Mushroom Wars

Unionville High School and Kennett High School are bitter rivals. The two schools are 3.2 miles apart. Both are located in the town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. If a driver were to travel the 3.2 miles between the two, he would encounter two Landhope gas stations, three developments, plenty of trees, a country club, a graveyard and a formerly haunted house. If the driver entered Kennett High, he would notice that KHS’ student body includes 900% more Hispanic students than UHS’. Unionville is ranked #5 Best High School in Pennsylvania by US News. Don’t you dare forget it. Kennett is ranked #45. Unionville would not dare let them forget it.

In January of 2014, Kennett played Unionville in a basketball game on the Unionville courts. The intensity of the match, the filth of the rivalry, and the prejudice of the community led a group of Unionville students to chant racist taunts at their rival. They yelled about the inferiority of Kennett’s diverse class, of the “illegal” Mexican population. The taunts were built around the ideas of Mexico and Mexicans, of Us and America. The students sneered that such conflicting identities could not exist without a clear class hierarchy, a hierarchy that needed to be reinforced in every social setting.

Kennett won.

After the fact, both schools decided to take the never-ending feud to twitter. Kennett students boasted of besting the rich white snobs of Unionville. Unionville complained about the unjustified pride Kennett students felt for their school. As one Unionville student tweeted, “Kennett logic: we won a basketball game! The fact we are illegal, poor, and dumb no longer matters.” Other tweets mentioned sombreros and lower SAT scores. The Unionville-Kennett Twitter War of 2014 was crass, violent, and legendary. Both schools were needlessly cruel, driven to vulgarity by in-group bias and teenage immaturity. Students at both schools tweeted out grossly hateful taunts and didn’t care to think of consequences before pressing the baby blue send button. However, only the UHS students’ taunts extended past petty sports rivalries. Their rigid belief in class and race order led to the largest, most involved online war the town of Kennett Square has ever seen.

The town of Kennett Square, located 45 minutes outside of Philadelphia, claims mild fame as the mushroom capital of the world. In 2012, NPR explained “How A Sleepy Pennsylvania Town Grew Into America’s Mushroom Capital.” Kennett Square takes this title very seriously. A Mushroom Festival is held every year in the downtown square, and the tourist shop The Mushroom Cap offers various mushroom-themed souvenirs. On New Year’s Eve of 2013, a giant mushroom made of glowing crystal was installed in the town square, inspired by the crystal ball that drops in Times Square. In 2016, Joe Biden visited.

Both UHS and KHS take pride in the quirky nature of their town. The majestic Longwood Gardens sits in the white part of town and attracts visitors from all across the East Coast. La Michoacana ice cream, in the Mexican part of town, is often listed on Philadelphia’s best eats and was ranked “Best Ice Cream in Philly” in 2009. Still, Kennett students hold more pride for the town—as seen in both their name and the location of their homes. Kennett High School is part of the Kennett School District, while Unionville High School is part of the Unionville-Chadds Ford school district. No Unionville students live in the downtown “Historic Kennett Square,” as it is out of district lines. This victory in pride for Kennett is reinforced by the fact that the tourist shop only sends out post cards with pictures of Kennett High on the back. Still, many Unionville students do not see this as a major loss, as the house sizes increase the further you travel into the Unionville-Chadds Ford district.

According to both the NPR article and local town lore, the original mushroom farmers were Quakers, who hired Italians, who hired Mexicans. The mushroom farms are located throughout the wider Kennett Square area, offering an unbelievably unpleasant stench to which the locals grow immune. The odor and sludge surrounding mushroom farming help color the insults flung at sports events—contributing to Unionville’s school-wide culture of superiority, classism, and racism. Twitter feuds over sports inevitably end in dirty Mexican jokes. Parents are left to frown complacently at the school-wide emails detailing student incidents and misconduct.

Nonetheless, small groups are growing more vocal about that negative culture that has fermented in Unionville for years. Marginal progress has been made with Unionville’s Student of Color Association, instated in direct response to the 2016 election. As a sophomore member of the group matter-of- factly informed the district’s Superintendent, “People outside of our district view Unionville as a joke because of how racist and privileged it is.”

A long snaking border travels from East to West State Street, marking the white parts of town from the Mexican parts. The Mexican market Fritangas Snacks sits to the south of State Street, a few feet away from KHS. The market is surrounded by similarly-themed shops, visited almost exclusively by Mexican families. The shops lay to the side of the main road, State Street, as most of the Mexican shops do. If a student were to walk from the Fritangas Snacks on South Union Street to the juice bar on West State Street she would pass, in order: La Michoacana grill, a used book store, and a community center called The Garage, primarily serving Kennett students. Once she turned onto West State, she would stroll by a French bakery, a sushi restaurant, a window replacement store, a café, a mushroom gift shop, a small Mexican bakery, and a pie shop.

The small bare Mexican bakery, Panaderia Lara, is one of few Mexican owned shops on State Street. The shop hides nestled between a renowned restaurant and an ultra-hip café. Residents and visitors of Kennett Square sometimes wander out of the town’s single parking garage and pause with their noses tilted up. They usually only stop for a few seconds, sniffing around aimlessly for the sweet scent before giving up and heading into one of the trendier shops. Few trace the smell back to Panaderia Lara. Those who do startle at the mere 75 cents charged for a pastry and wonder if that little shop had been there all along. The other Mexican owned shop is La Michoacana, a regionally revered ice-cream shop and grill visited by the likes of Joe Biden. La Michoacana is a spot, popular and respected for authentic Mexican food. It provides palatable ethnic spice to the mild town, adds a bit of intrigue and culture. Panaderia Lara has neither the respect nor the popularity of La Michoacana. Its services are beat by chic sweets in the wildly popular cafe Talula’s. Never mind that Talula’s does not offer treats as warm or as sweet as those in Panaderia Lara. It cannot belong.

White Unionville and Hispanic Kennett students rarely interact outside of a sporting context. Mexican students can sometimes be seen walking from The Garage to The Marketplace, an area where Unionville students are found. The YMCA is also visited in considerable numbers by both schools. Few other spaces (the Giant on Baltimore Pike being another location) allow for sustained interaction between white Unionville and Hispanic Kennett students. The YMCA is the closest thing to interracial utopia that Kennett Square has to offer. Still, if a gym-goer were to walk through the Y, she would find that white and Hispanic students are rarely found in the same spot. Though located south of our border, the Y is still dominated by white students. The rivalry reaches into every aspect of town life, with Unionville winning a partial victory over Kennett High by claiming enemy territory.

Nationwide talk of “building the wall” is further agitating this quiet farming community. Racism against Mexicans existed in Kennett Square long before the 2016 election. But the increasingly open hostility that has mounted against Mexicans ever since has done the town no favors. Nonetheless, this new political climate has elevated the taunts of those Unionville students and turned them into a presidential platform. In May 2017, an ICE raid resulted in the arrest of 12 Kennett mushroom farmers, the first raid of its kind in remembered history. The raid signals this new era’s desire to strengthen our borders, to send back those who somehow managed to trick them. The understandable desire to maintain law and order clashes with the reality of a town’s, and a country’s, history. Kennett Square maintains its fame and its status through the labor of illegal immigrants. This fact complicates the weight of the phrase “illegal immigrant” when comparing it to the phrase “world-famous mushroom capitol.” Kennett Square is not unique so much as it is symptomatic of this country’s conflicting desire to strengthen borders (and the working class) while also maintaining a cheap, desperate labor force.

It must be noted that Chester County township, which houses both schools, voted against the current president (though the state of Pennsylvania did not). There is outrage and fear present in families of all colors throughout the community. Not all are complacent and there are clear, active proponents of tolerance. Still, many Unionville families have found little reason for alarm in this new era because many have yet to consider: What exactly would Unionville be without its greatest rival?

Sophie Tegenu ’20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at s.tegenu@wustl.edu.