88 pages 2 hours read

Under The Mesquite

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2011

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Part 2, Chapters 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Six Years Old”

Lupita recalls her childhood in Mexico. Her mother, pregnant with her fifth child, craves nopales en salsa, a cactus dish. To make the dish, Mami needs to cross a busy road, through a wire fence to access the cacti. Lupita recalls the faith the children had in their mother as they seized their chance to cross the road, the admiration they felt as Mami opened the wire fence for them.

Chapter 8 Summary: “The Gift of Words”

In another memory of her life in Mexico, Lupita recalls missing her father (Papi) while he worked on the other side of the border in the United States. She shares that it was her father who inspired her interest as a writer and encouraged her talent for words. Lupita recalls tracing words in her father’s notebook with his guiding hand, preparing for the new words they would learn when they moved to the United States. As a child, Lupita is afraid of moving to the US, worried that there will be no flowers to play with. Her father assures her that they’ll plant flowers in their new home, then he places the notebook in a case so important that it holds the family’s green cards.

Chapter 9 Summary: “Uprooted”

When Lupita first moves to Texas, she instantly misses los girasoles (the sunflowers) from her home in Mexico. She worries that even if she could find the sunflowers again, they would not understand her with her new English language. Lupita struggles to form the new sounds and words of English and blames her family for uprooting her.

Chapter 10 Summary: “En Los Estados Unidos”

As a child immigrant in the United States, Lupita learns English, but at first the language sounds “hollow, like the rain at midnight dripping into tin pails through the thatched roof of our abuelita’s house” (Page 38). Lupita also learns about United States history, portrayed in her textbooks as white men and women. Lupita misses the colorful history and food of Mexico, but Mami encourages her to think of herself as having two homes. When the children feel extra homesick, Mami takes them on a trip over the border to her mother’s house, where the children eat and Mami tells her mother about how happy she is that her children will have two homes and two languages.

Chapter 11 Summary: “Sisters”

When Lupita asks to go to a friend’s house, Mami reminds her of her sisters; Lupita has five little friends to play with at home. Frustrated, Lupita declares she’s not their mother. Despite this, Lupita expresses how close she truly is with her sisters, and how this closeness is precisely what leads to arguments and fights. Analiza, Tita, Juanita, Victoria, and Rosita play and love as hard as they fight with one another. 

Chapter 12 Summary: “Bebes”

Lupita reflects on her mother’s affection for babies. Despite having so many children, Mami had enough love to go around, but it also meant Papi working longer hours and being away for long stretches of time to provide the money necessary to support the family. Papi opens a saving account for each of his children, and with Mami as his teammate, they provide a stable home life.

Part 2, Chapters 7-12 Analysis

In Part 2, McCall flashes back to Lupita’s childhood as she reflects on how she was raised. Looking back, Lupita can see the meaning behind many moments with Mami while McCall uses the symbolism in these memories to provide the context of the family story.

The motif of plants and gardening reappears, now not only to emphasize the careful work Mami and Papi put into growing their family, but also to show a concrete connection to Lupita’s Mexican heritage. When Lupita first moves to the United States, her homesickness for Mexico focuses on the sunflowers she imagines have forgotten her. Because Lupita moves with her family, she doesn’t have to miss other people back home in Mexico. Instead, she can emphasize the sunflowers as symbolic of a time when she was more secure with her environment. Because sunflowers are tall, rooted firmly into the ground, and reliant on the sun, they symbolize longevity and the importance of remaining in place. In stark contrast, Lupita’s move out of Mexico provides her with a sense of displacement, and she cannot find the metaphorical sun that the sunflowers live for. Even the use of the term “uprooted” signifies Lupita’s metaphorical connection to the flowers she has left behind. If a sunflower is uprooted, they cannot survive, which parallels Lupita’s feelings about leaving Mexico. Additionally, Papi assures Lupita that in the United States, he will grow plants that remind her of Mexico, a promise the reader knows he will keep. This helps McCall drive her point that, in fact, the only true displacement is separation from family. Because the family stays together when they move, it does not matter where the sunflowers are—the real root and sun of Lupita’s life is her family.  

Lupita’s anxiety in the family’s move to the United States echoes a challenge Lupita faces later in life, we see in Part 1: Change. Change can be a major challenge and stress in life, and the change from Mexico to the United States is a plot point that helps McCall emphasize her overall themes about family; that is, that no matter what changes, family will always be there for you.

One of the things that changes in Lupita’s life when she moves to the United States is that she needs to learn a new language. McCall uses irony to demonstrate Lupita’s resilience, which signals, by extension, the perseverance of immigrants. Lupita, in her first-person narration, uses English ripe with metaphors to express her discomfort, ironically proving that she can indeed balance between two languages, two countries, two histories.

The theme of immigration and adaptation again appears through the character of Papi, whom the reader knows about in Part 1 but truly meets in Part 2. Papi is described through a physical and emotional contrast; his hands are rough from manual labor, but he is gentle and kind with his children. Lupita’s father provides the support and inspiration Lupita needs to embrace her new life in the United States, as symbolized by the notebooks he encourages Lupita to write in. In having Papi keep the notebooks in the same box as the family’s green cards, McCall crafts the notebooks as a symbol of the importance Papi places in education, learning, and words. The green cards are the family’s ticket into the United States, a ticket to new opportunity. Similarly, the notebooks filled with her writing are Lupita’s future ticket to new opportunities.

We learn about Lupita in context of her family through the relationship with her sisters. With five sisters all close in age, Lupita describes their bond using similes that compare the sisters to a string of pearls: too close together yet inseparable. Mami’s encouragement of the girls to stay close is McCall’s way of foreshadowing the future trauma of Mami’s illness; while Papi is away and the kids are growing and fighting, Mami is the glue of the family. The close, yet often fraught, relationships between the sisters emphasizes the natural and unbreakable bond that keep families close and demonstrates McCall’s message that no matter how difficult family can be, they are always there for you. McCall uses the simile of the pearls to differentiate between the sisters and the family as a whole; the gardening motif is reserved for Mami and Papi’s careful growing of the family, while the pearls are a symbol specific only to the sisters. By using these different comparisons through simile and metaphor, McCall highlights that, within families, different dynamics are at play that are important and distinct.  

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