When ESPN feature writer Roberto Jose Andrade Franco spent two weeks in Woodburn, Oregon, he met and spoke with a host of community members, from business owners to coaches to artists.
Those conversations informed a new piece Franco wrote about the ways the community came alive and together during the World Cup. Franco joins us to discuss his reporting and what he found during his time in Woodburn.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The ESPN feature writer Roberto Jose Andrade Franco is from El Paso, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, but he recently spent two weeks in Woodburn. He talked to kids and adults, to business owners, artists and community leaders, to the high school soccer coach. He emerged with a complex story about a community still reeling from the huge increase in immigration enforcement but finding joy and connection from the World Cup. He also found a connection to his own story and life that he says he was not expecting. Roberto, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Roberto Jose Andrade Franco: Thank you for having me.
Miller: What made you want to go to Woodburn in the first place?
Franco: Well, with the World Cup this year, I wanted to tell a story about a community, from its history to its present, to its goals and aspirations, and just an everyday type of what it’s like to live there. [I wanted to] tell that through soccer and, more specifically, through a World Cup game. So that’s how I ended up in Woodburn.
Miller: How much did you know about Woodburn before you got there?
Franco: Practically nothing. Like I said, I was searching for a community that I thought would work best. There were several other places that I had considered. I don’t quite remember exactly how I stumbled onto Woodburn, but the more I read about it, the more I was familiar with its history, specifically. That’s the one that started to make sense and, as you mentioned, I’m from the U.S.-Mexico border, so a lot of that just kind of made sense to me. Once it started, it became pretty clear that that was the best place to tell the story.
Miller: You mentioned you did some historical research. For folks in our Oregon audience who are not familiar with this, can you give us the short version of how Woodburn came to be over 60% Latino?
Franco: So it all comes back to the World War II labor shortage and the Bracero Program, which ends up bringing over 4 million Mexican laborers – all of them men – to work in the U.S. to essentially help feed the country. And a lot of them ended up in places like Oregon. Woodburn ends up as one of these destinations.
Miller: You spent some time with a man named Jose Molina, who owns a bunch of businesses in Woodburn, including a food truck called El Pariente. What did he do in preparation for this World Cup?
Franco: Well, he’s been preparing for months. And also, among the many businesses that he owns, he also owns a marketing business. So he’s been essentially trying to figure out the best way to capitalize off of this opportunity. He’s been planning on simple things like how many televisions he should have, how many chairs and tables he should post up outside of his business, to other things like how to advertise this on social media, how many soccer balls to give away as part of raffle – these kind of behind-the-scene things that go into running the business.
Miller: Can you describe the scene at his place during the Mexico-South Africa game?
Franco: Yeah, it had been raining in Woodburn for, I don’t know, several days before I got there. Once the World Cup game started that day, it was essentially a perfect day. It was 70 degrees and it was sunny, and it was the first day of summer vacation from the students at Woodburn Independent School District. So there’s almost like a natural optimism that there was around.
Obviously, the smell of food is around, and it was almost like an idyllic place to watch the first game of the World Cup, with everything, including the weather, including all the surrounding of the people. Right before the world’s first World Cup game starts, there’s, once again, this natural optimism that comes that maybe your team can defy perhaps even logic and advance farther than you expect them to. So that was just the general atmosphere, just this optimism that’s there.
Miller: And optimism that gets a boost when you score the first goal in the tournament.
Franco: Right, an optimism that happens. Yeah, exactly that, and that gets even more elevated once the team that you’re cheering for wins.
Miller: You asked one man who was wearing a Mexico jersey, what it meant to him. What did he say?
Franco: He said it meant community to him. He said that it was a way of representing where he was from, where he lives now. Obviously, Woodburn is a Latino community, largely Mexican-American. And it was a way of expressing who he was, to keep it in as simplest terms as possible, from everything to the history of these games, to the history of the World Cups – for better or worse – and even the hopes. He was wearing a jersey of the guy who would ultimately score the second goal for Mexico and probably one of the better-known players on the team.
Miller: I imagine you’ve seen many, many people over the years wearing Mexico jerseys. Had you asked that question before?
Franco: No, not specifically, not directly. I have a couple of friends and we always discuss these sorts of things, right? You go to a big boxing fight, and you always see the green jersey just scattered around the stands. You go to a big baseball game, you go essentially to any type of Mexican cultural sites, including parades, and you’ll see people wearing that jersey. So yeah, I’ve always had this idea of what it represents and why people wear it, but I had never come out and asked somebody, why are you wearing this and what does it mean to you?
Miller: Could you tell us a story of a man named Jorge Flores?
Franco: Yeah, so Jorge Flores, who is now the boy’s head coach of soccer with Woodburn High School, he came to Woodburn as a 14-year-old. He was in Atlas Youth Academy. He had the dreams of becoming a professional soccer player. Atlas is a historic club in Mexico. He came because his knee was injured and he had family who lived over in Woodburn. And his plan was always to return once his knee healed and keep on pursuing his goals of playing professional soccer. And he essentially never left. It’s 24 years later and he’s still here. Like I said, his goals within soccer have transferred from playing to now coaching, and I would say he’s very much the heart of this story.
Miller: In what way?
Franco: I think he reflects a lot of things about what soccer could mean, both in terms of the goals and aspirations of a young soccer player, but also the evolution of that. A lot of us have dreams of becoming professional athletes, and for the vast majority of us, those dreams die somewhere in high school, and that’s what happened to Jorge, really. But he continued to use soccer, right? That is how he gained his college education. That is how he contributes to his community now. As I mentioned, he’s the head coach of the high school soccer team.
Miller: So at halftime, during the Mexico-South Africa game, the crowd listened to a local singer who was walking around, an older, nearly blind man known as Don Bulma. He was singing a song, among others, called “Nieves de Enero” or “January Snow,” a song you know was made famous by a man named Chalino Sánchez. I want to play a Sánchez version of this song that’s online, just so folks can have a sense for it, and then we can talk about it.
[“Nieves de Enero” by Chalino Sánchez playing]
Miller: What is this song about?
Franco: The song is essentially about heartbreak. In this case, it is about heartbreak within a relationship. It is a song of unrequited love, but I think it also translates over more broadly than that, right? At least the way I’ve kind of processed this, it’s a song about heartbreak that translates to just about any aspect of life here. I think the reason why this song has become so important in the Mexican-American working class community is because it reminds people of something. And like I said, in this case, it’s specifically about love, but I think more broadly, in general terms, it’s a love of a country.
Miller: What was it like for you to hear that that day on the streets of Woodburn?
Franco: It took me a few seconds to figure out that’s what he was singing, just because, he’s obviously covering it and I’m used to hearing it in the Chalino’s version. His was a different style, I mean, obviously the voice, everything that goes into a person who’s singing by themselves on a guitar. But once it clicked – I would say that kind of clicked around the same time for everybody that was listening to it – it became almost like a somber mood in a sense. At that point, Mexico was up 1-0, but the mood changed, certainly. There was, like I said, kind of a somberness to the moment.
Miller: You talked to a woman named Reyna Lopez, the head of the Farmworkers union, PCUN, someone who’s been on our show a number of times over the years. What did she tell you about how her job has shifted as a result of the huge increase in immigration enforcement?
Franco: Yeah, she told me [that] essentially overnight, in late October of last year, that her job just drastically changed from trying to organize labor workers’ rights to simple things … or not even simple things, but much more complicated things like knowing what type of rights somebody would have, knowing what phone numbers to call in case one of their family members got picked up. Trying to, I don’t even know if she would describe it as making them feel safe because that definitely wasn’t there, but in a way, trying to reassure them that they were working on their behalf.
Miller: There are so many different spheres of experience in life where that have been directly impacted by that increase in immigration enforcement at the federal level, but you talked to some business owners to get their take and it’s one of the things that’s threaded in a lot of parts of your piece. What did you hear?
Franco: It was kind of across the board that their business was suffering, that it had almost overnight in the same way that was with Reyna Lopez’s job changing. Their business plummeted. Once people were afraid to leave their homes, that obviously kind of trickled down all the way to businesses, from the food truck, to the coffee shop, to the guy who owns the local brewery, there wasn’t anyone who didn’t have a similar story.
Miller: In the context of those fears you’re talking about and the real business losses, what has this World Cup meant to the people that you talked to?
Franco: It has meant a return to almost normalcy, perhaps not entirely just business sense, although that’s certainly part of it. But one of the persons that I spoke with, I think his exact quote was essentially, “People couldn’t do this sort of thing that we’re doing now several months ago.” So it brought back that sense of this is the way things were before the ICE raids came. That’s not to say – and I don’t want to imply that – that they thought that everything was back to normal, because that’s certainly not the case. But it was almost like a reprieve.
Miller: Finally, you wrote about your own experience of being in Woodburn and how resonant it was for you, despite the fact that the Willamette Valley is a very different habitat, a very different world than the desert, than El Paso. Why do you think it made such a strong impression on you?
Franco: I’ve actually thought about this, and I think because I was not expecting it. That probably says more about me being naive or even ignorant about it. But my entire life, I’ve lived Mexican-American communities. But that’s always been along the border, that’s always been along the Southwest. And I really didn’t expect to find that in Oregon, but as soon as I got there, it just felt familiar. Everything, once again, from the smell of the food to the music, to the way people interacted with each other, to the jerseys that they wore, to the clothes that they wore, to even the fears and the dreams that people had, that all, as soon as I was there, felt no different than than any other places that I had lived.
Miller: Roberto, thanks very much.
Franco: Thank you very much.
Miller: You can find a link to Roberto Jose Andrade Franco’s piece for ESPN on our website.
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