Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sports Culture in Latin American History

2015; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jsh/shv110

1527-1897

Rwany Sibaja,

Sports and Physical Education Studies

Scholars of Latin America have increasingly turned their attention to sports over the last two decades. Despite the recent proliferation of scholarship on this topic, edited collections have been few and uneven at best. Sports Culture in Latin American History is a welcome addition to Latin American cultural studies and the subfield of sports history. Edited by David Sheinin, this collection showcases an impressive array of scholarship that employs new and traditional sources to highlight the importance of athletes, who often found themselves at the intersection of discussions about race, gender, nation, civic identity, and public space. In the first chapters, contributions from Michael Donoghue and Ken Lehman highlight the role of combat sports in the articulation of an “authentic” national culture. Donoghue examines the life of Panamanian boxing legend Roberto Durán, whose working-class brand of machismo and defiant attitude towards American imperialism, suited the nationalist project of the military government of Omar Torrijos in the 1970s. Durán's turbulent life and career arc provide Donoghue with the opportunity to add a new wrinkle to literature on “muscular” politics and national identity, which he describes as “redemptive machismo.” Unfortunately, Donoghue spends so much time linking Durán to Torrijos' anti-American populism that he ultimately devalues the redemptive second chapter of Durán's boxing career and his significance during the dictatorship of Manuel Noriega in the 1980s. Lehman's chapter alludes to the connection between athletes and muscular populism in Evo Morales' Bolivia, but it does so without limiting athletes to their roles as symbols of state power and discourse. Instead, he situates cholo (predominantly indigenous or mestizo) culture and practices by examining the stories of female wrestlers. These transgressive luchadoras were at the center of contested notions of gender, ethnicity, national identity, and modernity. Their desire to fight in public spectacles upended family dynamics, redefined ideas about femininity, and provided a more positive—even celebratory—image of the cholo/chola. In highlighting the agency of these wrestlers in polleras (knee-length skirts), this chapter offers readers a nuanced and complex analysis of the ways in which athletes redefined bolivianidad.