Buried Onions

Buried Onions

• Genre: Fiction; young adult realistic
• Originally Published: 1997
• Reading Level/Interest: Lexile 850L; grades 7-12
• Structure/Length: 9 chapters; approx. 176 pages; approx. 4 hours, 15 minutes on audio
• Protagonist and Central Conflict: Eddie, a 19-year-old Mexican American living in Fresno, California, survives on odd jobs after dropping out of college. Haunted by the recent deaths of a friend and a cousin, Eddie perseveres and gets a better job landscaping, but this job depends on maintaining the trust of an employer who is inclined to assume the worst about Eddie.
• Potential Sensitivity Issues: Poverty; death, including murder; crime-related violence

Gary Soto, Author

• Bio: Born 1952 in Fresno, California; did agricultural work as a teenager; became interested in poetry in high school; was the first Mexican American to earn an MFA from UC Irvine in 1976; writes poetry, short stories, memoirs, and novels; won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for the film based on his middle grade novel The Pool Party (1993); has taught at UC Berkeley and UC Riverside; received the Literature Award from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation (1999) as well as many other awards including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation
• Other Works: The Elements of San Joaquin (1977); Living Up the Street (1985); Baseball in April (1990); Petty Crimes (1998); Why I Don’t Write Children’s Literature (2015)
• Awards: ALA Selected Audiobook for Young Adults (2001)

CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:

• Determinism
• Choice
• Resilience

STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:

• Develop an understanding of the cultural and social contexts tied to the cycle of poverty for Mexican American communities that impact Eddie’s development throughout the novel.
• Analyze paired texts and other brief resources to make connections via the text’s themes of Determinism and Choice.
• Develop and share a creative response that conveys an understanding of Eddie’s character trajectory based on text details.
• Examine and appraise the author’s purpose and techniques to draw conclusions in structured essay responses regarding gender, place, personal Resilience and other topics.