Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall is a coming-of-age story about the importance of family, heritage, and perseverance. This young adult novel comes directly from McCall’s own experiences as a young Mexican immigrant, a writer with a dream, and a teenager who watches her mother die from cancer.

Under the Mesquite infuses poetic form, free verse, imagery, and sprinkles of the Spanish language in order to portray a bildungsroman in which a young girl is forced to become an adult while maintaining faith in her heritage and her own strength. Published by Lee and Low Books in 2011 to critical raves, the novel has won four awards, including the Tomás Rivera Book Award (2013).

The novel is structured in six parts, with mini chapters that read like free verse poetry instead of typical narrative prose. McCall uses this structure to tell the story of Lupita, who expresses herself best through poetry. The connection between content of story and form contributes to the autobiographical nature of the book. McCall models the narrator, Lupita, after herself. In her first-person poetic narration, Lupita (McCall) uses imagery, similes, motifs, and parallel structure to articulate the development of a girl on the cusp of womanhood.

Plot Summary

Lupita is a Mexican American teenager, the eldest of eight children, and a devoted daughter to her parents. Immigrants from Mexico, the family has close ties to their language, culture, religion, and identity as family members.

Mami and Papi’s carefully curated garden in Texas is beautiful and representative of the care they put into growing their large family, not excluding the stubborn and (at first) unwanted mesquite that grows through.

Lupita’s happy world comes crashing to a halt when she learns of her mother’s cancer diagnosis. Lupita, a budding actress and poet, struggles to understand her role as a teenager in a very adult world. When Mami undergoes surgery and chemotherapy, Lupita takes her summer of sophomore year off to take care of Mami. Though frightening, it seems that the cancer scare is gone, and Lupita begins to find success and joy in acting and poetry. But the family is torn apart when Mami’s cancer comes back, this time for good. Lupita convinces her father to take Mami to a treatment center far from home while she manages high school and caring for her younger siblings. The hard work and separation appear to be for nothing, as Mami returns feebler and more weakened than before. Lupita and her siblings must watch as their mother slowly and painfully dies from her cancer. The family fears losing the glue that holds them together, but they also discover a new sense of freedom when Mami’s suffering finally ends. In the final part of the book, Lupita comes to terms with a future without Mami, and decides to embrace change by moving away to college.