Teens experience America’s urban, rural divide intent on busting stereotypes

This summer a group of high school students brought a whole new meaning to foreign exchange programs.

Wendy Rojas of Koreatown immersed herself in Sioux Falls, S.D. Expecting to see Mt. Rushmore, she instead found herself setting the record straight about her hometown. No, she explained to locals, her neighborhood is not overrun with gangs and rife with gunfire like they’d seen in the movies.

Maggie Quine of Kilgore, Texas, was just as shocked with what she had to clarify to L.A. teens visiting her hometown. No, Texans don’t get around on horseback.

Although Rojas and Quine didn’t need a passport for their trips, they might as well have traveled to a foreign land. In a novel program designed to break down entrenched stereotypes and spark lasting friendships, the American Exchange Project sent 13 urban L.A. teens to places like rural Arkansas, Ohio and South Dakota while 10 students from Texas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere arrived in Los Angeles.

“We’re trying to create a kind of antidote to prejudice by bringing together groups of young people who are very different from each other … politically, racially, ethnically, culturally, socioeconomically, and providing them with experiences that help them humanize the other so that they don’t demonize them later,” said David McCullough III, the founder of the organization.

Lexa Smith of Warren, N.H., left, and Anna Gordon of Jackson, Miss., both 18, learn about Los Angeles Central Library during a tour of downtown Los Angeles as part of the American Exchange Project.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

The genesis of the program is rooted in a 2016 cross-country trip McCullough took as 22-year-old Yale student working on a research project, interviewing students and teachers in impoverished areas. In the throes of the polarizing 2016 Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton presidential race, McCullough said he expected to face some animosity. He was wary of the fact that people from different parts of the country might not welcome a stranger — let alone a white researcher from an elite East Coast institution. What he found was much different.

In Cotulla, Texas, McCullough said his host family offered warm acceptance, taking him to church and giving him a tour of the town they were proud to call home. He soon met Kevin Coleman, a Texan who shared his love of cheeseburgers and Budweiser and they quickly became close friends.

They connected past their political differences, McCullough said, because they got to know each other as people first.

“I care about Kevin because I care about Kevin,” McCullough said. “If there’s one thing that I learned from that, it’s that you can find some of your best friends in some very unlikely places — places that are different from your own.”

Participants in the American Exchange Project, a domestic exchange program for graduating high school seniors, meet for a downtown Los Angeles tour.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

He launched the American Exchange Project in 2019 with a few thousand dollars in funding, linking high school seniors from Albuquerque and Anchorage to Flowood, Miss., and Palo Alto, Calif. This year, McCullough said the nonprofit sent its 1000th student on exchange with funding from Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg’s Hearthland Foundation and other contributors.

Downtown Magnets High School is one of 54 high schools participating in the exchanges and the first in Southern California. Rojas is one of 500 traveling students, the biggest group yet for the program. When she joined other project students and host families for pizza in Sioux Falls, she expected to learn more about the place she would call home for the next week.

Instead, she found herself confronting stereotypes when she described Sioux Falls as “quieter” than Koreatown.

“No more gunshots right?” another host family member asked. “Maybe we’ll shoot outside your window to make you feel at home,” they joked.

They continued, asking her about gangs and if she knew any gang members.

“I’ve never really seen anything,” Rojas told them, taken aback by the assumption. “I did explain to them sometimes you will see the gang markings on walls but you don’t really see a group of guys pulling up like in the movies … that’s not really real.”

Instead, she explained, it is the hustle and bustle of her apartment-dense neighborhood that makes Koreatown lively — the chatter of neighbors, the honks of traffic and the occasional squealing of a street race — not gangs and gunshots.

Though shocked, Rojas brushed off the comment as a bad stereotype — one she had hopefully busted — and continued on with her week getting to know students who were interested in learning about her, not just where she was from.

Rojas said she learned her peers wanted to be engineers and doctors, and she shared plans to study biotechnology at Cal Poly Pomona. While they may think differently from her, they all want to find a way to contribute to the world, she said.

As the week came to a close, Rojas found herself at a barbecue with the same local host family. But this time, the conversation was different. They asked Rojas to tell them about the L.A. she knows, which gave her a chance to describe the different cultures she encounters on a daily basis. They found common ground in the close-knit nature of both their communities, she said.

“We have our own perceptions of different places and different people but I feel like when we come together like this and we talk face to face, there is always a connection,” Rojas said. “Even if we disagree on maybe our political views or whatever, we can find something in common.”

Landing back in Los Angeles, Rojas joined fellow Downtown Magnets students in welcoming 10 visiting students for their first meal together. As they sat around a table full of strangers, it was the L.A. students who were first to break the silence, sharing stories of their own exchanges and eager to learn about the hometowns of their peers.

The initial nerves calmed throughout the week as the students visited Griffith Park Observatory, sampled Grand Central Market eateries and got lost in a sea of blue at a Dodgers game.

Axel Ruiz, 17, of Los Angeles, a participant in the American Exchange Project, meets with teens from outside California as part of an exchange program. Ruiz recently traveled to Little Rock, Ark., as part of the program.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Evelyn Moctezuma of Scranton, Pa., got to see the ocean for the first time. Da’Kenzi Robinson of Paris, Texas, successfully rode the Metro. And Quine felt she could be anyone she wanted to be in a city where no one seemed to judge or even pay attention to her, a stark contrast to her hometown where everyone knows everyone else’s business.

By week’s end, it seemed like the group could talk about anything — politics, race, their shared love of Spongebob, Robinson said.

“When Joe Biden had posted that he was resigning, we were on the Metro and then we all just started talking about it,” Robinson said. “You wouldn’t think that you could just have a regular conversation about that but it felt good to not have to be on a side.”

These are the kinds of experiences that can change the way students think about others who hold different views, McCullough said. And along the way, he added, he hoped that they would make some friends, just like he did.

“We’re defining people by fractions of who they are … we’re pretending that because we know one of their views, we know all of their views, which is very rarely true,” McCullough said. “The trip had me appreciate the complexity of all people and taught me how to navigate nuance — brought a world that’s not at all black and white very much into color — and that’s what we’re trying to do for these kids.”

McCullough added that he plans to continue expanding the project until a senior exchange is as commonplace as senior prom in hopes of building a “more connected country.”

Students from throughout the country tour the Los Angeles Central Library as part of the American Exchange Project.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)