After a harrowing trip last year from Colombia to the U.S.-Mexico border, an 11-year-old girl has found confidence – and even a career plan – through a New York City program dedicated to chess.
Mariangel Vargas Gomez said she’d never played the game before she arrived at P.S. 11 in Manhattan. Then she joined the special chess program, which the school launched specifically for new Spanish-speaking students.
“I was nervous at first, but now I feel confident,” said Gomez, who wants to be a chess master and a surgeon when she grows up.
She is a serious player, fiercely concentrating on the board while deciding her next move.
Gomez’s coach Russ Makofsky said she is ranked near the top 100 players among girls her age nationally. This spring, she competed in the national championships in Baltimore.
Makofsky, who helped launch the program through his Gift of Chess nonprofit, said chess teaches critical thinking, math and strategy. While he’s thrilled with Gomez’s success, what he wanted most was to help her and other new students build community.
“When you play the game of chess, you sit across from somebody and you’re equal for that moment,” said Makofsky.
This school year was marked by the political furor over the unprecedented number of asylum-seekers arriving in New York City. Gomez’s story represents another side of the crisis – a school community successfully mobilizing to welcome her, her family and fellow migrant students.
Officials said some 17,400 students in temporary housing have enrolled in the public schools since July. Most are believed to be migrants. As policy, the education department does not track students’ immigration status.
Accommodating the new students has been a tremendous challenge. Teachers across the city reported struggling to communicate with their new pupils, while administrators said they were straining to meet students’ basic needs. The city distributed $12 million to schools that received migrant students.
“I’m a principal that just brought my school through a pandemic and I thought that was going to be the most challenging thing I would have to do,” said Bob Bender, principal at P.S. 11 in Chelsea. “I was wrong.”
Bender said the elementary school has registered 127 new students from temporary housing across grades since last fall — including 50 children who all arrived one day earlier this school year with only 48 hours notice.
The school mobilized to welcome the new arrivals. The principal and staff met families at shelters and walked the children to school. Bilingual parents helped get students registered. The school hired Spanish-speaking paraprofessionals to assist teachers who only speak English. And with the help of a local church, the school arranged a Thanksgiving dinner for all families in temporary housing.
Then Bender and Makofsky decided to launch the chess program for the new students.
“I wanted these kids to feel safe, feel seen and feel like they could shine. I really thought this might be our ticket,” Bender said.
Makofsky, who oversees chess programs at schools across the city, recruited bilingual coaches, some of whom had been champions in their own home countries, to work with the migrant students. Then, two of his proteges, Kyle and Kaleb Lancman – a pair of Spanish-speaking twins at Stuyvesant High School who have played chess since elementary school – suggested an afterschool program so the kids didn’t have to spend their afternoons in cramped hotel rooms. Makofsky set up a space at St. Luke’s Theatre on West 46th Street, and the 16-year-old Lancman twins mentored students four afternoons a week, pushing their homework later into the evening so they could spend more time with the kids.
“Sometimes I’d stay up late, but it didn’t matter,” Kyle Lancman said. “The chess club is a once in a lifetime thing. We get to help the kids and teach them the knowledge that I’ve acquired over many years. And homework is – well, that matters a lot – but you can always do it later.”
Through the Gift of Chess, students received chessboards as well as software they could use to practice on their own. Makofsky said parents started sending in photos of kids playing chess by the light of a cellphone in their bunk beds at the shelters and hotels where they stayed.
Gomez was a strong student back in Colombia. She earned good grades, took swimming lessons and played in a music group. Then last summer, her parents – who ran a nonprofit for displaced people – started receiving death threats from militants. Her mother told her they were going on vacation, although it quickly became clear the trip was anything but. Her mother said they got lost in the Mexican desert. Thorns cut their skin as they made their way to the border.
At the U.S. border, Gomez and her parents were temporarily separated from her two older siblings. Officials in Texas confiscated the few belongings they had and told them to board a bus to New York City. When they arrived, they were sent to a hotel in Times Square. Gomez told her mother she felt like “un ratoncito asustado,” a scared mouse. She was terrified about starting at a new school where she didn’t know anyone and couldn’t speak the language.
“They’re going to judge me, they’re going to point at me,” she worried.
But it didn’t take long for her to start settling in. Other bilingual kids helped translate for her teacher, who speaks English. She started making friends. Then, every Friday, during her chess class, she was surrounded by other Spanish-speaking students, including many who also had recently crossed the border.
Her mother, Alexandra Gomez, said she has been overwhelmed by the welcome her daughter received from the school and the chess program.
“The school – all the staff, the security, the teachers, everyone, this whole group – has this humility, a commitment, a love for the students,” she said. “For us, the immigrants, that was the biggest fear we had when we arrived at school: ‘What do they think of us?’ And they’ve received us with open arms, and with a smile.”
Although much of the discourse around migrants has focused on challenges, Bender said he also sees an inspiring story.
“I’m so in awe and impressed with each and every one of them, how far they’ve come, their strength, power, and confidence,” he said. “I think what has been missed is the amazing gift we’ve been given from these kids and their courage.”
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