Arriving in bookstores on Memorial Day, The Boys From Little Mexico: A Season Chasing the American Dream is a non-fiction book written by first-time author Steve Wilson chronicling the Woodburn high school boy's soccer team through their 2005 season. The Woodburn Bulldogs or simply Los Perros, is a unique soccer team in a city unlike most in the state of Oregon.Of the over 20,000 residents in Woodburn around 50% are Hispanic. About 75% of the high school's student body is Latino and usually 100% of the school's soccer team is of Hispanic decent as well. And in a community based around agriculture that has been nicknamed "Little Mexico" by some, where the Hispanic population has gone from around 10% to 50% in the last 20 years, and where there are more Taqueria stands per capita than anywhere else in the state, soccer has become an integral and defining aspect of the town's culture. Heading into the 2005 season, the Woodburn boy's soccer team had made the state playoff's 19 years in a row, threatening to break the all-time consecutive playoff streak by any high school team in any sport. Can the all-Hispanic 2005 team keep the amazing streak alive? In a nation where the immigration debate is ripe and relevant with controversy and amidst an ever-changing ethnic landscape in America, can these teenage boys overcome the family and cultural challenges that face them and bring Woodburn soccer its first-ever state championship?
A well-written and easily accessible book, Steve Wilson has reported on a story that is not only socially significant to our times, but is also full of poignant relationships and unflinching emotion. The book offers many compelling moments whether you are a soccer fan or not a sports fan at all, from nail-biting action on the field to debates on bilingual education to a riveting account of one player's moonlit journey across the American border. The Boys From Little Mexico takes you deep into the lives of those involved with the Woodburn soccer team, exploring the issue of immigration from a different perspective, and gives a voice to a community in America that has often struggled to find its own.
I recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of soccer, but especially to those interested in learning more about the politically-polarizing immigration issue that's facing America today. Some have labeled this book the "Friday Night Lights" of soccer, but in many ways, it offers much more than simply a glimpse into the lives of these athletes, instead challenging you to look at these boys not simply as soccer players or merely children of immigrants, but to see them for what they are, people in our community who have real feelings, life goals, everyday struggles, and loving families. A wonderful book.
Here are a few excerpts from my interview with local author Steve Wilson:
Dropping Timber: So, when and how did you get the idea for this book?
"It was the fall or winter of 2004. And the first thing that happened was I read a newspaper article that described a playoff game between the Woodburn Bulldogs and the Lakridge Pacers, and the way the article was written it described the game from the perspective from the Lake Oswego kids. And it described them taking this trip down to Woodburn as if they were leaving the country and going to this exotic and dangerous, foreign place. And after reading it I thought, well, what would have been more interesting would have been the other way around. Because in a state like Oregon, 80% white and you have these few little communities with large numbers of Latinos, you know its not that big of deal, these wealthy Lake Oswego kids go pretty much anywhere and everyone looks pretty much like them."
"So they take this trip down to Woodburn, which is a small town, about a half hour away from Lake Oswego and I don't think their experience is quite as exotic as if they're leaving the country and going to like Tijauna at four in the morning or something, but it seemed to me that type of culture-clash thing the author was describing, if you flipped it over, what was the experience for the kids in Woodburn? Because every time they leave, they're going to a totally different place with a few exceptions."
Dropping Timber: So, after you formulated the idea, how did you go about starting your research and what was your experiences like meeting these people and their families?
"I called the coach and told him that I'd like to come down and hang out with the team and see them for a little bit. And I went down there and met with him, the assistant coach, and the principal and we chatted about it for a while. Woodburn, because they are kind of this unusual place in Oregon and because they've had a large number of immigrants for a lot of years, a bunch of Russians moved there around the 60's, they've been working on issues about teaching kids bilingual education and incorporating other cultures for a longer time than most other places in Oregon, so they've had a lot of people come down and want to study them."
"I think their reaction at first was sorta like, we're kinda sick of being in this fishbowl and why do people want to come down and look at us and use us as some kind of social example....a big part of writing, especially when you do this immersion type research is building relationships, so from the very beginning I had to let them know what my intentions were."
"So, I just started hanging out with them. They had summer time games, these very casual games where they would play against other high schools, just kinda warm-ups, and a lot of the kids weren't there, some of the kids had summer jobs and things, but it was the first time I met the kids, so I'd go to wherever they were playing and just hang out and observe."
Dropping Timber: What would you say one of the biggest values of this book is?
"Well, one of the things I learned is because demographically in the United States, well most, for the majority of population of white families, their birthrate is dropping. People are having fewer babies and are having babies at an older age. And so, Latino families, especially immigrant families tend to have more kids. So the percentage of children who are Latino in the United States is growing very, very rapidly."
"And because that brings with it issues about bilingual education and culture difference, especially with new immigrants, people who've come into the country, even if they were born in this country, and their parents are from Mexico, they have a much lower rate of high school graduation, college attendance, and college graduation, especially the young men....our educational system, our government, really doesn't know what to do with them right now and how to address the issue. And unless we figure something out we are going to have an increasingly smaller number of kids in this country getting college degrees."
"50% of kids in California, I think right now, are Hispanic in the K-12 educational system, that's the entire state. Recent reports suggest that by 2025, when 41 percent of all jobs will require a bachelor’s degree or higher and only 35 percent of Californians will have a college degree, California will face a shortage of 1 million college graduates....there's that many kids that won't be getting the education that our country needs....the most rapidly growing demographic in our country is not succeeding at the rate we need them to."
Dropping Timber: What's something this book offers from a soccer fan's perspective?
"Well, one things that's interesting is professional American soccer teams have not done a very good job of locating quality Latino players in the U.S. and it's something that's really been changing in recent years, but the way that players are moving up traditionally in the U.S. is getting on high-quality club teams, then going to play at college and getting scouted by pro teams usually at these big inter-club team tournaments or at colleges, but because so many of the Latino kids don't have the money, or they don't have parents who have the time to take them to all these things, they've sort of been left out of the process."
"So we've seen this southward pipeline of kids going down to Mexico and getting scouted by professional Mexican teams and playing down there and then some of them starting to come back up to the U.S. now. We've got Jose Torres and Hercules Gomez, both on the U.S. national team right now, both of them took that route. They played in high school here, were very good, but didn't get scouted by anybody here in America, but did get scouted by Mexican teams, so went down and played in Mexico, got their skills better, and then got back into the U.S. because now people recognized their talent."
Dropping Timber: Steve, some illuminating thoughts on immigration?
"There needs to be an international dialogue. It definitely needs to be addressed and obviously people are very upset about it. And I think that some of the concerns that anti-immigration people have are completely legitimate, especially economic concerns. But depending on what we want our country to do population wise, we need immigration in order to have enough people who are working to pay for things like social security and help take care of all the people getting old, because our population is going to hit its peak in about 20-30 years and then its going to start shrinking.... so the United States needs to have an influx of people in order to maintain a population, you know unless we decide we want a shrinking population, which brings with it a whole host of other econonmic problems, because you have a constantly larger aging population and a smaller amount of younger people.... so in many ways, immigration is very necessary for this country. But the way the debate is going now is not very helpful to anyone. It's just Republicans and Democrats yelling at each other."
"Right now in Mexico, your mandatory schooling ends at 13, in 8th grade, and in a lot of places there are no high schools. High school is considered a privilege. So if you're in a rural area you might not even have a high school in your town, so if you're a bright kid and you want to move up in the world, you end up having the choice of moving to another town to go to a school, and you parents have to pay for this and they probably don't have the money to do so, or you can go to the United States, a lot of kids come to the U.S. when they're teenagers and stay with an uncle or aunt or some other family member you know here and you get an education. And these kids who are doing this are the kids that you'd want to get an education. I mean they're the bright kids and the hard working kids, like a little self-selecting group of people who want to better they're lives and contribute to society."
Dropping Timber: What do you hope this book accomplishes?
"My hope with the book as far as immigration goes is that it humanizes people. Because I think the way we're debating immigration now is so black and white, and it's focused entirely on 'you entered the country without papers, so you're a criminal, so now you have to leave' and it's just so much more complicated than that. And there's so many families involved."
Dropping Timber: What can people do to help?
"One of the ways that has been shown to really improve kids educational outcomes is reading. So there's volunteer programs locally like SMART (Start Making A Reader Today) and a person just goes into a school and they get paired up with a kid who's a little bit behind and they just read a book and they do that once or twice a week....and literacy is incredibly important in determining your educational success."
CLICK HERE to check out the SMART program and start helping today!
About the Author: Steve Wilson lives in Portland, Oregon. A long-time magazine and newspaper freelancer, he also was the publisher, editor, and writer for the cult travel ‘zine Motionsickness. He occasionally teaches writing at Portland State University, where he received his M.A.
Here's cool little promo for the book:
"The Boys from Little Mexico" Book Promo from SQWare, LLC. on Vimeo.
Buy the Book! Find the Boys From Little Mexico at your local bookstore now or purchase your copy online. Here's the link from Amazon.com.
*** Also, Steve Wilson will be doing a reading from his book this Thursday, June 3rd at Portland State University, Smith Hall room 333 @ 6pm. The reading will be shared with Loretta Stinson, whose debut novel Little Green also began while she was in the PSU Writing program. Come and check it out!
And again, I highly recommend this book. It's a relatively quick and fun read, the book has the soccer action that will truly draw you in with its inherent drama as well as emotionally invest you into the lives of these people. People who are your neighbors, your co-workers, your schoolmates, your friends, and a big part of the community that we all live in. An important issue and an important book. Don't miss it.
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