At first glance, Madelyn Castro and Paul Zeferino seem to be worlds apart.
While 18-year-old Castro grew up in Palo Alto, home of Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley, 19-year-old Zeferino hails from Muskogee, home of the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in a region rich with Native American tribal history. Muskogee’s average household income is just one-fifth of Palo Alto’s, and has triple the poverty rate. Castro is headed to Northeastern University come fall, while Zeferino will start his post-high school journey at Oklahoma City Community College.
But a week after meeting one another, the teens realized their differences didn’t really matter.
“Paul and I got really close,” said Castro. “And I feel that’s because we were able to put our politics aside to get to know each other.”
Castro and Zeferino are part of the American Exchange Project, a program sending high school seniors to communities unlike any they’ve seen before. By connecting teens with peers on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, the project is betting on students to bridge the country’s ever-widening ideological gaps.
“We often hear that America is very polarized, and that if you have different ideologies, it’s almost like you can’t even try to get along,” said Alexis Chiu, an 18-year-old from Palo Alto who is visiting West Jordan, Utah, in early August. “But through this experience, I kind of realized that despite our differences, we’re almost all the same.”
Fourteen of those students landed in Palo Alto last week, flying in from not just Muskogee, but Dodge City, Kansas; Paris, Texas; Mission, Montana, and other places across the nation. They were met by their teenage counterparts — Palo Alto natives who, at some point in the summer, are visiting a new pocket of the country on their own.
From June to August, 350 high schoolers travel to new cities, towns and communities in 32 states to soak in the local culture. They’ll be panning for gold in Montana, cheering on a rodeo in Nebraska, and — for some — seeing the ocean for the first time in Santa Cruz.
“They can learn what it’s like to grow up both in the place that they’re in, and also in all the places that other kids are coming from,” said David McCullough III, who founded the program in 2019.
That’s not to say the students are shying away from their differences. Zeferino, for one, couldn’t believe the number of electric vehicles on the road — or the number of items he was expected to throw in the recycling bin. Malachi Zeairs, an 18-year-old from Kingsport, Tennessee, was shocked at how few Donald Trump signs he saw in Palo Alto windows, and the pride flags he saw in their place. And Jaxon Pond, an 18-year-old from Meridian, Idaho, said he was overwhelmed by the amount of wealth around him, and how people didn’t seem to realize how rich they actually were.
Some of those differences were harder to resolve than others. On a camping trip to Santa Cruz, the teens talked about gun control, a discussion that nearly every student felt was one of the hardest they’d had together. Victoria Senderzon, an 18-year-old from Palo Alto, said she was startled by how many in their group had been directly impacted by gun violence yet still wanted to own a weapon.
Despite that, Senderzon listened — and she felt those on the other side of the debate listened back.
“We realized that we all pretty much live the same lives in different locations,” said Pond. “We all live in the same country, even though we’re from all over. And we’ve all had the same experiences. Just in different ways.”
The idea for the American Exchange Project was born out of a 7,000-mile road trip McCullough took in 2016. He was just 22 at the time, but something about that excursion, which took him from his liberal Boston suburb to the fields of South Dakota, stuck. He had already been concerned about division in America, and for years after he got home, McCullough toyed with whether something from his trip could be used to help the country find common ground.
Eventually, he landed on a cross-cultural exchange, one where students are hosts one week and visitors another week. It’s a model that’s been used internationally for decades, the first of which came from the ashes of World Wars I and II to promote understanding among countries broken by conflict. Later, there were programs like Fulbright — the United States’ flagship international exchange for academics — and Seeds for Peace, which started by bringing Israeli and Palestinian youth to a summer camp in Maine.
Now, the U.S. needs a dose of that diplomacy. A poll by the Pew Research Center last summer found that between 2016 and 2022, Republicans and Democrats had increasingly negative opinions of those in the opposing party; with 72% of Republicans saying Democrats are more dishonest and immoral than they are, and 63% to 64% of Democrats saying the same about their counterparts across the aisle.
The exchange program gives the teens a chance to see people beyond those stereotypes. Zeferino, who plans to vote for former president Donald Trump in 2024, described his hometown as “Republican or die.” At first, he was slightly worried to set foot in Palo Alto, where President Biden won handily in the last election. But to his surprise, Zeferino said he felt welcomed by his peers — and feels many will be friends for life.
“Everyone comes from different political backgrounds, and that can make it feel like everyone is divided,” said Zeferino. “But coming here, we realized: everyone has different views, but it doesn’t make us like each other any less.”
