NovelGuide: The House on Mango Street: Novel Summary: Hips

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Hips

Summary
Esperanza, Rachel, Lucy, and Nenny are jumping rope and discussing women's-and their own still-forming-hips: "One day you wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition." Esperanza discusses hips scientifically (as she did the clouds in "Clouds"), while the other girls have different associations with hips: Rachel says they are useful for holding babies, Lucy says they are necessary for dancing, and Nenny says, "If you don't get them you may turn into a man." Gradually, the girls practice swaying and shaking their hips, all except for Nenny.
 
Analysis
This vignette continues the attention paid in "Chanclas" to Esperanza's maturation as a young woman. It also serves, however, to draw readers' attention to the growing gap between Esperanza and her sister. While Esperanza joins Rachel and Lucy in shaking her hips in a still-innocent but also slightly suggestive way (note the rhyme Rachel begins, "Skip, skip/snake in your hips./Wiggle around/and break your lip"), Nenny does not. Notably, she does not "use [her] own song," as Esperanza tells her to; she sings an "old song." She is not making the transition from childhood to adolescence that Esperanza is making; she is, as Esperanza says, perhaps speaking more truth than she knows, "too many light-years away." She is, physically and psychologically, in her own world-the world of childhood that Esperanza and her friends are even now leaving behind. Although Esperanza says that Nenny is "going, going," it is actually she who is moving away.