Spare Parts

by Joshua Davis

  It was thrilling to watch but also frustrating. The lot next door was filled with old cars. Untold mechanical riches were just on the other side of a chain-link fence, but the guy who owned the property refused to let Cristian examine the cars. He even accused Cristian of stealing parts. Cristian responded that the cars were nothing but junk; nobody would want them.

  Every year, Cristian looked forward to the monsoon season, which typically began around June. The wind would pick up and whip massive plumes of dust thousands of feet into the sky. It blotted out the sun and made things cooler, but that wasn’t the best part. What Cristian liked most was the strange variety of things that would blow into his yard, from geometrically complex tumbleweeds to basketballs, which could be used to make models of the solar system. He remembers watching a twelve-foot plastic swimming pool spin down out of the sky and land in front of his house. It was the closest he could get to the bounty of Bob Vila’s show.

  When he was nine years old, the family moved to a run-down trailer park in West Phoenix. Juan had gotten a job as a welder at a company that fabricated metal ramps for disabled people. Ironically, one client turned out to be the Border Patrol. Juan’s family was in the United States illegally, but he was nonetheless dispatched to Nogales to install access ramps at Border Patrol facilities.

  The trailer park was called Catalina Village and billed itself as a “walled community.” Long stretches of the five-foot cinder-block wall surrounding it were unpainted except the portions that had been graffitied and then hastily covered with whatever paint was on hand. The entrance featured a prominent sign that stated NO LOUD MUSIC in both English and Spanish. A pair of tennis shoes hung on electrical wires over the entrance, signaling that drugs could be bought in the vicinity. The park’s website put a cheery spin on the situation: “Start living the time of your life in one of our Phoenix, Arizona, homes!”

  The Arcegas moved into a pink single-wide trailer. It felt like a huge step up to Cristian, mainly because there wasn’t dirt everywhere. He was also just a block away from Alta Butler Elementary School. That meant no more school buses and fewer chances that he’d be taunted. He could simply walk to school.

  The downside was that he developed allergies. His sinuses clogged and his eyes watered. His mother took him to a doctor, who tested a variety of allergens on his skin and concluded that Cristian was allergic to nearly everything. His mother decided that the best (and most affordable) solution was for Cristian to stay indoors and watch more television.

  He soon found that watching Bob Vila had improved his English. By fourth grade, he was fluent, and by fifth grade, he was getting straight As. He was so adept, he found himself wondering why everyone else in his class was so slow. “All of a sudden it was boring,” he says.

  He spent as much time as he could in the school’s meager library, reading through the most challenging books he could find. He quickly ran out of options and found himself disgusted by a National Geographic series for kids that was low on facts and information. He also decided that schoolwork was inane and beneath him, but he did it anyway. It was easier to get it done than it was to prove to his parents and teachers that it was all a useless exercise.

  He didn’t encounter a teacher who inspired him until eighth grade. Ms. Hildenbrandt taught chemistry and encouraged Cristian to choose an independent project that interested him. Cristian decided he wanted to study rocket science. In particular, he wanted to explore the effect that a variety of different fin designs had on the aerodynamic properties of a rocket. Hildenbrandt thought it was a great idea and told him to dive in.

  Cristian recruited a couple of other students to be part of his launch team. Together they scrounged a few dollars and bought a model-rocket kit from a mail-order catalog. Then after school one day, Cristian tied heavy fishing line to one end of the soccer field fence and ran the line back about 160 yards to another fence. Kids were playing a game on the field, but he ran the string down the sideline. He figured it’d be okay.

  When he pulled the string taut and affixed the rocket to it, he was excited. He had a perfect experiment. He had equipped the rocket with the smallest engine possible, and a series of calculations led him to believe that it wouldn’t cover the entire distance between the fences. He would ignite the rocket, watch it zip horizontally along the string, and measure how far it flew. By testing out a series of fin designs, he’d determine which was the most aerodynamic based on how far the rocket traveled. That was the idea anyway.

  He carefully inserted the electric igniters, paid out the wires, and, just for fun, started a countdown: “Three, two, one, blastoff!”

  The rocket engine erupted with a roar and immediately melted the plastic fishing line. Now loosed from its guideline, the rocket was free to fly in any direction and was aimed horizontally across the playground. The kids playing soccer in the middle of the field screamed and dove for cover.

  Almost instantaneously, the rocket pivoted, shot straight up into the air, and emitted a huge boom above the field. A teacher came tearing out of a classroom and saw terrified children scattering everywhere. Up above, the rocket was peacefully descending from the sky beneath a parachute. While everyone else kept their distance, one kid ran excitedly toward the rocket: Cristian.

  “That’s how they knew who did it,” Cristian says.

  The teacher chastised him and told him never to do something so reckless again. Cristian said he understood, and resigned himself to shelving the rocket. But privately, he was already wondering what his next experiment might be.

  * * *

  As eighth grade drew to an end, Cristian started thinking about high school. He had heard about the international baccalaureate program at North High School. It was supposed to be a lot of hard work and that appealed to him. But when he visited to get an application, he was told no spaces were available. Rather than look elsewhere, he decided that his neighborhood school would be fine. Carl Hayden was only six blocks away and boasted two interesting magnet programs: computer science and marine science. The programs may not have attracted a lot of white students, but they attracted Cristian.

  When Cristian arrived at Carl Hayden, he decided to sign up for all honors courses, mainly so that he could insulate himself from “the idiots” who heckled the teachers, played pranks in class, and mocked his seriousness. He appreciated that honors students tended not to cause a ruckus, but he wasn’t particularly impressed with their intelligence. He skipped freshman science and took sophomore biology instead.

  He also tried to supplement his learning by researching cell biology and Shakespeare online. The problem was, the only Internet access he had at home was via a dial-up modem. He would just be getting into the juicy details of cell replication when his sister would pick up the phone and sever the connection. “Hey!” he’d yell. His sister yelled back that there were others in the family who needed to use the phone. She also accused him of being an adopted space alien their parents had found beside a garbage container.

  Cristian’s brief glimpses of a world filled with knowledge tantalized him. They also made school seem dull in comparison. It wasn’t hard for him to excel. He quickly established himself as one of the top two students in his class of six hundred. But he was bored. Really, really bored.

  That’s when he met Fredi Lajvardi.

  He could hear the Carl Hayden marine science magnet program before he saw it. Most days, the sound of a bass drum reverberated off the terrazzo hallway tiles and a techno song vibrated the air. The sound came from room 2134, a darkened, windowless classroom lined with fish tanks. Soft light emanated from the bubbling, glowing tanks, lending a sort of club atmosphere to the room. At first glance, it was hard to spot the teacher. That’s because Fredi Lajvardi often hovered in the back, playing music off a series of computers. Known to his students as Ledge, a condensed and reimagined version of his Iranian last name, Fredi had the wiry energy of a DJ at an all-night dance party.

  Technically, Fredi was the program manager of t
he marine-science program, a post he had held since 2001. In reality, he’d never been that interested in lecturing or teaching in any traditional way. At the beginning of every class, he convened “huddles” like a football coach, assigning kids individual missions for the period. “Okay, let’s do this,” he liked to enthuse, clapping his hands together and sending kids back to their tables. He doled out advice constantly: “Think about the moon’s gravitational pull”; “You really going to leave that garbage on my floor?”; “If anybody hears a bomb threat, you tell me.” His classroom had the high-intensity energy of a sporting event, where Fredi was the coach, cheerleader, band, mascot, janitor, and security detail, all rolled into one.

  The music was an important part of the atmosphere. In fact, the techno thumping out of the speakers in Fredi’s classroom was often his own. He recorded an album in the early 2000s—Ledge on the Edge—though he had never tried to sell it. He composed at night using ACIDPlanet audio software and played his tracks on an endless loop during the day for his captive audience. The reviews were mixed—Cristian personally thought it sounded awful—but the students weren’t willing to openly criticize the teacher’s tunes. Much of the music has the mid-eighties feel of the Beverly Hills Cop sound track—squeaky blips, pops, and bright, punchy rhythms—but by the fifth or sixth repeat of the music, it fades innocuously into the background.

  The music still had an effect, even after students stopped listening. Its bright, driving rhythm signaled that there were a million things to be done. It was almost impossible to listen to it and sit still. On ACIDPlanet.com—a forum for users of the music software—Fredi laid out his aim: “I hope people play my music when they need to be energized and get going!”

  On his drive into school in the morning, Fredi liked to blast his own music. It never seemed as if he needed any additional energy though. He was a wiry, bearded, five-foot-six-inch dynamo, brimming with the enthusiasm of a long-distance runner. In high school, he went to the state cross-country championship every year, laying down mid-five-minute miles in the 5K. Now in his forties, he managed sub-six-minute miles, pushing himself with the determination of someone who still had something to prove.

  The music was part of his educational philosophy. Fredi had always focused on getting kids excited to learn. He cared less about covering the required curriculum and more about finding hands-on projects. To many students, school felt sterile and bureaucratic. Fredi’s music was just one way he tried to change the ambience. It didn’t necessarily matter if they liked it. It was enough to be different.

  He also fought for unstructured time in the school day. When he arrived at Carl Hayden in 1987, he started a class called Science Seminar. There was no curriculum. Fredi just told students to find something fun to build or an idea to test. Over the years, students had embarked on a variety of unusual projects. One student tried to teach color-blind rats the differences among colors. Another student constructed a 1:60 clay model of downtown Phoenix, placed it in a wind tunnel, and blew carbon dioxide across it. The goal: determine how architecture could be used to increase air circulation and help dissipate trapped air pollution. Fredi’s room became the refuge of tinkerers, inventors, and frustrated dreamers.

  So when Cristian Arcega wandered into the marine science classroom one day, Fredi was primed to appreciate his talent. Cristian had heard about Fredi from Michael Hanck, a fellow freshman who was taking marine science. With Fredi’s encouragement, Hanck had started building robots in the classroom.

  “Robots?” Cristian asked Hanck.

  It was what he’d been waiting his whole life to hear.

  ON JULY 27, 1997, police in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler fanned out on foot and bicycles, in patrol cars and paddy wagons. They had received complaints from residents who were bothered by immigrants bathing naked in the orange groves around town. Other locals were upset that people assumed to be Mexicans were loitering around the Circle K on the corner of Arizona Avenue and Fairview Street. The problem took on global proportions in the mind of the authorities. James Dailey, an Immigration and Naturalization Service intelligence agent, described the area as “the first- or second-most notorious staging site for aliens in the world.”

  Agents quickly identified likely targets. When Venecia Robles Zavala, a mother of three young children, stepped out of the Food City on Arizona and Warner, a police officer on a bicycle stopped her. He overheard her arguing with her five-year-old in Spanish and demanded to see papers.

  “What papers?” she asked, surprised. “Newspapers?”

  “Immigration papers,” the officer clarified.

  “I’m an American citizen.”

  The officer asked her to prove it, so she showed him her driver’s license. The man wasn’t satisfied; a driver’s license was not proof of citizenship. Given that he’d heard her speaking Spanish, he needed further confirmation. A passport or Social Security card would do. Luckily, she had her birth certificate in her trunk. It was enough to convince the officer that she shouldn’t be deported.

  Four hundred and thirty-two other “Hispanic-looking” people were caught in a sweep that police labeled Operation Restoration. The stated goal was to “build stronger neighborhoods.” On day six of the crackdown, police and Border Control “circled the wagons” at Hamilton High School and chased down thirteen “aliens.” The immigrants were loaded into a van and deported. At a nearby Little Caesars, a sixteen-year-old and his friend were waiting for their pizza when a police officer and a Border Patrol agent entered and asked if they were “legal.” The teenager said he was, but the officers didn’t believe him. They instructed the staff to refund the boys’ money—they weren’t going to be eating pizza tonight—and loaded them into a squad car. One boy was able to call his mother, who arrived in the nick of time with her son’s Social Security card, but his friend wasn’t so lucky and was deported.

  Agents were required to fill out form I-213—the Record of Deportable Alien—when they detained an immigrant. The form contained room for a description of the detained individual, in part to show that officers had probable cause for apprehending the person. According to INS paperwork related to the sweep, probable cause could be “clothing consistent with that of illegal entrant aliens” or “a strong body odor common to illegal aliens.”

  The police didn’t restrict their activities to the street. On July 28, 1997, the authorities convinced a trailer-park manager to notate a map with Xs for every trailer that contained suspected illegal immigrants. At approximately 11:00 p.m. that night, officers banged on the door of a sleeping family. A man identified by police as B awoke to see bright lights shining through the windows. When he opened the door, the officers strode in, despite B’s protests.

  “We can do whatever we want,” an officer responded, though he admitted that they didn’t have warrants. “We are the Chandler Police Department. You have people who are here illegally.”

  B’s four children were roused, as was his brother-in-law, and all were ordered to produce their papers. The police refused to allow them to change out of their pajamas, even after B showed the officers that two of his children were U.S. citizens, while he and his other two kids were legal residents. When officers discovered that B’s brother-in-law had an expired visa, they radioed for backup and carted him away in his pajamas.

  When the Arizona attorney general Grant Woods reviewed the roundup, he found that a pregnant woman had been loaded into a van with no windows and no water on a day when temperatures reached 101 degrees. “At the scene of one mass stop and arrest, canine units were called in by the Chandler Police which resulted in at least one individual being bitten by a dog,” Woods noted in his report. He also pointed out that, in at least one case, a local cop had used “physical force beyond what appeared appropriate for the arrest” and needed to be restrained by the Border Patrol agents accompanying him. Woods also pointed out that most of the deportees had no criminal record: “There were no other warrants, charges, or holds for these individuals that
in any way indicated other criminal activity or that required extraordinary security or physical force.”

  Woods wrote, “The issue raised by this type of treatment is not whether the arrest and deportation is legal, but whether human beings are entitled to some measure of dignity and safety even when they are suspected of being in the United States illegally.”

  While the Chandler raid was one of the largest in Phoenix history, it was not an isolated event. A raid in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa in December netted 191 illegal immigrants, and in March 2000, the INS nabbed another 140 suspected illegal immigrants in the area. In January of 2000, the INS launched Operation Denial, a task force of one hundred agents dispatched to Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport and Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport. Phoenix was the prime focus—INS officials referred to Sky Harbor as the “Grand Central Station” of immigrant smuggling in the United States.

  The climate in Arizona was rapidly deteriorating. In 2000, a rancher named Roger Barnett declared open season on migrants. “Humans, the greatest prey on earth,” he told a London newspaper. He sewed a homemade PATRIOT PATROL patch on his shirt, mounted an ATV, and ranged across his twenty-two-thousand-acre Arizona ranch looking for anybody who appeared Mexican. According to court documents, when he found Hispanic-looking people on his land, he held them at gunpoint and threatened to kill them. His bravado inspired others, who formed armed vigilante groups to patrol the state.