The novel is composed of 44 interconnected vignettes, of varying lengths, ranging from one or two paragraphs to several pages. The protagonist, Esperanza, narrates these vignettes in first-person present tense.
In the afterword for the 25th-anniversary publication of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros commented on the style she developed for writing it: "She experiments, creating a text that is as succinct and flexible as poetry, snapping sentences into fragments so that the reader pauses, making each sentence serve her and not the other way round, abandoning quotation marks to streamline the typography and make the page as simple and readable as possible."[4] Cisneros wanted the text to be easily read by people like those she remembered from her youth, particularly people who spent all day working with little time to devote to reading. In her words: "I wanted something that was accessible to ... someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father."[4]
In 2009, Cisneros wrote a new introduction to the novel. Here she includes a few remarks on the process of writing the book. She had first come up with the title "The House on Mango Street"; under it she included several stories, poems, and vignettes which she had already written or was in the process of writing. She adds that she does not consider the book a novel but a "jar of buttons," a group of mismatched stories.[7] These stories were written over different periods of time; the first three were written in Iowa as a side project while Cisneros was studying for a MFA.[8] When orchestrating this book, Cisneros wanted it to be "a book that can be opened at any page and will still make sense to the reader who doesn't know what came before or comes after."[9] She says the people she wrote about were real, amalgamations of persons she met over the years. She tailored together events of the past and the present so that the story being told could have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that all the emotions felt are hers.[10]
