Windows

    In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros seems to use windows to represent lonely people; the idea is that these people just sit and stare out the window, perhaps wishing for a different life. The first shows up in "My Name", on page 11, when Esperanza talks about her great-grandmother:

"She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow."

In the text beforehand, she mentions that her great-grandfather forced her aforementioned great-grandmother to marry him, against her will, and that she never forgave him. It would appear, then, that here the window symbolizes the great-grandmother wishing she had not married, still angry at having been torn from her previous life. She longs for the way she used to live. Much the same thing is shown in "No Speak English":

"She sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her country [...]" (77)

Much like Esperanza's great-grandmother, Mamacita (the "she" in this passage) is being kept away from the life she used to live--in this case, presumably in Mexico. The many ways she shows her desire to return to her old life are detailed in the vignette: how she refuses to learn English, how she never comes downstairs,  how she misses the house she used to live in. It upsets her when her younger child speaks English, even when it is only a Pepsi commercial, because it makes her even more isolated from the people around her. She does not belong, and so she stares wistfully out the window.
    Finally, there is Rafaela. She, too, stares out the window and wishes for something different, something better:

"Rafaela leans out the window [...] and dreams her hair is like Rapunzel's. On the corner there is music from the bar, and [she] wishes she could go there and dance [...]" (79)

From the surrounding text, it is clear that Rafaela's husband does not let her leave the house, perhaps out of the fear that she will not come back. She asks the children who hang around nearby to get her things from the store because she cannot go there herself. The mention of dreaming that her hair is like Rapunzel's also shows her desire to escape; if her hair were indeed as long as Rapunzel's perhaps someone would climb up it to rescue her. She is trapped, unable to do what she wants, like the other two women who sit and stare out the window. The windows show that these women want to escape the lives they lead, controlled by men as they are, and also that it seems impossible to escape.