College should be the default expectation for students from early on, and Congress should give the children of undocumented immigrants permanence so that they can realize their college dreams here in the United States.
That’s the two-fold message that Oscar Vazquez hopes people get from “Spare Parts”—a new movie that recounts how he and a team of mostly undocumented Mexican immigrants at an Arizona high school built a ragtag robot that enabled them to defeat MIT in an underwater robotics competition in 2004.
Vazquez said the movie , which debuts Friday and stars comedian George Lopez, did a “good job” of portraying the unlikely story of how Vasquez and his comrades at Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix had bested students from an elite college in the robotics competition.
It’s the reality surrounding the story—low expectations for students in struggling schools and the constant threat of deportation for undocumented students—that he would like to see changed.
“All I was prepared to do was graduate high school,” Vazquez said during a panel discussion that followed a private screening of the movie in Washington, D.C.
“Now, they’re doing a pretty good program where they try to get kids interested in college from the get-go, changing the mindset,” Vazquez said of the robotics program at his high school alma mater.
“I wish that happened when I was there,” Vazquez said. “When I was there, the mindset was: ‘Graduate from high school and you’re good.’”
