My sister, Magdalena, is lucky. We call her Nenny at home, but at school, she is Maggie; the wanna-be American Latino girl that lives in that old, run down house on Mango Street. She's lucky because she's too young to get it. She doesn't understand that where we live defines who we are, living where we do makes us stupid and dirty. And worthless. She doesn't see the people laughing at her clothes, the bratty rich girls snickering behind their perfect, neutral colored nails at her, crinkling their snub noses at her in disdain. She doesn't hear the horrible things that people whisper about her, about me, about our family. She just walks along with the occasional skip, happily oblivious to everything around her, while I have to sit there and endure the understanding that we are the lowest of the classes, like the serfs in the medieval times that our teacher taught us about. We were tolerated because we were necessary, after all, without us, the peasants, who would do all of the undesirable but indispensable jobs that others were above doing?
Nobody. That's who.
And that's why I have to walk with my hands in my pockets, my head down, trying to be as small as possible so as not to provoke any more insults; while she just skips along, singing the song that always comes on my papi's radio under her breath, a few words lost in the intake of breath as each of her little size 16 girl's shoes hit the pavement. She skips along, undoing all of my hard work at being invisible. The whispers begin to explode again, and I can't take it anymore. I run, yelling 'Race you!' as I pass her, to make her run with me, I tell her: 'last one there is a moldy tortilla!' And she begins to run too, and we run, run far away from the nasty people who snicker and laugh, the people who think they are better than us, the people with the fancy cars that look scared every time you even look their way, as if to tell us, Please don't kill me. And we run like this every day, run home from school, run away from the real world and enter our world: the world where we are all equal, the world where we can walk and not have to wonder or care what other people think. We have entered the world of Mango Street.