Writers are told,
"Write what you know."
Yet journalists do the
opposite. We write what we research, what our sources say, what we are savvy
enough to uncover and what is driven by the newsmakers of the day.
Fortunate are the
journalists who write what they know innately, along with what their careers
have taught them. The result can be the story of a lifetime; a story that one
writer alone is intended to tell.
My friend Paul Cuadros
accomplished this with his new book, "A
Home on the Field," a
nuanced story of immigration. He weaves his own life through every page. In his
book, he writes:
I
was the first member of my family to be born in America.
We lived in a little room in the basement of St. Mary's underneath the chapel
and the altar. I can recall faint images of the tiled floors, the little yard
in back with the statue of the Virgin, and the cool walls of the stairs leading
to the basement.
Cuadros did not intend
such a personal project when he moved near the small North Carolina town of Siler City.
He went there to write "a wonky Washington journalist's book."
But because he was
willing to open himself up to life in the area, to become a part of
the story, his life and the story became enmeshed.
Another
necessary ingredient: Cuadros was just far enough removed from his family's immigrant
experience to draw strength from it. He didn't let the painful portions of his own
story stifle his efforts.
Paul's book could have been
titled "The Latino Hoosiers." The true story mimics the famous movie in which underdog athletes prove their detractors wrong and become state champions.
For Cuadros, it was the Jets, and the
game was soccer. The Jets would not have won the state championship if it
wasn't for the efforts of Cuadros. Again, he writes:
You
have to connect with the players, reach into their hearts, their guts, their
pride and switch something on in them so they can believe in themselves.
Yet becoming the team's
coach was not his original intention.
The book's subtitle,
"How one championship team inspires hope for the revival of small-town America," tells more about the
immigration themes: the migration of Latino laborers
into small southern towns; the backlash they face and how, through soccer, their children
begin the American of process of assimilation, and, at some levels,
acceptance.
A synopsis of the story
would say it began with Siler City's dwindling white population, that it
involved the poultry plants that opened and the Latino workers who began to
repopulate the town.
But the genesis of the
story starts in Peru, Cuadros' father's home country. More of the story emerges later in Michigan, where Paul was raised. After that, it's
Chicago and Washington, where he learned to be a journalist.
Cuadros chose Siler
City because the town had two poultry plants. As a reporter for the
Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, Cuadros had studied the
horrendous accident rates at such plants for Latino workers. The plan was to
have his Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship fund his further studies.
Then Cuadros' corazón y
alma (heart and soul) got in the way.
Bored with small-town
life, he began coaching some of the immigrant kids. Soccer was the game his
father had taught him as a boy in Ann Arbor. He writes:
I knew the immigrant experience here. I felt the
same pain and embarrassment of not speaking English when I started school. The
sting of being alienated, separated from a home, had left its mark on me as
well.
And so Paul connected
with Lenin, a Latino kid who had grown up in Siler City. By comparison, Lenin
was far more assimilated than the more recent immigrants. He had tried to get
the high school to start a soccer program. No luck. He was struck with excuse
after firmly stated excuse.
Lenin could
have been one of Cuadros' older
brothers, Al and Sergio, neither of whom had an official school soccer team to join. Both were born in his parents' native Peru. Their father
had immigrated, and later brought his family to join him -- a path many of Paul's Jets had taken to America as well. He writes:
By the time I reached high school, soccer had
become an official varsity sport, but my brothers had been one year too late. I
became determined to find a way for Lenin to play.
Cuadros brought his years of knowledge about race, ethnicity and the slow pace of change in America
to his coaching of the Jets. These and other lessons would become invaluable to the team -- knowing that good will is not enough to get a soccer team started; it would take a deal, a favor
owed and returned, to eventually make that happen.
Cuadros knew from reporting
when to keep quiet and just let people talk. The strategy revealed a deal that
would work, one that didn't threaten the town's beloved high school football
team.
Consider the day former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke came to town, hoping to feed off of festering resentment against the
immigrants. Cuadros
found himself watching Duke and his minions in a restaurant. He was waiting for
a chance to interview the infamous supremacist.
But then Duke, a Louisiana southern boy, rose to get a
plateful of chicken. Chicken -- the product of the workers he was there to
protest. Cuadros writes:
As he walked back to his
table, I lowered my head. I didn't have to see any more. Duke had said it all
with what he put on his plate. He had said it all for everyone in America who
views the migration and Latinos the way he does. They didn't want the workers
or their families living in their towns but they sure wanted their chicken. And
that was all that mattered. America spoke with its stomach...
Cuadros gave his
athletes the patience to find such insight -- a skill ultimately as important as
the discipline of practice drills and school attendance. He writes:
Perhaps only an immigrant son could understand
this. But "Americans" are born every day, everywhere in the world.
They are born in Bangladesh, they are born in Morocco, they are born in Brazil
and in China, in England and in Mexico and Peru. Many just never got the chance
to actually get here. Being an American is so much more than just having
citizenship. It's that beat in your heart to be free, to be your own man, to
have control over your own destiny. America has always been an idea. It has
nothing to do with papers, documents, or immigration laws. It has a lot to do
with ideals and dreams. And our country needs Americans like these.
Cuadros had seen his father,
a man who had studied Greek and Latin, reduced to cleaning up after
laboratory animals in exchange for the hope America might give his children. He
has lived among the broken family networks often entwined with immigration. His brother Alberto died before the book was published. So did his father.
But he had steered Paul well.
Early in his career,
Cuadros worked in advertising, earning a hefty but unfulfilling paycheck
writing pizza jingles. During that period, his father had asked him:
"What are you doing with your pen?"
The ultimate
result of that query is his book. It is a gift of love and honor from an
American son to his immigrant father.
Here is an excellent article that shows how the Mexican...
