In the novella, The House on Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros, Cisneros uses the minor characters, namely, Geraldo and Alicia, to illustrate the themes of racial prejudice and gender roles.
The Role of Minor Characters in The House on Mango Street
It is often that the smallest actions or decisions we make have the biggest impact on our lives. Likewise, in literature, minor characters often have important roles to play, either to convey a large theme or message, or to simply prove a point. In the novella, The House on Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros, Cisneros uses the minor characters, namely, Geraldo and Alicia, to illustrate the themes of racial prejudice and gender roles.
In the vignette, titled “Geraldo No Last Name”, Cisneros uses the minor character of Geraldo to portray the role of a minority race in the United Sates, specifically, the Spanish minority. Geraldo’s character is involved in a hit and run and tragically dies at the hospital he is taken to. Marin, who was the last person to see Geraldo, is questioned “twice [by] the police”; therefore this implies that Cisneros was trying to show how society was trying to find an excuse for Geraldo’s death. In addition to this, Cisneros characterizes Geraldo as “just another brazer” or “wetback”, suggesting that he is an immigrant who jumped the border. She also uses a rhetorical question, asking “what does it matter?”, therefore showing that the death of Geraldo is not important. Cisneros further illustrates the theme of racial prejudice by using the repletion of the phrase “if the surgeon had come”, proposing that Geraldo’s death could have been prevented but society chose not to because he was an immigrant with only a first name. As a result, Geraldo’s minor role in this novella as a minority race has depicted the reality of many people today who are in similar situations. Also, Cisneros has shown the social criticism of mainstream society’s treatment of immigrants as dispensable and second-class human beings.
