Viva LA Liga! Viva LA Vida! -- Local Soccer League Mirrors Latinos' Growing Prominence Around The Country

Coach Luis Argudo stomped the sidelines, the gold cross around his neck swinging like a wind chime in a dust storm. His team had entered the game as the highest-scoring in the league, but with a star player gone fishing, La Espanola was about to lose for the fourth time this season.

A perfectly timed head butt spanked the ball into the net: another goal for the other guys. "Bien hecho!" someone yelled from the opposite bleachers at Redmond's Marymoor Park. Well done.

More fans arrived, some in ranchers' hats, spreading out on lawn chairs with their infants and ice coolers. Nearby, a pair of steely eyed Latino soccer squads in shin guards awaited their turn on the field.

It was a typical Sunday for La Liga Hispana ("The Hispanic League"), whose 36 teams and more than 600 players this year made the Seattle-area league the largest of at least nine Latino-oriented soccer leagues alive and kicking statewide.

More than that, the blossoming of the league is a sign of things to come here and across the nation - part of a trend expected to see Latinos surpass African Americans as the country's largest minority group by 2005. Latinos already are Washington's largest minority group.

There are now more Latinos in King County than in Yakima County. The shift has drawn less fanfare than a last-place soccer match, but it indicates how immigration has begun leaning toward Western Washington, sprinkling its street corners, schoolyards, store aisles and soccer fields with the sounds of Spanish.

As the population takes root, so do the community staples that echo home for new arrivals and give others cultural anchors: Spanish-language video stores and church services, Latin markets and radio stations.

With more Latinos carving out lives in Seattle and its suburbs, what you see on playfields from Kent to Mountlake Terrace is a snapshot of the future - a population with increasing moments of leisure, a community coming of age.

In a decade, La Liga Hispana has grown from five teams to three dozen, with rosters dominated by working-class Latinos - car-wash attendants, short-order cooks, auto detailers, landscapers. And in addition to pioneering restaurants like Azteca and Jalisco, team jerseys now promote Latino nightclubs, car dealers and markets like La Espanola.

In many ways, La Espanola's 20-man squad illustrates the dynamics spawned by the flourishing population, with family members, foreign- and native-born Latinos, and non-Latino players. Luis Argudo is from the Ecuadorian seaport of Guayaquil; sons Joel, 25, and Jeff, 22, were born in the U.S. There are players with roots in Mexico and Chile and Nicaragua, a student from Saudi Arabia and several white players whose local origins are generations old.

Argudo came to Seattle 25 years ago, eager to try his luck after five years of low-paying work in Los Angeles. Now a 50-year-old welder for the city of Seattle, he doesn't feel like a demographic trendsetter. He just wants to play soccer.

On weekday nights, you'll find the hale, compact Argudo suiting up for Redmond's over-40 and over-50 soccer leagues, and the key chain he carries - a soccer ball and shoe - bears the name of the minor-league team he played for as a teenager in Ecuador. It's a reminder of the home he left behind in the 1960s.

For him, nothing is more sacred than soccer and family, and La Espanola is both - a passion lived out on playfields and a father's fantasy come true. His two boys were barely out of kindergarten when he first coached them on a soccer field. Back then, the proud dad imagined a day when they all might play for the same team.

Years later, his dream has been realized: All three don the red-and-white uniforms of La Espanola. Other team members, whom the Argudos host at post-game barbecues, might as well be family, too.

Despite its offensive firepower, La Espanola found itself fighting - at times literally - for a post-season berth as August approached. The loss at Marymoor Park made the climb even steeper. Argudo's aim - and the team's - was simple: To finish in the top eight and earn a shot at the title.

Language, religion - and futbol

The Argudos represent two branches of a growing community whose roots stretch from Mexico to Honduras to Brazil - first-generation immigrants who left homelands in search of a better life, and their U.S.-born, generally higher-educated adult children. All told, it's a diverse, often nationalistic population united by three common threads.

One is Spanish - some speak it, some don't, but many understand.

Another is religion - some practice and some don't, but nobody argues with Nana.

The other is the most popular sport on the planet - what half the hemisphere calls futbol. Throughout Latin America, enthusiasm for the sport attains spiritual fervor, at its best inspiring nationwide euphoria, at its worst provoking war. It seems inevitable, then, that soccer would play a role in the area's growing Latino identity.

Most Washington-bound Latinos once followed a Texas-to-Colorado-to-Idaho stream, headed for the agriculture-rich economies east of the Cascades. Now more follow in Luis Argudo's footsteps, leaving California for working-class jobs in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.

The community grew slowly and steadily through the early 1980s, then surged with two major events. First, in 1986, the U.S. made legal residents out of about 3 million eligible migrant workers nationwide, opening the door to their families. Then, in the early 1990s, California dealt a one-two punch - anti-immigrant sentiment and an economic recession - that prompted newer Latino residents to head elsewhere, including Washington.

From 1990 to 1997, Washington's Latino population grew by nearly 50 people a day, almost four times the rate of the overall population. In that seven-year period, the number of Latinos statewide rose 58 percent, from 214,568 to 339,618.

It was 1989 when Chon Garcia, owner of the Jalisco restaurant chain, pulled together the scores of Spanish-speakers kicking around at parks throughout the Seattle area. With help from others and promotion by Spanish-language radio jocks, he founded what was then called La Liga Mexicana ("The Mexican League").

The mostly Mexican Latinos who'd earned legal residency now "felt like they were part of the community," says state research analyst Antonio Sanchez. "They knew the Immigration (and Naturalization Service) wasn't going to come take them away. . . . They could turn to recreation. And they did it on their own. This is not a situation where King County Recreation said, `OK, it's time to create a Mexican soccer league.' It's their own league."

Many players work six days a week, with Sundays off. Says real-estate agent Ricardo Aguirre, who served as the league's first commissioner: "Some of these guys, all they do is live for that Sunday."

Although it began as an alternative for those whose limited English hindered their participation in other leagues, La Liga Hispana has diversified with the changing community.

La Espanola, with five non-Latino players, is a good example. Says Julia Dube, whose blond, blue-eyed husband, Chris, plays for the team: "When Chris came home and told me he was playing for the Mexican league, I was like - `I didn't even know you could.' But the commonality is, they all love the game, and they're good at it."

The team's core has been solid for years - guys Argudo coached when they were younger. Son Jeff and a few others, including Eric Dahlberg, a lanky blond, and Hatan Attalah, a Saudi exchange student, all played together at Bellevue Community College. Along with Joel Argudo, who just got a degree in geography from the University of Washington, the friends poke around for pickup games in Tacoma or Mercer Island.

Last year the team called itself Los Amigos, with each of its 20 players putting up his share of the team's $1,300 entry fee. The team made the playoffs, but lost in the first round.

Then sponsorship - and a new team name - came from Bellevue's La Espanola, a Latin grocery where Luis Argudo often shopped for Ecuadorian sardines and tuna. The Eastside's exploding Latino community has meant booming business for La Espanola, and co-owner Daniel Luciu guesses the Golden State has fueled 75 percent of it. With cookies from Mexico, juices from Brazil and peppers from Peru, his shelves reflect the same growth and diversity found on area soccer fields.

Good business, good will

The driving force behind La Liga Hispana is a loose fraternity of Mexican restaurant owners and members of the Hispanic Business Chamber - contractors, insurance agents and other young professionals.

Those business leaders, many of whom began as dishwashers and cooks and remember when fellow Spanish-speakers were hard to find, provide the bulk of the league's administration and sponsorship. (Among its senior ranks, it is rumored, sponsors wager friendly bets - $1,000 or dinner at their restaurants for the winning team.)

They represent the new leadership of the evolving community. No longer a vocal, political one advocating for a struggling minority, it is now a broader, more quietly influential one whose emerging economic power echoes the population's increasing stake among the middle class.

For them, Antonio Sanchez says, patronage is more than just a convenient way to advertise. It's a gesture, part good business, part good will. "They spend a lot more than they get back," he says. "It's what we call corazon (heart)."

In March, all that corazon turned Tukwila's modest Fort Dent arena into a disheveled mini-version of the Olympic Games' opening ceremonies. In the stands and on the field, stretching from goal post to goal post, 1,500 Latinos squinted in the sun amid the sizzle of carne asada and the crooning of amor-stricken mariachis.

Though Eastern Washington's soccer leagues have been around longer, Seattle's opening-day fiesta was a commissioner's dream for an organization founded 10 years ago with just five teams.

At midfield, league honchos posed for Siete Dias, a Spanish-language weekly newspaper whose publisher, Raul Perez-Calleja, has seen the annual Latino business directory he prints grow from 80 to 200 pages in seven years. La Espanola and 35 other uniformed teams waited their turn in rainbow clusters, all with their sashed madrinas - regally festooned soccer babes, the Daisy Dukes of the futbol world.

And of course, there was soccer. The field was cleared, and a Seattle "all-star" squad took on a select crop of players from Yakima-area leagues.

If soccer is taking America by storm, the U.S. women's team's World Cup victory was its most recent thunderclap. The Washington State Youth Soccer Association has gone from 100,000 to 125,000 members in four years, while the Washington State Soccer Association estimates there are 50,000 to 55,000 adults playing in affiliated and non-affiliated leagues statewide.

The state association's nine Latino-oriented leagues include close to 200 teams and more than 3,000 players. Independent leagues exist, too, and in the Yakima Valley, where Mexican-dominated squads have kicked around for 20 years and 5,000 fans show up to watch title matches, those include the Libertadores de America and a league consisting entirely of warehouse laborers. They vie for fields along with Yakima's Liga Mexicana and Sunnyside's League of the Lower Valley.

"Soccer there is like a second religion," said Polo Rivera, a Yakima leagues representative. "That's what people do in Yakima on Sundays."

Futbol frenzy also abounds in Walla Walla, the Tri-Cities, the Centralia/Chehalis area, Tacoma and Mount Vernon. A team representing Wenatchee's Chelan Soccer League finished third in 1998's Copa Mexico, the U.S. national Mexican soccer finals, held last year in Orlando, Fla.

Watching the all-star match from the sidelines, Rivera, like others, downplayed rivalry between Eastern and Western Washington. But naturally, he confided in an inspired moment, Seattle would like to beat Yakima, since that's where the best futbol is played.

On the field, two competitors collided. The Seattle player hit the dirt.

"Don't be mean!" Rivera yelled to the Yakima player from the sidelines. "Es un viejito." He's just a little old man.

The crowd stayed in the game, despite the periodic rumbling of passing freight trains on tracks abutting one end of the field. When a driving Yakima player sent a kick through the defense that banged off the top of the goal, a gasp flew up like a kettle's whistle from the stands where Antonio Sanchez sat with longtime pal Carlos Rosetti and league commissioner Ted Rodriguez, owner of the Torero's chain.

"Carlos, if I was there, I would have made that goal," Sanchez said dryly.

Sanchez and Rosetti, business manager for the newspaper El Mundo, once scraped around Seattle for soccer games. "I would never have dreamed we'd see a league this big," Sanchez said.

Neither, perhaps, did its founders.

Size presents a challenge

Like any young organization, La Liga has been needled by demons of amateur status and adolescence, and its ballooning size poses a constant challenge for those in charge. Tempers, egos, politics, apathy, missing money and on-field violence have plagued the league over the years, and along those grassy sidelines, fans sometimes forget they can't pop open beers in a public park.

Exequiel Soltero holds the leash of the 36-club monster, calling hour-late board meetings to order with the tabletop gaveling of an empty Coke can. Like Luis Argudo, he came here in the 1970s, and at the time, fellow Spanish-speakers were scarce. But to a 19-year-old Mexican native from California, Seattle truly looked like the Emerald City. "I saw the opportunities," he says.

In those early days, he worked around the clock scrubbing dishes at a local Mexican restaurant, doing weekend shifts as a prep cook. "No days off," he says. "But I was saving all my money."

Four children and 20 years later, Soltero owns four Maya's restaurants from Seattle to Tacoma, with his flagship location two doors down from the original spot he opened in 1979. At one time, he employed every one of his 13 brothers and sisters - all of them from Cuautla, a small town in the Mexican state of Jalisco notable for the number of Seattle restaurateurs it has produced, among them the owners of Azteca, Las Margaritas and Torero's.

For league office manager Juan Ceballos, Mondays are the worst - all day on the phone in the league's Rainier Valley office, reminding people to turn in scores so he can update the standings and post the next week's schedule. In between are the occasionally maddening voice-mail messages left by people changing addresses or wanting answers and leaving only their first names.

"Jorge who?" Ceballos wonders after one call. "There must be two dozen Jorges in this league."

The white-haired, 57-year-old Argentine, as polished and crisply groomed as a family doctor on a telenovela, took a year off from his engineering job to help the league. Ten months later, he's in trouble at home, and the Redmond-to-Rainier Valley commute eats a tank and a half of gas a week. It's too much for one person to tackle.

"My wife says, `Is there a woman involved?' " Ceballos says. "I say no, there is soccer. Soccer can blind you."

Things began to turn around for the league last year, when Soltero was treasurer: In 1998, La Liga Hispana drew 24 teams and turned a decent profit. And while few of its players have turned the heads of the Seattle Sounders, the city's professional franchise, its games are nonetheless competitive.

"The quality of play is quite a bit better than the other leagues around here," says referee Tri Bains. The league's on-field conduct has improved as well, he says.

Still, when athletic competition is laced with nationalism, tempers can be tough genies to keep in a bottle.

La Espanola's players have seen civil wars erupt on opposing squads between teammates claiming superiority for their mother countries, and some of them say La Espanola itself is targeted for having so many non-Latinos on its roster. Says Jeff Argudo, "They don't even consider us Mexican (he and Joel), because we're second-generation."

Others say conflict is only natural when you blend contact sport, ego and playoff-minded teams clawing for crucial wins. "Some players just want to hit you rather than play the game," says former UW kicker Oscar Santana, a nutritionist who plays midfield for low-ranking Real Espana. "They forget this is a recreational event. The refs do what they can, but once your adrenaline is up, if you want to hit somebody, you're going to whether you get a yellow (penalty) card or not."

La Espanola, despite leading the league in scoring, was eighth in the standings going into July's final weekend.

That Sunday, the team would take on Lynnwood's El Mercadito, bruised and fading in the standings because of a previous loss. "Sometimes teams like those, they don't have nothing to lose," Argudo said beforehand.

El Mercadito attacked early, with several unsuccessful shots on goal. The assault seemed to awaken La Espanola, and with its two primary weapons - Attalah and Dahlberg - blanketed by defenders, Jeff and Joel Argudo quickly put the team up, 3-0, at the half.

Coach Argudo was pleased. Don't let up, he said. But the second half brought more pulling and shoving. Tempers rose. La Espanola popped in another goal to make it 4-0.

Then, the implosion - the ball rolling out of bounds, Attalah there to retrieve it, the flying elbow drawing blood above his eye, the full-on rumble of limbs and torn jerseys. Order was eventually restored, but the game was called off, both teams were suspended for a week and police banned the players from the Fort Dent field for a year.

"This is what happens when teams try to get into the playoffs," Luis Argudo grumbled.

Expanding to 40 teams

You'd think the team's suspension - an automatic loss - would spoil Argudo's outlook, but he has other things on his mind. Lupe Solano, one of La Espanola's players, has asked Argudo and his wife to be padrinos, or godparents, for the Solanos' 2-year-old son, who will be baptized the following Sunday.

La Liga Hispana, too, is looking ahead. Commissioner Ted Rodriguez says there will be at least 40 teams next year, and officials say the league could use some corporate padrinos of its own if it's going to survive.

The league is also profiting from frequent visits from former soccer pro Victor Rangel, who played for Mexico's 1990 World Cup team and conducts clinics for La Liga's teams as well as for local youngsters. "We want to keep kids and young players playing instead of on drugs and on the streets," Rodriguez says.

La Liga Hispana mirrors Latinos' increasing endowment to Washington's immigrant-rich mosaic. "They've filtered into the infrastructure," Antonio Sanchez says. "Without them, it would just collapse."

That might sound like an overstatement, but consider the scene on a sunny August afternoon in Bellevue, where a standing-room-only crowd of more than a thousand parishioners packs into St. Louise's Catholic Church for the day's mass for Spanish-speakers. Eight sets of Sunday-best parents, padrinos and baptism-ready babies and toddlers line up in the alcove, where the parish calendar reflects change in the form of coming weddings: Steward-Chatfield, Aguilar-Cordova, Perez-Rodriquez.

Luis Argudo, his prized key chain dangling fashionably from his pants pocket, places a gold cross - his gift as godfather - around the neck of 2-year-old Franco Solano. Already he has bought the boy a soccer uniform and shoes, anticipating the day Franco takes the field.

The lemony light of stained glass washes over the crowd. Parents and padrinos approach the altar with their new ninos, and a handful of water welcomes each child into the community. Argudo scrambles into action, wiping Franco's dripping-wet head with a towel as they assemble before the crowd.

Somewhere, on a field in Shoreline, eight players - three short of the usual 11 - take the field for La Espanola and manage to eke out a tie, keeping playoff hopes alive. ("That's good," Argudo says later at a post-baptism party over barbecued goat, rice and beans. "We move up.")

And two weeks later, a goal by son Jeff Argudo would lift La Espanola to an overtime upset of No. 1-seeded Guaymas, 3-2, in the first round of the playoffs.

But never does Luis Argudo beam more than after the mass at St. Louise's. Smiling bright-eyed in the sunshine of the place he calls home, he lifts his new godson and holds him like a trophy.

Marc Ramirez's phone message number is 206-464-8102. His e-mail address is: mramirez@seattletimes.com.