How Mexico’s World Cup run brought a small Oregon town to life: The story of Woodburn, OR, is the story of the American dream. But can this town, with its vibrant soccer-loving Latino community, realize the potential afforded to so many other cities across the country? (Roberto Jose Andrade Franco, Jun 30, 2026, ESPN)
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.