Game Over 
The Border Fence, Brownsville 
Check Mates
Following in the footsteps of sports greatest rivals, two world-class chess players from Brownsville have been battling each other since kindergarten. They’ve both won state and national championships. They’re both ranked in the top five in the country. And they’re both in the fourth grade.
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The same could be said of Spada. Like his rival, he speaks Spanish capably. And in most ways he is similar to other confident nine-year-old boys. Asked if he has a favorite color, he replies decisively, “Yes. Orange.” His most treasured possession is his miniature schnauzer, Drupi. He has a crayfish, which he prizes, though not enough to name it. His favorite TV show is Nickelodeon’s animated series The Fairly OddParents. Interests outside chess include soccer, math, piano, and video games. One of his closest friends is fellow chess enthusiast Elizabeth Vasquez, a girl his age who mischievously enjoys reporting on Spada’s flirtatious behavior with girls at their school. To prepare himself for future challenges, however, he spends much of his time studying titles such as Chess Tactics, Play the 2 c3 Sicilian, Pandolfini’s Endgame Course, and Starting Out: Sicilian Najdorf. All of these books sit notably close to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on his shelf.
Where some people might find such study excessive, 34-year-old Fernando Spada and his 33-year-old wife, Claudia, believe it is prudent. “I think the Brownsville chess program will pay off,” said Spada Senior, a shy, polite engineer who manages microchip factories in Matamoros and Victoria. “They’ll get great leaders. Most hand labor is going somewhere else. If we don’t work on the minds, the U.S. will no longer be a superpower.”
For years, studies have tried to affirm the link between chess and more-sophisticated thought processes in young children, with varying amounts of success. After chess programs began popping up in the Valley in the early nineties, the anecdotes signifying the benefits spread and data began to appear. One of the most significant studies for the South Texas area was held during the 2001—2002 school year by Joseph Eberhard, now an eighth-grade social studies teacher at William Adams Middle School, in Alice. Eberhard studied children and chess for his dissertation at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and, noting that 69 percent of the children in the region qualified for the free-or-reduced-lunch program, he wanted to focus on the way chess instruction for children affected a poverty-stricken area. He found that students in Alice who received chess instruction dramatically increased their test results in nonverbal ability and slightly improved their test results in verbal aptitude. Eberhard also came to believe that children of poverty could benefit from chess since they were more entertainment oriented than achievement oriented and tended to be more spatial in learning style than linguistic or mathematical.
Jose Juan “J. J.” Guajardo, a teacher at Emaline B. Russell Elementary, in Brownsville, is usually credited as the first instructor to tap into the area’s chess potential, providing the initial imaginative thrust for the school district’s current program. Asked by his principal in 1989 to “do something” with a handful of rambunctious boys who had taken it upon themselves to smash a teacher’s square-dancing albums, Guajardo taught them to play chess. The principal was so impressed when she poked her head in the classroom and witnessed the once-unruly youths hunched over their boards that she asked Guajardo to work with them every school morning at seven o’clock. He did. Guajardo wasn’t an expert, but he believed that if he taught them the fundamentals, their natural abilities would take over.
That year, on a whim, he decided to take his little team to state. They lost half of their games, but he continued with the instruction, and in the spring of 1993, Russell Elementary caught everyone off guard and won its first state championship. It won again in 1994. And in 1995. Some of Guajardo’s chess students didn’t speak English. Others had learning disabilities. But all of them were passing their standardized tests and feeling focused and smart. For seven years in a row, from 1993 to 1999, Russell Elementary won the Texas Scholastic Chess Championship.
And the children were treated like royalty. “During that time here in Brownsville, a lot of negative stuff was going on,” Guajardo said, sitting outside a local tournament one sunny afternoon. “There was the drug war in Mexico that was spilling over into the streets of Brownsville. Unemployment was around eleven percent. Our mayor and several city officials had been indicted. I believe chess took off  because the community wanted it. They saw a great future, and they embraced these kids and said, ‘This is good.’ The kids would go to restaurants and everyone would say, ‘Oh, my God, you guys are the chess team!’ They would buy the kids lunch. They were big celebrities!”
By the late nineties Brownsville was holding regional tournaments. In the beginning, only a hundred or so kids would show up, but over the years the numbers swelled to three hundred, then one thousand and more. Students were arriving from Laredo, McAllen, and Edinburg, and other schools started winning tournaments. In the spring of 1999, Morningside Elementary became the first Brownsville school to enter a national tournament, placing second in its age category behind the defending champions, the prestigious Hunter College Campus Schools, from New York City.
The investment seemed to be paying off. And yet, a few adjustments would extend the reach of the chess clubs’ ambitions. The Brownsville Independent School District approved a budget of $400,000 earmarked for chess to help every participating school purchase equipment, pay entry fees and outside coaches, and travel to the national tournaments. Since the BISD adopted the chess program in the 2002-2003 school year, at least one Brownsville school each year has dipped into that funding to attend a national tournament, resulting in at least one school’s being ranked in the top ten annually. In 2003 a former high school chess champion from Brownsville, Clemente Rendon, returned home from a stint on the highly ranked University of Texas at Dallas chess team. Rendon, who is currently the vice president of the Texas Chess Association, noted the dearth of Grandmaster instructors in the area and spotted an opportunity to create a trickle-down effect of training in the community. He persuaded the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College to create a chess team, whose scholarships soon began drawing students from across the globe.
Unlike fortuitous sports victories that leave a community believing that the gods happen to be smiling on its citizens, all of this success made some residents think about what these hard-earned achievements really meant. There is never just talent in the water; something had happened in Brownsville. None of the implications were lost on the president of UTB/TSC, Juliet V. Garcia. “Those chess kids are smart enough to learn the game and win national tournaments,” she said. “This has changed them forever. They want to go to law school or to medical school. They want to become scientists.”
Texas demographics show that if the socioeconomic and education gaps between Anglos and non-Anglos don’t close by 2040, the state will face a dire economic crisis; if they do close, Texas will be ideally positioned for a global marketplace with a young, multilingual, multi-cultural population providing riches along the lines of $300 billion in aggregate household income.
“All of the negative characteristics you attribute to the growing Hispanic population—what if we changed that?” Garcia asked. “What if a Hispanic, being bilingual and bicultural, becomes a very productive member of our society? You imagine you’re the teacher of Fernando Spada. What do you think of his potential? Or his siblings’?”
AS THE TENTH ANNUAL Texas Grade and Collegiate Championship approached, the boys had been co-champions for an intolerable six months. They knew they would be facing off against each other at the largest statewide tournament in the Valley. What they couldn’t have foreseen was the showdown that would occur three weeks earlier, on October 14, when they were randomly paired up at the less prestigious Besteiro Middle School Scholastic Chess Tournament.
The relaxing August had brought fresh interests into their lives, allowing them to be typical kids for a few weeks. Both boys had declined the invitation to the World Youth Chess Championship and taken a little bit of a breather: Spada had gotten into robotics, karate, swimming, and soccer, though he continued to memorize games with a software program equipped to engage a player in more than 1,200 games; Mendez signed up for a peewee football team and gave chess a rest. “It was taking a toll on his brain,” said Mendez Senior. But the leisure came at a price.
Spada easily recounted the play-by-play at the Besteiro tournament. “He took knight to c3,” he said, using the chess notation that marks where a piece moves along the board’s columns and rows. “What I found out in that game is, if you exchange queens with him, he collapses. He doesn’t know what to do. I found that out after I attempted to get him to trade my queen four times—he never took it until he was forced to, and then he collapsed.” Clearly this was a thrilling discovery, but he was careful not to give himself too much credit, because Mendez always played knight c3. “I expected that opening,” he said. It was Spada’s first victory against his rival in two years.
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