Carmona 1 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 Carmona 2 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 Carmona 3 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. Carmona 4 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.
