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Anthony Carmona
Professor Brand
ENC 1102
26 April 2021
Esperanza And All Poor Children
“You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there. I
nodded. I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to.” (Cisneros 10).
This is a quote from Esperanza, a character from the novel The House on Mango Street that
narrates her experiences as a member of a family that constantly struggles from poverty. One of
the central obstacles her family has dealt with, is finding a good house. Esperanza’s strong
commitment to get a house she will be proud of, without understanding the difficulty behind it, is
a common reaction of all young children that experience the events caused by the many factors
of poverty.
Scientists Ambrosi, Solène Blaye, Agnès Gonthier, Corentin carried out a series of
studies on young children to analyze their cognitive and proactive control when presented with
an implicit event. Cognitive control reflects the child ability to generate in their mind, an image
or picture that will serve as a guide for behavior. In other words, it is the capacity to act by
visualizing an imaginary goal. Proactive control, in the other hand, deals with the anticipation of
problems before they manifest to the individual. This involves understanding of the
complications that may occur during the path to attaining a goal. The results of the experiment
revealed that “children from an early age show evidence of cognitive control, when it is triggered
by implicit events, at an age where proactive control, is not yet functional” (Ambrosi). The
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finding of these results proves that a young child that is triggered by implicit events, has the
ability to visualize the potential solution but, at the same time, is not yet capable of identifying
the complexity of the process of reaching the solution.
The implicit events that triggered Esperanza’s cognitive control abilities were the several
occasions in which she moves to a house expecting her ideal home but instead is always met
with the harsh reality of another temporary house. Consequently, she develops a strong
commitment to the goal of one day having her dream house. But, as she lacks proactive
functions, her mind cannot yet grasp the difficulty of the steps nor the tremendous effort required
to get a house. Esperanza’s lack of a stable house is just a small element of poverty, a subject
immensely complex and multifaceted. By alternating the implicit events caused by unstable
housing, to the many other occurrences that poverty might weight on children, one can conclude
that every poor child will react to their own implicit events, in a similar neurochemical manner
portrayed by the scientific results.
Another attribute that connects to both Esperanza and other children from low-income
families is the positivism behind their aspirations. From the moment of Esperanza’s interaction
with the nun in front of her house, to the end of the novel, she has an undying spirit to pursuit
and accomplish the goal of getting a real house. Independent of her parents’ influence, Esperanza
sees herself as the architect of her own destiny. She is convinced of that posture and believes she
has the power to change things. In the journal article “Children's Perceptions of Poverty,
Participation, and Local Governance in Uganda” by Sophie Witter and Jenifer Bukokhe, there
was a study made to identify young children’s inside perspectives and thoughts about their poor
living conditions. Regarding the perception of poverty and participation, they concluded that
young children “have a positive view of their potential role in mitigating poverty and are
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enthusiastic to be involved”, (Witter). In connection with Esperanza’s case, this inference
portrays that there is a living spirit among a wide range of young poor children, which believe
that a brighter future is within their reach. This mode of thinking is not inaccurate in its
fundaments, but it is an incomplete and borderline innocent perception of poverty.
As we mentioned before, the results prove that this sort of optimistic thinking
predominates at the younger ages. As individuals grow, so do their capabilities of predicting and
understanding possible problems. In other words, as one gets older, the idea that poverty is
something that someone everyone can break from, becomes an ideological talk. Universally
defining poverty is an almost impossible task, partly because it is highly based on individual
experience. Someone who has not had that experience is at risk of falling under the concepts of a
single story.
As a general rule, society should let people that think like Esperanza live to their
positions because it might be what works for them. In the other side, people that that disagree
might also be right on their own understanding. Poverty is an abstract word, and children’s
perception is just as justified as any other.
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Works Cited Page
Witter, Sophie, and Jenifer Bukokhe. “Children's Perceptions of Poverty, Participation, and Local
Governance in Uganda.” Development in Practice, vol. 14, no. 5, 2004, pp. 645–659. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/4029893. Accessed 27 Apr. 2021.
Gonthier, Corentin, et al. “Learning-Based before Intentional Cognitive Control: Developmental
Evidence for a Dissociation between Implicit and Explicit Control.” Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Mar. 2021. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.1037/xlm0001005.
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