieties about enclosure and confinement. With the female protagonists’ attempts to redefine their relationship with home based upon the critical revisions of their Chicana and Dominican identity, the two novels suggest that home is not something one can easily dismiss but something that one needs to constantly reinvent.