American Like Me

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“American Like You”

In this activity, students will examine their own family trees or community roots to reflect on connections with the past.

In Essay 32, Joaquin Castro discusses his admittedly precarious family tree. The only relative he knows, outside of his brother Julian, is his grandmother, Victoria, who comes to the US as an orphan with her sister after her mother dies of tuberculosis in Mexico. In learning about Victoria’s history, Castro strengthens his beliefs on immigration reform: He does not think immigrants should need to prequalify before entering the country, since hardworking immigrants of all kinds, prequalified or not, have helped improve the US for hundreds of years.

In this activity, research a relative or ancestor or construct a fictitious character from previous generations of your family; tell a small portion of their story based on historical fact or family record. You can pursue either of the following options:

• Trace your family tree if possible to learn about potential immigrant relatives or ancestors, Indigenous relatives or ancestors, or another connected historical figure about whom you are interested. Write a story from the first-person perspective of this person, imagining the sights, sounds, and feelings they might have experienced during their lifetime.
• You might instead research an immigrant figure (of no relation to you) or construct a fictional immigrant based on research. Write a story that imagines this figure’s early experiences arriving somewhere new. Write this story from a first-person perspective.

Draft your story and take advantage of peer editing or critique circle feedback.

Throughout the revision process, draw comparisons between the experiences of the figures in your story to 2-3 authors represented in the text. What themes or emotions connect these figures across centuries and communities?

In sharing your story aloud or in a published format, let your classmates know whom you chose to be the narrator of your story why you chose them, and the ways in which they might compare to figures in the text.

Teaching Suggestion: For those students who elect not to write about their own personal histories and are interested in American history and immigrants, you may consider providing them with the following articles to get inspiration on the person that they may want to write about: (1) “17 Famous Immigrants Who Helped Make America Great“ (Global Citizen) (2) “These Iconic Figures of American History Were All Immigrants“ (TIME)and (3) “Nine Immigrants Who Helped Make America Great“ (CNN).