Adumbration to Manifestation: The Trajectory of Sandra Cisneros’s Confrontation with Coloniality and Humanism

Abstract: This article places Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984) , Loose Woman (1994), and Woman Without Shame (2022) in dialogue. It argues for an evolution across these texts as they engage with coloniality and humanism via thematic strands of domesticity and sexuality. The House on Mango Street shows primary impulses that animate Esperanza regarding home and sexuality, but as Loose Woman attests, a personal decoloniality does not simply mean an escape from Mango Street, nor it is necessarily found in a home of one’s own, since the home remains affected by historical structures. In Woman Without Shame , a seasoned Cisneros revisits her early inclinations to overtly and reflectively explore surprising possibilities for living and loving that Esperanza was just beginning to imagine.