Rally ‘Round the Ball : Soccer clubs serve as expatriate communities for many Latinos, offering camaraderie and connections to the present, as well as the past.

All sports have their songs: the smack of hickory on horsehide, the crack of colliding polyethylene helmets, the swish of a basketball through a net. But to the thousands of Spanish-speaking futbol players who spend their winters de-thatching public fields across the county, soccer is the sound of tearing grass and the sweet, sweet thump of leather inflated to 10 pounds of pressure.

Victor Ramirez got thumped particularly hard. At an early-season game in Oxnard, he was playing for his team, Villa Jimenez, when an opposing player--a guy with a right foot like a cinder block--booted the ball straight into Ramirez’s groin. As Ramirez doubled over, he drew reflexive winces from players on both sides.

His teammates helped him off the field, but as his injured area continued to fill with fluid, friends decided he needed a trip to the hospital. One trip turned into three as doctors repeatedly had to drain the severe bruise. Medical insurance covered the hospital bill, but with little in personal savings, Ramirez, a 27-year-old Oxnard factory worker, had to depend on the same friends who carried him off the field to pick up his expenses during his recovery.

It never occurred to anyone that things could be otherwise. That’s because most of the men on Villa Jimenez are from the same town in Mexico, a town named, you guessed it, Villa Jimenez. And, like dozens of other soccer clubs in the county, the team forms an expatriate community that, in addition to acting as a mutual-aid society, serves as a job-referral agency, housing locater and basic social unit, second only to family.

“It’s natural,” said Sigifredo Ambriz, captain of Villa Jimenez. “If you just came to this country and you don’t know a lot of people, you go out and kick around the ball with guys from home.”

The California Soccer Assn. sanctions 200 adult recreational soccer teams in the county. League officials say that of the 4,500 registered players, the majority are foreign, mostly from Mexico. The club rosters contain the names of so many Mexican cities and towns that they look like index pages from a road atlas.

While it is no surprise that big cities such as Guadalajara, Morelia and Mexico City have exported enough native sons here to fill out an 18-man club, what’s remarkable is the number of small towns--some too little to appear on standard maps--that even supply players for more than one team in the county.

Copandaro, a settlement of 6,000 people in the state of Michoacan, has two teams in the Ventura County League. So does Villa Jimenez (population 20,000). And the somewhat larger town of Tecalitlan in the state of Jalisco has a couple of clubs in the Thousand Oaks League.

Mexican immigrants tend to have great sentiment for their town or province of origin, said Samuel Mark, a USC professor who specializes in Latino culture in Southern California. Other nationalities also form teams based on their country of origin, but usually only Mexicans field teams based on small geographic areas.

“They tend to trust the people from their hometown,” Mark said. “It makes sense that they join others where some have settled, and that they help each other as the need arises.”

There’s even a word for it: paisano.

That sort of trust and cooperation can grow into immigration chains--or networks--which, according to experts, can accelerate immigration, particularly from small towns. Douglas Massey, co-author of “Return to Aztlan,” a book about U.S.-Mexican immigration, said that without such contacts it would be much harder for new arrivals to connect.

Whereas most Mexican towns have a market or a central square where people go to meet, Massey pointed out that American cities have only street corners and supermarkets with “No Loitering” signs.

“For a lot of people, the first thing they do when they get to a new place is go to these soccer fields and look for familiar place names,” Massey said. “That’s why soccer is important . . . because the games have regular meeting times. They’re a place where people can go and exchange information.”

Even as soccer plays a key role in integrating immigrants into their new community, the game also forms some of the older links in the immigration chain.

“Most of these young guys you see playing out here, we know their fathers,” said Efrain Moreno, 43, president of a Thousand Oaks team composed almost entirely of men from Tecalitlan. “I’ve got a nephew playing on this team who wasn’t even born when I came here in the ‘70s and started playing.”

In some cases, soccer is the main reason some men come to the United States. Coaches for semi-pro teams keep an eye on developing talent in Mexico. If they find a promising player, they often encourage him to come north.

Martin Munoz, a 31-year-old practical nurse at St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital who plays for Villa Jimenez, said he was recruited by Zaragosa, a semi-pro team in Santa Barbara’s Central Coast League.

“They gave me money for the plane ticket to come here, money for uniforms and a place to stay for a couple of months until I started working,” Munoz said. “I got my first job through the team, washing dishes. Then they got me a job waiting tables, then one working at a nursing home.” He estimates the team spent about $1,000 on him and gave him a performance incentive of $50 per goal.

Expatriates from all over the soccer-playing world, which is to say all over the world, form teams in Southern California. Among teams from England, Germany, Holland and Central American countries, probably the best-known is The Exiles, which started in 1975 when some British expatriates in the music business got together in Manhattan Beach.

“It was Rod Stewart, Hamish Stuart from Average White Band, myself and some other Brits,” said Exiles President Lionel Conway, head of Madonna’s record label, Maverick.

Among the blue-collar Latino teams, it’s the club’s president, often a former player, who pays much of the team’s $1,000 to $2,000 annual cost for uniforms, insurance and other expenses. In contrast, Conway spends $10,000 a year on his team, earning The Exiles a reputation as the glamour boys of Southern California amateur soccer.

“The Exiles come up here from L.A. once in a while,” said Ramon Arcero, registrar for the local chapter of the California Soccer Assn. “Once, all of them showed up in limousines, I think.”

Conway got a kick out of that one. “I would think we’re financially better off than most teams,” he said, “but we don’t travel to games in limousines. I think Rod might have taken a limo to a game in Oxnard once, but that’s about it.”

Not all local games have the star power of a Rod Stewart taking a corner kick. Weekend matches in county parks and schoolyards each draw an average of about 100 fans. Top-level teams will bring out about 500 people, and tournament finals can get crowds of a couple of thousand, club officials say.

Few of those spectators will be Anglos. And maybe that’s because to understand local soccer--to really appreciate the tableau--you have to know something about the lyrical qualities of cursing in Spanish.

It’s not enough to call the ref a billy goat of dubious parentage and impaired judgment. Truly effective profanity employs poetic devices. Word choice is important, naturally. But it’s the way the words fit into the delivery that affects the quality of the invective.

For instance, when a linesman blows the whistle on a breakaway because your team’s forward is offside, the disgusted observer would use a simple phrase:

“ El jodido juez de linea .” (That damn linesman.)

But really successful cursing requires a tonic accent. You raise the tone of the syllables to give them emphasis. The best example of this is the use of arbitro , Spanish for referee. When it comes at the end of the sentence and the tone is raised on the first two syllables “ar-bi,” it builds suspense for the “troooooo” decrescendo, thereby producing a harangue:

“No tiene madre! Una tia se le partio. Jodido ar-bi-troooooooo .” (He doesn’t even have a mother. An aunt had to give birth to him. The damn referee!)

However satisfying the jeer feels on the tongue, it can result in a technical foul if the referee decides to penalize the team, as much as $50, for its fans’ behavior.

“Yeah, (fines happen) pretty often,” Delgado said. “The fans get noisy.”

They are noisiest during matches that feature rivalries from Mexico--cross-town antagonisms from the homeland are vigorously pursued here.

Natives of Tecalitlan split into two teams just a year ago. Efrain Moreno’s team, San Isidro, takes its name from an old neighborhood in the city of Tecalitlan. Their archrival still uses the city’s name. They’ve played just once, last year in Thousand Oaks, and San Isidro was victorious, 1-0, in a battle that produced several yellow cards (warnings for rough play) and a couple of red-card expulsions.

Perhaps the hottest rivalry is between Copandaro and Villa Jimenez. Villa Jimenez is the seat of local government in the municipo (the Mexican equivalent of a county) in which Copandaro is located. Those from Villa Jimenez charge that, because such a high percentage of Copandaro natives work in this country and send money home, the town is flooded with expensive consumer goods and U.S. currency. Copandaros, it is said, have an air of economic superiority.

“We call it Dollar City,” Delgado said.

Asked how many red cards will be handed out in February when Copandaro plays La Villa, Delgado replied, his face brightening: “Several.”

The holidays mark the midpoint of the nine-month season. League play slows down for Christmas and so do the individual players. Cold weather means muscles have to be warmed up, and night games on winter weekends are not favored by men who come from places where the mercury drops below freezing maybe once every 100 years.

Liniment gets slathered on before the game and brandy takes away the chill after night games. When games are played during the day, the preferred post-game potable is beer. At game’s end, before the sweaty shirts and cleats come off, the players engage in the latest round of the league’s most enduring rivalry--Miller vs. Bud.

After a weekend practice game at McKinna School in Oxnard, a man who showed up with a case of Budweiser was roundly hazed by others with Miller in their hands. The reason: Bud-maker Anheuser-Busch contributed to the campaign of Pete Wilson and other pro-Proposition 187 candidates, and Latino activists have called for a boycott of the company.

The man carrying the Bud tried to defend himself, pointing out that Bud is one of the league’s sponsors, but sentiments against 187 are running so high that he was overwhelmed.

In the end, a compromise was reached: Everyone agreed that 187 is a bad thing and, after a moment’s reflection, they decided to drink the Budweiser last.