Does The House on Mango Street have a sequel?

For a long time, Sandra Cisneros resisted the idea of having her much-loved 1983 classic, The House on Mango Street, adapted for the screen.

But the Chicago-born author changed her mind, according to Deadline, because of renewed attention on Latinx immigration narratives and the ubiquity of streaming services. Cisneros will act as executive producer for a TV adaptation of The House on Mango Street, a project funded by the same producer who brought Narcos to Netflix.

The House on Mango Street, by now standard fare in schools and universities across the United States, is the coming-of-age story of Esperanza Cordero, a Chicana girl growing up in Chicago.

Cisneros entered the public spotlight again early last year when she received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In a lovely acceptance speech, Cisneros dedicated her award to many people, including “all divided by borders, the mothers and fathers punished for seeking asylum, for the children traumatized by separation. . . For the undocumented globally, for the stories they carry inside them, a burden too big for one body to contain.”

Recently, Cisneros spoke in support of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, a novel about a dangerous journey from Mexico to the US southern border and the focus of the new year’s most divisive book world debate.

“It’s written in a form that will engage people, not just the choir, but people who might think differently,” Cisneros said. “We’re always looking for the great American story, and this is the great story of the Americas, at a time in which borders are blurred.”

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a book that has had a profound effect on so many readers. Luckily for fans of the book, it was recently announced that The House on Mango Street will be adapted for TV by the producer behind Narcos, Gaumont.

Prior to this news, Sandra Cisneros had rejected all offers to adapt her book but has changed her tune due to our everchanging world and the evolution of television. When asked about her decision she said, “I write because the world we live in is a house on fire, and the people we love are burning,” she said. “Television has grown up in the last 20 years and now is the time to tell our stories.”

The forces behind this new adaptation are in full support of the story with Gaumont’s president of U.S. Television, Gene Stein, stating, “The House on Mango Street is a timeless story that captures the struggles, dreams and spirit of a young woman who epitomizes the experience of many young women coming of age in America today. It’s an inspiring and uplifting story that speaks to the challenges faced by so many trying to find their place in society.”

Read more about this exciting book-to-screen news on Deadline.

(Feature image courtesy of @litwithjoandkell)

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Writer Sandra Cisneros still has that distinctive voice that's as bright as a new penny. Yet when asked what it means to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her first and most celebrated book, The House on Mango Street, she said she thinks it means she's getting old.

"I just put my head down for a minute, and a couple of decades have gone by," she said wryly. It was only a few weeks before she was to embark on a multicity book tour to commemorate The House on Mango Street, and Austin is one of the first cities on the schedule. "It's like my oldest child," she continued in a telephone interview from her San Antonio home. "I don't feel old enough to be a mother, although I'm old enough to be a grandmother! But that book ... it's a celebration. A celebration and harvesting of a future I planted, a confirmation and a blessing."

The House on Mango Street is the title that brought Cisneros to the forefront of U.S. Latino arts and letters and indeed solidified her place in American literature. The book is a series of interrelated vignettes loosely centered around a principal character, Esperanza Cordero, and following her coming-of-age in inner-city Chicago. The book gained attention when it appeared in 1984, both for its spare, lyrical language and its distinctly Mexican-American backdrop. Latino readers first embraced the book, awestruck to see their experience, diction, and culture poetically illuminated, but it quickly earned a wider audience. In 1985, it was an American Book Award winner. Thereafter, Cisneros earned several other awards, including the prestigious MacArthur "genius grant." Today, Mango Street is studied in grade schools and in universities and is widely anthologized, with translations throughout the world. An estimated 4 million copies are in print, and in the U.S., Vintage Books is releasing an anniversary edition of Mango Street in conjunction with the book tour.

"It's funny, but I had – I guess I would have to call it a vision – when I was writing [Mango Street]," Cisneros said. "I was talking to a friend, and I just saw that this book was going to have a life of its own and the ability to attract a wide audience like The Little Prince." ("Of course, my book is nothing like The Little Prince," she's quick to add.) In fact, her model when writing Mango Street was Jorge Luis Borges' Dreamtigers, a collection of seemingly unrelated pieces that can be read individually but have greater resonance when considered collectively.

"I didn't find out about 'story cycles' until after the fact," she said, referring to her work and others that can be read out of sequence. She was also highly conscious of not excluding readers. While Mango Street rings with humor, it also has moments of violence and sexual aggression. She diligently used language and images that a more seasoned reader could decipher and a less mature reader could still enjoy.

And Mango Street is not, as some readers assume, autobiographical. Over the years, the book has been analyzed, sometimes arriving at conclusions that somehow become mythologized interpretations of Cisneros herself – as in one narrow assessment that Mango Street's Esperanza longs "to be white."

"The voices are true, the characters are true. But it's not a memoir," she said. "As a writer, you draw from every house you lived in."

While Cisneros agrees that Mango Street is the most beloved of her books, she admits that there are things she could change.

"There are some lines I could rewrite. I would be more consistent with punctuation – things maybe another writer might appreciate," she said. "At the time, I thought I had more stories. People ask for sequels. I guess I could, but why? I did what I set out to do. And I had other questions I wanted to approach craftwise. To me, books are always questions. ... I write my way toward the answer."

The Austin Public Library and the APL Foundation present an evening with Sandra Cisneros celebrating 25 years of The House on Mango Street on Monday, March 23, at 7pm at the Paramount Theatre, 713 Congress. The event is free and open to the public, but seats must be reserved at www.austintheatre.org/cisneros. For more information call 974-7400.

Does House on Mango Street have a sequel?

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