PART ONE
Lorenzo Santillán was a baby when his mother dropped him on his head. It was already shaped like a pear. Now he had a big bump growing on his forehead. His mother was worried. There weren’t good hospitals in Zitácuaro, their little town in the Mexican state of Michoacán. So she snuck the baby across the US–Mexico border through an underground tunnel to get him better medical care.
A doctor in Phoenix, Arizona, took a look at Lorenzo and said that surgery could fix his skull but might harm his brain. “As far as I can tell,” the doctor said, “Lorenzo is doing fine. Why risk it?”
From that moment on, Lorenzo’s mother always told him that the bump above his right eyebrow meant he was smart. “Your extra brains are in there!” she said.
Now that they were in the United States, they stayed. The family was barely getting by in Michoacán, but in Phoenix, his father could make five dollars an hour as a gardener. The only problem was that they didn’t have permission to stay. Without legal immigration status, they would join the millions of undocumented people living in fear of being arrested or sent back to their countries. But it was worth the risks.
They moved into a two-room apartment in a poor neighborhood near downtown Phoenix. It was very different from Zitácuaro, where Lorenzo’s father could search the forest for food—skunks, squirrels, and iguanas that his mother would make into a delicious stew. Now they were starting a new life in the middle of a big city, and they couldn’t hunt for dinner. They were stuck eating mostly beans.
His mother got a part-time job as a hotel maid. His father did gardening work under the burning Arizona sun. The family grew. Lorenzo and his older brother, José, had been born in Mexico, but soon, new children came into the family—Pablo Jr., Yoliet, and Fernando—born in the United States and automatically American citizens. While Lorenzo and the rest of his family didn’t have papers, his two younger brothers and sister had US birth certificates and social security numbers, which meant they would have opportunities—like legally living and working in the United States—that Lorenzo could only dream of.
His mother loved her new life, and Mexico soon became a faded memory for her. But his father never forgot the peace and quiet of the Mexican forest. Now he found himself in a new country with five children to feed. At night and on weekends, he would come home with a twelve-pack of beer. Lorenzo would watch him drink his way through it. His father got emotional when he was drunk. Sometimes he told Lorenzo, “I love you, mijo.” Other times he snapped. One day, he asked Lorenzo to clean up the living room. Lorenzo refused—he hadn’t made the mess—so his father grabbed an extension cord and went after him.
That wasn’t the first or last time Lorenzo received a beating from his father.
* * *
As Lorenzo got older, his cheeks filled out, but the top of his head stayed small. Kids made fun of his pear-shaped head, and when he got to middle school, they also laughed at his unibrow. Many days, he came home crying.
The other boys at school all seemed to have short hair and nice fades, but not Lorenzo. His family couldn’t afford a barber, so his mother cut his hair at home. One day, he decided he needed a new look.
He asked his mom to trim just his bangs. Except for the top, he let the rest of his hair grow out, and soon it reached his shoulders.
“It looks really nice,” his mom said.
His classmates didn’t think so. Sometimes they called him an egghead, other times El Buki, after a long-haired Mexican pop singer. When they called him a girl, Lorenzo fired back that he was more of a man because he could take all the insults.
“I don’t want to be like everyone else!” he yelled, trying to pretend it didn’t hurt. He was different, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Cristian Arcega tried not to care what anyone thought of him. But it was hard. He was short, skinny, and not good at the things that got you noticed among kids his age. He couldn’t tell jokes. He couldn’t play soccer without tripping over his own feet. Being short meant it was easy for others to push him around. He decided it was safer to stay inside, away from bullies, and play with things that couldn’t push back.
Except sometimes they did. When he was four years old, Cristian took apart the family radio and snapped a few internal wires with a fork. What would happen if he broke the connections and then plugged it back in? When he flipped the power switch, the radio popped with a bright electric flash, and the lights went out. The house was thrown into darkness.
His mother rushed in and grabbed him. “¿Pero qué estás haciendo?”
As she asked him what he was doing, he could only think one thing: Wow, that was fun!
Soon, other household appliances ended up in pieces. He wanted to take things apart and see how they worked.
When he turned five, he declared, “I want to build robots!”
Nobody in the family was surprised about this—or knew how to help him. His school, in a poor neighborhood in Mexicali, Mexico, was built of wooden shipping pallets. His parents hadn’t finished elementary school and had little interest in computers and other machines.
One day, Cristian’s father left his job at a vegetable-packing factory and crossed the border to find work in Arizona. The money was better, but he missed his family. Cristian missed his dad, too. While he was gone, he busied himself by building things out of lumber scraps and rusted nails—from helicopters that wouldn’t fly to race cars that barely rolled. His father was pretty sure that in Mexicali, Cristian wasn’t going to get to learn to build robots. In the United States, he might have a chance.
At five years old, Cristian was driven across the border. He slept through most of the mysterious journey. When he woke up, he was in Yuma, Arizona. His family explained nothing about the illegal crossing. They just kept driving another two hours east until they reached the small town of Stanfield, Arizona, fifty miles south of Phoenix.
With only six hundred people, Stanfield might have seemed like a ghost town. Tumbleweeds blew through vacant lots. There were few homes, and many of them were boarded up. Everything was brown except for the little patches of green farmland in the middle of the wide, empty Sonoran Desert.
Cristian’s father and another family had rented an old house with torn-up shutters and holes in the walls. The roof was full of holes, too, but luckily it didn’t rain much. There wasn’t enough space for both families, and so they all crammed together in three dusty rooms.
Cristian started school that December at Stanfield Elementary. A sign out in front of the brick buildings had a picture of a roadrunner, the school’s mascot. It seemed like a welcoming place, but Cristian couldn’t speak any English. On his first day, he was seated at a desk among the other students. His teacher chattered away, but Cristian didn’t understand a word she said. When the teacher passed out a worksheet, he couldn’t make sense of the English instructions. He looked over at a girl sitting beside him, but she said something mean and covered up her work.
Copyright © 2023 by Joshua Davis and Reyna Grande
