Four scruffy teenagers, all of them undocumented immigrants, drove to Santa Barbara, Calif., in June of 2004, carrying a crude contraption constructed out of pipes and wires and emitting a nasty smell. They carted it to the University of California, strolled into a campus aquatic center and slipped it into a swimming pool.
The ugly, smelly contraption was a robot designed to work underwater. The four teenagers built it at school — Carl Hayden Community High School, located in a poor Mexican-American neighborhood in Phoenix. They’d come to Santa Barbara to compete in an underwater robotics contest sponsored by NASA and the U.S. Navy. Standing by the pool, Lorenzo Santillan, one of the Phoenix kids, checked out the competition — 10 teams from colleges, including a squad from MIT composed of two computer science majors and 10 engineering students. “I’ve never seen so many white people in one place,” Santillan joked.
MIT’s robot was a sleek aluminum machine decorated with a sticker advertising ExxonMobil, which had donated $10,000 to the MIT team. It was a thing of beauty. The robot from Hayden High was not. Constructed of PVC pipes pasted together with funky-smelling glue, “Stinky” — as the kids named it — contained computer parts they’d begged and borrowed and such high-tech equipment as a plastic briefcase, a milk jug and a sunscreen bottle. The Phoenix kids lowered Stinky into the pool for a test drive. They worked the remote controls, but the robot didn’t respond. They hauled Stinky up and saw that water had leaked into the plastic briefcase that housed its brains. The contest began the next morning, so they needed to fix the problem overnight.
Joshua Davis tells the story of these four plucky teenagers and their robot in his fast-moving and sometimes inspiring book “Spare Parts.” It’s a story Davis first told in Wired magazine in 2005, and a movie version will arrive next year. Of course, Hollywood doesn’t make movies about poor immigrant kids who lose robotics contests to corporate-funded MIT students, so you’ve probably already guessed that the Phoenix team won the contest. Congratulations! You’re right. It’s a great Hollywood feel-good tale of scrappy underdogs beating long odds. But there’s more to the story, and “Spare Parts” illuminates the human side of two polarizing political issues — immigration and education.
These teenage engineers are four examples of the bogeyman who terrifies so many Americans — the Mexican who sneaks into the promised land. Of course, they’re also individual human beings, each with his own quirky personality.
Oscar Vazquez joined ROTC at Hayden High and was so gung-ho that he won an Officer of the Year award. He planned to join the Army until a teacher informed him that illegal immigrants couldn’t serve. Cristian Arcega loved to build things, and he learned English watching his favorite TV star, Bob Vila, the home repair guy. Smart and curious, he amused himself reading about cell biology online and graduated second in his class at Hayden High. Luis Aranda preferred Julia Child to Bob Vila. Inspired by watching Child cook on TV, he began working in restaurants at age 11, first as a dishwasher, then as a cook. He didn’t like studying — reading made him sleepy — but when he heard about a class where kids could build a robot, he signed up.
“Spare Parts” is a delightful book, perfect for inspiring high school kids. Ionly wish he’d paused more often to quote these young men, and let them tell us in their own words their great story — a great American story.
NONFICTION: UNDERDOGS
Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream
by Joshua Davis (Farrar Straus Giroux)
