Excerpt from Spare Parts by Joshua Davis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In 1870, early Anglo immigrants to the region named the town's east–west streets after U.S. presidents and labeled the north–south roads by local Indian-tribe names. It seemed like a fitting compromise, given the history of the region. But in 1893, the town council decided that the Indian names were too hard to remember and renamed the north–south roads with numbers. The new names also helped Anglo immigrants feel that the land was more fully theirs.

As the city developed, tax revenue was largely allocated to infrastructure for the neighborhoods settled by Anglos. The white neighborhoods got water lines, sewage pipes, and paved roads. The barrios where Mexican immigrants settled got almost nothing. In 1891, the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce published a pamphlet touting their achievements. "Here are none of the sleepy, semi-Mexican features of the more ancient towns of the Southwest, but, in the midst of a valley of wonderful fertility, has risen a city of stately structures, beautiful homes, progressive and vigorous."

When World War Two brought a boom in wartime manufacturing, factories were opened in West Phoenix, away from the pretty citrus groves and canals of East Phoenix. To house workers, companies such as Goodyear and Alcoa constructed small villages near their factories. The housing attracted working-class whites, who built a community in the area. Carl Hayden Community High School was meant to serve that population.

But in the sixties and seventies, as the factories expanded and pollution increased, the working-class whites in West Phoenix migrated out of the area. Leukemia outbreaks among children were reported. In many cases, the housing was poorly built, as it was meant to be only temporary. "Anybody who could afford it moved to the East Side," says John Jaquemart, a historian for the City of Phoenix, who grew up in East Phoenix during that time. "At the least, you moved somewhere else."

At the same time, the population of the region was exploding, driven by a boom in agriculture and high-tech industries. In 1950, the city had 106,818 residents, making it the ninety-ninth-largest city in the United States. Over the next ten years, the population quadrupled and added hundreds of thousands of residents every decade after that. By 1990, Phoenix had a population of almost a million people and was the sixth-largest city in the United States.

The population boom led to a ripple effect across the region's economy as relatively wealthy, newly arrived residents needed a variety of services, from landscaping to cleaning. The spike in demand for labor was met in part by immigrants who streamed across the border illegally, all of whom needed somewhere to stay. West Phoenix was the prime choice. It was cheap and close to downtown, and whites were abandoning it because of the potential health problems and poorly built, decades-old temporary homes.

The changing demographics of the city posed a challenge for school administrators. A 1974 Supreme Court ruling prohibited busing between districts, which meant that white people in the suburbs could stay in their own schools, while minorities in the city center were left with the facilities abandoned by their predecessors. Nonetheless, in 1985 a federal judge ordered the district to desegregate. With few options, administrators tried to entice white students into the inner city. In the mid-1980s, Carl Hayden became a magnet specializing in marine science and computer programming. The thinking ran roughly along these lines: white people like the ocean and computers, so if there's a school that offers specialized classes focused on those things, it'll attract white people.

It didn't work. No amount of computer programming or oceanography curriculum was enough to entice white families, who fled to the suburban neighborhoods surrounding Phoenix. While tony districts such as Scottsdale and Mesa filled with white students, Phoenix grew increasingly Hispanic. Finally, the district just gave up. There was no more diversity to balance. In 2004, Carl Hayden was 98 percent Hispanic—pretty much all the white kids had left—so in 2005, the federal court lifted its two-decade-old desegregation order. Administrators and some teachers tried to put a sunny spin on it. "From school to school, we are equally balanced," announced Shirley Filliater-Torres, the president of the district's Classroom Teachers Association. She didn't point out that the schools were equally balanced because they were nearly completely filled with one race. "We have probably done as good a job as we can to desegregate, given our student population," she said.

Excerpted from Spare Parts by Lindsey Davis. Copyright © 2014 by Lindsey Davis. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.