Lorenzo’s Noggin
The book opens with imagery that prove to resonate through the rest of the novel in various ways. The imagery touches upon themes to be explored such as immigration, inequitable access to life-changing technology, and those things which make innovative scientific minds work differently:
“Lorenzo Santiallan had always been different. It might have been his head. When he was a few months old, his mother dropped him on a curb in Zitácuaro, a town of about 100,000 people in the Mexican state of Michoacán. He already had an odd, pear-shaped head, but now he developed a lump on his forehead. Laura Alicia Santillan was worried. She decided that he needed better medical attention than he was getting in Mexico, so she began the long journey to the United States, eventually slinking through a tunnel under the border with Lorenzo in 1988.”
Stinky
The technological centerpiece of the story is an underdog robot that reflects its underdog overlords. The imagery most strongly associated with the robot is even offbeat: it is not associated with how it looks or sounds, but something way more unusual: how it smells.
“Many of the teams had arrived at the competition with extraordinary underwater machines. They were made of machined metal, and some teams had budgets of more than ten thousand dollars. These kids had shown up with a garishly painted plastic robot that was partially assembled from scrap parts. They called their creation Stinky because it smelled so bad when they glued it together.”
Joe Arpaio
Notorious Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaido, convicted criminal pardoned by Donald Trump, shows up in the book. He is the iconic image of a slow-witted, weak-minded, ill-informed, uneducated, overfed, zealously armed figure of authority whose investment in stereotype over facts is representative of the central antagonist of the book: systemic stupidity.
"Mexican immigrants were unlike any immigrants that had come before them. They were often disease-carrying criminals and didn’t have the same values as American citizens. `My parents, like all other immigrants exclusive of those from Mexico, held to certain hopes and truths,’ he wrote in his book. Mexicans were a separate class of people. Most of the Mexicans his department apprehended were, he said, `potential’ swine-flu carriers.”
Pedro Sanchez
The name Pedro Sanchez appears in the book just twice. He is completely fictional, a character invented for the backstory which sets up the circumstances which the challenges which entries must face in the 2004 MATE Robotics Competition. The backstory is about the sinking of a German submarine in the Caribbean in 1942. It is less the story than the reaction to it by one of the students that creates the imagery which is significant, revealing the extent to which cultural inclusiveness can change lives even when done in the smallest of ways:
“Lorenzo read the story in his bedroom. There were funny-sounding German words and something about a secret agent. Eventually, the German submarine is engulfed by a mysterious explosion off the coast of Florida. The captain is then miraculously rescued by a Spanish-speaking fisherman named Pedro Sanchez. `Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ Lorenzo said to himself. Submarines, explosions—all that was fine. But the mention of Pedro Sanchez caught his attention.”
