Response to "My Name"

          In "My Name" by Sandra Cisneros in her collection of vignettes The House of Mango Street Esperanza makes an oath to renew her identity by breaking from from her family history. Esperanza is saddled with the name Hope after her great-grandmother, "a wild horse of a woman" (11). However, this same great-grandmother was tamed by a patriarchal great-grandfather who "threw a sack over her head and carried her off...as if she were a fancy chandelier" (11).  It is evident that Esperanza's description shows she respects her great-grandmother's independence, and even relates to it, but is also aware of her great-grandmother's enslavement to traditional gender roles. Esperanza continues, "She was a a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse--which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female--but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong" (10).  Thus, Esperanza notices her culture's  history of the oppression and objectification of women and asserts that her own life will break this pattern: "I have inherited her name but I don't want to inherit her place by the window" (11).  Esperanza both finds pride and scorn within her name and her own heritage. Her relationship with her name, and therefore her culture, is contradictory, which she describes by detailing how "at school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of her mouth" but at home, where her native language is spoken, "in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver" (11).  Therefore,  Esperanza both loves and hates her name, and is aware that her heritage is a burden of a gift she must carry in order to make her own stamp on the world.

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Journal #2, inspired by "My Name" - rough draft! 

     My mom lost. No, my father would not agree to name me Lucy. That was a name for a Peanuts character and later our first dog, a runty beagle who left warm yellow spots in each corner of the kitchen and who we eventually returned to the pound.  As a teenager, there were definitely times I wished I  could have been just as easily been returned and therefore freed from my family, but instead, my name has always shackled me, more so than most, to my father.  I hve received duplicates of his AARP cards in the mail since I was 19. 
      But still, my mother argues,  JamieAnna, my full name, my true given birth-certificate certified two-part name staring with a 'J' is an homage to my granny, JimmyJoy.  
   JimmyJoy grew up in Oklahoma, out of tumbleweed and dust, where she left behind an older sister, Wanda, for a secretary job in Texas. She shut the door behind her with only suitcase and an itching left ring finger. 
    And the story goes that the first of JimmyJoy's four marriages was maybe for love, or was it the second, to my mom's father, the handsome trumpet player? Definitely not the third, a scraggly drunk of a guy who sent a shotgun bullet into the headboard of the heirloom bedframe  my mom still sleeps under today.  And finally, my granny's final last name, froze on number 4, Content, the surname of a colonel. And today, at 88, Granny's just plain old granny and thank God husbandless, and she tells me that about marriage, you must be coldblooded.  
     Today it's rare to find woman a woman carrying  two first names. You don't see any PollyAnnas or MaryBeths running business meetings or directing films. And over time and convenience, my own name's slimmed down  to  Jamie, and my full first name remains intimate, spoken to me only by cousins best known during childhood and of course, old grannies who know what I ought to be doing with my life.