My best friend Rita's Grandmother passed away today.

I felt so terrible for her.

It's funny because she had said that if her Grandma was

to pass away, it would be like losing her Mother.

I brought her food just to make sure she

ate before she went to work.

Hopefully I can be there for her like she has been there for me

in this time of need.

As of this week I have been assigned to read

The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros.

She lives in the King William District of SA.

I never thought I liked her stories when I was in high school.

But now that I'm reading them they are so beautiful to me.

Maybe it's because I'm older and more mature.

It's a book of short stories, sort of like a novela

but in literature form.

Great read, I reccomend.

The House on Mango Street

My Name

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.

It was my great-grandmother's name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse--which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female-but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong.

My great-grandmother. I would've liked to have known her, a wild, horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That's the way he did it.

And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister's name Magdalena--which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least- -can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza. Would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.

By Sandra Cisneros