Spare Parts: One Summary & Analysis

Davis jumps to describing Lorenzo’s early childhood. When he is a few months old, his mother Laura accidentally drops him on a curb in Zitácuaro, a town in the Mexican state of Michoacán. He already has an odd, pear-shaped head, and now he has a lump on his forehead on top of that. She decides that he needs better medical attention, and in 1988 she crosses through a tunnel under the U.S.-Mexican border with Lorenzo.

Laura finds a doctor in Phoenix, who tells her that Lorenzo seems to be doing fine. The doctor could perform a cosmetic surgery, but it would be unnecessary. From that moment on, Laura tells Lorenzo that the bump on his head means he is smart.

Laura and her husband Pablo decide they should stay in the United States, because they have barely been getting by in Mexico and there are a lot more opportunities in the United States. The family (Laura, Pablo, Lorenzo, and his older brother José) moves to a two-room apartment near downtown Phoenix. Laura gets work as a hotel maid, and Pablo works as a landscaper.

Once in the United States, Laura and Pablo have three more children: Pablo Jr., Yoliet, and Fernando. These three children will have significantly more opportunities to live and work in the U.S. than Lorenzo and José.

Laura tries to put Mexico behind them, but Pablo does not forget the solitude of the Mexican forest. He has a hard time adjusting to the urban desert with five children, and on weekends buys a twelve-pack of beer and works his way through it. Sometimes he is kind to Lorenzo; other times, he abuses him.

At school, Lorenzo is often mocked for his odd-shaped head. Lorenzo embraces the fact that he is different and grows his hair long. Laura supports him, but kids continue to make fun of him. He yells back at them in response, saying that he doesn’t want to be like everyone else.

In seventh grade, a friend asks Lorenzo to carry marijuana for a local gang. He stashes it in his backpack and leaves it on school grounds as instructed, but he is terrified the whole time. He realizes he isn’t cut out to be a criminal and refuses to do it again.

Instead, Lorenzo tries to join the marching band. He learns piano pieces by ear, but the band has no piano, so the teacher gives him a xylophone instead. But Lorenzo does not read sheet music, and so when he marches along with the band at Christmas, he hits a few wrong notes before giving up.

Lorenzo returns the xylophone and does not return to band. He is desperate to find friends, but the heckling continues. He starts to pick fights at school until a counselor assigns him to anger-management classes. He learns a few techniques to cope with his anger, but it’s hard to ignore all of the teasing.

After school, Lorenzo helps his godfather Hugo fix cars in the makeshift auto repair shop he has set up in his driveway. Hugo won’t let Lorenzo do much more than clean the tools, but Lorenzo stands beside the cars and watches. Lorenzo learns the importance of creativity and ingenuity, as Hugo doesn’t have much money, and to survive he has to come up with fresh ideas and adapt. Lorenzo takes this to heart: an unusual idea isn’t necessarily bad. It might be the only solution.

Davis delves more deeply into Carl Hayden High School’s and West Phoenix’s history. In 1965, the students were nearly all white, and it had once been a well-regarded school. Now, the neighborhood has an abandoned feeling, the outside of the school looks patchy and drab, and the school is 92 percent Hispanic.

The student body reflects Phoenix’s transformation. Phoenix was founded in 1868 by Jack Swilling, who came to Arizona, fell in love with a Mexican woman, and then built a canal to irrigate the land. Before long, the rich soil drew other settlers, and the city was developed. Tax revenue was largely allocated to infrastructure in neighborhoods developed by white settlers (which became East Phoenix), while the Mexican immigrants’ communities (West Phoenix) got almost nothing.

World War II then brought a boom in manufacturing, factories sprung up in West Phoenix, and small villages were constructed near the factories to serve the working-class white community who worked there. But in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the factories expanded, pollution increased, leukemia outbreaks were reported, and those people largely moved out of the area and over to East Phoenix.

As East Phoenix’s population expanded to almost one million people, wealthier residents needed a variety of services. This demand for labor was met by immigrants who came across the border illegally and settled in West Phoenix.

These changing demographics posed a challenge for schools, as in 1985 a federal judge ordered the district to desegregate. Administrators tried to entice white students back to West Phoenix by making Carl Hayden a magnet school specializing in marine science and computer programming. The attempt failed, and most of the white families had created suburbs surrounding Phoenix anyway, so there was no more diversity to balance. By 2004, Carl Hayden was 98% Hispanic, and so was West Phoenix. White people rarely ventured into the town at all, with one professor at Arizona State University commenting that “there’s nothing worthwhile there.”

Davis then turns to Cristian’s childhood, growing up in Mexicali, Mexico. He is a small, skinny boy who prefers to play inside, away from people who could make fun of him or push him around due to his diminutive size. When he is four years old, he disassembles the family radio and plugs it back in, shorting the power in the house. Cristian’s mother Leticia yells at him, but he is excited by his experiment. Cristian continues to take all of his toys apart, and he announces that he wants to build robots. No one knows where he had gotten the idea, but it quickly becomes an obsession.

In 1994, when Cristian is four, his father Juan travels to the United States and finds work in Arizona. He makes more money than he did in Mexicali, but he misses his family. In November 1995, Cristian’s family drives him across the border; he sleeps most of the way there. The town that Cristian moves to has a population of six hundred and feels like a ghost town. He and his family live in a three-room house with another family.

In December, Cristian starts elementary school. His biggest obstacle is that he doesn’t speak any English. He doesn’t understand the instructions on his worksheet, and he gets on the wrong bus going home. As the school year progresses, Cristian continues to have trouble, getting on the wrong bus again and again.

Cristian is in an English-learner program but continues to struggle. He receives straight Fs that year. His teachers sometimes yell at him or ridicule him; on the bus, kids call him names. Still, Cristian is convinced that he is smarter than most of them.

That summer, the family moves to a trailer on the outskirts of town. Cristian has allergies and so he decides to stay indoors most of the time, watching TV. That’s when he’s introduced to Bob Vila’s show Home Again, which is the first of a series of “fix-up-your-home” shows he hosts. Vila himself was a Cuban immigrant, and he becomes a symbol of hope for Cristian, who loves watching him work with power tools.

When Cristian is nine years old, the family moves to a trailer park in West Phoenix. Juan has gotten a job as a welder; ironically, one of the company’s clients includes the Border Patrol, and he is dispatched to work at their facilities.

The trailer park that Cristian and his family move to feels like a huge step up, primarily because there isn’t dirt everywhere. Cristian is also just a block away from his school, so he doesn’t have to deal with finding the right bus anymore.

Over the next few years, Cristian finds that watching Bob Vila has improved his English. By fourth grade he is fluent; by fifth grade, he is getting straight As and wondering why everyone else is so slow. He spends most of his time in the library, reading the most challenging books he can find.

In eighth grade, Cristian meets Ms. Hildebrandt, the chemistry teacher. She encourages him to choose an independent project that interests him. Cristian decides to explore the effect of different fin designs on a rocket. He recruits a couple of other students and scrapes together a few dollars to buy a model rocket. Cristian conducts his experiment next to the soccer field. He runs fishing line between two fences, affixes the rocket to the string, and figures he’ll ignite the rocket and measure how far it goes with each set of fins.

Cristian lights the rocket’s engine. It immediately melts the fishing line and shoots across the soccer field, before pivoting straight up and emitting a huge boom above the field. Everyone ducks for cover as the rocket floats to the ground under a parachute. A teacher runs out, scolding him, but privately Cristian wonders what his next experiment might be.

At the end of eighth grade, Cristian starts to think about high school. He visits North High School, which has an international baccalaureate program, but is told that there are no open spaces. Cristian then decides that his local high school, Carl Hayden, would be fine—he is attracted by the computer science and marine science programs.

When Cristian starts at Carl Hayden, he signs up for all honors courses. He skips freshman science and takes sophomore biology. He tries to supplement his learning by researching at home, but the Internet access is lost anytime a family member uses the phone. Cristian continues to excel in school, but he’s also very bored.

Cristian then meets Fredi Lajvardi, the program manager of the marine science program. At the beginning of every class, Fredi convenes the students and assigns individual missions for them to complete over the period. He plays loud, energetic techno music of his own making while doling out constant advice for the kids as they complete their projects.

Fredi focuses on getting kids excited to learn, caring less about covering the required curriculum. When he began teaching at Carl Hayden in 1987, he started a class called Science Seminar, in which Fredi simply told students to find something fun to build or an idea to test. Cristian hears about Fredi from a fellow freshman named Michael Hanck, who is building robots in the class. It is what Cristian has been waiting his whole life to hear.

About six years prior, on July 27, 1997, police in a Phoenix suburb named Chandler were alerted by residents that there were immigrants bathing naked in the orange groves; others said there were Mexicans loitering around the Circle K grocery story. INS agents are dispatched and quickly identify targets: one officer stops a woman arguing with her five-year-old in Spanish. He asks for proof of her citizenship. She shows him her driver’s license, but that isn’t enough. Luckily, she has her birth certificate in her car.

That sweep catches 432 other people, with the goal of “build[ing] stronger neighborhoods.” Police chase down thirteen “aliens” at Hamilton High School. At a Little Caesars, a sixteen-year-old and his friend are stopped and asked if they are “legal.” They’re loaded into a squad car; the teenager’s mother arrives in the nick of time with his social security card, but his friend isn’t so lucky, and is deported.

Officers are required to fill out a form when they detain someone and indicate probable cause. Such causes include “clothing consistent with that of illegal entrant aliens” or “a strong body odor common to illegal aliens.”

The next evening, the police do a sweep of a trailer park, having convinced a park manager to notate a map with Xs for every trailer that might contain illegal immigrants. The officers bang on the door of a sleeping family at 11:00 pm that night. A father, his brother-in-law, and four children have their papers checked. The brother-in-law has an expired visa and the officers cart him away in his pajamas.

Arizona attorney general Grant Woods reviews the roundup, finding that a pregnant woman had been loaded into a van with no windows or water on a 101-degree day. In another incident, one individual was bitten by a dog; in a third, police had used “physical force beyond what appeared appropriate for the arrest.” Woods notes that most of the deportees have no criminal record. Woods writes in his report that people should be treated with dignity even when they are suspected of being in the United States illegally.

The Chandler raid is one of the largest in Phoenix history, but it is not an isolated event. In addition to the police raids, various vigilante groups are formed. They hold “Hispanic-looking” people at gunpoint while patrolling the state. In 2003, south of Phoenix, twelve migrants are sleeping beside a pond when two men dressed in camouflage appear. The men open fire, killing two of the migrants. The police later arrive, but no one is apprehended for the crime.

By 2004, vigilante organizations continue to scour the state. Presidential hopeful Patrick J. Buchanan argues that what Mexico is doing to America is colonization, and that migrants are coming to reclaim the land. Buchanan says that families come to the U.S. to leech off government services, draining resources from long-standing citizens. He believes it is better to turn them away because they are being “inculcated with the values of a subculture of gangs, crime, drugs, and violence.”

Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix), agrees with Buchanan. To Arpaio, Mexican immigrants are “disease-carrying criminals” who “didn’t have the same values as American citizens.” He feels that the federal government isn’t doing enough to turn back Mexicans. And so, for kids like Cristian and Lorenzo, getting good grades might have been the least of their problems.

In 1996, nine-year-old Oscar Vazquez wakes up to a big fire outside. His father, Ramiro, is going to butcher one of the family pigs—a sure sign of a party. Oscar’s father had once been a police officer, but the government gave him a broken pistol; now he farms corn. Oscar holds the pig in place as his dad kills the animal, which he has never done before. When the animal stops moving, Oscar releases the rope, a little shaken.

Ramiro says that the pig isn’t for a party; it’s going to be sold to finance Ramiro’s journey to the United States. A week later, he leaves. Oscar’s mother, Manuela, quickly falls into a depression. Oscar’s older brother Pedro doesn’t help out much; his sister, Luz, helps with the cooking, but Oscar effectively becomes the man of the house and takes care of the animals and the farm.

Ramiro works on a potato farm in Idaho and sends $100 a month back to Mexico. Oscar misses his dad. He is in fourth grade and a standout student, even winning a second-place trophy in a state academic competition. But his father is not there to witness his son’s success.

A few weeks after Oscar’s eleventh birthday, Ramiro calls and says he’s being deported. Oscar is excited to have his father back, and Manuela is happier as well. His dad has saved a thousand dollars, and life returns to normal.

Ramiro quickly grows unhappy, as he could make more in an hour in the U.S. than in a whole day in Mexico. After two weeks, he announces that he is going back to the United States—and that he plans to save everything he can to bring the whole family with him.

In January 1998, Oscar boards a bus with Manuela. Luz insists on staying behind with a local boy with whom she has fallen in love. Pedro will come later. The bus travels north to Agua Prieta, a border town across from Arizona.

The next day, an older relative meets Oscar and Manuela and introduces them to two women, who hand them green cards. A few hours later, the ladies drive them to the crossing station. They are stopped by a border patrol agent; Oscar shows the man his green card, and he and his mother are waved through.

Oscar, Manuela, and the two women stop at a Circle K store next to a freeway overpass that amazes Oscar. He marvels at the concrete on-ramps and thinks that America is a land where anything is possible.

Ramiro arrives and hands the ladies an envelope with two thousand dollars. Then he drives Oscar and Manuela home to a one-bedroom apartment with peeling paint, a dirt yard, and neighbors who blast music. They also share the home with another family.

Oscar attends Isaac Middle School, but he doesn’t speak English. Within a few weeks, he gets to the right classrooms on time, but soon trouble strikes. Luz refuses to join the family in Phoenix and Manuela becomes increasingly anxious and depressed. One day after school, Ramiro tells Oscar that he plans on staying in the United States, but that Oscar and his mother are going to return to Mexico.

Oscar cries all the way to the border. Back in Mexico, he readapts to his life, but he is still riveted by the overpass. He begins to work odd jobs around town for a few pesos. He wins a government scholarship to return to middle school.

Eight months after they return, Luz elopes with her boyfriend. Manuela sobs for a week, until Luz returns with her new husband, beaming. Manuela starts to shift her focus to Oscar. She is hesitant to return to the United States but knows that there is more opportunity for him there. The schools are free, and the coursework is more demanding. Oscar, however, doesn’t want to go back. She puts her foot down and tells him to pack a bag of clothes.

In December 1998, Oscar and Manuela return to Agua Prieta. The ladies who had helped them cross before have now been arrested, so they need new “coyotes.” They meet three of Ramiro’s friends with green cards, who agree to help coordinate the crossing.

Sitting in the plaza, waiting for Ramiro’s friends, Oscar tells Manuela that he doesn’t want to go back. She points to a child with a remote-controlled car and tells him that she will buy him one if he is strong. To Oscar, the car is like magic.

Ramiro’s friends help Manuela and Oscar find two men claiming to be coyotes. They look more like addicts to Oscar, and he is afraid that the men will attack them. As they walk towards a hole in the border fence, Oscar scans the ground for rocks to fight them with.

Oscar, Manuela, and the two coyotes climb through the hole in the chain link fence. They start to jog, and Oscar sticks by his mother, afraid of getting caught and going to jail, or of his mother getting caught and being left alone.

As the sun sets, Oscar grows more and more afraid. The temperature starts to plummet. After what feels like hours, the group nears a road when a Border Patrol truck drives right towards them. They dive to the ground. As the truck drives past, the agent looks right at them but keeps going. They figure that the truck must be full, but the agent probably called for backup. They run the rest of the way to the buildings.

Manuela and Oscar walk around to the front of the building, which they discover is a Walmart. They wait inside the store. Oscar comments that they must have been running for hours. Manuela laughs and says that they left Mexico twenty minutes ago. She then hushes him so that no one will hear them speaking Spanish. Ramiro’s friends arrive within an hour and take Oscar and Manuela home. They arrive at a house with a big front yard with grass.

Oscar returns to Isaac Middle School. He doesn’t make many friends, but he does start to pick up English. He participates in a science fair: because he grew up in a bean-growing region, he conducts an experiment on how light and humidity affect the germination of beans. He meticulously documents his results in English, impressing and surprising his teachers. Oscar wins $200 at the county science fair. He starts to dream about going to college.

Oscar graduates from Isaac Middle School to Carl Hayden. He tries out for the football team but is cut for not knowing the rules. He tries out for soccer but plays too rough. Then one day, he sees a group of students jogging across the field; they belong to the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). He is impressed by their discipline and their tirelessness.

Oscar signs up for the ROTC, and Major Glenn Goins, the group’s instructor, welcomes him into the group. The mission of the program is to “inspire young people to become better American citizens.” Oscar transforms from a skinny kid into a muscled machine. By his junior year, he becomes the commander of the Adventure Training Team. With Oscar’s leadership, they begin to beat ROTC programs from much larger schools in competitions.

Goins teaches his students that the Declaration of Independence gave all people “unalienable Rights,” not just American citizens. But he also knows that many of his charges can’t enter the military because they are not American citizens. Oscar doesn’t know this, however. He views himself as American and wants to give back to the country that gave him so much, particularly after 9/11.

At fourteen, Oscar asks Major Goins if he can enlist. Goins asks if Oscar has a green card; when Oscar says he doesn’t, Goins admits that he cannot join the Army unless he is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Oscar is shocked. He walks away thinking that maybe if he was good enough, something would change.

When Oscar is a junior, he and his battalion go to an Army base to run an obstacle course. Oscar’s dedication while running the course leads Goins to promote him to cadet major, making him the battalion’s executive officer. Oscar rallies his squad to do long training exercises. Goins also teaches a civics class, in which Oscar memorizes the Preamble to the Constitution.

At the end of Oscar’s junior year, Goins awards him the Officer of the Year trophy—but it isn’t enough to change his immigration status. Two other cadets enlist, while Oscar stays at home. By the start of his senior year, he realizes that he needs to find something else to do with himself. So, he signs up for Fredi’s marine science class.

Davis describes Fredi’s own journey to the United States. Fredi is born in Tehran, Iran, in 1965. His parents, Reza and Tooran, are both doctors, and they move to Cleveland, Ohio, when Fredi is just a year old. His brother Alladin is born in Cleveland and automatically gains U.S. citizenship, something that Fredi won’t receive until he is nineteen years old.

Reza and Tooran follow jobs to Phoenix in 1969. Fredi starts elementary school and speaks English both there and at home—his parents want him and his brother to assimilate. But when Fredi turns eight, his parents announce that they are going to return to Tehran. Fredi doesn’t speak Farsi, and so he has a hard time adjusting to life in Iran. For Fredi, Iran feels like a place he should know but doesn’t. After only a year in Iran, the family decides to return to Phoenix.

Back in Phoenix, Fredi feels at home, until revolution erupts in Iran and hostages are taken at the American embassy. Across the country, Iranians are targeted and attacked. One day during Fredi’s sophomore year, he is heading home on a bike after cross country practice when a truck full of teenagers veers him off the road. They jump out of the car and surround him, kicking him until members of his team start to run over.

Fredi doesn’t tell his parents what had happened, instead focusing on running and his other outlet, building things. In eighth grade, he constructs a hovercraft out of notebook paper and balsa wood for a science fair. He catches the eye of Ann Justus, a science teacher at Camelback, who signs him up for her seminar.

Justus’s seminar is structured much like Fredi’s will come to be: with an emphasis on hands-on learning and building things. With Justus’s encouragement, Fredi designs more ambitious hovercrafts, winning first place each year at the Central Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair. His final hovercraft is a six-hundred-pound, sit-on-top, gasoline-powered hovercraft that can reach speeds of twenty-five miles per hour.

To Fredi’s parents, the hovercraft represents a distraction from his schoolwork. They want him to get a medical degree. He attends college at Arizona State University, but he finds himself dropping in frequently on Justus’s seminar, helping younger students. Justus watches him and pulls him aside one day, telling him that he is wasting his time in pre-med. He’s meant to be a teacher.

Fredi laughs off Justus’s statement, but by his sophomore year he finds that he can’t focus on his classes anymore. He drops out of pre-med and applies to the architecture program, hoping it will be more hands-on. When his application is rejected, he is blindsided. The rejection is especially painful because his younger brother Ali has just graduated, is bound for the pre-med track at the University of California at San Diego, and will go on to get his medical degree at Johns Hopkins.

Justus advises Fredi again that he should be a teacher. Fredi tries to argue why he shouldn’t be a teacher: people don’t respect teachers and they don’t make a lot of money. Justus tells him he’d be making a difference in people’s lives—and more than that, he already is a teacher. Fredi returns to ASU and starts taking education courses. Fredi’s parents are extremely disappointed in his decision.

In 1996, Fredi marries Pam Nuñez, the school psychologist. He coaches cross-country at the school and starts an electric car racing program. A year later, they have their first child, Bijan, and two years after Bijan they have Alex. Pam takes some time off to raise the kids. When Alex is two, he is diagnosed with pronounced autism. At the same time, Pam and Fredi see that Bijan is also having trouble in social settings, and he is diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome.

Soon after the diagnosis, Fredi’s parents move out of the state, their relationship more strained than ever. Fredi has his kids to focus on, however. In 2002, he stops coaching and shuts down the electric car program. In 2003, Cristian, Oscar, and Lorenzo walk into his science classroom.

In 1989, thirty-eight-year-old inventor Dean Kamen had already had a lucrative career. In his twenties, he invented a self-regulating syringe that was safer and more reliable than a human-administered shot. At thirty, he sold his company and used the money to create a private research facility in Manchester, New Hampshire. On the bottom floor of the facility, he constructed a science museum. He didn’t charge admission and built the exhibits himself, to give back to the community.

One morning, a rainy Saturday, Kamen sees a big group of children visiting the museum. Kamen stops one of them and asks if there are other science experiments that the kid would like to see in the museum. The kid doesn’t know, and when Kamen asks if he knows any scientists or inventors, he doesn’t. Kamen asks more kids if they could name any living scientists or inventors. When he gets more negative responses, he asks the parents, who also cannot think of any.

Kamen returns to his office and realizes that children don’t need access to more information; they need more interest and excitement in the sciences. He decides to start a robot contest. The initial contest, which he names FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is held in February 1992; by 2001, it has expanded to 13 regional competitions with 25,000 teens competing on 520 teams.

Fredi sees a flyer about FIRST in 1999 and starts a small team at Carl Hayden in 2000. He realizes he has a problem, though: he doesn’t know computer science, and the robots need to be programmed. He decides to find some help.

Allan Cameron grew up a mischievous kid in the fifties, setting up telephone wires between his and other kids’ houses. He has the shaggy appearance of a hippie, a look he cultivates after serving in the Navy during the Vietnam War. After his tour, he decides he no longer wants to take part in the military and works as an assistant to a philosophy professor at a community college in Arizona. The professor suggests he become a teacher.

Allan then gets a job in South Scottsdale, a pocket of poverty in an otherwise wealthy area of Phoenix. The fifth graders he teaches are unruly and disrespectful, and it seems that everyone has given up on them. Allan begins trying to discipline them with threats, but the class only gets rowdier. When he tries to explain the importance of education, one of the kids tells him that they are the worst kids in the school, almost with pride.

The next day Allan says that everyone thinks that they’re jerks, and that they have to change that perception. He offers to teach them what he knows about war. Not to fight, but to march. The kids start to march around the school in perfect lockstep during lunch and recess. They establish a new reputation for themselves: having the most discipline.

In 1982, Allan starts a Ph.D. in elementary education, and is four years into the program when he hears about Carl Hayden becoming a magnet school. Allan’s Ph.D. opens up new and more prestigious possibilities for him, but he can’t stop thinking about the school, and how the students needed more help than those already in college.

In 1987, Allan accepts a full-time teaching job in computer science at Carl Hayden and completes his Ph.D. in 1990. He starts programming and ham-radio clubs in the nineties and then signs on to start a robotics team with Fredi in 2000. He doesn’t speak Spanish, but most of the kids he meets at Carl Hayden are hungry to learn and willing to work hard, and he can’t imagine leaving them.

The Carl Hayden robotics team gets off to a slow start, but the kids who show up are thrilled to be a part of it—including Michael Hanck, who had taken Fredi’s marine science class as a freshman and joined the team the same year. Michael suggests that Cristian speak to Fredi about joining.

Cristian steps into Fredi’s classroom in May 2003, after the FIRST competition has already taken place that year. But Fredi doesn’t want to disappoint Cristian, and so he tells him about the club’s next project: building a catapult to fire pumpkins on Halloween. Cristian is extremely excited and starts to hang around the science lab. Fredi is impressed both by Cristian’s book smarts and his ability to build things on the fly.

Cristian sees Lorenzo hanging around the lab and assumes he’s just another loud jokester. But Fredi sees that Lorenzo is simply a lost kid looking for a way to define himself. When Fredi notices Lorenzo lingering after class, watching Fredi feed the fish in the tanks around the classroom, Fredi asks if he wants to learn. Lorenzo is honored to be entrusted with any responsibility and learns how to feed the fish.

Fredi then invites Lorenzo to McDonald’s. Lorenzo is speechless: no one has ever taken him to a restaurant before. At McDonald’s, Lorenzo stands nervously near Fredi and says he’ll have what Fredi is getting, unsure of what to order. When they sit down, Fredi tells Lorenzo about the robotics team, and the tools they get to use. Lorenzo is immediately captivated by Fredi’s description and joins the team.

A year earlier, in the summer of 2002, a group of Phoenix high school students from Wilson Charter High School visited Niagara Falls. They had converted a rowboat into a solar-powered dinghy, won a regional competition, and were sent to a national competition.

Niagara Falls was on the students’ list of sight-seeing places, and to get a full view they would need to go to Canada. A teacher, not wanting to take any risks, found an immigration agent and asked if kids with U.S. school IDs would be allowed to cross. The immigration agent then marched over to the kids and began quizzing them on their citizenship. Four of the kids had been brought across the border as children, and the agent detained them.

The agents phoned the principal of the school and asked her to fax birth certificates for the four detained students. When she could not, proceedings began to deport the four students to Mexico. The legal wrangling dragged on for three years before a judge ruled that the students were unfairly targeted. The students were allowed to stay, but the threat was clear. Even a seemingly harmless summer science competition could bear life-altering risks.

In the fall of 2003, Lorenzo and Cristian both sign up for the 7:00 a.m. robotics club class. Together with Michael Hanck, they begin to construct a massive catapult. As their designs grow outlandish, Fredi sees that the young students might need some leadership.  He mentions to Oscar, who is in Fredi’s senior Marine Science Seminar, that there are students building a catapult in the club. Oscar agrees to check it out; he is looking for a new team to lead.

Oscar is impressed with their designs but sees that the catapult they want to build is so big that it would require pulling a 120-pound weight back into firing position. They would need some extra muscle in order to fire it.

The catapult is meant for the annual pumpkin hurling contest hosted by the local pumpkin patch. The day before the contest, Fredi tells the group that they will leave at six the next morning. Lorenzo accidentally sleeps in and misses the van by just two minutes. He’s furious with himself and his lack of discipline.

At the pumpkin field, neither Cristian nor Oscar miss Lorenzo much. Both of them think that there’s no excuse for being late. When the competition starts, it takes all three of them—Cristian, Oscar, and Michael—to arm the trebuchet. On their first try, the pumpkin flies about 100 feet. They add more weight and reach up to 150 feet, placing them in second. Everyone has a lot of fun, but they realize that it might be helpful to have someone a little bigger on the team.

Luis Aranda is born a perfectly normal-sized six-pound baby in a shack in the city of Cuernavaca. His father, Pedro, had left to find work in the United States. His mother, Maria Garcia, works as a housecleaner for a Japanese woman, and takes Luis to work with her. Luis grows bigger and bigger, and the Japanese woman takes a liking to him. She knows that the family is struggling, and she asks to adopt Luis so that he might have a better life.

Maria Garcia can’t part with Luis, but she does consider how she might be able to give him a better life. Taking him to the United States seems like the only option. She, Luis, his grandfather, aunt, and two cousins all set off by bus. They walk through a hole in a chain-link fence on the border and take a taxi to Phoenix, where Pedro is. Eventually, Pedro is able to obtain permanent residency in the United States and get green cards for Maria Garcia and Luis.

By sixteen, Luis is 205 pounds, six feet tall, and a quiet kid. He’s not particularly interested in school, but he goes because he understands the sacrifices that his parents have made for him to be there. To help support the family, he starts washing dishes at an Italian restaurant while he is in middle school.

The kitchen fascinates Luis, and he starts cooking at home as well. By high school, he is working as a short-order cook at a restaurant next to a bowling alley. In his senior year, he finds a better restaurant job in a Phoenix suburb. He is initially hired as a dishwasher, but one morning when the kitchen is overwhelmed he offers to help out with the cooking. His boss, Harold, is impressed with what he is able to cook and promotes him.

At the beginning of senior year, Luis enrolls in Fredi’s Marine Science Seminar, which is meant to be an opportunity for seniors to work independently on a yearlong project. He hopes it will be an easy class, and Fredi offers up the chance of working on robotics for his project. Luis thinks that it is nice that the team seems to want his help. He doesn’t know Cristian or Lorenzo, but he does know Oscar, who is friendly to him despite his intimidating size and silence. When Oscar tells him that the team is going to build something great, Luis agrees to join.

In the summer of 2003, just before the start of the catapult project, Fredi and Allan travel to Monterey, California to learn more about a new robotics competition hosted by the MATE Center there. The competition is centered on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), which will have to complete tasks underwater. The trip fosters a new friendship between them, and afterward they call each other often. They tell each other how ridiculous it would be to start an underwater-robotics competition in a poor school in the middle of the desert. But, they agree to do it anyway.