Essay on Four Mexican Teens Pursuing American Dream: A Joshua Davis Story

We all have dreams about living a life that is fulfilled, and it all stems from the goals in our lives. Others like to refer to it as the American dream. Most people come to the United States in search for a better life, and the book written by Joshua Davis is an example as it portrays the circumstances of four young Mexican teenagers who are undocumented high school students who were brought to America by their families when they were young. Life in America is not easy for them for a number of reasons. All four students go to Carl Hayden Community High School in west Phoenix, a school where more than seventy percent of students receive subsidized lunches because they live below the poverty line. Fredi, a marine science teacher who cared less about covering the required curriculum and more about finding hands-on projects, plays a vital role in changing the lives of these four teenagers by mentoring them to be better. The main idea in this is to establish the social factors affecting the lives of Mexican American teenagers and how the effects can be tuned to enable these young people to reach their dreams and enjoy the American dream. ( Hill, Kathryn, 2010).

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In the book, we get to learn of four undocumented high school students who live in America with their parents, and life is not easy for them because, to begin with, they live in a shady neighborhood that is underprivileged. The four teenagers are lucky to find Fredi, who mentors them not only in robotics but also in life after they join Fredi's robots club, and later they compete along with MIT College students at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the third annual Marine advanced technology education remotely operated vehicle competition (Davis, 2014). An event that was sponsored by both the NASA and the Navy, the four teenagers cannot believe that they are competing alongside students who come from some of the most prestigious universities in the region. They believe that knowledge is significant, but good practice and creativity are important. Furthermore, people need dreams to enable them to do that which seems impossible at first, and the four teenagers are proof that with dreams a good mentor and a burning passion, people can achieve great things regardless of the cards life hands them.

All four teenagers are illegal immigrants, and this impacts their lives in so many ways, such as not being able to go to good schools because they are fugitives as well as the fact that immigrant parents lack the financial resources to send their children to good schools. Moreover, one of the teenagers, Oscar, had won the office of the year award and wanted to join the army, but he did not know until a teacher later informed him that illegal immigrants could not serve in the army no matter how good and physically fit they could be. All these show how social factors directly impact the lives of some of these teenagers, and the academic journey of the boys acts as an analogy to the struggles of immigrants in the United States (Serrano-Villar 17). The four teenagers are stereotyped even by the judge Tom Swean, who is accustomed to white, well-educated, and conservative clothed engineers, but there was a group of teenagers from the downtrodden west phoenix high school, and they gave Tom Swean the needed signals that the future looked different. Just by being Latino and of a foreign nationality made people believe that one could not achieve much in America.

In addition, Mexican Americans were treated as second class citizens who had no real rights in the United States, and this not only affects Oscar but the entire team because, as they competed in the robotics contest, a number of people imagined that them being in the competition was a mistake. Their socio-economic status acted to their disadvantage because they could not design a sleek and good looking advanced underwater remotely operated vehicle as to the one they brought to the competition was made of POV, unlike the fully funded design from the MIT college students. Regardless of the reputation and influence of the place they were from these four teenagers went against all the odds to win the competition to the amazement of so many people because even though their design was not as sleek and fully funded, they were creative and practiced the knowledge they had to create a remarkable underwater operated robot (Sheridan, 2016).

The story is significant in that it shows that being underprivileged and an underdog could be an asset because the same things that make one different could be the very reasons for their success, as in the case of the four teenagers. Also, it can be learned that when a person is disadvantaged, they often become creative using everything they have, and to survive, they have to come up with fresh ideas and adapt quickly. At times as in the case of Oscar we could have everything required such as leadership, dependability, intelligence and many more but the only drawback could be something we have no control over such as Oscar not being a citizen of the United States, this issue matters because young people learn that life has no absolutes and anyone can excel at anything regardless of their circumstances. All it takes is practice and creative use of knowledge to beat the odds.

Works Cited

Davis, Joshua. Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream. Macmillan, 2014. Print.

Serrano-Villar, Maria, Keng-Yen Huang, and Esther J. Calzada. "Social support, parenting, and social-emotional development in young Mexican and Dominican American children." Child Psychiatry & Human Development 48.4 (2017): 597-609. www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Social-Support%2C-Parenting%2C-and-Social-Emotional-in-Serrano-Villar-Huang/ [Accessed 2019]

Sheridan, Myra Infante. "First Opinion: Negotiating Risk and Reward in Davis's Spare Parts." First Opinions, Second Reactions, 9.1 (2016): 3.

Hill, Nancy E., and Kathryn Torres. "Negotiating the American dream: The paradox of aspirations and achievement among Latino students and engagement between their families and schools." Journal of Social Issues 66.1 (2010): 95-112.