Endeavors magazine: A Good, Swift Kick

When Paul Cuadros was a young boy, he felt most at home playing soccer with his dad and brothers in an empty Michigan Stadium. They spoke only Spanish. In school, Cuadros felt out of place. He could barely speak English and he looked different — Peruvian brown in a sea of white. “I spent my days in school educating myself, navigating the system on my own terms without my parents,” he says. Cuadros never did feel entirely comfortable, but he became fluent in English, captained his high-school soccer team, and graduated from the University of Michigan.

Twenty years later, Cuadros was spending his days in another football stadium, this time as soccer coach for Jordan-Matthews High School in Siler City, North Carolina. Most of his players were Hispanic, and several could barely speak English. Some longtime residents were angry about the influx of Hispanics; they wanted to kick these kids out of the country.

Cuadros thought his players could make something of themselves. But he had no idea that they would help ease the town’s racial tensions.

Cuadros, the son of immigrants, was raised in a tiny basement apartment in the church where his father Alberto was a janitor. At night, Alberto washed dishes at a candy store. His family was able to move into a house after a university researcher, himself the son of an immigrant, gave Alberto a job caring for lab animals. Alberto hated the job, but it came with health benefits and pushed the Cuadros family into the middle class.

Cuadros never forgot his roots, and he became an investigative reporter specializing in race and poverty. In 1998 he found a story he says he’ll be reporting on for the rest of his life. He was working for the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., when his research found that Hispanic populations were skyrocketing in towns with meat-packing or poultry plants. He wondered how these towns would be affected and how whites would respond. He decided to find out, moving to Pittsboro and focusing on Siler City, a town of eight thousand people with two poultry-processing plants.

In 1990, just 4 percent of Siler City was Hispanic. Ten years later 39 percent was Hispanic, nearly equal to the percentage of whites. Schools became overcrowded, and many teachers wound up spending a lot of time helping Hispanic students who had limited English skills. This angered a lot of white and black parents, Cuadros says. The town’s health-care system was straining under pressure from so many new residents, many of whom were uninsured and undocumented. Rural slums rose up. Still, the town’s economy was surging, thanks in part to the influx of Hispanic consumers.

In February of 2000 anti-immigration sentiment morphed into blatant racist rhetoric when a few citizens organized a rally featuring David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard. Hundreds of people attended. One man told Cuadros: “I’m mad because there ain’t no Greyhound buses here to load them up and send them back where they come from.”

Cuadros says, “What people don’t understand is that these poultry companies recruited workers from Mexico. This migration was planned.”

During the 1970s, slaughterhouses moved from cities to rural areas in order to break up unions, Cuadros says. These factories would ship whole chickens and sides of beef to local butchers, who would prepare various cuts of meat for consumers. Processing plants took over meat preparation in the late 70s and early 80s, creating disassembly lines to debone chicken and produce the prepackaged meat now available at any supermarket. At the same time, Americans began preferring chicken to red meat, and the poultry industry boomed. To maximize profits, companies hired workers — often blacks — at low wages, until they found an even cheaper labor force south of the border.

In many cases, Cuadros says, chicken companies paid Mexicans to travel north and sometimes provided them with housing. But chopping chicken all day is hard, dangerous work. After a year or two, many workers moved on to better jobs in construction or restaurants, for instance. “Chicken processing is a gateway industry,” Cuadros says.

When workers quit, factory owners dipped back into the Mexican labor pool. A former human-relations director at a poultry company told Cuadros, “We had something called a buddy bonus that if you brought a new employee and they stayed X amount of time, you got X amount of dollars and a coupon. We did a lot of innovative things to have people spread the word.”

Eventually, Cuadros says, word of mouth in Mexico sufficed.

Back at Town Hall, Cuadros asked David Duke why the rally wasn’t held outside a chicken factory. Duke responded, “Maybe we’ll go there next.” But Duke didn’t go there; he went to Golden Corral, where Cuadros, hoping to get an interview, watched Duke down a plate of fried chicken.

In the summer of 2000 Cuadros conducted a race relations experiment: he started a soccer team with white players from Pittsboro and Hispanic kids from Siler City. The players responded well to each other, and the team had a great year traveling throughout North Carolina. But some opposing players and spectators shouted ethnic slurs at the Hispanic players. “That was freaking amazing,” Cuadros says, still in disbelief.

When the season ended, a few players told Cuadros that their older brothers had tried to start a soccer program at Jordan-Matthews, but the principal had turned them down three years running.

“I thought that was strange,” Cuadros says. “I mean, how hard is it to start a soccer program? So I decided to do something that reporters don’t typically do. I got involved.”

By then, Cuadros had been hired as a stringer for TIME magazine; his beat was North and South Carolina, and since immigration was becoming a hot story, some ideas for a book began percolating in his mind.

Cuadros met with school officials but was rebuffed whenever he broached the subject of creating a soccer team. The main problem, he realized, was cultural. “The dominant culture of any small-town community has its institutions — football, basketball, baseball,” he says.

Frustrated with his lack of progress, Cuadros enlisted the help of county commissioner Gary Phillips, who had some clout in Chatham County and agreed with Cuadros that creating a soccer team should not be a big deal. And just like that, Cuadros got his team. Despite making a few enemies and causing quite a stir along the way, Cuadros did not retreat back to Pittsboro; he volunteered as the assistant soccer coach. The next year, in 2003, he became head coach.

The team was made up of kids from different backgrounds. Some had just arrived from Mexico. Some were born in North Carolina. A few players had come to Siler City from large cities because their parents had feared gang wars in Los Angeles or Chicago. Four players were white.

The team gelled and became an immediate contender, thanks in part to Cuadros breaking the players’ street-ball habits. But during the first few seasons, spectators again slung ethnic slurs, and opposing players took a few too many cheap shots on the field. After one game, fans threatened the team. “Just wait ‘til y’all get up here,” said one man, who knew that the team had to walk through the grandstand to get to the bus. Cuadros kept his players on the field until the entire stadium was empty.

Cuadros became more than a coach, helping some kids manage their troubled family lives, encouraging them to go to class and graduate, and making sure they understood the consequences of their decisions. He translated for a mother when her son injured his knee during a game and needed surgery. He made sure to help the kids however he could because he knew the custom they faced at home — when you turn sixteen, you’re on your own. “That worked in Mexico, but it can have disastrous results here,” he says.

Cuadros figured he had the makings of a good book, a story about what those Hispanic kids went through — where they came from, who they are, and why playing high school soccer meant so much to them. His five years of immigration reporting would add context. He found a literary agent, who pitched the idea to editors.

Then Jordan-Matthews won the 2004 conference title, earning home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. The team beat rivals who had been its nemeses in 2002 and 2003. And in the final game of the season Jordan-Matthews dominated Lejeune High School, a highly touted team from Jacksonville, to win the state championship. The players were overjoyed and carried Cuadros off the field, state trophy in hand. Back in Siler City, many people — white, black, and Hispanic — hailed the players as heroes.

The book Cuadros had pitched — A Home on the Field — turned into a modern-day Hoosiers. Three publishing houses bid for the rights, and Cuadros settled on Rayo, an imprint of HarperCollins.

“For a lot of longtime residents, the boys stopped being those ‘problem people’ and became winners,” Cuadros says. “That season gave people a reason to cheer and support the Hispanic community and to see themselves as part of that community. That’s a big thing. Bigger than I thought it would be.”

Things have changed a lot since Cuadros moved to Chatham County. His players don’t hear slurs anymore. Siler City went through an economic boom, and many residents recognize that it was largely because of Hispanics who paid taxes, shopped, ate out, and bought houses there.

A lot of longtime residents are still furious about illegal immigration and resent crowded schools. Blacks, whites, and Hispanics are still often cloistered in their own neighborhoods. But they’re rubbing elbows a little more, Cuadros says, and most Hispanics want to assimilate and are learning how. Cuadros’s former players, for instance, all speak English, work jobs, pay taxes, raise kids, and want to improve their lives. And, Cuadros says, there’s a sort of generational trust that’s slowly building between Hispanics and non-Hispanics in Siler City. “Over time, everyone has to deal with each other,” he says. “When you get to know people a little bit, you see their humanity.”

Paul Cuadros is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In 1999 he won a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation to report on immigration issues in the South. A Home on the Field was published in 2006. Cuadros is the head coach for the boys’ and girls’ varsity soccer teams at Jordan-Matthews High School in Siler City.