In Calexico, stories used to travel slowly.

They moved on bicycles and sneakers, through chain-link fences and across dusty backyards. They passed through kitchens where tortillas puffed on comales and radios argued with each other in English and Spanish. By the time a story reached Main Street, it had already changed shape—edited by laughter, softened by time, sometimes exaggerated by someone’s cousin who “swore it really happened.”

Nothing was permanent.
Nothing was recorded.

If you did something embarrassing, the worst-case scenario was that someone remembered it until Christmas.

Then the phones arrived.

At first, they were harmless little bricks. You could call your mom, play Snake, maybe take a blurry photo of your shoe by accident. No one suspected that, one day, these same devices would become tiny historians—quietly documenting every joke, every crush, every bad haircut, every moment of teenage brilliance and teenage disaster.

Somewhere along the way, the stories stopped traveling slowly.

They began to fly.

Today, a student in Calexico can post a video at lunch and reach thousands by dinner. Their joke, their dance, their frustration, their brilliance—captured, replicated, and launched into something mysterious and invisible called an algorithm.

When I was growing up, an algorithm was just something your math teacher threatened you with.

Now it decides who gets seen, who gets ignored, and who accidentally becomes famous for tripping over a backpack in the hallway.

Recently, TikTok updated its terms of service and privacy policy. The announcement was polite, technical, and easy to ignore—like a substitute teacher reading rules no one planned to follow. But hidden inside the legal language was a simple truth: the platform is not just watching what we post.

It is studying us.

It learns what we like, what we linger on, what we search for at midnight, what we type and delete before anyone else sees it. It doesn’t just collect videos—it collects patterns, moods, hesitations, and habits.

In other words, it knows you better than your best friend.

Possibly better than your abuela.

But TikTok is not unusual.

It is just honest.

Every major social media platform does something similar. They don’t merely host our stories anymore; they map them. They don’t just amplify voices; they predict them. Somewhere in a server far away from Calexico, a system is quietly deciding which stories matter and which ones will disappear before anyone notices.

Growing up in a border town has always meant living between worlds.

We learned to switch languages mid-sentence, to carry two histories in one body, to understand that identity is complicated long before anyone taught us the word “identity.” We knew that who you are depends on where you stand—on which side of the street, which side of the border, which side of the conversation.

Back then, complexity belonged to people.

Today, complexity belongs to machines.

To an algorithm, a student in Calexico is not a story.
They are a pattern.

A kid scrolling at midnight becomes a behavioral trend.
A joke in Spanglish becomes a data point.
A moment of vulnerability becomes “engagement.”

And slowly, without anyone announcing it, adolescence becomes measurable.

Once, the school day ended at 3:00pm.

Teachers went home. Students spilled into streets, fields, and living rooms. Arguments faded with distance. Embarrassing moments dissolved into memory. By the next morning, most things had been forgiven, forgotten, or at least improved through exaggeration.

Now the classroom follows everyone home.

A teacher’s voice appears in a student’s video.
A hallway argument becomes content.
A private joke becomes public currency.

Most teachers never agreed to this.

Most students never noticed it happening.

TikTok’s updated rules didn’t create this world. They simply admitted it exists.

In places like Calexico, where identity has always been shaped by borders, languages, and stories passed down at dinner tables, something subtle is changing. Students are no longer just growing up in a community—they are growing up inside a system that watches, remembers, and predicts.

We used to worry about whether kids were being heard.

Now we must ask a stranger question: Who is listening?

And what are they doing with the story?

Sometimes I think about those old afternoons in Calexico, when the sun hung low over the desert and the only record of our lives was dust on our shoes and laughter in the air. We were seen only by each other, remembered only by those who loved us.

Today’s students deserve that same fragile freedom—the right to be awkward and brilliant in private, to fail without an audience, to experiment without being archived.

The border they now cross is not between countries, but between childhood and data.

And if we are not careful, they will reach adulthood fluent in algorithms, but strangers to their own stories.

There’s more waiting at https://xinkblotz.com. Telling stories, sharing thoughts, and drinking coffee. A blend of fiction, reflection, and whatever’s brewing – one post at a time.