Journalist Paul Cuadros has written a lot about the Latino communities of North Carolina. He moved here 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 of the journalism school at UNC–Chapel Hill, 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.
Journalist Paul Cuadros is the author of the story “The Cocineros of Franklin Street,” featured in 27 Views of Chapel Hill, published by Eno Publishers. Paul is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Time, and other national and local publications. He has focused on issues of race and poverty in America. In 1999, he won a fellowship with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, one of the most prestigious in journalism, to report on emerging Latino communities in rural poultry-processing towns in the South. The culmination of this 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 a predominantly Latino high school soccer team as Siler City grapples with Latino immigration.
A Home on the Field was the summer reading selection at UNC–Chapel Hill in 2009, as well as at other universities in North Carolina and beyond.
A professor of journalism at UNC–Chapel Hill, Paul is co-recipient 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 Journalists 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 and episodic series based on his book, chronicling the lives of Latino youth on the soccer team he coaches in Siler City. He is working on his second book on migration.
