by Joshua Davis
Lorenzo tried to reason with his hecklers. When he mispronounced a word in English and kids laughed, he pleaded for some sympathy: “Why you gotta make fun of me for something I meant?” That only produced more laughter.
Lorenzo’s anger mounted and he started picking fights at school. He ended up bruised, scraped, and in the principal’s office. He was on track to be expelled. In an effort to turn him around, the school counselor assigned him to anger-management class. He learned that his anger was explosive, the most dangerous type. If he didn’t rein it in, he would self-destruct. The counselor showed him how to calm himself by counting backward from ten. The problem was, he wasn’t sure he wanted to calm himself. It was hard to ignore all the teasing.
After school, Lorenzo started helping his godfather fix cars. Hugo Ceballos lived with the Santillan family and had set up an informal business in their driveway; anybody with car problems could pull in and Hugo would pop the hood, figure out what was wrong, and fix it right there.
Hugo wouldn’t let Lorenzo do much more than clean the tools with a rag damp with gasoline. It gave Lorenzo an excuse to stand beside the cars and watch. He learned that when you jack up a car, you should position a tire on the ground beside you when you slide under the vehicle. That way, if the jack fails, the car will land on the tire, not you.
That’s a badass idea, Lorenzo thought.
Lorenzo wanted to do more, but Hugo didn’t let him. So Lorenzo hovered on the periphery, cleaning the occasional tool and watching closely as Jose, his older brother, helped. Hugo explained to Jose that it was important to keep track of all your parts. “Anything you take off a car, remember where it goes,” he told Lorenzo’s brother. When Hugo installed a rebuilt engine, Lorenzo stood a few feet back and listened as Hugo showed Jose how to use a torque wrench to tighten the bolts. Lorenzo listened carefully and tried to get as close as he could to the car. He had to be careful though; if he got in Hugo’s or Jose’s way, he’d get yelled at and told to go inside.
The chief lesson Lorenzo learned was that it was important to be creative. Hugo wasn’t running a normal mechanic’s shop, with a wall full of tools and shelves filled with supplies. He had little money, a small set of hand tools, and his ingenuity. To survive, he had to come up with fresh ideas and adapt.
Lorenzo took that to heart. He didn’t fit into white American culture and couldn’t find his place in the immigrant community. Even band—the standard home for high school misfits—didn’t work for him. But his days looking over Hugo’s shoulder in the driveway had taught him to think outside the norm. In the driveway, an unusual idea wasn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it might be the only solution.
AT ONE TIME, Carl Hayden was a well-regarded school; it even had its own off-site equestrian program. Students could ride horses in an indoor facility so they wouldn’t get too hot in the desert heat. The school district even built a rodeo ring for teens. It was meant to be a school for white kids.
It’s not that way anymore. Now the neighborhood around the school has an abandoned, overlooked feel. Some of the roads are still unpaved dirt. Junk-food wrappers and diapers lie in the desiccated weeds on the side of the road. At the school entrance on West Roosevelt, security guards, two squad cars, and a handful of cops watch teenagers file past a sign that reads, CARL HAYDEN COMMUNITY HIGH SCHOOL: THE PRIDE’S INSIDE.
There certainly isn’t a lot of pride on the outside. The school buildings are mostly drab, late-1950s-era boxes. The front lawn is nothing but brown scrub and patches of dirt. The class photos beside the principal’s office tell the story of the past four decades. In 1965, the students were nearly all white, wearing blazers, ties, and long skirts. Now the school is 92 percent Hispanic. Drooping, baggy shorts and crisply ironed denim shirts are the norm.
The current student body reflects the transformation of Phoenix. The city was founded in 1868 by Jack Swilling, a morphine-addicted former Confederate officer. Swilling had come to Arizona seeking gold but ended up falling in love with a Mexican woman instead. Trinidad Mejia Escalante, a seventeen-year-old from Hermosillo, Mexico, was visiting relatives in southern Arizona when she encountered Swilling. Escalante’s mother didn’t approve of the drug-addled soldier, but the young lady was smitten and eloped.
Soon after their marriage, the Swillings built a canal near the Salt River, a meager flow of water that spills out of the burnt-umber Mazatzal Mountains into a broad, flat valley. They planted corn, sorghum, and even a vineyard and discovered that the land was productive. The winters were warm and the soil rich. Before long, the Swilling Canal drew other settlers, one of whom dubbed the new community Phoenix. This referred to the ancient, ruined Indian canals that still ran across the land, the remnants of a lost civilization that was now rising again as a result of the marriage of an American man and Mexican woman.
In 1870, early Anglo immigrants to the region named the town’s east–west streets after U.S. presidents and labeled the north–south roads by local Indian-tribe names. It seemed like a fitting compromise, given the history of the region. But in 1893, the town council decided that the Indian names were too hard to remember and renamed the north–south roads with numbers. The new names also helped Anglo immigrants feel that the land was more fully theirs.
As the city developed, tax revenue was largely allocated to infrastructure for the neighborhoods settled by Anglos. The white neighborhoods got water lines, sewage pipes, and paved roads. The barrios where Mexican immigrants settled got almost nothing. In 1891, the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce published a pamphlet touting their achievements. “Here are none of the sleepy, semi-Mexican features of the more ancient towns of the Southwest, but, in the midst of a valley of wonderful fertility, has risen a city of stately structures, beautiful homes, progressive and vigorous.”
When World War Two brought a boom in wartime manufacturing, factories were opened in West Phoenix, away from the pretty citrus groves and canals of East Phoenix. To house workers, companies such as Goodyear and Alcoa constructed small villages near their factories. The housing attracted working-class whites, who built a community in the area. Carl Hayden Community High School was meant to serve that population.
But in the sixties and seventies, as the factories expanded and pollution increased, the working-class whites in West Phoenix migrated out of the area. Leukemia outbreaks among children were reported. In many cases, the housing was poorly built, as it was meant to be only temporary. “Anybody who could afford it moved to the East Side,” says John Jaquemart, a historian for the City of Phoenix, who grew up in East Phoenix during that time. “At the least, you moved somewhere else.”
At the same time, the population of the region was exploding, driven by a boom in agriculture and high-tech industries. In 1950, the city had 106,818 residents, making it the ninety-ninth-largest city in the United States. Over the next ten years, the population quadrupled and added hundreds of thousands of residents every decade after that. By 1990, Phoenix had a population of almost a million people and was the sixth-largest city in the United States.
The population boom led to a ripple effect across the region’s economy as relatively wealthy, newly arrived residents needed a variety of services, from landscaping to cleaning. The spike in demand for labor was met in part by immigrants who streamed across the border illegally, all of whom needed somewhere to stay. West Phoenix was the prime choice. It was cheap and close to downtown, and whites were abandoning it because of the potential health problems and poorly built, decades-old temporary homes.
The changing demographics of the city posed a challenge for school administrators. A 1974 Supreme Court ruling prohibited busing between districts, which meant that white people in the suburbs could stay in their own schools, while minorities in the city center were left with the facilities abandoned by their predecessors. Nonetheless, in 1985 a federal judge ordered the district to desegregate. With few options, administrators tried to entice white students into the inner city. In the mid-1980s, Carl Hayden became a
magnet specializing in marine science and computer programming. The thinking ran roughly along these lines: white people like the ocean and computers, so if there’s a school that offers specialized classes focused on those things, it’ll attract white people.
It didn’t work. No amount of computer programming or oceanography curriculum was enough to entice white families, who fled to the suburban neighborhoods surrounding Phoenix. While tony districts such as Scottsdale and Mesa filled with white students, Phoenix grew increasingly Hispanic. Finally, the district just gave up. There was no more diversity to balance. In 2004, Carl Hayden was 98 percent Hispanic—pretty much all the white kids had left—so in 2005, the federal court lifted its two-decade-old desegregation order. Administrators and some teachers tried to put a sunny spin on it. “From school to school, we are equally balanced,” announced Shirley Filliater-Torres, the president of the district’s Classroom Teachers Association. She didn’t point out that the schools were equally balanced because they were nearly completely filled with one race. “We have probably done as good a job as we can to desegregate, given our student population,” she said.
The transformation was complete. West Phoenix was Hispanic. And while that population worked downtown or in East Phoenix—cleaning the city at night like ghosts that disappeared at sunrise—the doctors and engineers in Scottsdale and Mesa rarely ventured west. Various reasons were given: it was dangerous, it was dirty, it was hot.
“We looked with nothing but contempt at anything west of Central Avenue,” says William Collins, a historian with the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office.
According to Jaquemart, the City of Phoenix historian, East Siders claimed they could never live on the West Side because the sun would be in their eyes as they drove downtown to work in the morning. Jaquemart’s geography professor at ASU put it more succinctly:
“There’s nothing worthwhile there.”
CRISTIAN ARCEGA TRIED not to care about what others thought of him since it usually wasn’t positive. As a young boy growing up in Mexicali, Mexico, he was short and skinny and didn’t excel at the things that usually got you noticed. He wasn’t good at cracking jokes and couldn’t play soccer without tripping over his own feet. His diminutive size made him easy to push around. He quickly realized that it was more interesting to stay inside, away from bullies, and play with things that didn’t try to hurt him.
Except sometimes they did. When he was four years old, Cristian disassembled the family radio and snapped a few internal wires with a fork. Then he plugged the disemboweled device back in. He was curious to see what would happen if he broke connections and then electrified the whole thing. When he flipped the switch, the radio popped with a bright electric flash and the lights in the house went out. His mother rushed in and grabbed him. As she yelled at him, he could only think one thing: “Wow, that was fun.”
Soon, anything his mother bought him ended up in pieces on the concrete floor of their unfinished home in an impoverished neighborhood near the U.S. border. “He always wanted to get on the inside of everything,” his mother recalls.
When he turned five, he announced that he wanted to build robots. Nobody in the family knew what to say. He attended a kindergarten made out of wooden shipping pallets; there wasn’t a lot of technology in the classroom. Nor had he gotten the idea from his parents, who hadn’t finished elementary school and had little interest in programmable machines. But somehow Cristian had become obsessed with building robots.
In 1994, Juan Arcega, Cristian’s father, traveled to the United States and found work in Arizona fabricating mobile storage containers. Juan made more than he was making in Mexicali in a vegetable-packing factory, but he missed his family. Plus, he felt that the United States offered more opportunities for his unusual son. Cristian kept trying to build things out of lumber scraps and rusted nails—from helicopters that wouldn’t fly to race cars that barely rolled—and Juan was pretty sure that Cristian wasn’t going to get a chance to improve his skills if he stayed in Mexicali. In the United States, he might have a chance.
In November 1995, members of Cristian’s family drove him across the border. He was five years old, and the journey felt like a mystery, largely because he fell asleep in the car. When he woke up, he was in Yuma, Arizona. His family said nothing about the crossing. They just kept driving another two hours east until they reached the small town of Stanfield, Arizona.
Stanfield didn’t seem like much of a step up from Mexicali. It had a population of about six hundred people but felt like a ghost town. Tumbleweeds blew through vacant lots. Of the homes that did exist, many were boarded up. The town featured a few dollops of green farmland in the midst of the vast, empty Sonoran Desert.
The Arcegas moved into the home that Juan had rented. Cristian remembers it as “a scary-looking, decrepit house” with torn-up shutters and holes in the walls. Luckily it didn’t rain much, because the roof was full of holes. They lived there with another family, all packed together in three dusty rooms.
Cristian started school that December at Stanfield Elementary. The campus was a collection of cute brick buildings with a sign out front featuring a roadrunner, the school’s mascot. It seemed like a nice place, except that Cristian couldn’t speak any English. On his first day, he sat down at a fake-wood-laminated desk with a cubbyhole beneath it. As the third-grade teacher chattered away incomprehensibly, Cristian watched the other students pull worksheets from the desks. He did the same but couldn’t make sense of the English instructions. He looked over at a girl sitting beside him, but she said something sharp and covered up her work.
At the end of the day, he was supposed to take the school bus home. His mother had told him which bus to take, but when he walked out to find it, he was confronted with an array of identical-looking yellow buses. He saw a girl he recognized—he had seen her playing at a house near him—so he followed her onto a bus.
The bus drove and drove. Nothing looked familiar. When the girl got off, Cristian didn’t see his house anywhere so he didn’t move. Finally, he fell asleep. He was awoken by the driver and saw that he was the only kid left on the bus. It was dark out. He had been on the bus for hours.
“Where do you live?” the man asked.
Cristian showed him a slip of paper. His mother had written out the address. The guy laughed and said something. Cristian got the gist: “You got on the really wrong bus, kid.”
The guy was nice about it and went out of his way to drive Cristian home. But as the school year progressed, Cristian kept having trouble. Sometimes he’d end up a quarter of the way to Yuma; other times, he’d be halfway to Phoenix before he realized there was a problem. He’d watch one child after the other get off until he was the last kid on board. He coped by falling asleep. On at least one occasion, his mother went to the school when he didn’t show up for dinner, and an administrator radioed the buses until a driver reported that one sleeping boy was on board.
He was assigned to an English-learner program but continued to be mystified. One day, when he couldn’t understand an assignment, one of his teachers yelled at him. Cristian could read all the words; he just didn’t know what they meant. He received straight Fs that year.
Some of the kids weren’t welcoming. He remembers hearing the word wetback for the first time on the school bus. It was directed at him. Kids felt bolder on the bus because the bus driver was driving and couldn’t do anything to stop the taunting. Most of the time Cristian couldn’t exactly tell what the kids were saying to him, but he knew it wasn’t nice.
Obviously he wouldn’t win a fight. He was small, and outnumbered. But he was also unwilling to give in. Though he was ridiculed by some of his teachers and taunted by his classmates, Cristian was convinced, even by age six, that he was smarter than most of them. His smug detachment only ratcheted up the abuse. One boy in particular seemed to take pleasure in calling Cristian names. Finally, on the last day of the school year, as Cristian was walking off the bus, he smashed his fist into
one kid’s face and fled to his house before anybody could respond.
That summer, the family moved to a trailer on the outskirts of town as temperatures rocketed up to 110 degrees. When Cristian ventured outside to play in the dirt, it burned his hands. When he grabbed a piece of metal to make something, it singed his skin and left a welt. After that, he decided to just stay indoors. They had a television and could sometimes pick up a static-filled transmission of Spanish-language Power Rangers from Nogales, about a hundred miles to the south.
That’s when he flipped onto an American broadcast of a bearded white guy wielding a circular saw. The man had gray hair and a slightly nasal voice and was tearing through a piece of wood with the saw. Cristian quickly realized that the man was building a staircase. His younger sister complained—she wanted to watch cartoons—but Cristian refused to let her change the channel. He had just discovered the magic of Bob Vila, home-improvement guru extraordinaire.
From 1979 until 2007, Vila hosted a series of popular fix-up-your-home shows, helping to touch off a home-remodeling craze and inspiring Tim Allen’s comedy show Home Improvement. With a flat American accent, plaid shirts, and a New England–based remodeling business, Vila came across as an old-time Yankee. In reality, he was born in Cuba. His family had fled Havana in 1944 and he’d grown up in a Spanish-speaking family in Miami.
“At some point you have to consciously choose your identity, and I chose to be an American kid,” Vila says of growing up in a Spanish-speaking family. “For the next forty-eight years, I didn’t focus on my heritage.”
And yet in 1996, in a trailer out in the middle of the Arizona desert, Vila became a symbol of hope for a young boy struggling with his own cultural identity. Vila and the machines he used mesmerized Cristian. The six-year-old boy didn’t need to speak English to appreciate the raw beauty of a cement mixer or the twisted innards of an air compressor. He just loved watching the power tools, and how they made the sawdust fly. Vila’s table saw looked enormous, like something a giant would use. It was a glimpse into a magical world, where people had an endless amount of building supplies and extraordinary tools. Cartoons paled in comparison. For Cristian, Bob Vila’s Home Again was the real fairy tale.