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Del football Al Fútbol/ futebol : Historias Argentinas, Brasileras Y Uruguayas En El Siglo XX

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3678069

1527-1900

Gregg Bocketti,

Sports, Gender, and Society

As Diego Armus and Stefan Rinke point out in their introduction to this volume, the long neglect of sports by historians of Latin America has been replaced by a remarkable recent reversal. Del football al fútbol/futebol serves as a useful introduction to the current state of Latin American football scholarship; more importantly, it indicates possibilities for enriching this research.The contributors demonstrate football's utility for understanding subjects that have interested other scholars of Latin American sport, such as the modernization of urban areas, the articulation of national identities, the politics of popular culture, and the character and influence of the mass media. This last is reinforced by the reliance of many contributors on sources produced by the sports and popular press, another way in which the volume resonates with the historiography of football in Latin America and elsewhere. The volume's more significant contribution comes with its authors' willingness to break beyond the field's usual geographies and categories of inquiry. Franco Damián Reyna—who examines the sports press in Córdoba, Argentina—and Coriolano Pereira da Rocha Junior and Fernando Reis do Espírito Santo—who relate football to the modernization of Salvador, Brazil—look outside Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, the cities that have dominated Argentine and Brazilian football scholarship. The scholars suggest that the experiences of the countries' football capitals and their provinces may have been more alike than dissimilar, but in order to test that proposition historians must first examine critically the assumptions that Argentine football was porteño and that Brazilian football was carioca and paulista.Other contributors also challenge scholars' tendency to settle for national histories; indeed, this is one of the volume's main themes. Julio D. Frydenberg and Raanan Rein emphasize the heterogeneity of football in Buenos Aires, Frydenberg by demonstrating football's vital role in forging distinct neighborhood identities and Rein by showing how one club's participation in the Peronist movement helped define both the club and its neighborhood. Several other authors adopt comparative and cross-national approaches, approaches sorely lacking in the historiography of Latin America and its sports. Maurício Drumond highlights essential characteristics of Latin American populism by demonstrating how Juan Perón and Getúlio Vargas used sports to remake their nations. Stefan Rinke and Florencia Facchio depict the 1930 World Cup hosted by Uruguay as a false dawn for globalization, a moment when, to organizers' disappointment, football emphasized the distance between the two sides of the Atlantic. And Camilla Cattarulla demonstrates Latin American football's analytical reach by explaining how the ability and willingness of Italian journalists covering the 1978 World Cup to see clearly Argentina's military regime were complicated by economic and cultural ties between Italy and Argentina and by violent politics at home.There are fewer explicitly comparative and cross-national essays here than one might hope; still, part of the benefit of the collection is that it indicates just how useful that approach might be. For example, Rodolfo Porrini shows that the Uruguayan Left's struggle to deal with football was epitomized by its conflicted responses to the country's successes in international competition in the 1920s and 1930s, and Bernardo Borges Buarque de Hollanda examines Brazilians' experience of globalization by narrating the evolution of the iconic Maracanã stadium, built as a populist monument for the 1950 World Cup and transformed into the embodiment of contemporary commerce for the 2014 competition. This point is emphasized by Luiz Carlos Ribeiro's comments on the “desterritorialização do jogador brasileiro” in his essay on Brazilian social scientists' increasing willingness to challenge nationalist narratives of the sport (p. 195). Football has been an important way that Latin Americans have engaged the world, and this volume serves as a call to future scholars for further comparative work.Finally, several of the essayists pay attention to football beyond the official and professional categories that have received the most scholarly attention. Diego Armus and Pablo Ariel Scharagrodsky are most explicit in this regard, showing that while dominant pedagogies consistently marginalized football in Argentine physical education, students' own interest in the sport meant that it was prevalent in Argentine schools, if informally and unofficially. For her part, Cecilia Nuria Gil Mariño shows that although 1930s Argentine cinema acknowledged the distance between “stadiums and vacant lots,” filmmakers exhibited great faith in football's ability to resolve social differences.Whether due to the availability of sources or to interest, though, most historians continue to focus on formal and professional football in Latin America. It is to be hoped that this volume's indication of the kinds of football histories that remain untold will inspire further work beyond national identities, capital cities, and professional football. Historians have discovered much about Latin American football and, through it, about Latin America; as Armus, Rinke, and their collaborators demonstrate, there is much still to be discovered.