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Cathy is a young girl who befriends Esperanza when she first moves to Mango Street. She lives in a home filled with cats. Cathy gives Esperanza information about who is and isn’t safe to speak to in the neighborhood, although some of her tips have racist and classist undertones. For instance, she discourages Esperanza from befriending two working-class Mexican American sisters, Rachel and Lucy, as they are noticeably poor. Cathy, meanwhile, is exceedingly proud of her French heritage and even claims to have a distant blood relation to the queen of France. She also claims that her family will one day inherit an ancestral estate in France. It’s difficult to gauge the truth of this claim, but the French estate is likely a fantasy. Cathy and her family cling to their noble French heritage as a point of pride, but their actual connection to it is distant at best. They may refer to this heritage as proof of their superiority over other ethnicities, but in reality, they live on Mango Street – in a low-income neighborhood – all the same.
Cathy’s family moves away soon after Esperanza’s arrival, in search of a majority-white neighborhood. Cathy parrots her parents’ beliefs by telling Esperanza that their neighborhood is “getting bad,” in reference to the increasing number of Latin Americans moving in. Cathy’s family represents the phenomenon of white flight, a mass exodus of white people from urban areas in the mid to late twentieth century. Desegregation and the increase of immigrants from Latin America caused previously segregated neighborhoods to gain an influx of more racially and ethnically diverse inhabitants. In response, many white families left their city neighborhoods and moved to the suburbs in an attempt to self-segregate, creating the suburban landscape that is now a hallmark trait of American society. Cathy’s family, whom we can assume are white due to their apparent French ancestry, are engaging in white flight when they gradually move from neighborhood to neighborhood, seeking places where white people are the majority race.
