Breaking Down Barriers.(Vietnamese-American football player Dat Nguyen)

If any other group of kids had won the Rockport-Fulton youth soccer championship in Texas, the parents of their opponents would surely have applauded. But most of the members of Dat Nguyen's team were the children of Vietnamese refugees. So when the proud victors rose to accept their trophies, the crowd showered them with boos. It was the 1980s, and back then tensions were so high in the small south Texas coastal community that white shrimpers and their Vietnamese competitors sometimes carried rifles into the bay and took potshots at one another from their boats. Dat Nguyen's domination on the soccer field (he scored as many as 10 goals a game) didn't make his team any more popular with the locals. "We weren't wanted in that community," Nguyen recalled. "They wanted to kick us out. There was so much hatred between the two cultures. My parents told me we couldn't trust anybody outside our family."

Nobody in Rockport would dare boo Dat Nguyen now. The hard-headed kid who brawled on the field to defend himself against racist taunts grew up to become the closest thing Texans have to royalty. Nguyen became a 5-foot, 11-inch, 231-pound football star. After leading Rockport-Fulton High School to statewide renown, Nguyen went on to play at Texas A&M where he broke the school record for tackles and in 1998 was named the best defensive player in the country. Last week Nguyen, now 25, finished his second season as a middle linebacker for "America's Team," the Dallas Cowboys. The easy going, quick-to-smile athlete has broken a lot of barriers. He is the first Vietnamese-American ever to play pro football. He was the first Vietnamese-American to start at linebacker for a major university in Texas.

But equally remarkable are the barriers Nguyen has broken down in this tiny, racially divided corner of the United States. Thousands of Vietnamese refugees moved to the gulf coast of Texas in the 1970s, many drawn by the opportunity to make a living doing what they once did in Vietnam: shrimping. According to the U.S. Census, 1,112 Asian- Americans, the vast majority Vietnamese, live among a population of 23,129 in Nguyen's home county. At last count well over 70,000 Vietnamese lived in Texas. Dat Nguyen is the first to have a day named after him in his hometown, and the first to have his picture plastered on a billboard displayed on the way into city limits. "That boy never backed down for nobody," recalls Jimmy Hattenbach, Nguyen's old soccer coach and mentor. "He has helped to mend this community--everybody in this town believes that. When the football team started winning, it really brought the town together. He became a role model."

Nobody would have believed that was possible just a few years ago. Dat Nguyen's family fled Ben Da, a fishing village on South Vietnam's Vung Tau Peninsula, in a fishing boat, the night shells began to rain down on their village in April, 1975. Ho Nguyen, Dat's brother, remembers soldiers firing artillery at their boat from the shore. After brief stops at an Arkansas refugee camp, where Nguyen was born, and in Michigan, the family landed in another war zone. Thousands of Vietnamese shrimpers had already begun new lives in the bays of south Texas. When they began pulling around-the-clock shifts, the locals felt their livelihoods were threatened.

Soon things turned violent. ...