Sports and Nationalism in Latin / o America

H. Fernández L'Hoeste, R. Irwin, J. Poblete, H. Fernández L’Hoeste, R. Irwin, J. Poblete, H. Fernández L'Hoeste

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137518002
• Print ISBN:
  9781137487186
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology

This collection interrogates sports in Latin America as a key terrain in which nation is defined and populations are interpellated through emotionally charged practices (state policy, media representations, and sports play itself by professionals, national teams and amateurs) of inclusion and exclusion.

P A R T I

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Sports and the Construction of Nationalism

C H A P T E R 1

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Football and Patria, Ten Years Later: Sports Nationalism as a Commodity

Pablo Alabarces

Translated by Wendy Gosselin

Fútbol y Patria was my PhD thesis at the University of Brighton. I finished it in December of 2001, in the middle of the Argentine crisis of that year. The dating is literal: I was in the protests in Plaza de Mayo on the night of December 19 with 300 pages under my arm. I presented my thesis on December 21 and it was approved on February 8 of 2002. When my editor proposed its publication as a book, I reviewed the last chapter in order to supplement the analysis of the Korea-Japan World Cup held during the crisis: with that addition, the thesis was published in December of 2002.

I attempted to analyze the relationship between national narratives and soccer during the Argentine twentieth century—that is, during the entire Argentine history of soccer—with different focal points, organized by a complex periodization that combined elements of key sporting events—for example, the World Cups or the appearances of the figure of Diego Maradona—crossed with political history—Peronism or the military dictatorships. I combined methodologies—the analysis of audiovisual texts, historical documentation, journalistic clippings, ethnographic interviews—and disciplines; the book is inscribed within the sociology of culture and of sports, cultural studies, and history. I basically wanted to analyze the relationship between sports, politics, national identity narratives, and mass culture.

The book aimed to discuss various theoretical matters simultaneously. The most immediate one might seem to be the relationship between nationalism and sports, since there were no published texts in Latin America about this topic besides the ones produced by the founders of anthropological studies of soccer such as Roberto Da Matta and Eduardo Archetti, Brazilian and Argentine respectively. In those first years of the new century, I had coordinated a working group called Sport and Society, sponsored by the Latin American Social Science Council (CLACSO), that allowed me to launch a discussion on the subject with colleagues from different countries of the continent, including: Sergio Villena Fiengo, a Bolivian researcher working in Costa Rica; Andrés Dávila, Colombian; Luis Antezana, Bolivian; Fernando Carrión and Jacques Ramírez, Ecuadorians; and Eduardo Santa Cruz, Chilean. This network kept me up to date on the state of sports studies in their countries and allowed us to begin, together, a comparative discussion.¹ One of the first things we learned was that there would be a huge difficulty in establishing a general theory. We carried out a second comparison, in this case with European studies that we knew bibliographically; again it seemed hard to go beyond the obvious statement that sports and national narratives were related. However, the ways in which this relationship varied, according to each specific case, demanded the consideration of multiple variables, among them, the degree of international success, the role of certain exceptional subjects, sports heroes, government involvement in sports, along with the production of national or nationalist narratives, and, finally, the role of mass culture, of course, the great narrator of Latin American sports during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Actually, my real preoccupation was not sports nationalism, but the general theories of nationalism. The starting point was that the invention of “nation”—a concept established by Hobsbawm (1990), one of the few historians of nationalism who paid attention to sports at the time, and further developed in the context of Argentine sports by Archetti (1999)—was produced in multiple spaces: the central, visible, and legitimate ones (the state, the university, and politics), but also those of the peripheries: mass culture, popular practices and consumptions, food, dance, and sports—what Archetti called “the free zones of culture.” Sport constituted, at the same time, a fundamental repertoire of what Michel Billig (1995) called banal nationalism, which proposes that the objects and spaces of our everyday lives are the ones in which nationalism becomes, precisely, quotidian and banal.

In the debate around nationalisms at the time, both culture and economy assumed important roles on the global stage, producing significant consequences for real states and nations—the supposed loss of economic and political sovereignty, of particularisms, and even of the category of national culture itself—as well as for the theory on states and nations. It seemed very difficult to produce new reflections on nationalism in the midst of varied and contradictory phenomena of globalization and tribalization, the deterritorialization of some identity narratives and the microterritorialization of others, migrations and diasporas, the ethnification of some national narrations, and the permeability of some borders and the closure of others (sometimes of the same ones simultaneously). In the Argentine case, there was another Latin American particularity: the country was experiencing, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the consequences of a decade of neoconservatism with the consequent inheritance of its internal fragmentation, the crisis of the unifying narratives, and the central position of the market as a provider of identity narratives. Those were the times of consumers as citizens, paraphrasing the title of García Canclini’s (1994) book. Citizenship—hence, nationality—seemed to be more a consequence of certain symbolic consumptions than of state narratives and political affirmations.²

In the context briefly outlined here, my work found that national narratives had always been, historically, very dependent of the actions of the state. In contrast to other countries of the continent, early Argentine modernity and the weight of its public school system had subordinated mass culture as the great provider of those narratives; furthermore, beginning in the 1950s, the role of Peronism as the provider of the national-popular narrative of the state had been decisive in adding sport as a support of that narration. That is why the important place of sports, particularly soccer, in national narratives had been dependent of those produced by the state until the last two decades of the twentieth century. In those years, three particular circumstances made the Argentine case very special: first, the dictatorships, especially the last one (1976–1983), which had even organized the 1978 World Cup won by the Argentine team; second, the appearance of the exceptional figure of Diego Maradona, who occupied the center of any discussion about soccer and nation from 1977 to 1994; and finally, as I have already mentioned, the neoconservative decade and the withdrawal of the state from everyday life, with the simultaneous social, economic, political, and identitary fragmentation and impoverishment of Argentine society. Therefore, I concluded that the unifying discourse of the nation seemed to be vanishing with its great narrator, the Argentine state, which, at the same time, could not be replaced by a weakened civil society. Upon his retirement, soccer was deprived of its last hero, Maradona, which, had he kept on playing, would have meant the continuity of the great plebeian, national, and popular narration of the nation established by Peronism; Maradona’s absence meant the impossibility for soccer to propose an alternative national narrative, and its tribalization and fragmentation: clubs, micro-territories, local fan organizations. The narrative remained, then, in the hands of the market: commercial advertising of products directly or indirectly related to soccer proliferated in mass culture each time an international event (World Cup, Americas Cup, Olympic Games, etc.) was at hand. Those advertisements insisted, on the contrary, on the permanence of a nationalist narrative that could not be verified as socially effective. The advertisements recuperated the weight of a national-popular tradition and its permanence in the imaginary, transforming it into a desire and a commodity. Media cannot replace the nation nor propose a democratic narrative because they cannot narrate the ruptures and conflicts that a truly democratic society builds. On the contrary, they sustain the absence of conflict as an imaginary horizon that conceals the domination that exists in every class-based society. Thus the market took charge of the boundaries of the nation by replacing existing national-popular discourse with commodities (beer, mobile phones) that could “unite the homeland” behind an epic narrative that was not political but built around sports.

Following Beatriz Sarlo’s (1998) metaphor, my work consisted of postulating soccer as a postmodern cultural machine, that is, as a producer of national narratives. But my conclusion was that the machine was television, not soccer, and that sport was only one of its many shows.

Five and Ten Years Later: New Focal Points

In 2006, the success of Fútbol y Patria led my editor to propose a new revised edition. My initial idea was to do it before the World Cup in Germany, during that same year; I finally postponed the project one more year so it might not seem opportunistic. I extended my analysis of Maradona, who had been twice near death due to his excesses and had transformed himself into a television host. I prophesized, as a joke, not imagining that my prophesy might come true, that in a future edition of the book Maradona would be the coach of the national team and lead it to win a Cup. I also added the analysis of the World Cup in Germany, especially of the advertisements: if in 2002 all of them had to take note of the huge economic, political, and social crisis, four years later they could forget about it, as Argentina had seemingly come out of the crisis, and they could simply keep on projecting a banal, success-oriented, and narcissistic nationalism.

The year 2006 marked Lionel Messi’s first World Cup competition, at only 20 years of age; he was becoming a star in Barcelona and globally, he had won a gold medal in the Olympic Games in Beijing, and his possibilities of becoming Maradona’s “heir” grew rapidly. That is why my conclusions that in 2002 were titled “To Die for Batistuta?” had to be changed to “To Die for Messi?” Two years later, the German edition bore that title: To Die for Messi? (Für Messi sterben?) (Alabarces, 2010).

Since then, I have tried to avoid the subject. I oriented my research towards other matters: fundamentally, the paths of popular culture in neopopulist times. Nevertheless, the 2010 World Cup found me attentive: on one side, the confluence of Maradona’s reappearance and Messi’s stardom and, on the other, the way in which the Argentine state, in its Kirchnerite cycle, claimed new relationships with both soccer and national narratives.

I want, then, to return to the topic, limiting my analysis to textual genres: journalistic articles, advertising, and, once again, audiovisual materials. The continuity of my debate and exchange with Latin American colleagues led me to attempt to enrich my analysis from five and ten years ago by incorporating new data and a new reading approach. I propose to analyze three problematical knots. One of them is new or had been displaced in my original work: gender. The others were already present in Fútbol y patria, but the events of the last two years demand new readings on them: the matter of exceptional subjects and sport heroes (both Messi and Maradona) and the role of the state in the production of new national narratives, with a focus on the relationship between the World Cup and the creation of a new state program, Fútbol para todos (Soccer for Everyone), nationalizating the broadcasting of local soccer.

The Chicas and the Machos

In Fútbol y patria I emphasized a masculine narrative of the nation that was produced, reproduced, conducted, and administered by men, as is the case with most nationalist narratives, especially Argentina’s.

Nevertheless, the analysis cannot avoid the fact that Argentina’s most successful sport in the international context is not a men’s sport: it’s women’s field hockey. Data is pretty clear on this. Argentine soccer obtained two Olympic golden medals, in 2004 and 2008, but, as is well known, Olympic soccer is a second class competition, with age restrictions (23 years old being the maximum possible age) for players. The national team obtained three under-20 cups, once again, a second class tournament limited to juvenile players. Since 1993’s Americas Cup, the men’s national soccer team has not won a major tournament. Meanwhile, women’s field hockey obtained Olympic silver medals in 2000 and 2012 (a year in which the men’s soccer team did not even qualify to compete) and bronze medals in 2004 and 2008, and won two World Cups in 2002 and 2010, earning a third place finish in 2006. They have also won the gold medal in four of the last ten Champions Trophies, a sort of a mini World Cup played every year.

Other men’s sports that are both popular and successful have not attained the same level of success: the men’s rugby team dominated the American competition but has only obtained a bronze medal in the 2007 World Cup, which was celebrated as if it had been gold. Basketball, a sport with great Latin American rivalries (Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela), exploded in the same decade, and the men’s team won second place in the 2002 World Cup, defeating the North American dream team and obtaining a gold medal in the Olympic Games of Athens 2004 and bronze in Beijing 2008. Those international successes are also bigger than soccer’s: but, once again, they cannot match those of the women’s field hockey team, “las chicas” (the girls).

The Argentine use of the word chicas is not usually meant to be insulting, implying not smallness but youth. The coach of the successful Argentine teams, Sergio Cachito Vigil, frequently used the term. In 2000, during the Sydney Olympics, the players decided to rename the team Las Leonas (the lionesses). The choice, despite its inventors’ claim that it was based on the characteristics of strength and courage, echoed the denomination of the national rugby team, Los Pumas.

Despite all their successes, no national narrative could be or has been constructed around the chicas of Argentine hockey. Las Leonas, despite being the Argentine team with the greatest international success, have not been fodder for nationalist arguments. There were some operations of soccerization—for example, in the chants of the followers or in the presence of the players in media—but Las Leonas have not become the objects of a fundamental metonymy in relation to the nation. Their presence in advertising is significant: it is more graphic than televisual because of the fragmentary audiences—both female and from upper middle classes. Even though they share sponsors with soccer, basketball, and rugby, such as Adidas or Visa, there are no televised advertisements referring to the typical nationalist narration of soccer. There is a limited but meaningful exception and it is focused on the best player in history, Luciana Aymar, who has been chosen as the best hockey player in the world in seven of the last ten years by the IHF, a continuity and a consensus that only Lionel Messi could emulate. In a Gatorade ad, a magnificent goal made by Aymar is narrated by the voice of Víctor Hugo Morales (the most important soccer narrator in the country) but describing Maradona’s goal against England in 1986 (his most famous and intense narration). The end of the advertisement claims “Than...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Sports and the Construction of Nationalism
• Part II   Sports as Intranational Mediation
• Part III   Sports and Alterity
• Part IV   Sports as Transnational Mediation
• Notes on Contributors
• Index