Important Links:
Listen to Paul Cuadros read his story, “The Cocineros of Franklin Street,” from 27 Views of Chapel Hill:
Learn more about A Home on the Field:
Read Paul Cuadros’s story, “Jets in the Sky,” which was published in South Writ Large:
To purchase a copy of 27 Views of Chapel Hill, click here:
Music for this episode is entitled “Soledad,” by Dario Benedetti. It’s available on Soundstripe:
Season Two, Episode 21 Show Notes
Paul Cuadros on the Cocineros of Chapel Hill’s Franklin Street
Journalist Paul Cuadros has written a lot about the Latino communities in North Carolina. He moved there more than 25 years ago to write about life in Siler City, a small town in the central part of the state that was experiencing a seismic demographic shift. When Paul joined the faculty at the journalism school at the University of North Carolina, he got to know another Latino community when he headed each day to the lunch counter at Sutton’s Drug Store. There, the cocineros have become as much a Chapel Hill institution as the drug store itself.
Bio—
Journalist Paul Cuadros is the author of the story, “The Cocineros of Franklin Street,” featured in 27 Views of Chapel Hill, which was published by Eno Publishers. Paul is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Time magazine, and other national and local publications. He has focused his reporting on issues of race and poverty in America. In 1999, he won a fellowship with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, one of the most prestigious fellowships in journalism, to report on emerging Latino communities in rural poultry-processing towns in the South. The culmination of his reporting was his book, A Home on the Field: How One Championship Team Inspires Hope for the Revival of Small Town America, which tells the story of Siler City, North Carolina, as it coped with Latino immigration through the lives of a predominantly Latino high school soccer team.
A Home on the Field was the summer reading selection at UNC in 2009 as well as at other universities in North Carolina and beyond.
A professor in the journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill, Paul is corecipient of the 2006 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism Award for his contribution to the radio series “North Carolina Voices: Understanding Poverty” broadcast on WUNC. He has won the National Association of Hispanic Journalist’s award for online reporting, and the UNC Diversity Award in 2012 for his work on campus opening doors for minority students, faculty, and staff.
He was involved in a documentary film production and episodic series that was based on his book and chronicles the lives of Latino youth on the soccer team he coaches in Siler City. He is working on his second book on migration.
