A Home on the Field by Paul Cuadros

What They are Saying About A Home on the Field

Publishers Weekly
August 4, 2006
A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America
Cuadros, Paul (Author)

Cuadros, an investigative reporter of Peruvian descent, set out to write a book on the "Latino Diaspora" in the southeast but decided to tell the story through the Mexican high school soccer players of Siler City, N.C.-whose team Cuadros himself lobbied for against the resistance and overt prejudice within this old-boy "football town." The players' thwarted ambition and punitive social hurdles encapsulate the plight of Latino immigrants who flock to rural hamlets seeking better lives and steady work but run up against palpable fear and suspicion in towns that still faintly reek of Jim Crow hostility. The Siler City team's struggles bring the town conflicts into sharp relief and give Cuadros a sturdy framework for exploring meaty issues of class and ethnic conflict.

In alternating terse and tender prose, he delves into his players' backstories and captures their buoyant camaraderie to shape an inspiring underdog's tale without romanticizing the team's painful immigrant realities, such as their parents' shaky health insurance and high school drop-out rates. This feel-good read coincides neatly with the start of a new school year, staking its faith on fresh starts.(Sept.)

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Kirkus Reviews
July 15, 2006
Cuadros, Paul (Author)

A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small TownAmericaThe small-town American immigrant experience, as told by a Peruvian author who coached a high-school soccer team comprised of impoverished Latino students.
Time magazine contributor Cuadros spent a decade moving between big cities before finally settling in tiny Siler City, N.C. Here, the author begins by mapping out how he ended up in Siler City, explaining his yearning to write about the Latino immigrant life there and, by extension, throughout the country, and illustrating how this broad subject matter was whittled down to a telling chronicle of the triumphant rise of a local soccer team. Cuadros carefully relates the history of the town, but the bulk of his text concerns his job as a soccer coach in an area where the sport is popular, yet played, thanks to prohibitive cost, almost exclusively by white kids. He made some contacts at Jordan-MatthewsHigh School and set about introducing a soccer program into their curriculum.

He coaxed onto the field, while also illustrating the various pitfalls the players faced. From their lack of eligibility, to scenes of family tragedy, nothing is painted more vividly than Cuadros’s confiscating of a firearm that star player Enrique carried around to protect his mother, who had been robbed at gunpoint. The team would soon rise to success, and the author’s description of their victories is nicely balanced with a broad overview of Latinos’ relatively recent migration to the American South, with a conclusion infused with cautious optimism.
A worthy social commentary and biographical portrait that ends neatly with a list of each players post-high school achievements.