How a small Oregon town became a Mexican soccer stronghold

Roberto Jose Andrade FrancoJun 30, 2026, 10:30 AM ET

JOSE MOLINA HAS spent months planning for this summer. The giveaways and raffles, the tables and screens to show the World Cup games, and the social media posts to promote the food truck he owns, El Pariente Mariscos y Mas, in Woodburn, Oregon. "If you want to market to Latinos," Jose says, "TikTok and Facebook is what hits."

Along with the food truck and a few other businesses -- insurance, taxes and construction among them -- Jose also owns a marketing company. "I can show you the first video we made," he says scrolling through El Pariente's TikTok account.

He goes past old posts of aguachiles, their best-selling dish. Shrimp served with sliced avocado, cucumber and red onions, swimming in lime juice and red or green chile sauce. Past hot menu items like carne asada, chorizo and bistec tacos made with fresh tortillas. Past posts celebrating Father's Day and Mother's Day and the championship game of the Mexican soccer league. Past close-ups of octopus on the flaming grill and voiceovers that say, "estamos en Oregon pero el sabor es 100% Sinaloense" -- we may be in Oregon, but the flavor is 100% from Sinaloa -- Jose lands on their first post from April 2025.

"People said eating here, in the sun, made them feel like they were back in Mexico," he says as he shows me the video that helped them sell out their first weekend. That's when he knew he had something. A little less than eighty miles from the Oregon coast and a little more than a thousand miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, Jose was selling the feeling of being around something familiar.

"A little bit of nostalgia," he says.

After a few months, El Pariente, right off of North Front Street, established itself among the other businesses in downtown Woodburn. The town square sidewalks are a little tight as people walk between carts selling fruit and vegetables. Banners on light posts read "Bienvenidos" and "Welcome." Signs and conversations are often in Español, the language of the community's many Spanish-speaking agricultural workers.

It has been this way for decades. Ninety-five percent of the businesses in downtown Woodburn are Latino-owned and operated. Some people even call it "Little Mexico."

Kids would play soccer on the grass near El Pariente in the early days of the business, Jose remembers. "I think soccer hits here because they're outside and it feels like they're home again, like in our country," he says.

This past year, the question of home in Woodburn has been top of mind for Jose and many of his customers, and the World Cup has become a moment when they wondered: would residents of Woodburn return to "Little Mexico" to watch and celebrate the games?

IN DOWNTOWN WOODBURN, where he grew up, Anthony Veliz recognizes a face everywhere he goes. He knocks on store windows and gets smiles and waves in return. He moved to Portland a year ago, but he is still a vital and proud part of Woodburn's community. "I was the first Latino ever elected to the school board, and only the second city counselor," he tells me over breakfast, between bites of ham and eggs. "And we were the majority at that time."

At that time was the late 1990s and early 2000s when the census first marked Latinos as Woodburn's majority. A change that began eight decades before; an incidental outcome of World War II and the labor shortage it caused.

Across Oregon during World War II, people from small towns who weren't drafted to fight in the European or Pacific fronts moved to cities where the defense industry flourished. Portland, a little over thirty miles north of Woodburn, became a hub for shipbuilding, while in Seattle, 175 miles further north, Boeing built bombers. That, combined with the forced internment of people of Japanese ancestry -- including U.S. citizens, many of them agricultural workers -- meant there weren't enough laborers to pick the berries that grew there during the spring and summer. Woodburn has so many berries that it used to call itself the Berry Center of the World.

"My grandparents are from Coahuila, Mexico," Anthony says. "They arrived here in 1943." They were among the laborers who came to the northwest as part of a 1942 binational agreement between Mexico and the United States called the Bracero Program. More than four million Mexican men, across 24 states, came to help the country's agricultural industry survive.

"We now have five, six generations of Mexicanos, Mexican Americans, Latinos," Anthony says of Woodburn. Over time, the laborers' personal roots grew into Woodburn's fertile soil. The Bracero Program ended in 1964, but many Mexican workers remained, or returned with their families, ready to make home and community out of a place that needed them. Today, 61.4% of the town's 31,000-plus residents are Latino.

From the beginning, the Braceros played soccer when they weren't working in fields and forests. It helped close the distance between their new home and the one they left behind.

"Soccer is woven into community identity and pride," Anthony says.

IN EARLY AUGUST, an article in the Salem Statesman Journal indicated an immigration and refugee advocacy group named Oregon For All reported the arrest of four Woodburn farmworkers who were on their way to work at a nearby blueberry farm when they were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Statesman Journal later reported that according to several advocacy groups, 31 other Woodburn residents were detained by ICE on October 30, 2025.

"The people who were being targeted were workers and many of these workers have been here for a long time. They have families here. Oregon is their home," Reyna Lopez, executive director of PCUN, a farmworker union and Latino advocacy group based in Woodburn, said at the time.

"They got a van full of workers, right here in front of us," Jose tells me, standing near his food truck. Someone posted a video of the pick-up on social media, he says, a way for the community to tell its people what parts of town to avoid. He says that soon after, downtown looked more like a ghost town.

On November 21, 2025, the Woodburn City Council passed a resolution declaring a "local state of emergency in the city of Woodburn due to the economic and humanitarian crisis resulting from the impacts of federal immigration enforcement actions."

According to Reyna Lopez, activity of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Woodburn decreased starting in January 2026. But it took time before many residents felt safe enough to return to the life that was. In February, the Woodburn Independent reported that over 250 Woodburn High School students walked out of school to "speak out against local and nationwide immigration enforcement."

"We have people who are now just barely coming back, telling us, 'We hadn't returned because we were afraid to go out,'" El Pariente manager Nereyda Miranda says as she signs a delivery order. Last fall she changed how she drove to work, avoiding major streets out of fear that she might encounter officers. She would try to ease her nerves by praying and telling herself, "Nothing will happen to us." But even then, she felt fear. "You have to be brave," she says.

It has been raining for the past few days, but the clouds have finally cleared as Mexico's first game of the World Cup approaches. "Latinos are back," Jose says. May's flowers are a month old and butterflies dance above them. The school year is done, and summer has brought a kind of natural optimism to the city's streets, he thinks. The World Cup is here. In America. And maybe the games will be a return to the way things were in Woodburn. Or maybe they'll be a distraction from the way some things have changed.

"The construction guys are coming," Jose says as a truck pulls into El Pariente. It's about 10 minutes before Mexico play South Africa, and they're here to eat and watch the game. The game is on outside projector and on a television in an indoor seating area. Just as it has been planned for months.

"Put it on in Spanish," Jose tells one of his staff.

IN THE NINTH minute of the game, South Africa commits an error just outside their box, and Mexico's Julián Quiñones scores.

The fans in what'll always be Estadio Azteca to me, celebrate, yelling and hugging and jumping so much they seem to make the Mexico City stadium shake.

A man in the Woodburn crowd, 2,798 miles away, yells "GOOOOOAAAALLLL!" He has lived here for two years and hasn't returned to Mexico. "I feel it more," he says of watching the game and his national team play. "I appreciate it in a different way. When you lose something, you value it more."

Jose cheers too. He's from Guatemala, wearing a U.S. soccer shirt and celebrating Mexico. When I look at him smile and high-five with the construction workers, I can feel how belonging here has more than one meaning.

My text chats full of Mexican friends who are pessimistic about the team, start to feel more optimistic. A text from my brother, who has always believed, makes me miss home.

And for those few seconds, one of the world's most politically complex sporting events feels simple. Just a game, between two teams from two different countries. Hair on the back of your neck standing up because the team that scored is yours and you are theirs.

And for those few seconds, wherever you are, what matters is that Mexico has scored the first goal of the 2026 World Cup. In Woodburn, the man selling fruit on the street corner wears his Mexico jersey and watches on his phone. The dozen people in the nearby brewery wear green, white and red. A blind musician wearing a thick white puffer and carrying a guitar walks around asking people if they want a song.

"EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK you see that community pride," Jorge Flores says. From the Woodburn High School soccer pitch he looks toward the stands where nine state championship banners hang. All of them won since 2010; two by the girls' soccer team, seven by the boys. "This is a soccer community," he adds.

At 38, Jorge has lived here for 24 years. "Our fields were dirt," he says of where he grew up playing in Romita, Guanajuato, some 2,000 miles away.

He was just 14 when he left in 2002. He had been part of Atlas' youth academy. A founding team in the first Mexican professional soccer league, Atlas had a reputation for developing young talent. The type to play for Mexico at the World Cup. "I got injured in a tournament," Jorge says now, rubbing a hand on his left knee.

It was his uncle, who lived and worked in Woodburn, who first told Jorge he should visit. He could enroll in school and maybe learn English. Perhaps even work in the fields on weekends. "They have beautiful soccer fields," his uncle told him. Jorge was sold.

Through Yuma, Arizona, he and others crossed in the back of a van. Their coyote, a guide hired to help them navigate the terrain, had stopped for gas. A woman in another car looked through the window of the van. She called the authorities after she saw about 20 people, old and young, sitting inside. Jorge and the others ran into the desert as the van sped away, he tells me.

For two days they hid in the part of the Sonoran Desert called El Camino del Diablo, or the "Devil's Highway." Death was everywhere. The desert felt vast and dangerous. Immigrants often died in the crossing of hunger, heat and thirst, he knew. Humane Borders, a nonprofit organization that maintains water stations along the Sonoran Desert, estimates 4,474 migrants have died crossing there during the past three decades.

"The coyote found us on the third day," Jorge says, looking out at the deep green of the soccer fields. Days later, he was in Woodburn. The first months were difficult. He stayed with his uncle, aunt and cousin, but away from everything he had known. A dozen years passed until he saw his parents and home again.

He enrolled at Woodburn High School, learned English and went on to play four years of varsity soccer. He married his high school sweetheart. They had two sons. His goals changed. From wanting to return home to play professionally once his knee healed, to staying here. Soccer could help him earn a degree, he thought, make a new life.

"If I leave or get deported, I'll at least have my education," Jorge reflects, even now. He graduated from Western Oregon University in 2015. Four years later he earned a master's degree in teaching from George Fox University in nearby Newberg, Oregon.

"I became a U.S. citizen last year," Jorge says, pride in his voice. These days he visits Romita at least once a year, usually for Christmas. But after a few days he misses Woodburn. "This is now home," he says, sitting in the shade of the bleachers.

And now he is a Spanish teacher and head coach of Woodburn High boys' soccer team. The team is full of players who are the sons of farm workers who, like him, left home once upon a time. Jorge thinks part of his job is to help them bridge the struggle between present realities and distant expectations.

"Parents believe their children are going to play professional soccer," he says. He'll meet with them before each season, telling them he hopes they do. But as teacher and coach at a school where 85% of students are Latino, he'll explain that what he hopes most for them is that they'll graduate. Today, the high school that once had an estimated 40% dropout rate among Latinos, now has an on-time graduation rate higher than the state average.

"I understand their passion," Jorge says of the players' parents. And he knows if nothing else, soccer can be a way to avoid the berry fields that surround everything here. A way of escaping a dawn start time for $15 an hour. Prepping the soil and planting. Strawberries in late spring and blackberries after. Blueberries until late August.

"I'VE WAITED A long time to see if you'd change, and you won't even look at me," the blind man in the white coat plays his guitar as he sings in Spanish of unrequited love.

"You said once the January snows came, we'd go see the Virgin and marriage would be the first thing to do."

As the game heads to halftime, the Mexico fans at El Pariente listen as the man sings, "Nieves de Enero." It's part of the working-class Mexican American songbook. Made famous by Chalino Sánchez who was born in Sinaloa but made his career in the US, singing at clubs near where Mexicans lived. With the game on in this small west Oregon town, it feels like a bittersweet anthem of sorts. A song to say you are where you are and you are where you are from all at once.

If food can remind you of home, songs can make you think of what's lost. The same fans who screamed in celebration after the first goal and groaned loudly at the few other shots that narrowly missed, go quiet. The construction worker who has been talking loudly, eats in silence. And the often smiling Nereyda has a blank expression on her face as she prepares micheladas.

She's also from Sinaloa, left five years ago.

"Why here?" I ask.

"Things in Mexico were complicated," is all she says.

"The January snows are gone, and the flowers of May have arrived, you see me holding on as strong as a macho can, trying to quiet my bitter pain."

The singing man is called Don Bulma by everyone around Woodburn. He has played the guitar and sang since he was young. A few years ago, he suffered a type of stroke that left him practically blind. Since then, this is how the 71-year-old makes money. The community takes care of him, gives him food to eat and money to sing. He might not see like he once did, but Don Bulma tells me he feels God's presence more than ever before.

"I can't stand your lies anymore, this wait is destroying me, to see that years have passed, and I don't plan to die in this wait."

THERE ARE BUTTERFLIES all around Woodburn.

They fly near the top of a downtown mural that tells the story of a place shaped by the crops it has raised and the people who've harvested them. Like Everywhere, USA, in the 1970s and '80s, downtown Woodburn became a shadow of itself. Suburbanization, sprawl and recessions gutted the area. Local businesses left, moving closer to the major roads leading to Portland and Seattle.

Latino businesses moved into some of the abandoned downtown spaces. Not everyone in the community embraced the change.

"There are some folks who won't come downtown because of all the Hispanic businesses," Mark J. Wilk, then president of the Woodburn Downtown Association, told The Oregonian in August 2002. "There is a group that would like Woodburn to look like it did in the 1950s." Among that group, some also wondered if a mural that prominently featured butterflies along with a depiction of Fiesta Mexicana -- the annual celebration that marked the end of the harvest -- was the image downtown should portray. But as Woodburn City Council Member Jim Cox explained in 2012, "If Latino business hadn't moved in, the downtown would be vacant."

There are butterflies on a mosaic a mile from Woodburn High School, too. It's part of several apartments built for farmworkers. And there are even more butterflies on a mural spread across two other farmworker housing buildings on Park Avenue. They are down the street from the park with a soccer field where there's usually someone kicking a ball.

"They're monarchs," artist Hector H. Hernandez says of the butterflies he has placed in the art all around Woodburn. The western monarch species move between Mexico and the U.S., symbols of migration and transformation.

"A Chicano's a person that has a clear conscience about having two cultures," Hernandez says. Like the butterflies he paints, Chicanos are from both here and there. That's everywhere in Woodburn. From bilingual signs on stores to how soccer players and coaches communicate on the pitch, which some opponents don't understand.

There are butterflies flying all around Woodburn. More of them during the spring when tulips bloom, in the same fields where, as a little girl, union leader Reyna Lopez stood with her father. "I'm bringing you out here so you can see what it's like," he told her, wanting Reyna to see the hard work it took to pick every berry they ate.

Reyna's father was from Michoacán, and her mother was from Sonora. They followed the strawberry season from California to Woodburn because the union -- PCUN, Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste -- protected farm and forest workers, she tells me. "My parents worked a lot. They were both farmworkers," Reyna says. "They worked 50 to 60 hour weeks in crazy weather. Sometimes dangerous conditions. But they really tried to make a better life for me and my sister."

In 1992, the same year Walmart came to this area and drew more jobs out of downtown Woodburn, the union helped build housing for its members. Before the first complex was complete the project's president received a letter. "The Mexicans will work the summer season and then spend the winters in living quarters built for them with our money. They will create a bigger dope problem and crime will increase," the letter read. It was signed by Americans for the Last Crusade.

That came a year after anti-Latino flyers circulated around Woodburn. "Do the Hispanics contribute to our society?" the flyers asked rhetorically. "Of course. They breed faster. They do more dope. Their art form 'graffiti.' They cause more crime." It was signed by a group calling itself American Values Association.

"I want you to get an education," Reyna's father told his oldest daughter back in those fields. "I want you to make something more of yourself."

She did. Lopez went to college and served as a senate intern. In 2008 she was one of the few Latinas in the Oregon State Capitol when outside it, she saw protests after a bill passed that kept undocumented workers from obtaining a driver's license. "What am I doing in here?" Lopez asked herself. "I need to be out there with my people."

Since 2018, she has been PCUN's executive director and its first woman leader. Last year, she was the grand marshal of the Fiesta Mexicana parade. "Grateful to be able to celebrate culture, and to get to display the beauty of being Mexican American in the U.S. today," she wrote of the honor on her social media account. "Our joy is resistance."

Due to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer's activity last fall, she says her job changed overnight. It went from fighting for better working conditions to making sure each family had a plan in case they were detained and from working on a collective rights bargaining bill to making sure members felt safe.

"They were afraid to even open the door," Lopez says of the union members she represents. During the coldest and darkest part of the year, some of her members hid in the housing buildings covered with murals and butterflies.

Woodburn felt empty. Children stopped playing soccer at the park. No thumping sounds that came from kicks. Not a soul between the goal posts.

"WHAT DOES WEARING the Mexico jersey mean to you," I ask Eddy Sanchez and Antonio Calderon as they watch the game at El Pariente. Both had stood with their right hand over their heart when the Mexican national anthem played before the game began.

"It means everything," Eddy says. "It's like a status symbol," Antonio adds. "I love that I represent my culture. That's why this new bright green colored and this maroon-colored one stand out. You can distinguish it from a distance. 'Oh, that's part of us. He's one of us.'"

Eddy wears the green-colored jersey of Raúl Jimenez who scored Mexico's second goal and allowed an entire fanbase around the world to breathe a little easier. Antonio wears the maroon-colored one of Santiago Gimenez.

"You didn't see as many people doing what we're doing right now," Sanchez says of those days when he would shop for family members' groceries so they didn't have to leave their homes. "Just coming out, enjoying a meal, having fun." Antonio nods in agreement as Eddy talks. "It almost felt like we weren't wanted," Antonio adds.

They turn back to watch the game. Mexico is up 2-0 now, fifteen minutes to play. They're starting to believe.

"I hope Mexico makes it as far as possible," Eddy says.

THERE'S AN EMPTY space where Café La Onda once was. The coffee machines are gone along with the stack of cups. The tip jar isn't there and neither is the bilingual sign listing its hours. It's now just a bare countertop inside the Metropolis Marketplace on Front Street; that's between the train tracks that migrant workers also built and the plaza that echoes that feeling of being in Mexico.

For years, even as its ownership changed, Café La Onda was part of downtown. About three blocks from El Pariente, it was the coffee shop that helped establish a morning routine. Customers recognized familiar faces and made small talk while waiting on their usual orders or a recommendation they took from the barista.

"It was a community gathering space," Andrew Yoshihara says of the coffee shop. Priced out of his hometown of Portland, he has lived in Woodburn about five years. "So many brown folks here," he says, calling it a refreshing change for him. "Being mixed and presenting Black in Portland was not the easiest growing up."

Andrew and his family were the last to own Café La Onda. They served coffee from different Mexican states because it helped his customers remember home. "We had a bangin' breakfast sandwich too," he adds. "Meat, cheese, eggs, on a ciabatta roll." Before he owned it, he practically used the neighborhood coffee shop as an office to run his nonprofit, Bustin' Barriers, that helps kids with disabilities play sports including soccer.

"We were doing pretty well at the beginning," he says of his coffee shop. The profit margins were thin because that's how the food industry works. But they were surviving, even catering events for PCUN and other organizations in Woodburn.

"But once the administration shift happened, and tariffs kicked in, it made it really difficult to have a small business," Andrew says. In May 2025, Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield was part of a coalition of states attorneys general that filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against recent federally established tariffs. "These tariffs are doing real damage to Oregonians and our small businesses," Rayfield said at the time.

Prices and shipping rates went up, and the cost of living in Woodburn did too. Soon after, a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich was a luxury fewer could afford. The margins got even smaller. When people were too afraid to leave their homes, it couldn't survive. Café La Onda closed in February of this year.

Nothing has yet replaced it. Tomorrow morning there won't be anyone waiting for their coffee, asking a familiar face, "Did you see the game?"

"It was a cool little coffee shop," Andrew says, wincing at how long ago those days feel now.

A GROUP OF four young soccer players kick the ball among themselves. On their first day of summer break, they watched Mexico beat South Africa 2-0, then ran to Legion Park and its million-dollar turf that Amazon bought. Amazon now operates out of a 3.8 million-square-foot building, the largest in Oregon, and is on its way to becoming Woodburn's largest employer.

At 16, Lupita is the oldest. Her sister, Camila, is 12 and the same age as their cousin Kevin. The youngest is their 9-year-old cousin, Anthony. All of them from Woodburn. All of them with aspirations that this is the year Mexico advances further than usual in the World Cup.

"At least the quarters," Kevin says, though he and his cousins haven't nearly lived long enough to remember the last time Mexico reached the quarterfinals. For the past 56 years that has been part of the Mexican national team's story. And just when it seems like they'll make it -- beating historical powers like France and Germany and ties that felt just as good against Italy and Brazil -- something painful and improbable happens.

They've lost in penalties and after being ahead of past World Cup winners and perennial contenders. They've lost to their most bitter rival -- the U.S. -- and that's why the U.S. fans chant "dos a cero" whenever they play the Mexican team. They lost to Argentina in 2006, when Maxi Rodríguez scored a goal so perfect it left every Mexican stunned. Their 2014 loss to the Netherlands was the most painful. In stoppage time Arjen Robben drew a phantom penalty by throwing himself on the pitch. "No era penal," Mexico fans still say even if a dozen years have passed.

"Yeah, quarters," Lupita agrees with Kevin. An optimistic prediction. But that's what happens when your team wins its first game of the World Cup. The grandest of soccer dreams feel a little closer to reality.

"I want to make it professionally," Anthony says of playing soccer. "College, at least," Kevin adds. "Same," Camila says. They speak English among themselves even if it's only Spanish with their parents. All of them young enough to pursue whatever dream they want.

But they're young, not naïve. They know that the feeling of home can suddenly change. They've seen it up close. They've seen it this year.

"I love soccer," Lupita says. "It's a way for me to cope with my emotions and just not feel anything out on the field."

I CAN SEE the water tower beneath the shade of Woodburn's downtown plaza. And around me, within a few blocks, is everywhere I've been in this town. There's something about the plaza that reminds me of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where my parents grew up, and the water tower reminds me of all the ones I know around El Paso, Texas, where I grew up and still live now. There's a peace sitting here, a sense that I'll remember the plaza and the towers even when I'm a thousand miles away.

I didn't expect to feel this.

I have been in places thick with emotions from pain and excitement, disappointment and joy. But Woodburn was different. There was a subtle feeling I got as soon as I walked its streets and in the quiet interactions and longer conversations I had with its people. It all reminded me of something familiar, though I hadn't felt it in a while.

Perhaps I'd grown accustomed to the feeling of living in El Paso where storefront signs are also written in two languages. Where I see Border Patrol vehicles so often, even at a food truck or local coffee shop, that they begin to blend into the landscape. The in-between feeling makes a kind of sense along the literal space that borders the U.S. and Mexico. But away from home, in Woodburn, all that felt different. I wasn't on the border, I was on an island, and the surrounding waters had been rough in recent months.

Woodburn returned me to people and things I hadn't fully recognized in years. Reminded me of the cousin disappointed to discover it isn't full of gold here. The roommate I had in 1999 who didn't return from a visit home because he had been detained. And since they're always a threat in some communities, it took me back to the canceled workdays after someone saw immigration agents lurking near construction sites.

Being in Woodburn, reminded me of the fragile edges that define a community and of the unsaid things that pass between people. When no one needs to explain why the butterflies aren't as colorful and the berries aren't as sweet.

There was something about Woodburn that felt familiar. In the same way that, growing up, I understood I had opportunities only because someone else had risked everything for me. But I was young, and I could only understand it as an idea. In Woodburn, I fully felt again what it meant. I saw my father and mother's struggles reflected in some of the people. The belief I've had for a few years now, was reaffirmed. That out of all the good things my parents gave me, the best was a home that was proud of who we were and where we came from.

That's what I felt in Woodburn. It was in everything there. In the breakfast conversations, as citizens tried again to make sense of their place within the towns and the countries they call home. In the anger and confusion some of them felt about having to think twice about where to be and how to show up. In the bloodshot eyes of someone telling me how they'd made it this far. They wondered if they'd ever see home and those they love again.

But in that cold and gray of western Oregon, I also felt warmth. From those who effortlessly exist living between here and there because they're so very much from both. Those whose voices got louder when others couldn't speak. The coaches who recognized their job was about much more than what happened on the fields. And more than anywhere, I felt that sense of community around the celebration of sports. Of the game. Those who cheer for Woodburn, those who cheer for Mexico, those who cheer for the U.S., even when sometimes it has been difficult to live in each.

Watching the World Cup in Woodburn -- as an adult, in Oregon, of all places -- I felt a connection I hadn't expected. To a place I had never been, and a jersey I had seen countless times before but hadn't yet managed to truly ask what it meant to those who wore it. And in people sacrificing for a future whose fruits they would perhaps never fully enjoy, I felt how much people from my own past had made possible for me.

SOMEDAY, YEARS FROM now people may still talk about what this tournament has been for Mexico. The unexpected joy the team brought, playing with the kind of spirit and composure - sweeping the group stage without giving up a goal - that made so many so proud and so hopeful.

In a few weeks there'll be a new World Cup champion. Players will celebrate, wherever they're from. Fans will celebrate, wherever they are. And children across the miles will run onto fields in parks and schools, imagining a future as World Cup winners themselves.

A few weeks after the tournament ends, in August, when the blueberries are ready for harvest, Woodburn will host another Fiesta Mexicana. Along with a parade and booths offering traditional dishes, it'll include a soccer tournament for children and adults.

Then the late fall will come, and the chill in the air will carry a hint of the snows of winter, and because nothing belongs to just one place and because peace is fragile, the monarchs of Woodburn will begin to migrate.

They'll fly south across Oregon and across California.

They'll fly until they reach the mountains of central Mexico. And when the spring comes again, they'll make their way back to Woodburn.