A new film about Oakland youth from undocumented families highlights the healing power of soccer amid the spectre of Trump’s immigration policy

Benjamin Gonzales says Futbolistas 4 Life, an after-school soccer program at his high school in Oakland changed his life.

“If it wasn’t for our team I wouldn’t have graduated high school,” Gonzales says.

April Rojas, another member of the team, agrees. She says Futbolistas 4 Life – futbolistas is Spanish for footballers – helped keep her family together: “Soccer is a way to cope with things that we don’t know how to cope with.”

The free program, founded by students at Oakland’s Life Academy high school in 2009, is featured in a new eponymous documentary that follows Gonzales and Rojas as they navigate immigrant life under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program and the anxiety of living with undocumented family members.

Directed by Oakland native Jun Stinson, the film highlights the no-frills soccer program as the tie that binds a community together and keeps students in school. Led by Dania Cabello, an educator and former semi-pro player whose own family came to the United States in 1976 from Chile, the group met twice a week for practice sessions. With no field to use, Cabello would hold training sessions in classrooms, the school gymnasium, or on concrete playgrounds.

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“The students made this an important program,” Cabello told the Guardian in an interview. “They used sport – a platform which was important to them – as a connection to larger issues affecting their daily lives. It was an example of young people really taking action and ownership.”

The opposite of the high-cost, pay-to-play system prevalent across much of America where young players are often charged money for elite coaching, Cabello’s players didn’t wear cleats and shinguards or brand name training shirts. They attended practice in school clothes. But as Rojas explains: “You are writing with your feet. You are expressing yourself.”

Feel-good football story aside, where Futbolistas 4 Life wins is by putting human faces to the story of immigration in the United States. Players are lost to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids, work weekend jobs to help support their families and navigate ever-changing immigration laws that can make or break communities.

Gonzales details his journey from Michoacan, Mexico, as a kid: awoken in the night; crawling through a tunnel under the border; hiding under a seat in a truck that sped through the night toward California. Now 22 years old with a young baby, Gonzalez runs a t-shirt screen printing business and plans to return to college this fall. He credits Futbolistas 4 Life with grounding him in a new community.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest “You are writing with your feet. You are expressing yourself.” Photograph: Futbolistas 4 Life

“The team was like a family and it helped me stay in school,” he says. “People sometimes never get second chances. But that is what the soccer team gave me – a second chance.”

Rojas was born in Los Angeles to undocumented parents – they currently have temporary visas to stay in the United States – and says Cabello’s soccer program helped her see challenges she faced in daily life in a different way.

“A lot of people think of immigration and soccer as very different things but those two things collided in our lives,” says Rojas, who was in ninth grade when Stinson’s camera began following her.

“There were a lot of firsts for me and Futbolistas helped me get over a lot of anxiety that I had,” she says. “Anxiety comes from avoidance. You can’t avoid things in a soccer game. You can’t say I don’t want to play any more and end the game. You have to go to the end.”

Rojas also says the Futbolistas 4 Life program bonded her family when it might have cracked.

“Me and my dad had never had the best relationship but football was something that we could come to an understanding about,” she says. “We were always arguing and it was affecting me mentally and gave me anxiety and I didn’t want to go home and deal with conflict. But once I started playing soccer and really got into it it helped us bond in a way that we didn’t before.”

The great irony of the Futbolistas program is that its success led to its ultimate demise. A wider community of approximately 60,000 people had nowhere safe to play. Futbolistas 4 Life held fundraising events and celebrated raising $300 for a future field. That’s a lot of money when you pass a round a hat but not enough to construct a pitch.

Everything turned on a $100,000 grant from the US Soccer Foundation – a charity that promotes soccer as a vehicle for social change in underserved communities – to construct a field on school property. The caveat was the Oakland Unified School District had to match the grant. Futbolistas 4 Life led a local lobbying campaign that saw the project and funds approved.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Futbolistas 4 Life program was led by Dania Cabello, an educator and former semi-pro player whose own family came to the United States in 1976 from Chile. Photograph: Futbolistas 4 Life

Today, middle and high school teams play competitive games against other schools and more people than can fit into the gym use the field. Mission accomplished, Futbolistas 4 Life was disbanded in 2013. As Cabello explains in the film: “Sports spaces are really human spaces. They are rooted in a lot of joy.”

Still, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or get worse. Stinson began filming in 2012 just as the Obama administration introduced its Daca program to give undocumented students like Gonzalez a pathway to a secure existence in the country. Today, the spectre of Donald Trump’s Daca reversal and zero-tolerance immigration policy – and what that means to families – looms large.

“Things that have been happening for a while are more visible right now,” says Cabello, who now teaches a physical education masters program at a Bay Area college and coaches freestyle soccer at high schools. “There is a really serious problem we have in this country in dehumanising this imagined ‘other’ that makes it easy for people in positions of power to make decisions that are so harmful to individuals and communities.”

Rojas, now 20 and entering her third year at Berkeley, hopes the film is seen by immigration hardliners who might see a story about families they never consider. For her part, filmmaker Stinson says she hopes to “get out of the California bubble and screen the film in places where people are not necessarily supportive of these youth.”

In the real world, Rojas says she lived with a feeling of insecurity all her life but still struggles to put her family’s experience into words - especially in the current political climate.

“As a kid, my dad gave me passwords and codes for things if he wasn’t here anymore,” she says. “I can’t imagine what my parents have been through. We have struggled with the fear of being separated all my life but it has now intensified and it is in your face.”

Rojas refers to a part of an essay she wrote in her application to Berkeley that paid tribute to what she learned as part of Futbolistas 4 Life: Life can’t always be a new pair of cleats, fresh out of the box.

“I think about Footballistas 4 Life all the time,” she says. “I wake up and I want to go back. It was a family. It taught me a lot of things I still use today.”