Barriers for Belonging in Fiction : The House on Mango Street as a Resource for Teaching

Abstract: Swedish curricula and syllabi constitute a richness of different considerations. Withinthis composition of principles, it is distinctly declared that all Swedish schools should counteract any inclination of discrimination and that intolerance must be answered with different measures, including knowledge (Skolverket, 2011b, 1). Scrutinizing ways in which knowledge can be used as an instrument towards these issues is therefore incentivized. On this token, the following essay investigates the potentiality of usingthe novel The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros in English 7 instruction in upper secondary school, as teaching material for imparting knowledge about different forms of discrimination. To achieve this purpose, the essay first examines the experiences of narrator and protagonist Esperanza Cordero through close reading, to explore how tacit and explicit racial and class-based discrimination shape her identity and inhibit her sense of belonging. Belonging is conceptualized through Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities wherein an individual is viewed as bargaining for belonging towards delimited and delimiting communities. Identity is viewed through a sociological lens as a transformative, negotiable, and revocable phenomenon and as interlinked with asymmetrical power relations. In addition, the essay analyses the findings from the close reading in relation to the syllabus for the course English 7, and the curriculum for upper secondary school. On this basis, the essay maintains that The House on Mango Street is suitable teaching material for the course English 7 at upper secondary school. The results indicate an alignment between the principles stated in the steering documents and the findings of the analyses, illustrating the applicability of The House on Mango Street as teaching material within a Swedish school setting. Furthermore, the results reveal how the novel presents teachers with ample opportunities to mediate how forms of discrimination are intertwined with questions of identity and belonging.