This Love Is Not for Cowards

February 27, 2012
What’s it like to live in the “world’s most dangerous city?” Miami native Powell wanted to find out, so he moved to Juarez, Mexico, which, he says, had 2,700 murders in 2009, “the year I got here.” Knowing no one in the city, Powell gravitates to the local soccer team, Indios de Juárez, which is in danger of being relegated to the minors after not long ago inspiring the city with its improbable elevation to the Mexican Primera league. Through the team, Powell (We Own This Game) gets to know a cross-section of Juarez’s population. There is Francisco Ibarra, the enigmatic owner of the Indios, who believes his team can save the city; Marco, the American-born player who ignores the violence in favor of making his sporting dreams come true; and El Kartel, a rowdy bunch of diehard fans who believe in the Indios even though the town around them is crumbling to the ground. Powell’s prose is smart and witty, and betrays a journalist’s keen eye for detail (“Mexico is where American fads go for an encore.... The Blockbuster Video near my apartment remains crowded”). Much like the soccer classic The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinniss, Powell’s work explores not only the connection between an athletic team and its fans but also one city and one community’s ability to simultaneously face conditions that destroy hope and try to restore faith, and in doing so he has written not only a great sports book but also a powerful treatise on civics and human nature.

March 15, 2012
The candid story of a life-changing season an American journalist spent following Ciudad Juarez's hapless but beloved soccer team, the Indios. When Powell (We Own This Game: A Season in the Adult World of Youth Football, 2003) decided to go south of the border and live in Juarez, a town that experiences 10 murders per day, cartels and corruption interested him only in so far as they were part of the local color. What caught and held his attention was the Indios, a soccer team struggling to hold on to its major-league status and its dignity. As Powell drew closer to the members of the organization, he learned that the Indios were much more than just an ordinary sports franchise. For owner Francisco Ibarra, the club functioned as "a vital social program, the one bright spot in a city growing impossibly dangerous." For the players, the team offered professional and economic opportunities. For American-born midfielder Marco Vidal, the Indios were a way to reconnect with his roots and fulfill the family dream of returning to Mexico. And for the citizens--especially the members of the Indios' rowdy, irrepressible fan club, El Kartel--the team represented hope and a way for the people to show they had been neither cowed nor defeated by the violence surrounding them. At the same time, however, Powell also saw that the team was ultimately powerless to save people (including himself) from the tragedy of tacitly accepting atrocity as the norm. The team could only help people survive in a city where "[m]urder [was] effectively legal" and a country where the government was as much to blame for the daily executions as the drug lords it claimed to be fighting against. Unsentimental and deeply humane.

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November 15, 2011

The Mexican city of Juarez is wracked by violence from drug and human trafficking, But this is not a book about its horrors. It's a book about how the community rises above them, particularly through its love of soccer (that is, futbol) and its hard-up but inspiring team, the Indios. Too tough-minded to be called heartwarming but inspiring nonetheless.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.