Players search for their places among rosters taped to the walls and press their way through rows and rows of numbered, brown cafeteria tables. Parents, relatives and community members pitch in to raise money, contribute team snacks and meals-be it breakfast tacos or lasagna-and pack schools during competitions, so much so that in some instances, police have even been called out to unsnarl traffic jams.Īt Vela, the parking lot is filled to the brink, and cars spill onto the side streets, parked brazenly under “No Parking” signs. Tournaments like the one at Vela Middle School are family affairs. At the state level, they have dominated the Texas Scholastic Championships chess competition, winning about a dozen first-place slots at the elementary, middle and high school levels since 1993. Yet, over the past two decades, a different story has attracted the attention of major media outlets, including Texas Monthly, The New York Times, CBS and HBO, as they chronicle the legacy of chess as a phenomenon in the region and the burgeoning of some of the world’s newest young talent.Īt national championships, schools from the Brownsville Independent School District have placed among the top five in team competition since 2005. When Brownsville and other cities in the Valley make national headlines, it is usually in connection with the politics of immigration or the atrocities of the drug war only a stone’s throw away in Mexico. The lush city with tropical temperatures and palm-fringed, artificial lakes, known locally as resacas, attracts avid bird-watchers from around the world and serves as a winter home for thousands of retirees-typically from the Midwest and the North-dubbed Winter Texans or “snowbirds.”īut the city lies in an impoverished area, where the median household income is roughly $30,000, about 95 percent of students are considered economically disadvantaged and 34 percent have limited proficiency in English. Alongside follow mothers and fathers, cousins and grandparents, aunts, uncles and anyone else the competitors’ families have invited to the annual Chess of Champions, one of 10 major chess tournaments held for students in kindergarten through high school in this border city.īrownsville, with a population exceeding 175,000, sprawls along the southernmost tip of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley.

Everywhere, coaches, teachers and volunteers shuffle groups back and forth from one corridor to the next to gaming areas set up throughout the small campus in Brownsville.

Vela Middle School on a winter Saturday morning. With foldable chessboards in small, oblong bags slung over their shoulders, armies of excited children squeeze through the halls of Filemon B.

Filemon vela middle school