In 2008, I featured a piece on siblings Alexis and Amber Hernandez. Mexican-Americans who have grown up in the Central Valley of California, they had at the time both recently been called up to play for Mexico’s U-17s. Today, I return to this story by focusing on the club which helped them to develop. The South Valley Chivas Academy in Porterville, California has, for the past several years, been developing young players against tremendous odds, including poverty, isolation, and cultural differences. Yet despite these challenges, the academy has succeeded in developing several promising young players, including Amber and Alexis, and become an official academy for Mexican powerhouse Chivas.

The academy formed as part of Chivas’s sangre nueva (new blood) effort to develop young talent. While at a player identification try-out in 2005 for young players that Chivas Guadalajara put on in San Bernardino (it drew 15,000 players and showed the top brass in Mexico that there was the potential for a US-based team; later that year Chivas USA was founded), Alexis was identified by then scout Dennis te Kloese. Esmaldo and Gilbert kept in contact with te Kloese and when Chivas decided to establish actual affiliated academies in the United States, South Valley Chivas become the second one.

Photo: South Valley Chivas Academy

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Two encounters with foreign fans inspired Los Angeles-based filmmaker Pablo Miralles’s current project, the documentary film about the US-Mexico soccer rivalry called Gringos at the Gate. The first came at the 2006 World Cup in Germany, where he was on assignment for Los Angeles television stations. An English fan he was interviewing said to him, “You know what I’m most scared of? I’m scared that Americans will actually start caring about this sport.” The thought of this clearly spooked the (slightly inebriated) English fan, who proceeded to start crying. Which led Pablo Miralles to wonder: What was it that would lead a fan halfway across the world to shed tears over the possibility that the US would become a soccer power?

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