Under The Mesquite

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

ACTIVITY 1: “Personal Rose Garden”

In this activity, students will make connections to the novel’s symbols and associated themes on identity by designing a personal “garden” that reflects their personal identity.

Nature and gardening are prominent motifs that represent important ideas in the novel such as family, motherhood, sisterhood, change, loss, and transformation. Lupita frequently relates herself to elements in nature, such as the mesquite and Mami’s rose garden. The nature and gardening motifs help support the themes of Family Is the Strongest Foundation and Identity.

In this activity, you will analyze how Lupita uses nature and gardening motifs to convey her experiences and understanding of herself. You will also analyze how these motifs support the novel’s major themes. Using your analysis, you will craft your own “garden” that symbolizes important aspects of your identity, demonstrating an understanding of how motifs and repeated symbols construct a cohesive statement on identity.

• Consider what things are central to your identity—your important traits, activities, or values that are important to you. Consider how you could represent those things through symbolism. Your “garden” does not have to be a literal one—it can be a garden of words, songs, artwork, or anything else you feel represents you, as long as your project has a cohesive organization or theme to it.
• o  As an example, Lupita considers her family and Mexican heritage to be important aspects of her identity, as well as her writing and connection to language. If she were to complete this project, she might decide to create a garden of Spanish words or poems that she feels especially capture the important aspects of her identity.
• You will display your garden visually. Your options include slides, a poster board, a drawing/painting, an interactive video, a collage, a model, a concrete poem, or other visual representation as approved by your teacher.
• Your project will culminate in a presentation for your class.

Teaching Suggestion: Because of the personal nature of this project, students may struggle with self-reflection or feel uncomfortable displaying themselves in front of the class. The option to submit a written defense of their project instead of an oral presentation can be offered in such cases at the teacher’s discretion. You can also connect this back to the short pre-reading activity, where students selected an object that represented them and composed a free verse poem about it; this may be particularly helpful if students get stuck on selecting symbols to represent their identity.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners and for students who might benefit from more tactile, kinesthetic methods, this activity can be adapted to creating a personal “garden” out of supplied materials, such as images from magazines or a bank of provided words. Students could also be asked to create a “garden” that shows the intersections between their own cultural identities and their developing understanding of the English language by combining images or words from their native language with new vocabulary from the novel.

ACTIVITY 2: “Poetry in Performance”

In this activity, students will make connections between modes of language expression in the novel and genre intersections in the hybrid novel in verse genre by adapting a poem or scene in the novel into a dramatic monologue or scene.

As Lupita weathers the grief and changes she encounters during the novel, language is her ultimate refuge. She finds solace both in composing her own words and acting out the words of others in her drama class. Given what you know about the verse novel as a hybrid genre between novel, poetry, and drama, you will select one of the poems from the novel and adapt it into a dramatic scene.

• Select one of the poems in the novel to adapt.
• Individually or as group work, analyze your selected poem. Who are the key characters in the poem? What is the central conflict, emotion, or scene it describes? How does Lupita use figurative language and other poetic devices to convey these things? How does Lupita’s first-person perspective impact the reader’s experience of the poem?
• After your analysis, you will turn the poem into a short scene or monologue. Consider how Lupita uses line breaks and other devices to create rhythm in the poem; how will that translate to dialogue? If your selected poem is mostly internal reflections from Lupita, you can add dialogue to your scene as needed to convey the scene effectively.
• Consider how Lupita’s language conveys a distinct sense of setting and action to the reader. Adapt her internal experience into an external scene that preserves the intent and emotion of her words and communicates the poem’s overall theme.
• Avoid copying the words verbatim—consider how they are written as poetry and what adaptations would be needed to make them sound natural in speech or dialogue.
• Rehearse your monologue or scene; your project will culminate in a performance for the class.

Teaching Suggestion: For this activity, students can consider the intersections between drama, poetry, and the novel in verse. It may be beneficial to review some of their pre-reading responses and notes about this hybrid genre. Focusing on the intersections between poetry and drama will also help students analyze Lupita’s connection with the performing arts as an additional dimension of her connection with language in the novel.

Differentiation Suggestion: Some students may be anxious about public performance. As group work, this activity could be divided into roles. For example, some students in the group could be tasked with writing the script/adapting the poem, while others in the group could be tasked with performing the words, giving careful consideration to diction, enunciation, and delivery. Other students could be assigned to “block” or “direct” the scene or may be responsible for creating costumes, props, or sets that maximize the theme and intent of the chosen poem.

For more advanced students (or as an activity to encourage engagement while other groups are performing), the students in the audience may be asked to write a brief analysis/reflection of how each group’s performance enhanced or changed their understanding of the poem and how well the group’s adaptation captured the poem’s themes.