Las Diamantes de Siler City

Las Diamantes is a serial documentary podcast about an all women, nearly all Mexican and Mexican-American recreational soccer team from Siler City, North Carolina. Most of these women play on several teams, and one of those teams is called, "Las Diamantes," or in English, "The Diamonds."

My name is Jess Clark. I created this series as my master's thesis project as a graduate student in the school of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I spent the spring season of 2015 recording and interviewing players from Las Diamantes at practices, games and in their lives off the field. The result is episodes 1-4. 

Why Las Diamantes?

The women who play on this team are part of a unique American generation, and they have a unique story to tell. All of the women in this series have parents who immigrated to Siler City from Mexico to work in furniture manufacturing or chicken processing. Their parents are just a small number among the thousands of Latin American migrants who came to rural areas of the southeastern U.S. to find work in food-processing and manufacturing, beginning in the late 1980s. Those migrants settled and either had children in the U.S. or brought their families over from their countries of origin. The result was an explosion of the Latino population in the southeastern U.S. 

Today, the kids that were born to that generation of Latin American migrants have just reached adulthood. Many have opportunities their parents never had—they can go to college and enter the middle class. But others don't have documentation, and for them, those opportunities are still out of reach. There are women on Las Diamantes in both of these situations. 

Issues surrounding documentation are just a few of the many unique phenomena shaping this new generation. Las Diamantes are part of a generation of not only mixed nationalities and immigration statuses, but also mixed cultures, mixed languages and mixed races. How they respond and build their own complex Latina identities is an important story to tell. 

The soccer field is one place where women are building their own Latina identities. It's a distinctly Latina or Latino space outside the mainstream white, Anglo culture. But it looks very different from the way soccer is played in Las Diamantes' parents' Latin American countries of origin.