Cisneros has discussed the relationship between her own personal experiences and Esperanza's life as depicted in The House on Mango Street.[2] Like her protagonist, Esperanza, Cisneros is Mexican-American and was born and raised in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Yet there are differences; for instance, where Esperanza has two brothers and a sister, Cisneros was "the only daughter in a family of seven children".[3] Earlier, Cisneros suggested that as the only girl in a family of boys, she often felt isolated. Cisneros attributes "her impulse to create stories" to "the loneliness of those formative years".[3]
While completing an MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop,[3] Cisneros first discovered a sense of her own ethnic "otherness", and at this time she felt marginalized "as a person of color, as a woman, as a person from working-class background".[4] In an interview, Cisneros stated that during her graduate studies, when she began writing The House on Mango Street, she found the academic atmosphere highly discouraging. She remembered finding her classmates' backgrounds very different than her own and realized she had little in common with them: "I was so angry, so intimidated by my classmates that I wanted to quit. But ... I found a way to write … in reaction to being there I started to have some Mango Street almost as a way of claiming this is who I am. It became my flag".[5] Cisneros created Esperanza from these personal feelings of displacement.
