befriends Sally, an attractive girl who wears heavy makeup and provocative clothing, and is physically abused and forbidden from leaving her home by her strongly religious father. Sally's and Esperanza's friendship is compromised when Sally ditches Esperanza for a boy at a carnival, leaving Esperanza to be sexually assaulted by a group of men. She recounts other instances of assault she has faced, like an older man forcibly kissing her at her first job. Esperanza's traumatic experiences and observations of the women in her neighborhood, many of whom are controlled by the men in their lives, only further cement her desire to leave Mango Street. It is only when Esperanza meets Rachel and Lucy's aunts, who tell her fortune, that she realizes her experiences on Mango Street have shaped her identity and will remain with her even if she leaves. As the novel ends, Esperanza vows that after she leaves, she will return to help the people she has left behind. Structure The novel is composed of forty-four interconnected vignettes, of varying lengths, ranging from one or two paragraphs to several pages. The protagonist, Esperanza, narrates these vignettes in first-person present tense. In the afterword for the 25th-anniversary publication of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros commented on the style she developed for writing it: "She experiments, creating a text that is as succinct and flexible as poetry, snapping sentences into fragments so that the reader pauses, making each sentence serve her and not the other way round, abandoning quotation marks to streamline the typography and make the page as simple and readable as possible." Cisneros wanted the text to be easily read by people like those she remembered from her youth, particularly people who spent all day working with little time to devote to reading. In her words: "I wanted something that was accessible to ... someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father." In 2009, Cisneros wrote a new introduction to the novel. Here she includes a few remarks on the process of writing the book. She had first come up with a title "The House on Mango Street"; under it she included several stories, poems, vignettes, that she had already written or was in the process of writing. She adds that she does not consider the book a novel but as a "jar of buttons," a group of mismatched stories. These stories were written