Product Description

A Home on the Field is about faith, loyalty, and trust. It is a parable in the tradition of Stand and Deliver and Hoosiers—a story of one team and their accidental coach who became certain heroes to the whole community.

For the past ten years, Siler City, North Carolina, has been at the front lines of immigration in the interior portion of the United States. Like a number of small Southern towns, workers come from traditional Latino enclaves across the United States, as well as from Latin American countries, to work in what is considered the home of industrial-scale poultry processing. At enormous risk, these people have come with the hope of a better life and a chance to realize their portion of the American Dream.

But it isn't always easy. Assimilation into the South is fraught with struggles, and in no place is this more poignant than in the schools. When Paul Cuadros packed his bags and moved south to study the impact of the burgeoning Latino community, he encountered a culture clash between the long-time residents and the newcomers that eventually boiled over into an anti-immigrant rally featuring former Klansman David Duke.

It became Paul's goal to show the growing numbers of Latino youth that their lives could be more than the cutting line at the poultry plants, that finishing high school and heading to college could be a reality. He needed to find something that the boys could commit to passionately, knowing that devotion to something bigger than them would be the key to helping the boys find where they fit in the world. The answer was soccer.

But Siler City, like so many other small rural communities, was a football town, and long-time residents saw soccer as a foreign sport and yet another accommodation to the newcomers. After an uphill battle, the Jets soccer team at Jordan-Matthews High School was born. Suffering setbacks and heartbreak, the majority Latino team, in only three seasons and against all odds, emerged poised to win the state championship.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #386630 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Released on: 2007-10-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061120282
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author

Paul Cuadros's family moved to the United States from Peru in 1960. An award-winning investigative reporter, he has written for Time magazine and Salon.com, among others. In 1999 Cuadros won an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to write about the impact of the large numbers of Latino poultry workers in rural towns in the South. He moved to Pittsboro, North Carolina, to conduct his research and stayed on to document the growing Latino community in the Southeast.

Customer Reviews

Excellent and inspirational
Remarkable and well-written story of Latino high school students who win the North Carolina state soccer championship. Let me underscore that it's good sports writing, as well as reasonable social analysis. The author is both the coach of the team and a magazine reporter. White supremacists are sure not to like this book, as klansman David Duke himself denounced these kids. The story of "Los Jets" will win the hearts of all real Americans, just as they won the struggle against racism and poverty.

Certainly does not deserve its current average rating
Realistically I probably wouldn't rate this book a 5, if giving it that rating meant that it was one of my favorite books. It's not quite there - but it's a very meaningful story, and doesn't deserve the low rating it currently has at all. I did find the descriptions of the soccer matches boring, but overall...the depictions of immigrant life is very absorbing and impacting, and will be educational for many.

Cuadros Discovers New Ground
..........................Cuadros Discovers New Ground.

Written by me elsewhere, last year, 2008: Here is news of a book that may be the most important book ever to come out of my county Chatham: ...I recommend "A Home on the Field" by Paul Cuadros, as a refreshing change from the usual diet of postmodern ennui.... "A Home on the Field": On the surface it's the story of a high school soccer team; beyond that it's a story of the Latino Diaspora now taking place. The novelistic structure of the book follows the rule that says, "Leave out the parts that people would like to skip." ... The teenagers in this story are not media-defined, iPod-enclosed teens; these guys are more like something out of Cormac McCarthy. Paul Cuadros is a good writer; he got there first on a lot of topics with this book, topics that are hot in a lot of places like Siler City, North Carolina.
...The fact that the publisher, HarperCollins, has allowed my copy of the book to be riddled with so many typos only seems to enhance it's value as artifact. I once considered HarperCollins to be a big New York publisher; the story of how this publication came to be in such rough shape is something in itself I'd pay to know. ...The book has so far been flying beneath the radar, the reasons why are in themselves part of the fascination. The conservatives, sure, that's easy to understand. But a lot of liberals around here are missing it, too. I suspect they may be reading too much Lolita in Tehran--in other words too tuned in to the world media picture. The old cliché about Chapel Hill, where UNC is located, (and by extension, next door here in suburban north Chatham) still holds true: it's still a place where well-heeled liberals can go, read the New York Times and ignore local issues. (Disclosure: I learned about "A Home on the Field" from my son who played soccer on a college scholarship, still plays league ball and knows Cuadros and a lot of the people in the book.) People see the book as a worthy piece of history and social commentary--others are only now beginning to realize what value this thing has as pure story, as literature. I only hope that whoever makes the movie doesn't screw it up.

Now, a year later, it's January 2009. I just read that "A Home on the Field" has been chosen by the University of North Carolina for this year's freshman reading program. The University of North Carolina administration and certain Republican NC congressmen have long enjoyed making political hay of railing at each other over the choice. (Nowadays they choose a new book each year.) Those who remember "Nickeled and Dimed" and "An Introduction to the Koran" will see my point here. The event has by now reached ritual proportions. Each fall an up-and-coming state rep from the Republican west is honored to step up at his blustering best to declaim and decry the choice. It is an event eagerly awaited, a brief respite back into the civilization we were once promised. At the end the congressman and the university retreat, each un-bloodied, yet each with reputation enhanced. To witness such battles over mere books is to witness history. It should be interesting to see how this plays out. Good luck to Mr. Cuadros.