Teaching 'The House on Mango Street': engaging race, class, and gender in a white classroom.

Abstract

What we read, and how we talk and write about it in the classroom, offers meaningful possibilities for the interrogation of class and cultural privilege. In "Teaching The House on Mango Street: Engaging Race, Class and Gender in a White Classroom" I rely on Louise Rosenblatt's reading theories, Maria Lugones's political theories, and strategies of engaged pedagogy to discuss ways in which white, privileged teachers can encourage white, privileged students to recognize themselves as raced, classed and gendered so that they can begin to think more fully about the whys of their cultural dominance. I consider how the act of reading as a dialogic relationship of efferent and aesthetic reading offers these students the opportunity to question the distances between their lives of privilege and the character Esperanza's life of marginalization.

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I first came to concerns about race, class, and gender issues with my students in mind while teaching at a private day school in the northeastern United States. All but a handful of students and three teachers were white, and the majority of these students and teachers also came from economically privileged families. The identities of the few students who attended the school with financial aid were kept secret, purportedly to "protect the students." This atmosphere of privilege and the contentment in this privilege, even though it was not shared by all, was in striking contrast to the town's population, which includes various minority groups and an established working class. From eighth grade until graduation, these students are "raised" in an environment that largely, even in terms of curriculum, separates itself from issues of class, culture, and gender. Students are implicitly taught to continue a tradition of unchallenged white wealthy dominance.

I was completely uncomfortable with this dynamic. Raised in a similar environment, and having begun to confront my narrow, elitist education in graduate school, I felt it was my responsibility to teach my students about alternative ways of living and being in America, so that they might learn more about the significance of their own constructed positions. In an essay about Anglo feminist scholarship, Lynet Uttal argues that Anglo middle-class feminists neglect to recognize that "`gender,' `race' and `class' are not static categories, but rather dynamic social processes in which everyone is located, [and] therefore an Anglo middle-class feminist also has a raced, classed and gendered position in society" (43). Just as Uttal hopes to educate Anglo middle-class feminists to their positions, I hope to teach my students, including the sophomore students I taught at this school, that their positions in society are likewise raced, classed, and gendered. They need to learn they are privileged for their color and for their money, or their parents' money, and they need to learn that most people do not benefit from their position. In thinking of the few students at the school who did not fit this profile, I also wanted to introduce readings and discussions which recognized and valued lives beyond this white-moneyed image the school asserted. My strategy for attending to these issues included my pedagogical practices of reading and teaching, which I will discuss in terms of teaching The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

So, what can an upper-middle class, white woman like me know about marginalization as a result of class and race? And how can I teach upper class white students to recognize the problematic nature of their privilege, based as it is on color and socioeconomic status? Through practice, reflection, and research, I have found that partial answers to these questions lie in two pedagogical practices: teaching what Louise Rosenblatt calls "aesthetic" reading and practicing a pedagogy based on the work of Paolo Freire and bell hooks. These pedagogies which value dialogue between the student, her text, and other students offer ways for me to teach these privileged students towards an awareness of their cultural dominance. While this move towards awareness, by teacher and students, marks only a small step towards greater insight and possible action, this process of consciousness raising attempts to disrupt naive notion that race, class, and gender differences do not matter; rather, they dramatically affect the quality of all our lives.

In Literature as Exploration, Louise Rosenblatt talks about the importance of teaching literature because it can "[make] comprehensible the myriad ways in which human beings meet the infinite possibilities that life offers" (6). Rosenblatt identifies the process of reading as a combination of what she calls "efferent" and "aesthetic" reading. In efferent reading "the reader must focus attention primarily on the impersonal, publicly verifiable aspects of what the words evoke and must subordinate or push into the fringes of consciousness the affective aspects," and in aesthetic reading "the reader must broaden the scope of attention to include the personal, affective aura and associations surrounding the words evoked and must focus on--experience, live through--the moods, scenes, situations being created during the transaction" (Rosenblatt xvii). Traditional teaching, she suggests, tends to emphasize the efferent; instead of entering into an affective relationship with a text, a student searches for "hidden" meanings and collects plot details because that is what she is taught, implicitly and explicitly, to do. Rosenblatt helps us recognize the potential of aesthetic reading as a way to improve a student's "literary experience" and his/her life.

Of course, in addition to how we teach our students to read, the content of what we read with our students is also important. I grew up in a predominantly white middle and upper-class community, reading books valued by this culture. As a result, books like The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, The Crucible, and even Chaucer's Canterbury Tales felt like my cultural heritage in a way The House on Mango Street would not have. My private high school students were in a similar position. In a community which largely ignored class and racial experiences beyond a generalized upper-class white experience, academic reading merely reinforced the absence of conversations about class, race, and gender. While my students and I might have learned different lessons if we had been taught Thoreau, Miller, and Chaucer from perspectives raising issues of race, class, and gender, the content of what we read builds a sense of belonging, of what traditions we belong to and what belongs to us. Because fiction can act as a window to other worlds, privileged, white high school students need to read books by and about those of other races, classes, and experiences.

Equally problematic, however, becomes the inclusion of readings by, for instance, black women authors, without raising relevant race, class, and gender issues, bell hooks calls these teachers to task in Teaching to Transgress when she identifies white female English professors who are "eager to include a work by Toni Morrison on the syllabus of her course but then teaches that work without ever making reference to race or ethnicity" as practitioners of tokenism not challengers of the traditional canon (38-9). Teaching Carolyn Chute or Alice Walker is not enough; we cannot ignore class, race, and gender without falling into the kind of "dishonest" or un-self-conscious study Maria Lugones describes in her essay "Hablando cara a cara/Speaking Face to Face: An

Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism." Lugones writes that

   being unaware of one's own ethnicity and racialization commits the
   inquirer to adopt a disengaged stance, one from outside the racial
   state and the ethnocentric culture looking in.... Such a disengaged
   inquirer is committed either to dishonest study or to ignoring deep
   meanings and connections to which she has access only as a
   self-conscious member of the racial state and as a sophisticated
   practitioner of the culture. (50)

While Maria Lugones is not talking about classroom situations, her claim, echoing that of Lynet Uttal, is equally applicable to teachers. The disengaged inquirer who is a teacher, and who perhaps thinks it is acceptable to teach Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon without discussing race, irresponsibly reinforces a similar lack of disengagement in his/her students. I witnessed this lack of engaged inquiry when the English department head observed my class the day I assigned a paper connected to The Color Purple, required reading for tenth graders. After class, he expressed concern that the paper revolved too much around women. He was right; the paper did focus on women. We had just watched an interview with Alice Walker where she had defined "womanist," and students were exploring the connection of this word to the story and to their own relationships. The department head worried about the boys' abilities to write on "women's issues;" he was afraid it would be too hard for them. He claimed, in complete contradiction to some of the ideas Alice Walker raises, that "women's issues" are not "men's issues," that the gender issues raised by the book were too difficult to talk about, and I, as the teacher, was too obviously interested in women. Talking about gender in The Color Purple brought up conversation of race and class; this is difficult but important talk which I welcomed and feared, but I could not imagine teaching The Color Purple without talking about them. A teacher and an administrator with the power to choose the required reading but who does not want to talk about race, class, and gender sets a tone of disengaged inquiry that is in complete opposition to our real need to talk about these issues.

For hooks, reflection and risk-taking are ways in which teachers can challenge themselves to be better teachers by "striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world" (hooks 15). While I will not make any claim towards the self-actualization hooks tells us we should seek in taking risks, I will share with you a "risk" I unexpectedly found myself taking. Parents complained to the Dean of Students, a black woman, and the Academic Dean, a white woman, about my course syllabus, which aligned Song of Solomon, The House on Mango Street, and The Woman Warrior alongside Hamlet, A Doll's House, and Slaughterhouse Five. A few parents complained that I should not teach so many books that were not classics. Mothers also called and complained that their sons should not have to read so many books by women. Ironically, the two mothers complained to the one black woman in the school about the one female English teacher. No one complained about the head of the department, who was teaching the same books. Of course, he certainly was not raising issues of race, class, and gender as my students and I were. It was particularly problematic that I, a new, young, and female faculty member, was teaching particular books in particular ways that would apparently dilute the quality of their children's high school education. Naively, I never imagined I would be fighting parents, an administrator, and a tradition of disengaged inquiry to meet my ethical responsibility as a teacher.

Given my sense of responsibility as a teacher, this notion of disengaged inquiry demands my opposition, and a practice of liberatory pedagogy helps me challenge this lack of awareness. Paolo Freire's influential theories, discussed in works like Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Hope, and taken up by bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, offer us pedagogical strategies with political implications, the potential to transform and democratize lives. Freire's vision to teach "reading the world and reading the word" resonates with Rosenblatt's definition of aesthetic reading, even as it seeks to move students towards a greater sense of their own agency, towards an understanding that their engagement in the world matters. In reading the word/world, Freire tells us that "men and women take themselves in hand and become agents of curiosity, become investigators, become subjects in an ongoing process of quest for the revelation of the "why" of things and facts" (105). bell hooks, recasting Freire's notion of conscientization into an American educational system, calls this pedagogy transformative, radical, and engaged.

Getting these students engaged is what is at stake. Teaching aesthetic reading and practicing liberatory or engaged pedagogy offers a way to get students invested in and reflective about readings like The House on Mango Street, which seem to have little to do with their everyday lives. Of course, Louise Rosenblatt's work also shows how we can read as gendered, raced, and classed because we are asked to read out of our experiences. But it is a practice of aesthetic reading informed by an engaged pedagogy which seeks to encourage these students to recognize their problematic place in the world. At the most basic level, this means trying to create my classroom as a community of thinkers who inquire into our lives and the world together.

In turning more specifically to a discussion of this particular classroom and our talk of The House on Mango Street, I hope the connections between these two practices become clearer. In teaching The House on Mango Street, I basically tried a variety of strategies to help students realize the importance of their voices in our classroom and to recognize that academic discussions should not be divorced from life. These practices included valuing class discussion centered on students' contributions, valuing the private in a "public" classroom through assignments drawing on the personal, and through choosing The House on Mango Street as a class text.

I chose The House on Mango Street because I imagined my students would like the style of the book, especially the mini-chapters/vignettes and the poetic language, but also because these students were experienced readers: The House on Mango Street was not a challenging book for them to read efferently, and we could spend more time thinking about issues and less time identifying what would happen next. Written in the deceptively simplistic style of a child's narrative, the text encourages an aesthetic reading. Since students are more likely to make personal connections when they read to experience a book rather than just collect information, the likelihood grew that issues of race, class, and gender might also arise. The familiar coming of age genre also enabled our discussions to move from Esperanza to the students and back again. Like Esperanza my students, too, were figuring out who they wanted to be. But because Esperanza faces class and cultural challenges with which most of my students were unfamiliar, as we read Esperanza's story, my students began to investigate these issues.

One strategy which makes this investigation possible is classroom talk. Like bell hooks, I find that "[U]sing that telling [of personal experience] strategically--to come to voice so that you can also speak freely about other subjects" (hooks 148) gave my students the chance to really think about and interrogate each others' ideas and beliefs--their voices mattered. While these students could not all speak as persons oppressed by institutions of power based in color, gender and class, they could share their perspectives gleaned from what they observed around them, what they have seen, heard, and read. Sharing their observations brought up different perspectives and questions even as it brought up a lack of understanding and knowledge. In a classroom where a community of thinkers is valued not for the facts they absorb, but for personal and thoughtful engagement, then the reading of a culturally distant book like The House on Mango Street has the potential to gain greater relevance.

In a situation where this combination of aesthetic reading and liberatory pedagogy seems to work to raise the awareness of many of the students, the gap between their lives and Esperanza lessened in the greater awareness of both. In class discussion one day, a student mentioned that even the use of the word "block" separated them from Esperanza. My students associated blocks with city blocks, with more congested, close, and poorer neighborhoods than those they grew up in where neighbors live further apart, driveways may be a quarter of a mile long, and they would never ride their bikes--their fancy mountain bikes--past boarded up but still open laundromats. A female student volunteered that, just like in "The Family of Little Feet," she and her friends played dress-up in colorful high heeled shoes, but unlike Esperanza and her friends, she and her friends did not get harassed by "bum man" for kisses. As a class, we were able to discuss how their privilege as upper-class, white individuals gave them material possessions denied Esperanza, and gave them safe places to play and be innocent as children. They also got angry with the white nuns and teachers who made Esperanza and Rachel in "11" feel stupid, poor and embarrassed, beginning to realize how the negative treatment of these two characters by whites drew them into issues of race, class, and gender as participants not just distanced observers. They live in Esperanza's dream house because they are white wealthy young members of the dominant patriarchy. While many of the students probably could not fully articulate this notion or the implications of it, the distinctions between their lives of safety and plenty and the lives of Esperanza and her neighbors were clear to these students.

In her essay, "The Critical Reception of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street," Maria Elena de Valdes determines that the most appropriate reading situation for The House on Mango Street is this kind of communal one. She says that "the reader response that is most valuable is neither the public review process nor the private solitary reading, but the intersubjective, communal readings wherein individuals read, create, and share this creation" (295). The importance of communal reading and sharing is repeatedly reaffirmed in engaged pedagogy. The sharing of ideas, expectations, and personal stories around the reading of The House on Mango Street helped many of my students begin to draw new conclusions about themselves and their traditional white education and culture based on this shared and individual exploration.

While many of my students began to move into consciousness of their privilege(s), this does not guarantee that they will continue to move towards action against the oppressive institutions of which they are a part. Parents, administrators, teachers, and students need to commit to different strategies to raise us to awareness and action. And while some students in our classes resist, that is no reason to stop finding ways to bring these issues and discussions of cultural domination into our classrooms. In fact, it is more reason to do so.

Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Robert R. Barr. New York: Continuum, 1996.

Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Lugones, Maria. "Hablando cara a cara/Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism." Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. 46-54.

Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature as Exploration. 5th ed. New York: MLA, 1995.

Uttal, Lynet. "Inclusion Without Influence: The Continuing Tokenism of Women of Color." Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. 42-48.

de Valdes, Maria Elena. "The Critical Reception of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street." Gender, Self, and Society: Proceedings of the IV International Conference on the Hispanic Cultures of the United States. Ed. Renate von Bardeleben. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993. 287-300.

Kathleen J. Ryan, West Virginia University

Ryan is an assistant professor of English and the Undergraduate Writing Coordinator. Her research and teaching interests include composition theory, writing program administration, and feminist rhetorical theory and pedagogy.