English Language Arts: Setting Analysis (TEKS.ELA.9-12.7.D) Practice Test

In the summer when the mesquite looked like smoke against the horizon, Esteban kept his father's deed folded in a tobacco tin, sweat-salted and creased like an old map. The Rangers rode past the well some mornings, eyes unreadable under brim shadows, asking polite questions that felt like measuring sticks. Anglo neighbors spoke of fence lines and improvement, words that traveled north with barbed wire and came back as court summons. Esteban's mother burned sage and letters in the cookfire, whispering that paper could both bless and betray. A drought sat stubborn over the chaparral, thinning cattle and patience, so when a stranger offered cash for grazing rights, Esteban tasted relief and ash. To accept meant feed for the herd and school for his sister; to refuse meant honor that could not be eaten. The church bell clanged noon and the sun answered like a hammer. He remembered stories of land traded for safety and safety shrinking, of cousins gone to Mexico to start clean. By evening, he saddled his mare to ride toward town, not to sell, he told himself, but to register the deed again, as if repetition could turn rumor into law, under the witness oak tomorrow.

At the newsroom window, Kenta watched bulldozers level a shrine that had survived firebombs, its cypress beams stacked like bones beside glossy new rebar. Advertisers wanted smiling girls pouring cola; the city wanted forgetting dressed as progress. His editor, a man who joked in perfect American slang, slid a memo across the desk: a factory had collapsed upriver, but the owners were donors, and grief should be folded into page six. Kenta's mother kept wartime ration coupons in a lacquer box, relics of hunger that rattled when the cupboard emptied, and he heard them whenever he wrote the word efficiency. A veteran visited with a trembling letter from a missing brother, asking for a notice in print so the sea would not keep the secret alone. The occupation had officially ended, but censors lingered like odorless gas, powerful precisely because you could not point to them. Kenta drafted two versions of the story, one with names and one without, then watched his fingers hover over the typewriter as if over a shrine bell. To ring would be to call ancestors and accountants. He chose the version with names and walked it to layout, rehearsing how to apologize, if asked. Later.