Joshua Davis - Spare Parts

Co-Sponsored by 10,000 Degrees

Ten years ago, a team of undocumented Mexican American students from Carl Hayden High, a scrappy, underfunded public school in West Phoenix, took part in a national, NASA-sponsored underwater robotics competition. The school had recently launched a robotics club at the initiative of two unconventional teachers and was going up against not only other high schools, but colleges from around the country, including a team from MIT that was the beneficiary of a $10,000 grant from ExxonMobil. Improbably and amazingly, the four teens from West Phoenix won.
 
In Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream, Joshua Davis expands on this story, placing the teens’ amazing 2004 accomplishments in the context of the immigration debate and their entire lives. Davis takes us back to their childhoods in Mexico, shows us their daily struggles as they grew up in the United States, and brings their dramatic stories — which, in one case, involves deportation, a job picking beans in Mexico, and a tour with the US military in Afghanistan — up to the present day.

Joshua Davis has been a contributing editor at Wired for a decade and is the cofounder of Epic magazine. He is the author of The Underdog: How I Survived the World’s Most Outlandish Competitions, a memoir about his experiences as an arm wrestler, backward runner, and matador.

 

Location: 

51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera, CA 94925
Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream By Joshua Davis Cover Image
$19.00
ISBN: 9780374534981
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: FSG Originals - December 2nd, 2014