Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sports Culture in Latin American History

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-7288468

1527-1900

Joshua Nadel,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

The past decade has seen the blossoming of sports studies, both in Latin American studies and more globally. David Sheinin's edited volume Sports Culture in Latin American History is one more bloom in the recent historiography, offering an impressively wide array of selections on regional sport and sporting practices. Chapters range in topic from traditional sports such as boxing and football to less common pastimes like gateball and cholita wrestling. The chronology moves from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Still, while apparently disparate in topic and time, all the selections focus on the creation or retention of identity through sport, and this unity of theme makes the book a surprisingly cohesive whole.Much of the credit for this coherence belongs to Laura Podalsky, whose introduction directs readers' attention to key themes in the book. Podalsky identifies three: “the relationship between sports, the state, and national identity”; “an interface between athletic activities” and “discourses about ethnicity, race, and gender”; and sports as ritual (p. 5). All the chapters develop at least two of these themes. For example, Ageeth Sluis's excellent contribution on the “Deco body” in postrevolutionary Mexico, Katya Wesolowski's exploration of the shifting meanings of race and capoeira in Brazil, Carolyne Ryan Larson's examination of travel writers and indigenous physicality in Argentina, and Michael Donoghue's chapter on boxing and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos look at the state, national identity, ethnicity, and gender. Ken Lehman's chapter on cholitas luchadoras raises fascinating questions about ethnicity, gender, and ritual in highland Bolivia. Sheinin's own contribution on Colombian costeño identity shadowboxes with race and region, gender and the state, while Raanan Rein's study of fútbol club Atlanta and Joshua Hotaka Roth's exquisitely crafted article on gateball in Brazil highlight alternative ways to access the organic, bottom-up nature of sporting activities and ethnic identity.Roth's chapter stands out. In examining the relatively young sport of gateball and the interplay between Japanese Brazilian ethnicity, class, and public and private spaces, his work interweaves a number of pressing themes in the study of Brazil. More broadly he uses the sport to propose a new way to consider mestiçagem. Roth notes that sporting mestiçagem has typically been viewed as either integration—the assimilation of a dominant sport—or a form of multiculturalism, with “different groups playing different sports together” (p. 87). He suggests a third way. “If we shift our interpretive register,” he writes, the “freedom” that ethnic minorities feel to play their own games looks like integration (p. 87). In this view, mestiçagem is “the jostling together of distinct groups in a plural society,” and Japanese Brazilians are “integrated because of, rather than in spite of, the persistence of strong ethnic organizations” (p. 102). This reframing of integration has important interpretive possibilities in sports studies and beyond.Rein's “People of the Book or People of the (Foot)ball? On the Pitch with the Fans of Atlanta in Buenos Aires” takes a more traditional view of integration. The chapter is a social and cultural excavation of Jews in Club Atlético Atlanta. Rein suggests that though the “people of the book” never actually controlled the club, it became associated with Jewishness and became a way for Jews to integrate into Argentina through football fandom. The club, in other words, stood for much more than football. It was a gateway to Argentine identity. Similarly, for Sheinin, Kid Pambelé was more than a boxer. While Pambelé's boxing prowess taught Colombians how to win, Sheinin questions what “Pambelé's long slide” meant to a country that experienced “an accompanying slide into violence” (p. 146). This is one of many questions never fully answered: the nature of blackness in Colombia, the commodification of black boxers—and of a “mythified ‘black culture’” more generally—and the nature of costeño identity itself (p. 160). But the chapter's strength lies precisely in its suggestive and interpretive nature rather than the answers that it proffers. So too Larson's impressive “Natural Athletes: Constructing Southern Indigenous Physicality in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina” raises interpretive questions for future consideration. Larson argues that travel writers made claims about indigenous physical prowess that were “appropriated and symbolically incorporated into Argentina's nation-building projects” (p. 62). Though the links between foreign travel writers and Argentine intellectuals could be clearer, the chapter effectively broadens our ideas about physical culture and athletic activity, thereby opening new avenues for research.Individually, the chapters in Sports Culture in Latin American History offer important insight into sporting practices in the region. For that alone the volume stands as an important addition to the scholarship of sport in Latin America. Collectively, however, the theoretical questions that it raises—in terms of how we access physical activity in the historical record and what counts as sport—ring the bell to open a new round for sports studies globally.