Paul Cuadros is the son of immigrants. Big deal, maybe — this is a country of such people, isn’t it? But Cuadros is the son of recent immigrants. His father, Alberto, came here in 1960, not from Europe but from Peru.

Eventually, Alberto — working as an animal care technician at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor — sent for his wife and two boys. Paul, the third son, was born in America. He went on to college, and then to an advertising agency — a job that didn’t last too long because “who wants to spend all day writing about pizza?” Journalism school followed, where Cuadros nurtured the aim of writing about “the people marginalized in our society.”

Ten years of reporting on big city politics followed until, in 1999, Cuadros won a scholarship to write about Latino poultry workers. Not a widely known topic, I’d venture, but a fascinating story developing in rural communities in the South, in places like Siler City, N.C.

That was where Cuadros ended up and where he met up with an old friend: soccer. He saw the young Mexican immigrant kids who wanted to play soccer but had nowhere to play in this solidly football town. And he remembered his boyhood and the treasured one-on-one sessions with his father and the constant commands to “Control the ball!”

Cuadros found that the local high school, Jordan-Matthews, had no soccer team, and he set about trying to change that. He tells the story of that adventure in a wonderful book “A Home On the Field.”

His campaign has all the elements of an epic story. A minor epic, of course — this is merely a local sports issue we’re talking about — but it is exactly because of its small scale, exactly because we can get to know each of the characters involved, that the story Cuadros tells touches the heart and the emotions so intimately.

A soccer team was formed at J-M, nicknamed Los Jets. It had taken Cuadros and others nearly three years to start. They had to battle prejudice in Siler City, a community that felt uncomfortable with the growing Hispanic presence — a feeling that climaxed in an anti-immigrant rally at the Town Hall with ex-KKK Grand Dragon David Duke as the featured speaker. They had to battle opposition at the high school, where football was the entrenched sport.

But many of Cuadros’s biggest problems came from the Mexican boys who so desperately wanted to have a team, and a field to play on. Cuadros began as the assistant coach, and by the second year he was something he never intended to be: the head coach of a high school soccer team.

He was dealing with a predominantly Mexican-immigrant team. They and their parents knew little about eligibility rules, simply did not understand that grades and, in particular, attendance could affect whether or not a boy could be on the team. Many of the boys worked in the chicken plants that had first brought their parents to the area. They couldn’t make the practice sessions. “The work issue was a definite impediment to the team,” Cuadros writes.

The cascarita didn’t help either. That’s what most of the boys wanted to do at practice sessions, a sort of easygoing pickup game. Running laps, learning team play, studying tactics — most of this was new and unattractive to them. For Los Jets’ first-ever practice, more than 30 boys showed up; on the second day there were only 16. Some were working, some didn’t like the training. There were other reasons for absence: Two brothers tried out, but they alternated sessions, never both appearing on the same day. Cuadros learned they were sharing the same pair of soccer shoes.

In their first game, Los Jets posted a resounding 5–0 win, but the celebrations were quickly cut short by the school principal demanding to know if a certain student had played. If he had, the game would have to be forfeited, as he was academically ineligible. Cuadros checked — yes, the player had been on the roster for the game … but he had not shown up, he had gone to work instead. The first win for Los Jets was legitimate. The team was saved because a player had done the very thing the coaches had pleaded with the players not to do.

And so it went for Los Jets, two seasons during which the team learned to live with racist abuse. Cuadros lists some of the insults, which sound suspiciously mild: “Stupid Mexicans!” “We’re gonna call the INS!” “Go back to Mexico.” There was awkwardness, too: The referee who looked at the team for a pregame check and asked “Where are the Americans?” Then, quickly realizing he had been offensive, he started his apology, “Do you all understand English?”

The Mexican boys, used to playing a skilled ball-control game — Cuadros emphasized possession — found themselves in a second culture clash, this time with the physical, hard tackling game practiced by their mostly white opponents.

The third season, in 2004, was the big one. Los Jets made it all the way to the North Carolina state championship, to play against Lejeune — the high school from the marine base. The Jets’ bus broke down on the way to the game (of course it did), but this is a feelgood story that ended in smiles, with a 2–0 Jets victory.

But it didn’t stop there. Later came the Siler City Christmas parade, with the team as part of the march, cheered by the locals.

Where do these boys go now?

What happens next for La Pepa, for Pee Wee, for La Bomba, for Fish, for Guero, for El Indio and the other boys whose complicated lives Cuadros relates so movingly?

For some, getting into college is clouded by their immigration status — they are illegal. And as soccer players, they will learn that the sport’s set-up in this country — dominated by European thinking — is still not welcoming for Latino players.

pgardner@nysun.com