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Aunt Lupe, whose full name is Guadalupe, was once a beautiful and healthy woman defined by her strong swimming skills, but in her middle age, she is disabled by an unnamed disease. As such, she needs support from her family members, not only in the physical sense but also in the emotional sense – she’s housebound, and her only interactions happen when visitors stop by to speak with her. Esperanza likes visiting her aunt, although she is slightly discomforted by her home, which is smelly and messy due to Lupe’s condition keeping her from performing domestic chores. During her visits, Esperanza recites books and poems to her aunt, who is blind and unable to read to herself. They both share a love for and connection to the written word, and when Esperanza shares an original poem, Lupe encourages her to continue writing and foreshadows the novel’s greatest theme: that Esperanza will find freedom – and an escape from Mango Street – through writing. Older women on Mango Street often take on a wise and mythic characterization that reminds one of seers or fortune tellers. We see this particularly with the three sisters, but Aunt Lupe’s prophetic comments on Esperanza’s creative gifts paint her in the same sage and mystical light.
Esperanza looks back with remorse on a day that she and her friends played a game in which they imitated Lupe’s mannerisms, which included mimicking, and to an extent, mocking her disability. She reflects that, having been around her aunt so much, Lupe’s disease became normalized, so she didn’t respect the toll it had taken on her life. Aunt Lupe’s condition also sheds light on the financial state of those who live on Mango Street – it seems that Lupe is unable to fund any treatments or services that might have reduced her symptoms or made it easier to live with her disability. Although Esperanza is too young to understand the tragedy of Lupe’s situation during childhood, her poignant descriptions of her aunt’s failing body and her lack of knowledge regarding any official diagnosis or treatment plan make it clear that Lupe is yet another victim of the miserable conditions on Mango Street.
