Playing a tough game in Siler City

Paul Cuadros was worried when his star goaltender had to leave the team to care for his sick grandmother in Mexico. The Siler City high school soccer coach was less concerned about his team's fortunes than his player's fate -- the boy called Fish was an illegal immigrant who would return only if he could cross the Arizona desert with a smuggler's help.

After a hot and harrowing trek, Fish made it back to Siler City, where he anchored Jordan-Matthews High School's drive to the state championship.

Cuadros details his team's "Rocky"-esque journey in "A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America" (HarperCollins/Rayo, $22.95, 276 pages). It is an ambitious hybrid of a book, at once a sports story -- with plenty of play-by-play action -- an account of the challenges faced by poor Hispanics in North Carolina and an immigrant's eye view of America.

Cuadros, the first member of his Peruvian family born in America, is a journalist by trade. He came to Siler City in 1999 with a foundation grant to study Latinos working in the town's chicken plants. Soon his attention fixed on their children, many of whom held jobs even as they attended school.

Soccer was their game, but Jordan-Matthews did not field a team because, Cuadros was told, it was a football school. The reporter saw this as another slight by a community unwilling to embrace its newest residents. "There was nothing worse than being a stranger in a small Southern town," he writes. "What made it even harder was that the newcomers didn't speak English."

As Cuadros details the town's long history of racism -- until recently the school mascot was a ghostlike figure that resembled a KKK nightrider -- he reminds us how the past haunts and informs our current debates over immigration. An anti-immigration rally in Siler City just after his arrival, with the former Klansman David Duke as its star, makes clear that old demons die hard.

Undaunted, Cuadros pushed and pushed until school officials allowed him to start a team. As he writes of how he molded this talented crew -- turning freewheeling playground stars into a disciplined unit -- he illuminates the world his players inhabit. It is a landscape of grinding poverty, low expectations and daily encounters with racism tempered by a strong sense of community.

Many of his players have led nomadic lives -- picking blueberries in Duplin County, then tomatoes in Swain County, then cutting Christmas trees in Alleghany County. Steady work at Siler City's chicken plants offers roots but no escape from hardship. One of the star players, the oldest of five children in a fatherless family, lives in a single-room house. During the winter, they use the heater sparingly "because of the cost of kerosene," Cuadros reports. "The family mostly huddled together at night for warmth on their mattresses." One can only imagine the conditions they fled in Mexico.

America presents other challenges to Cuadros' players, besides the racist taunts -- "Go back to Mexico," "Wetbacks" -- shouted during games. Many immigrants left countries where school seems unimportant after sixth grade, and usually ends when children are 16. Most expect their kids to work, even as they attend high school. It is hard for parents "to guide their kids through the American high school experience when they themselves have never been through it, don't understand it, or are too busy working to try."

Another culture clash involves identity. "I had often heard immigrant Mexican families speak with derision about being ambitious," Cuadros writes. "Gaining wealth, acting 'white' [by studying hard], assimilating, and not speaking Spanish separated people from the community."