A Home on the Field: How One Championship Soccer Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America

Description

In the spring of 2004, a small group of Latino high school students-Los Jets!-won the North Carolina state soccer championship. Not too shabby for any team, but considering how the Jets fought against prejudice-including a David Duke rally against them-poverty, ignorance, and desperation, their win takes on a bigger meaning. In A Home on the Field, their coach, Time reporter Paul Cuadros, tells their triumphant story-one that's being echoed all across America, but nowhere more strongly, and poignantly, than in the rural South. The Jets' story has already recieved national attention and been featured in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

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.