Sports in South America: A History 9780300268447

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Introduction: Sports in South American History
Part one: The beginnings of sports
1 Sports from the Margins
2 Colonial Sports
3 The Pioneering British
4 Education
5 Clubs
6 The Sports Business
Part two: The ends of sports
7 Beauty
8 Endurance
9 Controlled Violence
10 Technology
11 International
12 The 1930 World Cup
Epilogue: World Champions, Local Histories
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

SPORTS IN SOUTH AMERICA

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matthew brown

Sports in South America a history

ne w h av en

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&

l o nd o n

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Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Brown. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala and Scala Sans type by Newgen North America Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934257 ISBN 978-0-300-24752-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For Mairi, Morag, Keir, Calum and Natasha

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Sports in South American History

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part one: the beginnings of sports 1 Sports from the Margins 21 2 Colonial Sports 38 3 The Pioneering British 4 Education

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69

5 Clubs 83 6 The Sports Business

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part two: the ends of sports 7 Beauty

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8 Endurance

135

9 Controlled Violence 10 Technology

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162

vii

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c ont ent s

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11 International

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12 The 1930 World Cup

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Epilogue: World Champions, Local Histories Notes 221 Bibliography 243 Index 269

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INTRODUCTION: SPORTS IN SOUTH AMERICAN HISTORY

two balls were brought onto the pitch in the first soccer World Cup Final, held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1930. The two teams, Argentina and Uruguay, had been unable to agree on which ball to use. Both were made of leather: one was slightly bigger than the other and manufactured in England; the other a little heavier and made in Scotland (figure 1). The Belgian referee tossed a coin, and the game began with the Argentinians’ ball. The hosts won the match 4–2 and with it the title of the first World Champions.1 This book tells the story of how sports became important in South America in the period between when the rules of Association Football were being written down in London in 1863 and Uruguay was hosting and winning the international competition organized by the world governing body, FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), in 1930. The British role in all of this—from the balls and the rules to the so-called fathers of football who set up the first matches and leagues—is placed in the context that has until now been lacking. Soccer is only one part of this story: association football’s popularity fed on preexisting sporting cultures across the continent that have long been forgotten or ignored. South American soccer achieved global predominance in the 1920s Olympics and the first World Cup because of long and diverse histories of sports participation and spectatorship. Sport was used by individuals and institutions to improve bodies, nations, and cities and to incorporate

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Figure 1. Footballs used in 1930 World Cup Final. Images reproduced courtesy of The Neville Evans Collection and The Priory Collection and The National Football Museum, Manchester.

immigrant communities into society. Those sports included rowing, throwing, racing, fighting, team games, motorsports and flying. In the 1910s and 1920s states increasingly adopted and supported soccer because of rising awareness of the symbolic potential of this sport in rendering the nation unto itself and projecting its image abroad. As Eric Hobsbawm famously wrote, “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.” Soccer’s rules were not rigid, like those of athletics; they were not untranslatable, like those of cricket. Eleven-a-side teams opened space for all. Players of different appearance all wore the same shirt, in ways that individual sports or submerged swimming costumes could not emulate. Soccer’s rules and the decisions of referees were all interpretable, creating the “constancy of conflict that makes soccer the most satisfying of sports to watch.” The game was all about movement, story, and narrative— just like national histories themselves, as Juan Villoro observed. The fastest, biggest, strongest, smartest, and richest do not always win in soccer, and this fitted with the designs of the authorities in countries like Uruguay that were small, young, and relatively poor compared to European counter-

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parts. International competitions became part of the attraction, a means of showing off republican values of togetherness, strength, skill, and control rather than the divisions and inequalities around class, race, gender, and region that continued to divide the continent’s societies. By 1930 sport in South America had become a space to dream, a place to sketch out the future of city, nation, and masculinity, seeking commonalities within a global context that was explicitly universal and international both within and outside the continent.2

Origin Stories There is a common story about the origins of sports in many parts of South America, a story that this book complicates. It revolves around a British pioneer, sometimes remembered as the Father of Football. This man emerges from the shadows carrying a round ball under one arm. He strides erectly out of the railway sheds or docks toward the center of some waste ground, beckoning others to join him. Indicating with clear arm signals and firm instructions, he outlines what they are about to do. “Play!” he declares. On the dusty patches at the fringes of this space at the edge of a city, other, darker-skinned men pause their work and allow their attention to follow the ball as it is kicked back and forth, chased, and fought for. Attracted by the noise, a bunch of children move closer and start to cheer in time with the action before going home and trying it for themselves. This is the story told of Charles Miller in São Paulo in Brazil, who returned home from private school in Southampton, England, and converted a nation to “the beautiful game.” Versions of it involving Royal Navy sailors are scattered across the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific coasts of South America, in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile. In some places British teachers are commemorated for their role in introducing the game, and some of these are still remembered in the names of clubs, like (Isaac) Newell’s Old Boys in Rosario, Argentina, or cups, like Alexander Watson Hutton in Buenos Aires. These are histories with contemporary relevance for branding: soccer clubs compete to declare themselves the decano, or Old Master, the ones whose ancestors set in train the glorious soccer of today.3

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If you have read a book about South American sports history before, likely it will have begun with a variant of one of these stories before jumping ahead twenty years and getting stuck into the subject of the book, whether Brazil became a football superpower, how Argentina developed its own style of playing soccer, or the biography of a legendary player. Eduardo Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow presented “English invasions” that turned into “Creole football,” “given life by the creative energy of the peoples who discovered it.” Despite some moves toward revising these legends by Josh Nadel in Fútbol! and Pablo Alabarces in his Historia mínima del futbol en América Latina it remains widely accepted that, even if there were some exceptions to the rule, the first sportsmen in South America were British, and that the local population observed with some skepticism before copying them and beating them at their own game. After these English or British origins (words which are often conflated because of the Spanish and Portuguese use of inglés and inglês for British) a national or Creole style of playing is understood to have been developed in deliberate contrast, partly because British social and economic influence was becoming resented as neocolonial. This process has been studied in depth for the history of soccer in Argentina, often relying on the English-language newspapers of the British community in Buenos Aires. It became the catchall interpretation for Latin America as a whole for readers of English because of the work of the renowned sports historian Tony Mason in his Passion of the People? Subsequent English-language accounts, for example, Chris Taylor’s The Beautiful Game, Alex Bellos’s Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round, and Jonathan Wilson’s Angels with Dirty Faces have fleshed out the details of the seemingly inevitable rise of soccer in South America.4 In researching this book I made a conscious decision to move beyond the soccer heartlands of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay that are sometimes taken to represent South America more generally and to immerse myself in the wide panorama of Spanish and Portuguese sources listed in the bibliography. Perhaps more important, I took off the soccer-tinted glasses in order to examine all sports. Rather than tracing the predestined rise of the roundball kicking game to become the twentieth century’s hegemonic form of popular culture in South America, the book explores the roles of sports in the continent’s unique republican histories within global networks shaped

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by the legacies of colonialism. Within this context we come to see how the British origins of sports became an essential starting point for narratives about the meaning of soccer and its representative value for diverse cities, clubs, and nations. As organized sports became part of the everyday lives of hundreds of thousands of people through schools and sociability, the Britishness of soccer’s origins entered sports history, despite the fact that many of the sporting pioneers were in fact Dutch, or German, or North American, or Italian, or born and bred in the places where they taught. From this perspective, places where soccer did not become popular in the 1910s were not somehow failing or absent from the history of sports. They had their own sporting traditions, whether in bullfighting, horse racing, or indigenous sports, which resisted or existed alongside soccer. This book is focused on South America rather than Latin America. The geographical focus on a landmass, rather than on a culturally defined and much disputed cultural region, allows me to bring out the comparative analysis between places without getting lost in the debates about whether the British settlers in Argentina or the Germans in Brazil really count as Latin in the first place. In choosing to locate this history geographically rather than culturally, I have followed the insights of the pioneering Brazilian geographer Gilmar Mascarenhas. The continental focus allows us to keep an eye on sporting histories where soccer did not become dominant, for example in Guyana and Venezuela. I do not rank countries as more or less developed or advanced in their sports seeking rather to explain difference and identify connections, both within and across boundaries. Indeed, Sports in South America reveals the origins of how South America came to be imagined elsewhere in the world as a footballing place as much as a political or geographical area.5 In the decade I have been researching and writing this book there has been a remarkable expansion of new work on the history of sports in South America. Most of it has been published in Spanish or Portuguese, meaning that it is not as well known to Anglophone readers as it should be. South American scholars working in local archives, inspired by the pioneers in the field—like Eduardo Archetti and Pablo Alabarces in Argentina and Tomás Mazzoni, José Luis Leite Lopes and Simoni Lahud Guedes in Brazil—have been concerned with the history of individual cities, clubs, or countries,

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particularly in those two countries. I have tried to bring their findings into dialogue with my own investigations in archives across the continent. Considerable gaps remain in our knowledge due to the unavailability of archives and the unwillingness or incapacity of historians to research in these areas. I rely heavily on the pioneering research of others, including two recent books that work across Latin America: Brenda Elsey’s and Josh Nadel’s Futboleras, a pathbreaking revival of knowledge about women’s participation in sports; and Pablo Alabarces’s Historia mínima, which devotes its first half to establishing dates, names, and authorities for the first soccer matches, clubs, and competitions. This new research means we can now rethink the legendary myths of origin of the British pioneers, the clubs, and the teachers and place them in their specific historical contexts. Sports in South America shows how soccer emerged from vibrant, distinctive sporting cultures that were marked by South American societies’ colonial pasts and by the desire of their leaders to participate in what they saw as a global movement toward human progress.6

Sport in a World on the Move Charles Miller, the renowned Father of Brazilian Football, was born in Brazil in 1874 to a Scottish father and Anglo-Brazilian mother. He was sent to secondary school in Southampton, England. In later photographs he had a mustache and looked like a typical Victorian sportsman. On his return home in 1894 he set about convincing his friends at the São Paulo Athletic Club (SPAC) that they should give the round-ball game a try. They were already playing and organizing cricket matches and athletic tournaments. Miller was an energetic organizer of matches, leagues, and rules. He was also typical of the hundreds of thousands of children who were born along the Atlantic coast of South America in the mid- and late-nineteenth century—in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco as well as São Paulo—whose parents had crossed the Atlantic in search of a better life. Some of these were economic migrants, seeking land and a better standard of living than they had in Italy, Spain, Germany, or the UK. Some were agents of empire, representing diplomatic missions or companies. Many of those migrants were forced, however: Brazil had continued

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to import slaves to work on its coffee and sugar plantations until the midnineteenth century. At the end of the 1800s South American states were seeking to reinvent themselves in the languages of equality, nation, and anti-imperialism. The institution of slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888. The centenaries of independence, from 1910, provided some key moments for reflection about where South America had come from and where its peoples were going. At that time very few people thought of South America as a coherent whole, least of all the Brazilians who were separated from their neighbors by Portuguese rather than Spanish colonization, and the linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical legacies that this brought. The generation of the early 1900s, which included Charles Miller and other children of migrants from Europe and Africa, linked the historical past and national identity to their sporting activities. They embraced the increasing globalization of South America that was being facilitated by technological changes in shipping and print, and ambitiously promoted schemes that would see their cities recognized as being just as cultured or civilized as anywhere in Europe or North America.7 Around 1900 it was increasingly believed that these countries shared some Latin heritage that differentiated them from the United States—as promoted in the works of writers like the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó. This collective spirit or style was understood to include an instinct or aspiration toward beauty, community, and peace in contrast to the materialist and imperialist warmongers to the north. The War of the Triple Alliance of 1864–70, in which Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay combined to destroy the armed forces of Paraguay, and the War of the Pacific of 1879–83 involving Chile, Peru, and Bolivia were the last major military conflicts between South American states for fifty years, until the Chaco war of 1932–35. A generation grew up between these conflicts and threw its energies into sport at a time (for them) of international peace. Sport, education, and politics were intertwined from the beginning. In 1874, the year of Charles Miller’s birth, the president of Argentina was Domingo Sarmiento, the author of a celebrated book subtitled Civilization and Barbarism who promoted the “conquest of the desert” as a means of ridding Argentina of its detrimental indigenous past. Sarmiento was an educator who promoted physical education as a means of creating citizens

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who shared goals, territory, and values, united as “imagined communities,” in Benedict Anderson’s formulation, and through “invented traditions” in Hobsbawm’s phrase. Sarmiento once commented that when he saw Oxford and Cambridge students practicing “their famous rowing and the virile games of cricket and athletics” he finally understood how so few colonists could have maintained British power in India until the arrival of military reinforcements. Sport became central to ideas of order, power, and progress in South American nations.8

What Was and Was Not a Sport? Sports matter because of how they feel and how they look. Influential thinkers such as Friedrich Schiller and Johan Huizinga have argued that the instinct to play creates communities, societies, and art. Play is what humans do when their desire for freedom of movement combines with the beauty of the curve of a ball through the air, the satisfaction of throwing an object at a target, or the joy of creating a new form with others or alone. The historian of sports Allen Guttman conceptualized Play as either Organized Play or Spontaneous Play. Spontaneous Play includes activities like Chase or Catch, which are not formally organized and therefore do not count as sports. Guttman splits Organized Play into Competitive Games, those with rules, teams, and pitches, which are sports, and Non-Competitive Games, which are not. This distinction recognizes the difference between A Game of Soccer, which might be called a Match or a Contest, and a game in which two players try to keep a ball in the air for as long as possible or to kick it back and forth over a river, which would not be a sport no matter how much fun it might be. Finally, in his useful typology, Guttman divides those Competitive Games into Physical Contests, which are sports, and Intellectual Contests, like chess, bridge, and dominoes, which are not. The definition of a sport according to the dominant model of scholarship on the subject, therefore, is a Physical Contest that is a Competitive Game growing out of Organized Play. The many debates which have continued into our own day about what is or is not a sport take place on the fringes of this definition. Are chess and bridge sports because they require physical endurance to sit and con-

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centrate in the same place for a long time? Can gymnastics, surfing, or roller skating be competitive and judged as such, when the ethos of many practitioners is so opposed to competition? The tensions over what sports were for in South America constitute the organizing principle of this book, which traces the establishment and popularization of some sports and the marginalization and decline of others. The histories of sports provide us with new understandings of empires, cultures, ideologies, technologies, and nationalisms.9 Modern sports, fitting Guttman’s definition with their independent, secular governing bodies and their rules of play and conduct, were developing out of play and into formalized, competitive contests at a time of global history when military conflict was requiring greater involvement and obedience from citizens. The recurrence of military vocabulary in sports—training, drilling, attacking, defending, shooting, and so on—is no coincidence. From the 1870s boys in schools around the world were being deliberately molded into citizens who would be able to participate in large, hierarchical armies when required, some as unflappable officers, others as obedient soldiers. This vision of education was developed as part of the Anglican muscular Christianity of the private schools of England like Harrow, Rugby, Eton, Winchester, and Charterhouse, and versions of it were developed in schools across the world, with increasing urgency in the buildup to war in the 1910s. Yet competitive sport as a preparation for war was not a British invention. South American histories show that indigenous sports were also framed by this type of thinking. Existing sporting subcultures were mobilized when ideas about the purpose of civilization and education and the scope of citizenship underwent transformation in the late 1800s.10

Sport and the Civilizing Process Norbert Elias and his collaborator Eric Dunning saw sport and leisure as products and catalysts of the civilizing process, in which societies moved away from violence and toward self-control. Elias found the origins of modern sports in the nobilities of England, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century, whose daily lives moved toward a more controlled, civilized way of doing politics and controlling their lands with less violence. Elias’s

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use of the term civilization rightly raises the hackles of many people today, with all its colonialist, patriarchal implications. Elias’s and Dunning’s writings on the civilising process remain useful to us, however, because they engage with the worldview of elites who thought in these terms. Sports boomed in South America in the late 1800s at the same time racist thinking shaped much public policy. Domingo Sarmiento’s “civilization and barbarism” binary of his 1845 book Facundo fused into the subsequent wave of Social Darwinism, the survival of the fittest, institutionalized racism, and state-led attempts at genocide of people regarded as being inferior. Many of Sarmiento’s contemporaries believed they could and should be on the civilized side of the equation. Others saw barbarism in physical sports and the emotions they could unleash, believing the indigenous, Black, and mixedrace populations of South America to be incapable of controlling their bodies and their emotions sufficiently to play by civilized rules. The promoters of sports were generally liberal, motivated by a desire for progress, sometimes invigorated by foreign examples; others were anxious to emulate and overtake European decadence, though as a whole sportsmen and sportswomen came from a patchwork of political, class, racialized, and gendered identities. Their goals of civilizing South Americans through education, laws, and moderation came together in sport. In the early 1900s these debates began to be shaped by global eugenicist ideologies. As well as promoting the immigration of white settlers and conducting military campaigns against indigenous societies who resisted the nation-states’ incursions on their land, Sarmiento and his successors saw sports as a way of working with and improving their national populations. The goal was to move them away from their traditions and rituals and from vice and toward what they saw as more secular and rational civic virtues. We cannot and should not extract sports from these social and political contexts. There was no unidirectional civilizing process of sporting progress passed from Europe to South America, as Elias speculated there might be. South Americans shaped the globalization of sports. The performances of athletes from marginalized social groups showed how sports could sometimes subvert racism and allow poorer or supposedly weaker people to give imperial or richer societies a bloody nose.11

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Scholars of sport in South America have drawn on Elias’s work. His insistence on the “figurational” combination of societies, individuals, and collective leisure practices, including sports, led him to eschew master narratives of ludic diffusion. Yet historians have sometimes been hesitant to engage with Elias because of the central theme of his work around the civilizing process and his argument that modern sports emerged because of the unique social and economic transformations of eighteenth-century England, the origin and bastion of the rules- and ethics-based restraints on violence that he viewed as civilized. This book reclaims some of Elias’s insights on the urge to control levels of violence in sports in order to understand the historical sporting landscape that existed in mid-nineteenthcentury South America. I do not want to insist that South America was just like England in possessing the social and economic conditions that might give rise to modern sports—that would be ridiculous given the different histories of industrialization and urbanization. Instead, drawing on empirical data unavailable to Elias and those influenced by him, I want to show that if we disentangle “modern” from “originating in Europe,” we can see very similar sporting practices emerging from extremely different social circumstances. We need to reconsider some of the assumptions about what a sport was or is, stripping away the Eurocentric assumptions that underpin the field, which presume the necessity of written rules and self-appointed legitimate governing authorities for a sport to have existed. The games played on the margins of society by indigenous peoples and slave-descended AfroAmericans have been discounted because they lacked written codes and rules. The sports predicated on violence against animals enjoyed by Iberian colonizers, such as cockfighting and bullfighting, were unfavorably compared with supposedly more civilized sports in which physical violence was limited, restrained, or even, as with gymnastics, entirely eliminated. Sports involving animals were categorized as blood sports or simply barbarous. They have in many cases been erased from the history of sport, even though their practitioners, arenas, and traditions went on to influence other practices. By bringing these activities back into the field we can paint a much richer picture.12

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Sources for a Global History of Sport In writing this book I have drawn on the approach to the global history of sports set out by Matthew Taylor and Paul Dietschy, locating the local origins of sports within global and imperial networks. Global history can be a problematic discipline at the best of times, but the development of global sport is one area among many which, by emphasizing the agency of South Americans in global processes, can redress the balance in the historiography which tends to place the region in the position of periphery, margin, or victim. The major challenge is the survival and availability of sources. In the last decade many British newspapers, national and local, have been digitized and catalogued into one platform, making a search for individuals and clubs the matter of a moment rather than years of sleuthing. The digitization of nineteenth-century British newspapers revealed a multiplicity of different footballing codes across the United Kingdom which historians had not previously been able to detect, as demonstrated in the work of Gavin Kitching. These sources do exist for South America, where newspapers dedicated a lot of space to sports in the 1900s. The sources are being digitized in increasing quantities, but at the time of writing in most places they still often must be downloaded individually rather than searched for collectively because the document remains embedded in the portal of the institution that owns it. This means that, while much faster than in the days of analogue-only research, the hunt is still much more time consuming and laborious than working on the history of British, Australian, or North American sports. As well as combing the available online sources I have examined physical sources in national and local archives in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia. If and when all remaining South American newspapers are digitized and integrated into a single platform our knowledge of the diversity of sporting practices that were embraced by men and women will surely expand dramatically. At the moment, these histories are obscured by the way the archival material is preserved. It is slow work, and we rely on the patient labor of scholars trawling through the printed, visual, and written sources in the archives, like artisans, reading against the grain of the text, between the lines, around the words. That is what I have done in researching this book, spending time in archives in Valparaíso, Santiago,

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Lima, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Bogotá, Quito, Guayaquil, and London. I have not aimed to be comprehensive, to enumerate titles won, or to compare which countries’ sporting histories might be best or worst. Fans of particular sports (or clubs or countries) will no doubt be disappointed that they are under-represented. Rather, I have sought to outline patterns and processes, to identify networks and commonalities, using illustrative examples where possible to give a sense of the histories hidden in archives, libraries, and memories.13 Newspapers, where they survive—many exist only in incomplete collections scattered across the world—are a good source for the history of sport, though uneven because of the choices made by editors as to which sports merited what kinds of record. Bullfighting reports, for example, tended to be like those of an art review, around a thousand words long, descriptive and evocative, judging the performances of toreros and the bulls themselves as if they were directors and actors in a play. Cricket was often little more than scorecards, whereas for horse racing the focus was more on the spectators than the on-course action. In the early 1900s the organization of soccer clubs and meetings received a lot of attention in the newspapers, meaning that we frequently learn more about the institutional history than the playing records of early footballers. Thanks to the work of historians and fans seeking to affirm the popular nature of their clubs, we have learned a lot about Black and mixed-race footballers, although we still know relatively little about nonelite practitioners of other sports. This information would ideally be supplemented by records from the clubs themselves. Unfortunately, their own official histories often rely on the same scraps from the newspapers. Clubs who have preserved their archival documents from over a century ago are few and far between—and those willing to share them publicly are rare. My belief in the ability of sports institutions to archive and protect their histories is perhaps more skeptical than it might be because of my experiences conducting the analogue side of the research for this book. I have reluctantly relied on official club and federation histories or on the published work of scholars who have gained privileged access to the archives of clubs to which they belong. I had good luck and bad along the way. Many of the clubs I contacted did not have an archive or at least were not prepared to let an outsider in to look

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at it. Big soccer clubs in the present day are acutely aware that their histories are also their heritage, whose longevity (“established 1896”) is part of the brand, fiercely protected by often self-appointed gatekeepers. Times are changing though. Fluminense and Santos in Brazil now have fantastic stadium tours and museums, as do clubs and federations in Ecuador and Argentina. The National Museum of Football in Uruguay opened in 1975. The National Museum of Football in São Paulo has both an archive and incredible galleries. All these institutions have excellent resources, though the rise of soccer heritage like this may serve to further marginalize the histories of other sports through the expansion of carefully controlled museums, branded coffee-table books, and web histories. My attempts to work around the institutional inequalities of archives and libraries mean that some of the evidence uncovered in this book is the result of patience, guesswork, and the chasing down of apparently lost causes. I have pored over old newspapers, maps, photographs, letters, minutes, magazines, and the statutes of sports clubs in many institutions, to whom I am grateful for opening their doors and digital platforms to me and offering the privilege of handling and working with the documents entrusted to them: these are listed in the bibliography. Financial support for these trips was given by the British Academy, the Banco de la República de Colombia, the Chilean Research Funding Council CONICYT, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Newton Fund, and the University of Bristol. I followed a lot of clues up dead ends, and most lie on the cutting-room floor. Some of them yielded the greatest advances. In Ecuador the scholarship of the historical sociologist Fernando Carrión led me to the newspaper El Grito del Pueblo for a report on the first soccer match in the country’s history, in 1900. I found original editions of the paper in the National Library in Quito, where I leafed through the first two of the three issues that detailed the rules of the game. The third issue was missing, apparently having been ripped out of the bound volume. A librarian advised me to try the Municipal Library of Guayaquil, so I took a nighttime bus over the Andes to the Pacific Ocean. I was permitted to put on plastic gloves and a face mask to consult the missing third issue. On the bus back to Quito I came to understand how crucial this source was and to view my other material in a new light.

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I thank institutions and individuals here, within the explanation of my working practices as a historian rather than separately as an acknowledgment. This book is the result of a collaborative research endeavor which I have shared with many people. My first steps in Brazil were taken with Gloria Lanci on our British Academy–funded project on soccer history and urbanization in São Paulo. We were supported by two dedicated researchers, Bruno Jeuken Souza and Andre Feres. Gloria and I spent a week walking through São Paulo between districts, clubs, and stadia. We walked a lot in cemeteries looking for names of sportsmen and women, a habit I repeated among the gravestones of Valparaíso, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro. My attempts to immerse myself in sporting landscapes have sometimes yielded fruit. In Lima I walked the coastal barrios and happened upon the Shooting Club. In Rio, following clues set by Victor Andrade de Melo and Gilmar Mascarenhas, I roamed the historical center looking (unsuccessfully) for surviving traces of the first velodrome in the Lapa district. In the historical center of Bogotá I played the tejo throwing game with Ingrid Bolívar and colleagues; after a conference in Rio I persuaded the historians Alan Knight and Paulo Drinot to spend a day at the races. Engaging with contemporary sporting environments, whether spectating, walking, or playing, has contributed a hard-to-quantify element to the book. Sport’s social significance corresponds to the value of being and playing with different people according to agreed-upon customs and rules in which a sense of place is supremely important. While researching this book I have swum in the Caribbean Sea off Cartagena de Indias and kicked a ball around dusty pitches in Huancabamba in Andean Peru and in the Sierra Nevada in northern Colombia. In Quito, 2,800 meters above sea level, our children attended a Soccer School run by the municipal police. Numerous colleagues have indulged me. In Santiago I borrowed a bicycle from the historian Susana Gazmuri and cycled halfway up the iconic Farellones climb (one day I will return to get to the top). The morning after giving a talk on the bicentenary of Colombian independence, I got up at dawn and cycled up the Alto de Letras from Manizales. Later, I rode way up above the clouds from Bucaramanga thanks to the head of the local history department, Alfonso Fernández Villa. Back at home in Bristol I’ve been a linesman for Bristol Central F.C. and coach at Packers F.C., become a

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qualified Field Judge measuring discus throws and long jumps for Bristol & West Athletics Club, sat on the sidelines at Bristol Hawks Gym, and run an after-school chess club. The meaning and purposes of sport have come to occupy most of my waking hours and have no doubt seeped into the writing of this book. Carrying out research in these circumstances—irregular archival holdings, a massive and overambitious continental scope, and a tendency to head outside to do sport rather than always be reading about it—has meant that for several years I have been the fortunate beneficiary of the generosity of a large network of family, friends, and scholars who have accompanied me on walks and sent me links, suggestions, and documents. These acts of sharing have been a part of my methodology. Without them, the book would have been impossible. I have relied heavily on the advice, comments, and generosity of people for whom sports history has sat at the fringes of their lives and on fans who have looked kindly on my quest and shared their knowledge and collections. This spirit of shared endeavor is at the center of research in the humanities and should be at the explicit core of the historian’s methodology. The current climate of academic research in the UK is designed to introduce competition between researchers for funding, prestige, and data. This book stands as evidence that teamwork and shared goals among historians and the people they work with can continue to resist this win-at-all-costs mentality. For inspiration, comments on draft chapters, and reading suggestions, in addition to those mentioned on the adventures above, I thank Christopher Abel, Pablo Alabarces, Patricia Anderson, Esteban Ávila, Andrés Baeza, Jane Bateman, Mark Biram, Chris Bolsmann, Andy Brassell, Claire Brewster, Keith Brewster, Ann Brown, Peter Brown, David Brown, Bernardo Buarque de Hollanda, Angélica Bulnes, Courtney Campbell, Flavio de Campos, Gisela Cánepa Koch, Nathan Cardon, Natasha Carver, Tony Collins, Jo Crow, Arismende da Silva, Steffan Davies, Ella Dawson, Jennifer Doyle, Paulo Drinot, Brenda Elsey, John Foot, Nicola Foote, Klaus Gallo, Michael Goebel, David Goldblatt, Rut Bibiana González Echeverry, Daniel Gutiérrez Ardila, Nemesia Hijos, Martin Hurcombe, Alex Jackson, Camillo Jaramillo, Martin Johnes, Charles Jones, Ed King, John King, Colin Lewis, Felipe Lopes, Gilmar Mascarenhas, Tony Mason, William Maranhão, Vic-

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tor Andrade de Melo, Paul Merchant, Carlos Mesa, Mervyn Miller, Nicola Miller, Rory Miller, John Mills, Josh Nadel, Mike O’Mahony, Juan Luis Ossa, Gabriel Paquette, Julia Paulson, María Teresa Pinto Ocampo, Thea Pitman, Eduardo Posada-Carbó, Simon Potter, Andrew Primmer, Ayelén Puyol, Inés Quintero, David Quitián, Matt Rendall, Stefan Rinke, Gina Robinson, David Rock, Francisco Romero-Salvadó, Christian Schwartz, Alan Shave, Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Ana Suarez Vidal, Matthew Taylor, Cesar Torres, Alia Trabucco Zerán, Pete Watson, Jean Williams, Goya Wilson Vásquez, David Wood, and Eduardo Zimmerman.

Under Starter’s Orders In 1918 Uruguay’s most famous writer of the time, Horacio Quiroga, wrote a celebrated story titled “Juan Polti, half-back,” about the Nacional F.C. defender who shot himself one night in the centre-circle of the pitch because he could not face a life without sporting glory. The importance of sport in life and success on the international stage has been carved deep into Uruguay’s national story. Ever since the country’s second World Cup victory in 1950 South America has been renowned as the most soccer-crazy part of the world. “On the pitch,” as the historian Brenda Elsey writes, “unlike in the global economy, South Americans have beaten the industrialized North at its own game.” Sports fields have never been a neutral space for games.14 How sports were played and by whom were essential parts of the ways in which the independent republics of South America were imagined, governed, and represented to the rest of the world. The book is divided in two parts. The first looks at the origins of sports, first among indigenous and Afro-descended peoples, then in settler communities and in educational, club, and commercial settings. The second half explores the ends to which sports were put, focusing on the promotion of beauty, the celebration of endurance, the control of violence, and the harnessing of technology and nationalism. These themes blend into the final chapter, which fits the local, national, regional, and international stories together through analysis of the first FIFA World Cup in 1930. On the pitch, as with the two balls at the final, we see that tensions and conflicts over rules, meanings, and

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identities were not always resolved. Off the pitch, as with the death threats and street violence that followed the final whistle, we see that sport could enflame emotions as well as civilize them. These were the roots of the nationalism, fascism, and commercialism that exploded in the sporting world of the 1930s.15 This book tells the story of the extraordinary growth of sporting cultures at the end of the nineteenth century. Uruguay’s acclaimed victory in the men’s FIFA World Cup in 1930 came not from the intrinsic flair of the South American people or any cultural or racial predisposition toward physical activity. The pages that follow show how diverse preexisting sporting cultures were transformed by migration, by institutions, and by technology. Sports’ meanings were already political before the first footballs arrived in ports across South America, when the first bicycles were ridden, and when the first stopwatches were used to measure athletes’ performances. The political visions of these sporting republics changed through time. They could be inclusive and potentially revolutionary. They drew on long histories that deserve to enter the field of play.

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PART ONE

the beginnings of sports

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1

Sports from the Margins

in 1863, when the football association was formed and its rules approved in London, South America was not a sport-free continent, waiting patiently for the arrival of British educators and their balls, books, and boots. The games people played may not have had international rulebooks, clubhouses, or league tables. They did, however, have agreed-on codes of practice, competition, and physical engagement which fit, and therefore complicate, any model of modern sports that focuses on capitalist societies in Europe and North America and relegates South America to the margins. This chapter demonstrates the existence of diverse sporting cultures across the continent well before Association Football arrived and took root. Too often the theory of diffusion assumes that sports entered empty spaces. This is a colonialist logic: the emptiness of lands assumed to justify settlement, mining, new agricultural practices, and so on. Guttman recognizes that the cultural hegemony of some sports was contested and often resisted. I build on this argument to explore the multiple local sporting practices that existed in South America before the arrival of the sports that have been called modern and that persisted in the historiographical shadow of their popularization. I am therefore following Laura Podalsky’s observation that locally based research can overturn the persistent “notion of Latin American sports as derivative.”1 The modernity or otherwise of sports has been defined by an idea that the modern world developed in Europe and North America and was then

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transferred, diffused, or carried to peripheral areas. The prior sporting practices of South Americans have automatically been categorized as premodern or even barbaric. This is an area where sports history needs to catch up with the work of historians such as Nicola Miller and Michela Coletta, who have shown how this model of modernity as being something that South America received from outside does not stand up when challenged by local histories. What is true for the history of knowledge, clothing, or cities is also the case for sports.2 This chapter and the next on colonial sports raise the question as to the extent to which these prior sporting activities influenced the geographical spread of the adoption of athletics, soccer, or cycling. The diversity, depth, and sophistication of some of the practices described here suggest that we should include the indigenous cultures of South America within any global history of sport. The use of the word sport or desports to describe physical, competitive, and organized play comes from the hunting practices of English, French, and German landowners in the 1700s. As Elias showed, the enjoyment of this presumed sport came from its stylized recreation of the violence of killing animals out of necessity. The codes and rules that governed hunting as sport were crucial to legitimizing the activity and differentiating it from the “uncivilized” killing of animals by other social groups. The evidence from the available sources suggests that this understanding of hunting did not have much traction in South America in the 1800s. European travelers who sought out opportunities to hunt were often disappointed. John Potter Hamilton, the British commissioner to Colombia in the 1820s, wrote a whole book about sport when he got home, at the center of which were his disappointing hunting experiences.3 Travelers like Hamilton recruited local guides and found they had to explain how they wanted hunting to work. The diplomat Hugh de Bonelli, who published a travel account of his time in Bolivia and surrounding lands in 1842, recalled an expedition to hunt “seahorses of an enormous size” (presumably seals or sea lions) thirty kilometers from Callao in Peru. He wrote, “The slaughter of some of them on these occasions is very great, though the sport is not unattended with danger.” The sense that abundant wildlife made blood sports too easy appears frequently. Bonelli shot “a whole mule-load” of pigeons near Arica in “a single day’s sport.” Flor-

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ence Dixie wrote of Patagonia that “the wild duck were too tame to give real good sport, and the snipe-shooting in a country where these birds get up in flocks, is simply a matter of loading and pulling the trigger.” W. H. Hudson’s classic memoir of 1935 The Purple Land reflects at length on the unsatisfactory hunting in Uruguay for colonists who, in “trying to make their dull existence endurable, had tried, they told me, ostrich-hunting, visiting their native neighbours, partridge-shooting, horse-racing, etc; but the partridges were too tame for them, they could never catch the ostriches, the natives didn’t understand them, and they had finally given up all these socalled amusements.”4 In 1924 the first edition of the South American Handbook, published in London, included a twelve-page chapter titled “Sport in South America.” The focus was on game-birds, snipe, ducks, and “the kind of shooting to be enjoyed under the hospitality of British estancieros in Argentina and Uruguay.” It advertised guns, rods, and fishing at Iguazú in Paraguay and in British Guiana, where “the fish is often harpooned by the Indians, but it takes the hook readily.”5 Hunting for sport, however, was not universally admired or understood, even by its practitioners: the ostriches Hudson described were rheas. What did the indigenous peoples who were recruited as guides to these expeditions think of them and the way their methods and motivations were dismissed? They could just as easily be the guides who facilitated the hunt, as they could be the enemies of this type of sport, resisting incursions to their lands. In Argentina Bonelli commented that “a hunting party, well equipped, may bid defiance to any attack from the hostile Indians, and actually revel in sport.” The hostility of local peoples could be part of the exoticism of hunting memoirs. Dixie described chases and kills of rheas, condors, guanaco, and deer. She wrote her hunting memoir, Across Patagonia, with the skin of the puma they killed, nine feet in length, adorning “the floor of the room where I am at present writing.” However, Dixie wrote that she gained a new appreciation of the humanity of her companions on these expeditions: “Everybody, no matter who it is, taking his or her share of work, while the thought of fatigue must be banished.”6 Other wealthy tourists, such as Ianthe Dunbar and John Hills, felt “a pang of disappointment” that “the real Indians should look so ordinary” and in fact were regular, skilled hunters themselves, who killed animals out of necessity and took

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pride in their work. These travelers did not describe indigenous peoples already hunting for sport. In seeking out indigenous sporting practices in the 1800s one needs to look at a different type of source.7 * * * South America was a rural continent in the mid-1800s. Many of its towns and villages were scattered along coasts and rivers; mountain centers like Cuzco in Peru and La Paz in Bolivia were set within large areas occupied by indigenous communities. The vast Amazon rain forest, occupying much of the continental landmass, had a very low population density. Communication within the continent was often maritime and fluvial, and railways were only beginning to be constructed. Mules, oxcarts, and llamas carried bulk haulage. As cities began to grow, especially in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the countries most directly connected to the growing Atlantic economy, indigenous games were often equated with the rural world, and urban, civilized sports developed in opposition to those customs. The practices of rural peoples started to be collected by folklorists and the first anthropologists and displayed in books and museums. Existing ways of playing, spectating, and engaging with games became an object of study for the first time.

Indigenous Sports The surviving sources demonstrate that racing, throwing, and kicking games with their own rules and conventions were found across the continent in the mid-1800s to the extent that we can be confident that many indigenous communities used physical competition as a way of filling their leisure time, establishing status markers, and enjoying themselves, both in the city and the countryside.8 We need to be cautious with these sources. A focus on indigenous physicality could be, as it was for travelers and commentators in late nineteenth-century Argentina, a way of showing how uncontrolled the inhabitants of the provinces were, in comparison to the civilized residents of urban centers, as Carolyne Ryan Larson has argued. Identifying indigenous athleticism and molding it could be a way of incorporating resistant cultures into nation-building projects. Rather than stressing indigenous barbarism, other chroniclers wanted to stress a shared

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heritage between modern and indigenous—the basis for a shared, future, national sporting culture. This was the case for the Mapuche intellectual and political activist Manuel Manquilef (1887–1950), whose collections of traditional games set out their rules and conventions in great detail.9 The persistence of target games like turmequé and tejo in highland Colombia and throwing and hitting ball games like juego de sapo, pelotaris, and frontón elsewhere, indicates sporting cultures involving entertainment, gambling, fun, and physical exertion with commonly agreed rules. Tejo, a targeted-throwing game involving gunpowder, had its roots in the Muisca culture of Andean Boyacá and traveled with migrants to purpose-built halls and leagues in urban centers like Bogotá. During the nineteenth century tejo was routinely seen by urban elites as a barbaric, popular game which led the poor to vice and distracted people from work. Its practice was often linked to consumption of alcohol. In the 1920s it was revived by middleand upper-class bogotanos and reimagined as a national sport for men and women. Specialized pitches were built in the capital’s social clubs, as Gabriel Abello Rodríguez has shown. The reappropriation of tejo is a good example of the ways in which indigenous sports crept into the fringes of the mainstream in the early 1900s, being adapted to new social circumstances and subject to the same political and cultural debates about civilization, hygiene, and modernization as bullfighting, soccer, or athletics. Sports could be used to encourage teamwork and solidarity through official channels, with pelotaris in Ecuador promoted as the national ball game.10 The existence of running races is more a matter of conjecture. The history of the chasquis is relatively well known. They were the long-distance runners who tied the Incan empire together, traveling thousands of kilometers to deliver news and orders across the Andes. We do not know whether the chasquis raced each other or whether records were kept of who was the fastest. Evidence of the number of days taken to complete these distances may have been recorded in the chords and knots of quipus, given that they took place before the adoption of precise mechanical chronometers or lettered record keeping. Given that attempts to translate the surviving Incan quipus are slow going and that many have been destroyed or lost, it would be foolhardy to argue that the quechua-speaking inhabitants of the Andes definitely did not keep records of their times or distances.11

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Figure 2. Claudio Gay, Popular Customs: Game of Chueca (1839). Costumbres populares: juego de la cineca (chueca). Image reproduced thanks to Biblioteca Nacional de Chile https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Claude_Gay#/media/File:Historiadechile00fami_0143.jpg.

A relatively rich record does survive for the ball game called palitun, sometimes also known as palin or chueca, which was practiced by Mapuche in the south of the continent. In the mid-1800s Mapuche territories were on the margins of the increasingly hostile Chilean and Argentinian states. European travelers took great delight in describing the sporting practices they witnessed among Mapuche people. The artist Claudio Gay painted palin competitions. The Bristol-born traveler and ethnographer Richard Latcham, who spent several years in Mapuche territories in the 1880s and 1890s, described the practices as athletic games which occupied an important place as a rite of passage in the education of children. Latcham described the role of the Machi spiritual leader in healing the ball with which the game was to be played, suggesting that spectators believed this would determine the winner. Magic was also used, Latcham stated, to bless sporting equipment as well as the horses before they took part in “the races of which the Araucanians were extremely great fans.” These activities were presumed by Latcham to be primarily spiritual or ritual in nature, meaning that for him they could not be modern sports, which required a secular step away from religious ritual.12

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We need to be careful with the assumption of outsiders like Latcham that indigenous cultures were unchanging and that if they witnessed something today, it must have been happening for half a millennium. With palitun, however, Latcham drew on his friend Manuel Manquilef, a Mapuche intellectual who moved in elite Chilean circles as part of a generation who attempted to accommodate the tensions between the putative Chilean nationstate and Mapuche society. As Jo Crow has shown, Manquilef sought to imagine and reimagine indigenous culture as part of a campaign to secure Mapuche status as fully-fledged citizens. He was educated in an Anglican missionary secondary school and an urban Normal school and qualified as a teacher specializing in gymnastics. Manquilef’s view on the Mapuche sports of the past was colored by his education, politics, and a degree of nostalgia, yet his account of Mapuche sporting practices remains uniquely insightful, much more so than that of Latcham. It shows the existence of sporting practices that had developed with little or no influence from European colonizers. His account of palitun, published in 1914 in a bilingual Spanish–Mapudungun edition, aimed at demonstrating to elite Chileans the similarities they shared with Mapuche people such as himself, in cultural as well as sporting terms. He drew on and transcribed some of his conversations with Machi spiritual leaders who presided over the events. Manquilef was keen for Mapuche practices to be recognized as sports by his Chilean readers—he described palitun as being “like hockey” and “what the Spanish call chueca.” Weyeltun “is swimming” and trümen is “very ancient and powerfully develops physical strengths . . . similar to foot-ball, differing only in the number of players which, instead of eleven, are four per side.” In addition to palitun he detailed chasing games, running races, and teamwork exercises, with accounts of gambling and challenges as being integral to the social context for sport. Manquilef employed the importance of physical sport in Mapuche society to explain the successful resistance to colonial invasion throughout history. He stressed the physical flexibility and endurance as well as the skill and cunning that were learned through sport and put into practice on the battlefield. These were similar in many ways to the rationale among pro-European modernizing elites for adopting sports like soccer, cricket, and gymnastics. Manquilef, like other collectors

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of folkloric sports in the early 1900s, lamented that these traditions were being lost or forgotten and hoped that by documenting them they could be preserved.13 Manquilef’s account of palitun reveals a long history of sporting competition going back at least well into the early 1800s, “the time of our grandparents.” It attests to the role of sport in intercommunity relations—there is banter and pride, status and honor. Sport builds friendship and respect through physical competition. The “great games that brought us together in the friendship that today binds us” would be triggered by a challenge. The pitch was clearly demarcated: “around 100 to 200 paces in length, and 15 to 25 in width.” The ball itself is the symbol of that respect, addressed by one of the captains: “I hope that the two lines which will compete for you will be fast, invincible, so that you can overcome the pullu, soul, from the chest in which my adversary, kaine, friend, is hiding the ball. Run like lightning so that no one can stop you—that is the desire of your masters.” Players’ physical skill is recognized, and game management is present, indicating a high level of technical sophistication. Manquilef’s narrative technique is a mixture of numbered rules, reported action, direct speech, and running score. Spectators are present in large numbers at the side of the field, gambling and taking a full part in goading the opponent’s supporters, while being respectful of the progress of the game and its result. Important also are the conventions regarding self-control. Manquilef’s description emphasizes the ways in which Mapuche participants sought to control their anger or passion, showing their discipline and self-mastery, as per Elias’s later observance of sport and the civilizing process. Many of the surviving records of indigenous sports come from the anthropologists and folklorists of the early 1900s, who, like Manquilef, wanted to prove that South America had its own sports that predated the arrival of modern, codified games. Others sought to use indigenous cultural traditions to explain why they should prosper at soccer and other forms of athletics. In 1915 a Brazilian army colonel commented on a heading game called Zinucati played by the Pareci people in the north of Brazil with a rubber ball. In 1922 some of these players were brought to Rio de Janeiro to display their talents at Fluminense’s stadium. As Gaffney points out, “The incorporation of Zinucati into the space and time of the stadium was a way

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of naturalizing and co-opting the indigenous practice as an expression of national consciousness bridging modern and premodern Brazil.”14 Palitun and zinucati were not isolated examples. The ball games of southern Colombia also recorded a high degree of regulation regarding potential violence and scoring systems. Ecuadorian folklorists named their Andean ball game National Ball and described the simultaneous use of two “big, smooth, and soft” balls on a pitch marked with colored string, ideally in a schoolyard or patio, and with anything between 20 and 60 players divided into two teams. As in the Brazilian bola queimada (similar to the game called dodge-ball in English) players launched the ball at the opposing side, and anyone hit by it was obliged to leave the field. Judges and referees had multiple responsibilities, including taking bets and dispersing winnings. Folklorists emphasized teamwork, collectivism, skill, and resilience as they captured existing forms of sporting entertainment. Rules and conventions were first passed on orally rather than written down and institutionalized in a modern sense. That does not mean they did not exist. Indeed, their existence as physical, organized, competitive games demonstrates that sports were not necessarily tied to Europe or capitalism or technology. Sports in South America existed on their own terms, in particular communities and places, even before the arrival of European or North American innovations.15

Sport and Disorder The games played by indigenous people were categorized as disorderly and unwelcome by local elites. Unofficial ball games were played in many parts of South America, and, as elsewhere, they were restricted by the authorities where they were perceived to have disturbed public order. El Colombiano newspaper, in Guayaquil, Ecuador, reported in 1862 “the annoyance caused by children playing ball games in the city’s streets at advanced hours of the night, the noise they make and the damage they cause when a poorly launched ball crashes against a window.” Ball games with rubber were reported by travelers to the Amazon and the plains. The kicking, throwing, hitting, or catching of a bouncing object were a common form of play in many places. Gisele Franco de Lima Santos has shown how diverse ball and running games of colonial, indigenous, and African origin were

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converted into traditions and used by Brazilian teachers to educate children and to be played on special days. Play and games were central to many festivities. Writing about his attempt to persuade indigenous guides to support his mountain climbing expeditions in the Bolivian Andes, Martin Conway lamented that “the great trouble with the Indians is the intolerable number of holidays and fetes they are accustomed to observe” by which he meant they were too busy to help him climb mountains.16 The festival of Carnival was a focus for sporting activities. Participation included all social groups and entailed leveling social hierarchies, albeit for only a few days a year. Events involved racing, throwing water and flour, and chasing games as well as dance, drink, and public theater. Carnival could be a moment of mischief as well as an enforced period of leisure. It could itself be a game which elite commentators often regretted denegrated into popular upheaval and “barbarous” behavior. Yet despite being tied to the Christian festival of Easter, recreational and sporting activities as part of Carnival feast days cannot be interpreted only as religious or social rituals. Their religious connotations were often forgotten, increasingly triggering media panic in editorials. The “barbarous” game of Entrudo, which involved chasing and throwing balls and water through the streets and homes of Rio de Janeiro at carnival, as Hendrik Kraay has shown, both relaxed gender conventions and heightened awareness of the different understandings of shared public space. The efforts of the authorities to control and limit these activities show how some participants challenged the conventions about what behavior was permitted; and they reveal that the concerns of authorities about rough play in sports in the early 1900s had their origins in the earlier period.17 The transgressive possibilities of the sports that came from the social margins were perhaps most visibly expressed through capoeira, the AfroBrazilian sport that was both repressed and celebrated as a representation of African rhythms and traditions. Capoeira, which is often characterized as a hybrid between martial art, dance, and sport, arrived in Brazil with the slaves brought from West Africa in the 1700s. The joy and freedom found by its practitioners in bodily combat triggered anxiety among colonial rulers, who feared that it might prepare slaves for rebellion. As a performative martial art, capoeira did not have a numerical scoring system, which is

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why it is often categorized outside the field of sports. Yet in the widespread acknowledgment and transmission of codes of conduct, competition, and ritual that have been detected by its historians, capoeira was portrayed in some parts of the country as an authentic expression of male Afro-Brazilian identity. It was most commonly played in quilombo communities of escaped slaves and their descendants in and around former slave plantations, and amongst communities who had migrated from rural areas to cities. Around midcentury the political dimension of capoeira began to be transformed. Public capoeira performance in cities came to “annoy authorities, who seemingly could do nothing to control this expanding lower-class activity and the gang violence associated with it,” especially around days of national festivity. After the War of the Triple Alliance many disgruntled veterans of military service became involved in public capoeira performances on national holidays in Rio de Janeiro. These were usually peaceful and became part of the marking of national events. There was one particularly notorious episode of violence in 1876, though, as Kraay observes, it is difficult to pick out the motivations of the men involved. Soon after, the Rio de Janeiro chief of police called capoeira “a moral disease.” After the abolition of slavery in 1888 republican governments seized on the memory of incidents like this and repressed capoeira, seeing it as violent, dangerous, and uncivilized. Capoeira survived despite repression, prison, and even exile for its practitioners. Not until the 1920s did the athleticism of capoeira began to be seen as feeding into Black Brazilian footballers’ talents and leaning toward a reappraisal of Brazilian national identity that valued exoticized African rhythm and sensuality. By then, however, capoeira had been thoroughly excluded from the growing numbers of sports that were encouraged and promoted, even though the bodily characteristics and sense of community it encouraged were precisely those the state now sought to develop.18

The Horse and the Civilizing of Sport The horse was an important product of the Columbian Exchange, and thousands of horses roamed the continent’s plains. Horse racing and horse games are excellent examples of the ways South American sports transformed in the face of urbanization, migration, and cultural change. Horse

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sports developed in differing ways through the 1800s among indigenous communities like the Mapuche, within groups of gauchos and llaneros on the pampas and llanos, and separately among urban elites linked to political power. Riding was a pleasure for people with access to horses. The British representative in Venezuela Sir Robert Ker Porter had “a customary ride before breakfast along the riverbanks . . . two delicious hours in the fresh, damp air,” and even the rather sedentary Brazilian emperor Pedro II remarked after a ride that “the exercise did me a lot of good.”19 The ways in which horses were raced, saddled, fed, and prepared varied widely and were often loosely referred to later as creole to distinguish them from European models. Skilled games performed on horseback which fit the bill as sports were widely reported on the pampas of southern Argentina and Chile and the llanos of Colombia and Venezuela. Travelers marveled at the controlled violence that suffused these competitions. Horsemanship was highly valued, and success in games like pato won praise for the men who showed control of themselves and their horse and could physically dominate their opponents while displaying technique with sling and ball.20 Controlled physical force while maintaining harmony with nature was prized. Charles Darwin, observing these sports in the 1830s, recounted an occasion when he got himself tied up in the bolas, and some gauchos laughed at him: “They cried out that they had seen every kind of animal caught, but had never before seen a man caught by himself.” Praise for the gauchos’ skilled horsemanship was contrasted with the inability of outsiders to learn or emulate it in the writings of the “Scottish gaucho” R. B. Cunninghame Graham, one of the main chroniclers of South American horse sports. For Cunninghame Graham, “[Horse]-racing and cock-fights were the national sports, the former for short distances, two or three furlongs, with innumerable false starts, all of set purpose and with the object of tiring out the weaker horse before the race began.” He observed that while it might have seemed that violence and deceit were “reckoned fair and part of racing,” there were still codes of honor that were adhered to: “And nothing might be done except what wont and immemorial use had rendered sanctified.”21 On the Argentinian pampa the horse “was omnipresent—it seemed like everyone owned a horse,” and the sporting culture was correspondingly

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democratic and inclusive. The population had more than twenty times the number of horses per capita than in England or France in the mid-1800s. The rules and codes of honor of the carreras criollas were passed down through oral culture. There were no written codes, and gambling took place on the fringes, with bets agreed on between parties rather than through intermediaries: which means they seldom reached the archives. For Cunninghame Graham and folklorists of the early 1900s the carreras criollas were an expression of authentic gaucho culture, set apart from the Europeanized horseracing of Jockey Clubs and hippodromes that were springing up in towns and cities. The history of South American horse racing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, therefore, came to encompass a range of styles, regulations, customs, and audiences. A long report of “The Races” at the annual spring meeting at Viña del Mar in central Chile, in 1882, gives a sense of the size and popularity of horse race meetings and the combination of competition, spectatorship, and display they involved. Regular steam trains conveyed fifteen thousand people to the event. The writer in the English-language Chilian Times newspaper glowed that “the day was everything that could have been desired, the weather being simply delightful. The running, generally, was excellent, and the ground was in splendid condition.” The spectating public, accompanied by “guitar and harp” sang and was full of joy, yet “there was no pushing or struggling to obtain places, no horse-play, no shouting or yelling, and it was pleasant to observe the willingness and alacrity with which everyone from the highest to the lowest complied with the wishes of the stewards of the course. Fifty soldiers were detailed to police duty at different places on the railway, and there were a few on the ground, but, we believe, their services were hardly required at all.” The Chilean capacity to organize, attend, and enjoy sports in good order was compared favorably with civilized people elsewhere in the world.22

Indigenous Athletes on Display The tensions between sports and folklore, nations imagined in racial terms and indigenous communities on the margins of national territories are brought into perspective by the Anthropological Exhibition that accompanied the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, USA. It is quite a well-known

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anecdote that indigenous peoples from across North America, Asia, and the Philippines were brought to display their folkloric traditions for the viewing public. These indigenous athletes were kept physically separate and, by definition, were excluded from the international Olympics. However, the recent reconsideration of the 1904 games gives a good sense of how their participation can be viewed through different frames, one of which claims a sporting history categorized by joy and laughter against the monocultural seriousness of the Olympic movement.23 Five South American athletes took part at St Louis, named as members of the Tehuelche community and often rendered simply as Patagonians. In the official account they were named as Bonifacio, Casimiro, Colojo, Sinshek, and Chief Guechico (figure 3). How they were recruited to the

Figure 3. The Tehuelche participants at the Olympic Games in St. Louis, 1904, labeled the Patagonian Giants. Image reproduced thanks to the Missouri History Museum, N28378 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:%22Patagonian_Giants.%22_(Tehuelche_Indians_of_Southern_Argentina _from_the_Department_of_Anthropology_at_the_1904_World%27s_Fair.jpg.

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games is not known, though it seems that the perceived muscular strength of these “giants” was a big attraction for the organizers, who looked to test peoples against one another. The reports of the competitions staged on 12 August 1904 reveal the results of the Tehuelche participants. Bonifacio was third in the 100-yard sprint in 13.6 seconds behind a Sioux, George Mentz. Casimiro came in fourth in the shot put, throwing 30 feet 5 inches compared to the winner, another Sioux, William Dietz, with 33 feet 10 inches. In other events they were more successful. The Tehuelche team won the tug-of-war against a team of “Asians.” They were victorious in the throwing of a 56-pound weight, and in the bola-throwing competition the Tehuelches occupied the top three positions (possibly because no one else competed). The challenge to see who could hit a telegraph pole from 25 feet with a baseball was won by Chief Guechico. The historian Nancy Parezo wryly notes that he “was given an American flag donated by the Filipino commissioners, rather than a gold medal and cup such as winners in the regular Olympics received.”24 The conditions under which the Tehuelche athletes participated in these Olympic events left a lot to be desired. They did not have time to train or prepare for the events and were presented as much as a curiosity as anything else. They were not able to compete directly against official US or European athletes. Nevertheless, they left their mark on the event and went on to work in Wild West Shows displaying their rope and horse skills, competing successfully against cowboys from Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Montana and impressing observers with their “strength, alertness and general physical condition.”25 What was at issue here was a question of defining sports, athletes, and their relationship to standardized norms. Even Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern games, observed that these athletes were playing outside the mainstream rules being developed for sports. He wrote, “If one wishes to extend to natives in colonized countries what we boldly call the benefits of ‘athletic civilization,’ they must be made to enter into the broad athletic system with codified regulations and comparative results, which is the necessary basis of that civilization.” Placing indigenous sports on the margins of the Olympics—and of history—was and is still a political decision.26

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* * * Palitun, tejo, zinucati, pato, carreras criollas, capoeira, and bola throwing are clear evidence that many South Americans were participating in activities that fulfill the criteria set out by Guttman of organized, competitive, physical sports, around both 1900 and long before then. The questions about whether these activities and the people that performed them were civilized or modern were part of the struggle to control what people did with their bodies and what local, national, and gendered meanings could be assigned to them. As Roy Hora acidly notes about Argentina, “Those who affirm that soccer was the first sport able to excite the whole country only demonstrate their laziness at not having asked what came before it.” Gilmar Mascarenhas went further: “Most Brazilians would be disconcerted to think that Brazil existed before soccer, which they have come to see as an intrinsically natural and eternal part of their lives.” But before soccer there were many sports, spectacles, and entertainments. Horse racing is the most obvious example of how preexisting sporting practices were sucked into a commercialized sports industry with professional practitioners and enclosed spaces for sporting performances. Hora has shown how the ability to read the sport, and profit from it through betting, meant that the hippodrome became a unique space for popular sociability in the 1900s. There, elite and working-class fans mixed and came to respect one another’s knowledge. Among the legacies of horse sports on the pampas was the residual sense that the Argentinian nation might be better understood through its representation on the sports field than anywhere else. Apart from Argentinian horse sports and Brazilian capoeira, we know much less than we might about the survival and transformations of these games. This task awaits future historians and anthropologists. The clues as to how the indigenous past was mobilized into the sporting future are out there, for example, in the names of soccer teams of the early 1900s. Most famously, in 1925 David Arellano and friends named their new club Colo Colo after the celebrated sixteenth-century Mapuche leader who had fought against Spanish colonizers. Other examples include Club Guaraní in Asunción, Paraguay, founded in 1903, and Guarani in Campinas, Brazil, from 1911. Sport Club Inca was established in the Rimac district of Lima in 1912. There was more going on

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here than just the appropriation of indigenous culture by sports clubs, however. Colo Colo was a character in Alonso de Ercilla’s epic retelling of the Spanish conquest of Chile. The Campinas Guarani was named after a local composer’s opera about the Portuguese colonization of Brazil, Il Guarany, and the Rimac club was set up by workers at the Inca Cotton Mill.27 South America was far from a blank sporting canvas when the British pioneers arrived. The sports of the past, whether pato, bolas, or palitun, had already been pushed to the margins of the sporting landscape by the sports of the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers.28

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Colonial Sports

in the sports promoted by the spanish and Portuguese authorities, animals were often the protagonists. The prevalence of horse sports in rural areas from Venezuela to Patagonia is an example. But the sports most tightly linked in popular imaginations to the Hispanic legacy were bullfighting and cockfighting. The successes of nineteenth-century campaigns against cruelty to animals have fostered resistance to the inclusion of these activities in a historical study of sports in South America. Complaints about the violence inherent in these sports can be linked to legends of Spanish cruelty. Nevertheless, they were organized and competitive, and they were governed by clearly understood rules and regulations. By incorporating an analysis of where they took place, who took part, and how they were understood we can gain an understanding of the contested sporting environments that characterized many South American urban settlements in the 1800s.

Animal Sports: Cockfighting Cockfighting was a feature of many South American towns and villages that is recorded in any number of sources. It took place on ceremonial holidays like Saints Days and Easter, although the descriptions of the buildings used suggest that people had enough spare or leisure time to enjoy watching and gambling more regularly than this. Cockfighting was a spectator sport, and it drew big audiences, both rural and urban. People participated

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in the action by gambling on the result, being passionate about the proceedings, and becoming fans of specific protagonists. The traveler Juan Jacobo Tschudi wrote in the 1840s that the coliseum in the Santa Catalina square in Lima was “a very handsome structure . . . the finest circus for cockfighting in all the world.” Through the 1800s the rules and practices of cockfighting were developed, with clearer distinctions between ticket types and spectator facilities. Lima’s new coliseum, for example, had nine levels of seating around a circular amphitheatre.1 Fear of public displays of excitement and anxiety over the morality of public gambling led the municipal authorities in Lima to repeatedly ban cockfighting after independence. Well before the arrival of codified sports like soccer and cricket the local powers were already engaging with the question of how appropriate these activities were in a civilized society. As Norbert Elias posed the question, “Was the difference between the game-contests that people enjoyed prior to the eighteenth century and those which they enjoyed in the age of the industrial revolution simply a question of a higher or lower degree of crudeness? Was it due to the fact that the latter were less savage, that they were more ‘civilized’? And is that one of the distinguishing characteristics of ‘sport’?”2 Many people came to see cockfighting in these terms during the 1800s, and the restrictions can be taken as evidence of a civilizing process that sought to limit displays of public enjoyment of barbaric violence against animals. Nevertheless, events still were publicly announced by performers and singers in the streets, and entry fees were still charged and paid. Strict rules and conventions around the fights were followed, passions were aroused, and betting remained “fantastic.” Its cross-class popularity and profitability for the state through taxes tended to mean that cockfighting always reemerged after a ban. In 1860 Manuel Atanasio Fuentes described a circular Lima coliseum seating eight hundred spectators (“though 1,200 would squeeze in for significant matches”), overseen by a referee “being paid four pesos for an afternoon’s work.” The turnover for a year from entrance fees and gambling profits made by the owners was estimated at around one hundred thousand pesos, a considerable amount.3 Cockfighting was a popular recreation in many places regardless of attempts to prohibit or professionalize it, and chroniclers recalled the

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emotional tumult engendered by what Geertz called this “masculine symbol par excellence.” A pair of US scientists, H. M. and P. V. N. Myers, described cockfighting in Venezuela in 1867. Sundays, they observed, were dedicated to sports, and cockfighting was first among them. In Caracas they recorded that “the card and billiard tables are frequented, but the cockfights and bull-fights call together the greatest crowds.” Traveling up the Apure river, the travelers found cockfighting wherever they went: “At 10am we stopped for breakfast and a cockfight. A feathered gamester constitutes an essential accompaniment of the llanero voyager, and, on every opportunity that presented itself, our patron trotted out his bird for a contest.” They reached the town of Urbana on a day of festivity and arrived at the mayor’s house, where they “found a cockfight in full blast as a prelude to the dinner,” with the mayor “personally attending upon his feathered representative in the contest.” This Sunday entertainment was critiqued as uncivilized by its opponents, as it was elsewhere by both Protestant travelers and local liberal modernizers. In La Paz, Bolivia, a writer in 1890 who may have been a traveler or a local resident, thought that cockfighting showed that “Bolivia is a pretty uncivilized country.” Sundays were characterized by “loose public disorder,” “the day to publicly exhibit our vices—swearing, degrading activities, scandalous fighting.”4 By the turn of the century, sports were becoming more closely linked to modernizing efforts of civilization, social order, and progress. Cockfighting was therefore criticized as unworthy of being called a sport, such was its violence and barbarity, alongside other cruel sports that appear in press reports such as “coating rats in kerosene and watching them race in the streets” and “cats on rockets.”5 Cockfighting attracted great devotion from its followers, however, and the birds were recognized as representing their owners, who competed for social status in front of popular audiences, just like racehorse owners did in the higher echelons of society. Individual birds had their own fans and were described as such in the media: an advertisement from 1901 in El Telegrafo in Quito proclaimed that “the opening of a new building specifically designed for cockfighting” is announced for “aficionados in particular, and for the general public too.” Spectators admired the best fighters according to accepted criteria, judging them by their speed, skill, and technique. A Venezuelan magazine told the story of a man

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who loved the thrill of watching cockfighting for the sense of fraternity it created between men: “In here no one is worth more than anyone else,” he remarked. In a common refrain he was said to be more content when getting emotional watching cockfighting than he was while spending time with his wife.6 As cities and leisure tastes changed, older fans began to be nostalgic for their youthful activities. The memoirs written by fans and owners cherished the way cockfighting had brought disparate social groups together in a common pursuit. One of these, by the Ecuadorian costumbrista writer Alfonso García Muñoz, recalled his love of “emotive spectacles in which drama and courage make your heart beat faster.” “I love everything that makes my nerves flutter and my heart race,” he wrote. He described the spectators at the cockfighting ring in the La Tola district of Quito that he attended in his youth: People are agitated, constantly twitching and moving. The most dedicated fans, those who sacrifice most for love of this sport, are in the numbered seats. There is a real mixture of people united around just one goal: winning. The wealthy man who keeps a hand on the wad of notes in his pocket ready to throw them into the arena in blind, committed support of an ashcolored cock. The lawyer who forgets all about the trials and the intricacies of the law, as he dedicates his attention to the attacks of a noisy little cock who circumstance has turned aggressive. The retired soldier who is glued to the struggle, remembering his own heroics . . . in the independence wars. The public clerk who in these moments forgets about justice for all, and focuses only on every blow that his favorite cock lands on its furious opponent. The captain of industry who bets without caring if he loses, because he knows that his clients will pay. The dentist who is prevented from offering his professional services to the injured birds because, happily, cocks don”t have teeth. The middle-class men who risk all their savings, begging God that their bird will win. The old colonels who grumble about crazy bets, nervous and excited, cheering on their cocks—Hit it in the eye! Harder! That’s it, you bandit! Brilliant!—all while they seek takers for their bets. All these anxious faces, their eyes dilating at the urging of their emotions. They shout, they gesticulate, and they go mad.7

García Muñoz’s reminiscences show that cockfighting was experienced as a form of art as well as a competitive sport and a space for gambling.

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The narrative descriptions evoke the spectacle and the surroundings, and they rejoice in the beauty of the birds’ movements, whether in attack or in defense. The artistry of the event was a common theme of reports. In Montevideo in 1894 the illustrated magazine La Ilustración Sud-Americana published a large painting of a cockfight by the Argentinian artist Bosco. A whole column was dedicated to a description of the beauty of the engagement and the arcs of movement, culminating in one bird “cowering and trembling in a corner, seeming to implore the victor’s pity though it remains unmoved. It raises its wings, wheezes, shrieks and pursues its rival which can no longer defend itself, and would be fortunate now to be saved from death.” According to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, cockfighting produced a “loosened animality” among both its participants and spectators. It was precisely this response that triggered strong attachment in its followers and visceral condemnation in its opponents, leading to a gradual marginalization in towns and cities even as it survived in rural areas.8

Animal Sports: Bull Sports Even more than cockfighting, bull sports were closely linked to the colonial past. They were a central part of Hispanic urban society in the Americas, a focus for social life away from the Church. Bull-running and rodeo-based diversions were countryside activities throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming more established in cities as purpose-built bull rings were erected to replace the improvised use of central squares. Surviving historical sources center on the more regulated corridas de toros in cities, though rural traditions persisted, above all in the Andes. The most celebrated written record of Andean indigenous bull sports is the novel Yawar Fiesta by José María Argüedas, published in 1941, which depicts the event as a platform for competition between Hispanic and indigenous traditions in which different authorities wrestle to assert their control of the event. Bull sports were always contentious and politicized pastimes. Carlos III (who reigned in 1759–88) prohibited them as part of the Bourbon Reforms in Spain’s American colonies. After independence, bull sports became a marker of a country’s relationship with its Iberian heritage. The legacy of this practice is the continued debate over the prohibition of bull sports in

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Andean countries and the refusal to count them as sports, even in historical studies like this one. Bullfighting was a transnational practice, requiring bulls and bullfighters to cross geographical barriers and national frontiers to connect with local breeding centers and spectators. Bullfight promoters from Guayaquil climbed the Andes, for example to Riobamba, to scout, buy, and collect bulls. Bullfight entrepreneurs informed themselves about comparable spectacles in neighboring countries and planned tours and events accordingly. Bull sports were most popular in the Andes, and examples abound from Peru. The Plaza de Acho in viceregal Lima dated from 1766. Where bullfighting persisted, it was assertively promoted and contested on political as well as sporting grounds. In midcentury Cuzco, in Andean Peru, bullrings were adorned with floral arrangements in honor of the nation and its military and political leader Agustín Gamarra (1785–1841). Gamarra was a mestizo leader with a remarkably wide range of supporters who watched bulls as an art form as well as entertainment. Bullfighting became a touchstone for identity politics, as it symbolized the colonial past and the Hispanic present, part of what the historian Chris Schmidt-Nowara called the “struggle to define and to defend symbols and heroes that they considered authentically national.” Liberals, Conservatives, Regenerators, Reformers all had a view on bullfighting. Judged against the highly ritualized, ideal, civilized bullfight that was imagined taking place in Spain, spectators were often disappointed. In 1911 in Bogotá the San Diego Bull-Circus was destroyed by fans, just seven years after its construction, in protest of the bad performance of a bullfighter called Valentín.9 By the 1920s bullfighting was a part of an increasingly complicated urban sporting landscape in a few holdouts—mainly in the indigenous communities of the highland Andes of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, in the national bullrings in their capital cities, and in provincial towns like Arequipa, Trujillo and Ica. The South American Handbook of 1924 dedicated two whole pages to “the bullfight in Peru,” contrasting it with the limited sporting entertainment available elsewhere. In Lima in summer “famous bullfighters from Spain are engaged, often at salaries as high as those of the stars of the music-hall or cinema.” The kill was “a loathsome spectacle to those unaccustomed to the sight, but the aficionado will tell you that it is

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absolutely necessary for the success of the bullfight, as some of the superfluous strength of the bull is thus expended, and its temper worked up and its head down.” The link to its past as the seat of the viceroyalty supported the persistence of bullfighting in Peru, just as it shaped the resistance to the sport.10 Bullfighting was enjoyed by many as an example of the persisting link to Spanish culture. As the Ecuadorian poet J. Guillermo Córdoba put it in 1933, an afternoon at the bullring was “the genuine festival of the Spanish race.” When conservative politicians with links to the Catholic Church achieved power in these areas they often supported bullfighting through legislation or their own attendance. Spectatorship at the bullring became a way of asserting the Hispanic legacy that some held to bolster the legitimacy of national governments. In 1931 the Peruvian politician Víctor Haya de la Torre gave a celebrated speech in Lima’s bullring, setting out his ideas for national reform within the very epitome of its colonial legacy.11 Bull sports took place in town and village squares in many rural areas. Only a minority required the death of the bull, which was, after all, a valuable commodity. By the 1890s, for example, Venezuela’s press was lamenting that bull racing—coleadas de toros—was being practiced only in the countryside, where it survived as an amalgam of colonial legacy and plains tradition. In rural areas bull sports were part of the rhythms of holidays and festivals, though these fused with new communications infrastructure too. For example, in 1897 special express trains were contracted to meet scheduled steamship services and run from Guayaquil to Milagro for bullfights on the day of the Fiesta de la Purísima. Four famous bulls brought from Machacha were accompanied, for the pleasure of visiting tourists from Guayaquil, by “the exhibition of a lizard from last century, the display of a wild woman found in the mountains of Sicta and Huayama, by splendid horse races and magnificent cocks fighting.” This was a spectacular schedule of sporting entertainment. Standards of technique and time limits for the event’s several sections were developed to the extent that urban bullfighting fitted in with the tests for modern sports: organized, competitive, and physical.12 In some places bull sports experienced a resurgence in the early twentieth century, as urbanizing populations looked to continue their rural

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patterns of spectatorship in the cities. Freestanding bullrings—Plazas de Toros—were inaugurated in Bogotá in 1890, in Quito in 1917, and in Caracas in 1919. The administrations that promoted the construction of these venues tended to be conservative, looking to regenerate and promote a modern version of Hispanic tradition against Liberal, secular reformers. Cunninghame Graham’s account of child bullfighters performing in Caracas in 1925 describes the “taurine intelligentsia of Caracas” in a unique “vast amphitheatre.” He praised the authenticity of the spectacle, “more primitive and less rehearsed than it would have been in Spain.” The bullfighters “stood in old cast-off clothes, dirty and stained, holding their cloaks that looked like window curtains, no longer serviceable, without a jot of pride. Still in themselves, they were all active, sinewy-looking youths, but evidently country herdsmen, acting as bull-fighters for the occasion, and ill at ease on foot, under the public gaze.”13 Urban bullfights were politicized spectacles. The ability to organize, enact, and enjoy a bullfight was viewed by some, like Cunninghame Graham, as a mark of a civilized, Hispanic society. Bullfight journalists, the continent’s first sportswriters, judged the entertainment against an ideal European standard they may or may not have witnessed themselves in Spain, which Allan Guttman calls the tradition that “most successfully naturalized its concessions to modernity.” Bullfighting correctly according to style and tradition became a performance of Spanish custom, against which local societies judged themselves. New regulations were introduced in Peru in 1898 and 1919 to raise the standard of the performance, including the precision and speed of the bull’s death. It was hoped that local practitioners would emulate the style of the Spanish bullfighters who crossed the Atlantic. A Spanish bullfighter was ridiculed in Yawar Fiesta for not meeting these expectations.14 Just as some groups saw bull sports as an Iberian yardstick toward which their societies should aspire, others reacted against them. The Spanishness of bull sports became a reason for eradicating rather than cherishing them. In Brazil bull spectacles were already heavily regulated, following a longstanding Portuguese tradition since João I in the early 1400s to remove the killing of the bull from the entertainment. A major bull-sport event was organized in Rio de Janeiro’s Tiradentes square to mark the monarch’s

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coronation in 1818, though Melo notes that the sport’s popularity fell into decline with independence from Portugal in 1822. Bull spectacles involving running and chasing but no death persisted in rural areas, and attempts to appeal to urban spectators were made: in 1879, for example, a circus company promoted “Night-time Bull-fighting” in Rio de Janeiro after “great success” in Lisbon and Madrid.15 The most successful politicized attacks on bull sports were in Argentina and Chile. In Buenos Aires the Plaza de Toros was built in 1801 in the Retiro district on the orders of the new viceroy and was used by local militia under Santiago de Liniers to resist the British invasion of 1806. The British forces reduced it to ruins in the Battle of El Retiro. The government of Martín Pueyrredón banned bullfighting and demolished the ruins in 1819. The practice continued in some places, however, and Martín Rodríguez’s administration decreed prohibition in Buenos Aires again in 1822. Bullfighting in Chile was prohibited in 1823 by the new government under Ramón Freire, who banned cockfighting and slavery at the same time in the name of what he explicitly called civilization. Corridas went on in rural areas alongside rodeos and horse sports but never recovered as an urban sport. Bullfighting was formally prohibited in Argentina by law in 1891 under the liberal presidency of Carlos Pellegrini. In Uruguay bullfighting was prohibited by republican governments seeking to differentiate themselves from what they saw as a retrograde Hispanic past.16 In Quito President García Moreno (1821–75) remodeled the Plaza Mayor so as to render it “unfit as a place for -fights, or rather bull-baitings,” though these practices still took place nearby. In provincial towns the tone of bullfight reports was often one of disappointment that local bullrings failed to meet standards set in the capital. An Ecuadorian writer wrote to the authorities in 1900 requesting significant change to the events, including more sand and better announcements, to avoid the confusion that often affected gamblers. “Semi-savage spectacles” were derided, and the fate of poor animals decried, such as on one example “when the bulls, with backs scattered with darts, bleeding out of all its wounds and without the strength to attack, circled around the ring in a cruel, slow agony as the spectators laughed.”17 * * *

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The colonial origins and inherent violence of cock and bull sports have led to the erasure of these activities from most South American sports history. Yet these sports never entirely disappeared, remaining as a touchstone for sporting spectatorship, business, and identities. The performance of corridas de toros in public squares and then in purpose-built urban bullrings shaped the cultures of spectatorship that developed across South America in the nineteenth century. Especially in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia plazas de toros remained and even grew through the 1900s. Everywhere, these large public arenas with variable entrance pricing—the famed sun and shade that persisted into the twentieth-century distinction between stands and terraces in football stadia—were a reference point for debates about the nature of sports, entertainments, the artistic standards against which they should be judged, and the levels of violence which could be tolerated.

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3

The Pioneering British

it is often assumed that the South American adoption of sports had its origins in the British travelers who crossed the Atlantic with the Laws of the Game folded into their jacket pockets, a football and some studs squeezed into their suitcases. In this interpretation, South American sports were the result of British “informal empire” in the continent, meaning the commercial, financial, and cultural power that limited the sovereignty of the independent countries. The legend is often that the first soccer matches were played by these pioneering Britons, watched by wide-eyed, sport-starved locals who aped them. But how wide of the mark this is. In what follows I explore the extent of the British influence on the development of South American sports, picking my way through the consequences of the history of South American soccer initially being written as essentially British, from the players and journalists who wrote up the first match reports to the historians who used English-language sources to retell the stories of the fathers of football. Many of the first histories were produced by the people who institutionalized sports in the first clubs, committees, leagues, and federations The well-publicized promotional tours of South American ports by British clubs like Chelsea, Southampton, and Swindon in the 1900s and 1910s have fed into this explanation.1 Recontextualizing the role of the British pioneers of soccer sits within the broader aim here of decolonizing the histories of South American sports.2

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The Language of Sports According to Laurent Dubois, “soccer is a language, probably the most universal language on the planet. It is spoken more widely than English, Arabic or Chinese and practiced more widely than any religion.” More prosaically, evidence of the hybridity of sporting practice survives in contemporary sporting vocabularies. The appropriation of English-language sporting terminology into Spanish and Portuguese is often taken as testament to the influence of the British in sporting history. The most obvious is the word sport itself, which was irregularly integrated into Spanish and Portuguese, indicating how its customs had come from elsewhere. The word deportes gradually came to accompany or replace sport. Both words had their roots in the old French desport. New magazines tended to choose sport in their titles, such as El Sport and Sport y Variedades (Peru, 1899 and 1900) and Arte & Sport (Brazil, 1903). A sportsman was a man who engaged in a wide range of sports, who played, refereed, administered, and lived and breathed them. Many of those first sportsmen were native English speakers, and the language of many of the games, initially, was English. A woman sportsman was a sportswoman; a difference that was eventually effaced by the gender-neutral deportista. Individual sports adopted the terminologies preferred by  their translators: vocabularies, glossaries, and explanations of these terms were published for cycling, soccer, boxing, and tennis in the 1910s and 1920s.3 In Brazil soccer became the esporte bretão, the British sport. Many of the pioneering playing pedagogues of the early 1900s were trained in Britain, and the paraphernalia of the British empire hung over some of the early competitive matches, as when the players of Albion and Peñarol sang “God Save the Queen” and “Auld Lang Syne” after their match in Montevideo in 1893. Some clubs were named in English because it was the done thing, like using Greek words for politics or French words for cooking: examples include Valparaíso Wanderers, Valparaíso Wonders, and Valparaíso Wonderful, all founded in Chile in 1896. River Plate was named after the markings on a transport crate on the Buenos Aires docks in 1901. In Bolivia, The Strongest (La Paz, 1908) and Stormers Sporting Club (Sucre, 1914) illustrated a degree of Anglophilia but also a sense of play and creativity

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in naming; their rivals the Nimbles Sport Association explicitly contrasted their skill and agility against those of their plodding opponents.4 A number of clubs were named in English, sometimes by British expatriates themselves (Buenos Aires Football Club, 1867, SPAC, 1879, Santiago Wanderers, 1892, Montevideo Wanderers, 1902). More common was that local people used the naming of their clubs to gesture toward Britain. Newell’s Old Boys in Rosario, Argentina, was named in 1903 as a homage to the founders’ schoolteacher and inspiration, Isaac Newell (born Strood, Kent, 24 April 1853, died, Rosario, 16 October 1907), and in response to the Argentine authorities’ rule that clubs could not have the same name as the school (which also catalysed the foundation of Alumni FC by Watson Hutton’s students).5 Sports became spaces where languages fused. A good example is the survival of the words turf and jockey in Spanish and Portuguese, which reflect the way British and French owners promoted their own versions of horse racing to the initial bemusement and later the delight of already determinedly equestrian societies. Because of the preexistence of horse sports across the continent, the development of European horse racing became el turf in South America. A sense of this eclecticism is evident in the names chosen by owners for their horses—some of these were British, as when Thormanby (named after a celebrated English horse) beat Lord Cochrane (named after the Scottish naval officer who participated in Chilean independence) in a race in Viña del Mar in 1882. Among the first winners of the Valparaíso Derby were Chacapoal II, Wanderers, Anarquista, Huechún, Polonia, and Falkland, reflecting a wide range of references across geography, ideology, and geopolitics.6

Bats and Balls British communities across South America played cricket throughout the nineteenth century. In San Antonio de Areco outside of Buenos Aires British officers played cricket during their imprisonment after the invasion of 1806. Cricket was a major form of sporting entertainment in Buenos Aires from the 1850s, and a North versus South match became a feature of carnival every year. Cricket clubs provided the grounds and players for many of the first soccer matches, including the SPAC, whose

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members played cricket for two decades before experimenting with soccer; Rio Cricket, founded in 1872, who allowed Oscar Cox to use their pitch in the 1890s; and Lima Cricket, founded in 1859 and whose members played in the first soccer match in Peru in 1892. Some wealthy Englishmen, such as Colonel North, the Nitrate King, organized cricket matches in ports and mining outposts, leaving a rich seam of cricketing stories that has been drawn together by Abraham and Coyne.7 Yet cricket sits outside most sports history in South America apart from Guayana and today is a marginal presence at best. Cricket was played by English speakers among themselves and was defined by its “resolute Anglocentricity,” social exclusivity, and the complexity of its laws. Cricketers showed little interest in translating their rules. Lord Harris, the Trinidad-born colonial governor of Bombay and head of the Marylebone Cricket Club from 1895, said around this time, “You do well to love cricket for it is more free from anything sordid, anything dishonourable, than any game in the world.” It seems that the Spanish and Portuguese languages were included in what was thought to be sordid and potentially dishonorable by South American cricketers. The locals were not trusted to behave according to the strict honor code of their game. Hence it’s no surprise that South Americans seem to have shown little desire to learn or appropriate cricket.8 First-class cricket, recognized as the sport’s top level, was, however, played in Georgetown, the capital of Britain’s only formal colony in South America, from 1865. As Hilary McD. Beckles has shown, White British governors and soldiers used the sport for political, cultural, and social ends. The game’s popularity among the Black and Asian populations of Britain’s West Indian colonies created debates about what a representative team might look like. In Britain’s English-speaking Caribbean colonies, including British Guiana on the mainland and Trinidad (just twenty kilometers across the sea from Venezuela), cricket eventually became an agent of inclusion, albeit with strict social hierarchies, as C. L. R. James explained. In Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking South America, however, the complicated English vocabulary was used to protect the sport for its British practitioners, meaning that their cricket became an exclusive activity, very different from local soccer and from cricket elsewhere.9

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In this sense there is considerable similarity between cricket and baseball. Neither sport became popular in South America in this period, instead being closely linked to Britain and the United States, respectively. The first Venezuelan baseball club, the Caracas Base Ball Club, was founded in 1895 by Venezuelans and Cubans who had studied in the United States. In 1897 baseball was played at the University of Cartagena on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, with students from Panama and Cuba taking the lead in explaining the rules and organizing the teams. The rise of US imperialism in the Caribbean in this period—seen most clearly in its interventions in Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898, in the separation of Panama from Colombia in 1903, and in the construction of the Panama Canal by 1914—indelibly linked the game with the United States. It was difficult for Colombian or Venezuelan elites to associate baseball with their own national progress because of this. A similar relationship to that between cricket and the British Empire evolved. Baseball was taken up only in areas close to US petroleum interests and remained an enclave sport as that economy expanded. The Federación Venezolana de Beisbol was formed in 1927. The popularity of the game in Venezuela emerged sometime after the end of the period described here, when its link to the United States had become part of its appeal. Before 1930 both baseball and cricket remained peripheral to South American sporting landscapes, predominantly played in expatriate communities who used them to cement the link to home. Whereas cricket and baseball were linked to empire, soccer’s meanings were more open to interpretation.10

The First Soccer Match in South America We care about who kicked the first round balls because the past gives meaning to the present. If the first footballers were British imperialists, then greater satisfaction accrues to the nationalists who overturned their victories decades later. It matters if the first footballers were men, children, women, foreigners, or locals because sport was political, and so the history of soccer was politicized and contested. We must therefore look anew at the fathers of football, whose trajectories are rehashed in celebratory accounts of foundational legends, and trace a continent-wide history that adds to the many national stories treasured by the institutions, associations, and feder-

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ations who link their own origins and residual power to the early twentieth century. Association Football was named and codified in nineteenth-century Britain and is hence a legacy of Victorian Britain at its imperial, globe-spanning high point. Historians have described how the British variants coalesced into distinct codes of football in England and Scotland at midcentury. The reasons for this were various. First, schools established their own versions of football, and when their alumni wanted to continue playing at university they had to agree on some rules in common for the duration of the match. Second, improved communications, above all, railway lines, enabled more competition between towns, again necessitating agreement on basic aspects of the game, such as how to score a point, whether carrying the ball was allowed, or how violent players were permitted to be. Third, the rapid urbanization of London and parts of northern England and southern Scotland created more leisure time for working people. Soccer responded to all these processes: it was the simplest, lowest common denominator of the various forms of football, with the most basic scoring system; it was short in duration, enabling many competitions; and its restrictions on physical contact enabled it to be presented as a civilizing activity rather than a relic of more violent times. Because it had a simple essence—the winner was the team that kicked the ball through the goal more than the other team—it could be endlessly improvised with varying numbers of players, in all sorts of places with informal goalposts and pitch markings, and over any agreed upon time period: an evening pickup game until darkness called time, a long, leisurely afternoon, a snatched game during lunch hour, or a rushed school break. Association Football combined the flexibility and improvisation of play with a basic set of approved rules and extremely cheap equipment that provided the essential condition of a competitive sport.11 In 1848 some students at Cambridge University fixed on a common set of rules for football. In the same year the Chartist movement failed in their demand for a written British constitution; the monarchical regime survived with the assent or indifference of the population. Students in Europe were fighting for written, republican constitutions to embed political rights in their national politics—the year 1848 is remembered as one of revolution in Europe. The desire to codify laws and regulate behavior, the defining

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characteristic of nineteenth-century French political life, was channeled in Britain into sports instead. In 1863 the Football Association was formed in a London pub, with the agreement of thirteen Rules of the Game, drawing heavily from the Cambridge rules. The first recorded game of soccer in South America took place four years later.12 British influence on the spread of Association Football in South America is most clearly seen in the first game, played in Argentina in 1867 among the continent’s biggest British community on the Palermo Cricket field in Buenos Aires, where today it is commemorated by a plaque. As reported in the local English-language newspaper, the Buenos Aires Football Club was founded on 9 May 1867 in a guesthouse with five committee members who agreed to pay thirty pesos per season subscription. They determined that “the rules of the Football Association be adopted with some slight modifications.” It’s not known what those modifications were. The founding committee members were Thomas Jackson, 29, born in Cumberland; Theodore Barlow Smith, 21, born in Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire; Thomas Hogg, 24, and James Hogg, 26, brothers born in north Yorkshire; and Walter Heald, the secretary and treasurer, 26, born in Pendle, Lancashire.13 The UK Census records for 1851, when these players were all children, give an excellent sense of their family backgrounds, their connections, and the sporting cultures they brought with them to Buenos Aires. They were quite a disparate group. Only Theodore Barlow Smith, the son of the Sheffield-born, Cambridge University–educated vicar of Stoney Middleton, was from a gentlemanly background. The others were from relatively poor families. In 1851 the young brothers Hogg were living on a farm that employed twelve laborers in Skelton in north Yorkshire, run by their unmarried sixty-five-year-old uncle. As they were not going to inherit from their uncle, they later presumably made their own way in the world in Argentina. Walter Heald was the son of a Manchester undertaker’s assistant and a cotton piecer. Thomas Jackson appears to have been the son of a needle worker in Penrith. The founders of the Buenos Aires Football Club therefore included components of the several English currents that flowed into Association Football: Cambridge University, organized religion, the landed middle class, and the working class of North West England.14

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The Standard reported on the first match: Football Match. The Club opened its season on Thursday last [20 June 1867] by a spirited contest between sides chosen on the ground. There had been considerable difficulty in finding ground suitable for the match and at the last moment application had to be made to the Cricket Committee for leave to play on their ground at Palermo, and the best thanks of the Football Club are due to the ready permission given to make use of the cricket field. There were not so many players as had been expected, for many of those who promised to join the game seemed to prefer to see how the first meeting would go off.15

Rather than a glorious foundational moment this was an uncertain stagger forward, with disagreements over the code to be used, a postponement (from the Saturday 25 May independence celebrations to the Thursday Corpus Christi holiday) due to flooded playing fields, last-minute reliance on the cricket club for borrowed space, and the sides reduced to eight-a-side because of nerves and lack of commitment. Walter Heald supplied the list of players for the next day’s paper. Rather than putting out a notice and awaiting the floods of enthusiastic footballers on a Thursday morning, Heald and Hogg seem to have called at the hotels and guesthouses to persuade their friends to join them.16 The archival sources give a sense of who these pioneers were. There was a clear North West England feel to the twentysomethings taking the field. In terms of occupations, the most high-status were Thomas Hogg, who worked for the London & River Plate Bank; John Ramsbotham, 28, an estanciero, or landowner, born in Stand, Lancashire; Heald, who was an employee of the Krabbe, Higgins and Co. land company; and a Mr. Simpson, whom Raffo has identified as Edward T. Simpson, the Manchester-born manager of the Boca and Ensenada Railways. There were three traders in their early twenties: William Forrester, of Burslem, Staffordshire; Herbert Thomas Barge; and Thomas Best, of Manchester. Urban Smith was a stock-market agent, and James Hogg was a stock-market runner. There were five clerks, all a year or two either side of twenty: Theodore Barlow Smith; Norman Harry

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Smith of Birmingham; and John Harry Wilmott, of Grappenhall, Cheshire. Just two of them were not English: James Wensley Bond, of Leinster, Ireland, and William Muter Newbery Boschetti, born in Castries, the principal harbor of the British West Indian colony of Saint Lucia, who presumably had some northern Italian roots. Boschetti was born into a long-standing British naval family, and although he was born in Saint Lucia he was not the world’s first Black footballer.17 Just as the players came from a mix of northern English backgrounds, so did the rules they chose to play by, which were likely to be some combination of those the Hoggs, Heald, and the Smiths were used to in Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Derbyshire. There was certainly some very rough play: Heald recorded in his diary that evening that he could not sleep because of “internal damage (probably in the region of the kidneys)” caused by “a severe blow in the side.” The Buenos Aires Football Club had forged its own rules, seemingly a hybrid between the rules of the Sheffield Football Association and the Rugby Union. Charles Alcock’s Football Annual, which may have reached Buenos Aires in the luggage of one of the soccer pioneers, treated the kicking and carrying codes equally throughout. The conversation about how to play football continued in Buenos Aires through several years of intermittent games in which a unique local version of the game came into being. In 1874 it was decided that it was necessary to make a definitive decision for Association or Rugby: the Weekly Standard reported that “some difficulties [have] occurred in enforcing the Rules, which differed from any existing code, and we should recommend the adoption of one of the two recognized sets of Laws now used in England in preference to continuing our own of last year.”18

The First Soccer Matches This first match in Buenos Aires has been the subject of considerable research. Elsewhere the histories fade into myth and legend. Most rigorous research has focused on institutional histories of so-called official games, in which constituted authorities could confirm that the correct rules had been followed. The surviving evidence shows, however, that the first soccer games always predated the emergence of the institutions, and by digging

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into these stories we get a good sense of the multifaceted sporting environments entered by the British. After the 1867 experiment in Buenos Aires, soccer was improvised on the Atlantic coasts with little traction. Venezuela may have been the second South American country where soccer was played. However, no convincing evidence survives for the story of A. W. Simpson, a Welsh teacher who is remembered setting up matches in 1876 of “a sport called foot-ball” for the British, French and Trinidadian workers at El Caratal, by a gold mine near the settlement of El Callao alongside the Orinoco river. There was nothing inevitable about the adoption of Association Football in South America. When the pioneers in the Río de la Plata and the Río Orinoco moved on, soccer had not taken root, and it moved on with them.19 The transformation took place in the 1880s and 1890s when English expatriates were joined by a new generation of migrants in the 1880s from Spain, Italy, Germany, Scotland, and elsewhere. Many of these migrants showed both Anglophilia and a desire to improve South America races through sports. They believed this could be achieved through the institutionalization of sporting practices, and schools had a central part to play. The rest of this chapter assesses the British role in the education, business, and ideology of sports.

A British Education? Many British teachers were involved in promoting South American soccer, but the earliest teacher was José Mantero, a Jesuit priest from São Paulo state. In 1879 he traveled to Europe to spend time in schools and learn from their best practice. Over two years he visited Vannes School in France and Harrow School in England, where he observed soccer being played. Mantero brought home two leather balls and trained his students to pass and control a ball, and then organized semicompetitive matches. Mantero’s students at the Colégio São Luis in Itu, seventy kilometers from the city of São Paulo, became crucial to the establishment of the game in Brazil in the 1890s when they were young adults. As Mascarenhas pointed out, most towns in Brazil outside of the main cities had their first encounter with soccer via Brazilian students who returned home having encountered

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the game in Europe. Joaquim Moreira Alves dos Santos was one such example who came back from Liverpool in 1905.20 The paradigmatic British teacher of sports in South America was an evangelical, religious, sporting Scottish teacher named Alexander Watson Hutton (1853–1936). Like his contemporaries Isaac Newell in Rosario and William Poole in Montevideo he believed the popular uptake of soccer would make Argentinians and Uruguayans more disciplined, more robust, and more like Britons, with a physically strong population motivated by respect for the rules of the game, which they might carry off the pitch and into their daily lives. The first soccer league in Argentina was Watson Hutton’s initiative. Born in Glasgow, “the football capital of the nineteenth century” according to Collins, and orphaned at the age of five, Watson Hutton gained a degree in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. He arrived to teach in Buenos Aires in 1882 having accepted a teaching contract at the St. Andrew’s High School and then left to set up his own English High School after a row about the direction that physical education should take. Soccer was central to Watson Hutton’s educational ideology. The teachers he employed, such as William Walters, were also evangelical about the game, and his students went on to form the famous all-conquering Alumni FC team. His son played for them and subsequently for the national Argentinian team. The mainstay of the Alumni team came from the Brown family, whose grandfather James Brown had migrated from Leith, the port of Edinburgh, in the 1820s. Watson Hutton was Protestant, and ran the Buenos Aires branch of the Empire League as well as setting up the Argentine Football League. The narrative of soccer’s origins among these stiffupper-lipped Victorian men being transformed into something more creative, emotional, and criollo has been irresistible to generations of scholars and fans.21 It doesn’t take much digging into Watson Hutton’s legend to dislodge some of its foundational details. The English High School in Buenos Aires was a mixed school during Watson Hutton’s headmastership. Soccer was the boys’ game, even though there was nothing in the rules of Association Football that prohibited the participation of women, though gendered pronouns proliferate in the thirteen rules: he (7, 8), his (7, 8, 10, 10, 12, 13), and himself (6). The promoters of team ball games in the British private

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schools of the nineteenth century were explicit that their endeavors aimed to reduce violence among their pupils, channeling aggression into useful play and providing comradely physical activity as an alternative to vice. Girls and women were not thought to need such activity, hence their involvement in soccer was not encouraged.22 Yet can we believe that no girls participated in a game of soccer at break time or after school? What about the siblings who went home together and played in the street, like the five Brown brothers? Do we think their sisters never joined in? Of course not. Sports have their origins as games, and in those games, where the rules were observed with less rigor, inclusion was more likely. Many of the first formally recorded games discussed here included many footballing brothers, like the Hoggs and Smiths in Argentina. We should remember their sisters, whose names have not been recorded and about whom we know very little, as likely to have been among the first informal soccer players. It was the institutionalization of the sport and the hardening of educational guidelines in the early 1900s that most effectively sidelined girls from soccer.23 The English-born sports evangelist William Leslie Poole, a contemporary of Watson Hutton, taught at Montevideo’s English High School from 1885, and his pupil Swiss-born Henry Candid Lichtenberger Levins, founded the Foot Ball Association in 1891, which later became the all-conquering Albion Foot Ball Club. The national ethos was key here. Despite the provenance of their teachers, Albion’s statutes prohibited foreign-born players; the European surnames on the team sheets denote locally born children of immigrant families. Later, Poole became the president of the Uruguayan Football Association and professor of English at the University of Montevideo. He dedicated himself to institutionalizing the sport and popularizing it through regular matches, translating the rules and accommodating travel and stadia to the availability of spectators. Poole was an influence on sports culture as a multifaceted sports administrator and educator: in journeys from the UK to Montevideo in 1913, 1925 and, 1929 he listed his occupation as Government Official, Translator, and University, respectively. When he died it was reported that “a remarkable testimony of Uruguayan appreciation of his life and work was manifested by the thousands who filed past the body lying in state at the University, while the ceremony was attended by an

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extraordinary concourse of sympathizers, and the day became one almost of national mourning. Sports clubs and educational institutions placed magnificent wreaths on the grave, and eloquent panegyrics were delivered.”24 The transformation of local sporting cultures took time, and global connections had many stages, even in education. Soccer reached the Pacific coast of Peru, for example, via elite schoolboys such as Alejandro Garland, who had been schooled in Chile. It was then passed further north to Ecuador via other schoolboys who had been sent to Peru, such as Juan Alfredo Wright. The many pathways taken by the game to reach less-connected countries like Ecuador and Colombia are revealing. In Ecuador, a hybrid football game involving carrying and scrimmaging was played, and its unique rules were published in a local newspaper in 1900. The directors and members of the Club Sport Guayaquil, where the first matches took place, were from commercial families with links south to Peru—Enrique Vallarino Miró Quesada of the Peruvian publishing family was one—and north to Panama. Hybridity and improvisation were the norm. Club Sport Ecuador, also in Guayaquil, was the first club there to formally include soccer among its activities. The club’s inaugural texts noted that “Mr. Treasurer was commissioned to buy a football as soon as possible,” demonstrating that the club was founded without owning a football and suggesting the difficulty of getting hold of one.25 Mysterious English-speaking teachers do keep popping out of the early history of soccer in the Andes, including in Quito, where a Scottish teacher Mr. Brown, “a crazy soccer fan” inspired a generation of schoolboys in 1910, and a Father Descotte, a British Jesuit, taught at the San Gabriel school. In Bogotá a key figure was Henry Rowan Lemly, a US military officer who wrote history books, translated physical exercise manuals and the rules of soccer, and taught at the Military School in the capital.26 Lemly did not leave the same legacy as the British soccer pioneers elsewhere, however, because he returned to the United States and made only sporadic returns. He did not establish any leagues or clubs. The surviving photographs of soccer in 1911 Bogotá show park games with few spectators, and it was only in the 1920s that it began to be institutionalized and popularized. The comparison between Colombia’s forgotten pioneer with the committees and leagues doggedly organized by Watson Hutton and his friends in the 1890s in Argentina shows the importance of the

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administrative legwork over the pioneering spirit in establishing sporting cultures.27

The British and the Commerce of Sports Two sporting amateurs of British heritage compete for the title of father of football in 1890s Brazil, where São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro sustained distinct sporting, media and political cultures separated by over four hundred kilometers. Their backgrounds reveal the commercial and financial networks that sustained them, embracing and going beyond Britain’s informal empire. The parents of both Charles Miller, from São Paulo, and Oscar Cox, from Rio de Janeiro, sent them to be educated in Europe. Both of their fathers were cricketers, in the São Paulo and Rio cricket clubs, respectively. Charles Miller was sent to the Bannister Court boarding school in Southampton, England, returning in 1894 with the legendary rules, ball, and boots, informing his uncle that “I have returned with a degree in football.” Oscar Cox was sent to the École de la Ville in Lausanne, Switzerland.28 Charles Miller convinced the cricketers and athletes of the SPAC to play soccer, and the league he subsequently ran was, for the first six years, the Sunday afternoon entertainment for the coffee-plantation owners, the sugar barons, the import-exporters, the railway controllers; a gentlemanly runaround appreciatively watched by wives and children. SPAC had been playing cricket for several decades as well as organizing regular athletics meetings involving sprints, long distance, obstacle, and sack races. Children and women took part in these athletics meetings, often raising money for charity as well as providing social entertainment. Soccer, when Miller started promoting it, was seen as a man’s game, rougher and more physical than cricket, but the limits placed on violence by the rules were part of the attraction. Footballers’ technical skills were praised as much as their running ability or strength. Restraint, discipline, and rule-obeying were among Miller’s cherished characteristics, and as an employee of the Royal Mail Steam Ship line with its tight schedules and timekeeping it’s no surprise that he often took up the referee’s whistle too.29 Two other pioneers of soccer in Brazil were Thomas Donohoe, a Renfrewshire textile worker of Irish parents who set up a team in Bangu on the

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industrial outskirts of Rio, and Hans Nobiling (1877–1954), a migrant from Hamburg whose organizational activities complemented and competed with Miller’s in São Paulo. Nobiling was an accountant and banker who was obsessed with documenting the statistics of the sporting life he worked to establish through the Sport Club Germania (later the Pinheiros sports club). In his account of the early years of soccer Nobiling recalled the difficulties he faced upon arrival in Brazil in 1897. The British footballers infuriated him by swapping between association and rugby union rules. The first formal match was played with a Fuchs ball that Nobiling had ordered from Hamburg. Donohoe’s ball was bought by his wife, Elizabeth, and it may have been Elizabeth Donohoe, an unheralded print worker from Ayrshire, who brought the first football to Rio de Janeiro. But her story has vanished from history. “The deep-going male chauvinism of sport meant that there are never ‘mothers of football.’ ” From these few examples we can see that the global circuits that facilitated the expansion of soccer in Brazil, then, did not depend just on Charles Miller’s dedication or the power of British commerce. They were multinational and transnational, involving men and women, the local elites in both Rio and São Paulo, and dependent on the transatlantic shipping networks delivering balls from Scotland and Germany in a matter of weeks.30 British surnames are most clearly seen in the committees set up to institutionalize and administer sports in the 1900s. There was considerable competition to establish authority over the sports fields. In Argentina rival leagues and administrative structures persisted through the 1910s and 1920s. This was also the case in Chile, where lengthy rail journeys and regional demographic differences meant that the Football Association of Chile, founded in Valparaíso, competed with the Asociación de Football de Santiago. By the early 1910s there were functioning leagues, cups, and national associations here and in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, and Paraguay. In spite of the disputes over who had the legitimacy to control the game, the sport had a degree of stability, held together by tight-knit groups of ex-players who administered the institutions through meetings, minutes, statutes, and regulation of players’ behavior. The reporting of these leagues, cups, and committees shows how the British element was just one part of the complicated commercial and ideo-

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logical networks that were transforming sporting cultures. Albion F.C. in Montevideo, named in honor of Great Britain, is a good example of a pioneering British team in South America. Yet even here we find a diverse bunch of players. Albion’s first lineup in 1891 included French-Swiss, Englishmen, and Scotsmen. The Britishness of soccer was a background reference point rather than a defining point of causation. An example is the first Copa Lipton, played between Argentina and Uruguay in 1905, the cup put up by the Scottish tea magnate Thomas Lipton. The surnames, at first glance, were indeed strikingly British: there were several Browns, a Buchanan, Morgan, Anderson, Dickinson, Moore, Sanderson, and a Carve. All of them, however, were born by the Río de la Plata, and Carve was descended from a German, Karbes. Soccer became their way of negotiating between their ancestral pasts on the other side of the Atlantic and their new homes at the edge of the Río de la Plata. Looking back at them one sees British names, but they carried different identities onto the pitch with them. Soccer and fair play signaled back to an imagined English or Scottishness, while at the same time performing and creating new local, Argentinian, and Montevidean identities. Some coaches, such as John Harley, taught a passing style sometimes associated with Scotland, whereas rougher play was categorized as English. These migrants and their children carried multiple identities that were not as exclusive as soccer historians have wished them to be. Indeed, it was Glasgow-born Lipton who specified that the Copa in his name was only for native-born players, drawing a line between the sons of established residents like the Browns and clubs formed by newly arrived migrants “without a past but with a present,” such as the Genoese founders of Boca Juniors (1905).31 Sponsorship deals like the Copa Lipton were not the only way in which British commerce shaped South American sports. The most well-known are the tours made by British football clubs to the Río de la Plata and Brazil between 1905 and 1929. The attention given to these tours in the existing historiography inaccurately suggests a unidirectional cultural transfer, the tourists setting a path to follow for the South American teams that were formed and sometimes even named in their honor, teams like the Chilean Everton and the Brazilian Corinthians in 1909 or the Liverpools and Arsenals founded in Montevideo and Buenos Aires.

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Table 1. Soccer Tours of South America before 1930 Team

Year

Tour Destination

Southampton Nottingham Forest South African F.A. Everton Tottenham Hotspurs Corinthians Swindon Town Corinthians Exeter City Third Lanark Plymouth Argyle Real Madrid Motherwell Chelsea

1904 1905 1906 1909 1909 1910 1912 1913 1914 1923 1924 1927 1928 1929

Argentina Argentina and Uruguay Argentina and Uruguay Argentina and Uruguay Argentina and Uruguay Brazil Argentina and Uruguay Brazil Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay Argentina and Uruguay Argentina and Uruguay Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay

Here, I want to situate the tours within a wider context and a longer, multisport history that emphasizes the multidirectional cultural encounters already taking place on and around sports fields.32 British football clubs began to visit South America in the early 1900s, building on their own traditions of domestic and European tours (see table 1). For the amateur Corinthians team this was part football evangelism, part holiday, as Chris Bolsmann and Dilwyn Porter have shown. For the professionals, which were all the other clubs, there was also a financial component: the organizer of Chelsea’s tour suggested that the club would earn around £20,000 in 1929. Clubs tended to come to Buenos Aires and play several matches, with perhaps a trip up to Rosario or across to Montevideo. Excursions elsewhere were expensive and therefore rare.33 Rather than full-on tours, these were really trips to one city, usually Buenos Aires, with a couple of excursions thrown in. Corinthians were the most proactive in their touring. In 1910 their team won six matches in Brazil, beating Fluminense, Rio, Brazilians, Palmeiras, Paulistano, and SPAC in a fifteen-day whirlwind. In 1913 they played six games in ten days. The developing claims to representative sports teams are reflected in the

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names of the outfits they played against: Corithinians lost the first match to Rio de Janeiro XI and then defeated Foreigners, Brazilians, Paulistano, and Mackenzie College and drew their final match with Paulistano. The game against Brazilians was watched by fifteen thousand spectators at the spectacular Fluminense stadium, including the Brazilian minister for Foreign Affairs and the British and United States ambassadors. According to O Paiz it was a “Foot-Ball Internacional Inglaterra versus Brazil,” and so it might be argued that this set a pattern for the internationals played at the same venue against other opposition later on. Sporting tours of British amateur rugby union and cricket players took place through the 1910s and 1920s, and South Africans visited too. A British Islands Rugby Union team played as the Combined British against Argentina in 1910: the next day’s Standard newspaper compared the natives with the “scientific, clean and strong” play of their conquerors. The Marylebone Cricket Club played against Argentina in 1912.34 Their influence was probably limited, though greater than that of the global sports tours coming out of North America that did not even reach South America, such as Albert Spalding’s world baseball tour of 1888–89 or the round-the-world cyclists of the 1890s.35

A British Ideology of Sports? The historian Tony Mangan argued that British social clubs played and institutionalized sports in Argentina as a means of “fashioning a cultural umbilical chord to their mother country.” This assessment appears to have been true also in the case of some other ports and cities with British expatriate populations, such as Valparaíso, Montevideo, and São Paulo, where Creoles, the local White elites, dealt regularly with Britons in economic and political circles as well as in sport. English-language clubs like SPAC, Alumni, and Albion have entered football lore because of their early dominance. However, this interpretation cannot be applied to the entire continent. As was true of cricket, some of these sports were deliberately institutionalized as exclusive with no intention to popularize them. Buenos Aires was atypical in its British community numbering tens of thousands.36 The link between the British and sports was perhaps strongest in the perceived ideologies of sporting initiatives. Charles Miller worked for the Royal Mail Shipping Line in São Paulo and chose to personify timekeeping

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and rule-keeping in his professional, personal, and sporting lives. Part of his love of sport, like Watson Hutton’s and that of others, was the amateur ethos: they were revolted by prize money or paying players. They thought that footballers should play for the love of the game and the higher joys it bestowed, and they evangelized for this form of sporting governance in South America. The paradox was that at the time Miller and Watson Hutton were promoting soccer in Brazil and Argentina, the Football Association in England had legitimized professionalism (in 1888). At the same moment soccer was being promoted energetically in South America as an amateur pastime linked to British values, the purported home of football had left this attitude in the past as a response to its growing popularity and the interest of commercial investors. Soccer remained nominally amateur until professionalism was legalized in Brazil in 1929 and in Argentina and Chile in 1933. In promoting an amateur soccer, then, an imagined English footballing past was being recreated, a nostalgic dream in foreign fields. The apparent link of sport to a British ideology of gentlemanly amateurism and fair play became a centerpiece of the debates about the purposes and values of sports that I discuss below. Thinking about sports was intertwined with thinking about race and empire. As the journalist Federico More observed in Cascabel in Lima in 1935, “Each race has its role, we do not doubt it: the Saxons teach us corporal hygiene; the French mental hygiene; the Chinese the important hygiene of the stomach and palate.” If this was the extent of British “informal empire” in action, then it demonstrates quite how loose and unpredictable were the workings of those power relations, and how intertwined they were with racialized ideologies as well as with the networks and citizens of other powerful empires such as Germany and France and other places without empires where sport had become important too, such as Switzerland. The British stamp on regulations, league patterns, cup competitions, and the language of the game came as a result of the international networks in which the game was evolving, not as a result of the example of British pioneers. Because of the accessibility of soccer, its ability to act as what Guedes called an “institution zero,” a blank space upon which different meanings could be inscribed wherever it went, the practice could be appropriated by many people with vastly diverse aims.

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Soccer was turned into “a kind of universal modern language and was simultaneously transformed into a repository for constructing specificities.” The language of sports was partly linguistic and partly unspoken. The politics of empire ran through it all.37 One of the appeals of sport to educators who wished to civilize their pupils was the way in which they were wrapped up in the supposedly British concept of fair play, a learned behavior of selfcontrol. This concept was not translated in this period, passing unchanged into both Spanish and Portuguese. Fair play privileged “conciliation over contention” and voluntary obedience of the rules. It was understood as an existential characteristic of an amateur sportsman. The idea of fair play appealed to South American sporting reformers because they hoped it would trickle down into society, resulting in less violence in the streets, more taxes being paid, and increased respect for the rule of law. Sometimes it was rendered simply as “sporting spirit.” Above I revisited some of the dearly held beliefs about the British founders of sports in South America and have sought to contextualize the British players, administrators, and tourists alongside other factors. One can go still further. Research on individual clubs, leagues, and cups remains in its infancy. What’s more, by taking the British pioneers out of the spotlight we can illuminate some of the cultural transfers that went in the other direction. Instead of focusing on how British pioneers taught South Americans how to play, we can spend more time investigating how the British and other Europeans picked up South American activities and repackaged them for consumption elsewhere. A good example is the front-crawl swimming style, which a British schoolboy, John Trudgen (1852–1902), observed in a river somewhere in Argentina or Paraguay in the 1860s. Upon his return to England in 1873 Trudgen amazed spectators at the English national swimming championships. The over-arm style he used, reported as Indian, became established as the fastest way of swimming and was named after him. The identities of the actual South Americans who were already swimming this way remains unknown. South American sporting knowledge was erased as part of the codification of practice in Europe. As Taylor has shown, the diffusion of sports is better understood as a multidirectional process born of “a range of cross-cultural influences.”38

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The naming of sporting practices—from Indian to the Trudgen, from football to futebol—reveals how the creation and naming of new styles entered into dialogue with globalizing ideas of the purposes of sport. Historians like Fanni Muñoz called these new practices Creole cultures, which is what early twentieth-century elites called them in Peru when they were describing popular recreations like the carnival, music, and dance that surrounded popular sports through the 1910s and 1920s. The adjective criollo was also used in Argentina and Uruguay, recognizing the insertion of popular cultures into practices with external or elite origins. In the French and British Caribbean colonies, “Creole” was the word used to describe hybrid languages. In republican South America, “Creole” was used to describe hybrid sporting styles. The ways of playing and institutionalizing popular sports were recognized as being hybrid, Creole, or mestizo—literally, “mixed.” The in-between space occupied by soccer in South America as a result of interactions between cultures was what lent it its symbolic value in the 1910s and 1920s, as modernizing elites sought to control popular culture and keep it within hierarchical social orders. British origins had become important political reference points.39 British migrants were undoubtedly important in the early stages of sporting development in South America, though perhaps not as important as previous histories have suggested. South American sporting environments were imagined as multicultural, open, and self-consciously improving. Britain became linked with the development of sports for many reasons, from the identities of pioneers to the language in which the rules were codified. Some of those pioneers were not beyond a bit of self-promotion and wrote themselves into history. The spaces where sports were promoted were more important than the identities of the promoters.

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4

Education

sports were institutionalized through unprecedented physical education reforms in the 1880s and 1890s into the establishment of clubs, leagues, and association in the 1900s. The role of the British pioneers in creating a vibrant, expanding sporting culture is marginal when considered as part of the wider educational revolution that took place across the continent. A generation of sports-mad teenagers formed clubs when they left school and maintained the custom of organizing and playing sports because of their enjoyment, the health benefits, and, most important, because of the political and social meanings that became attached to the sport.

School Teams Alumni A.C. were the champions in ten of the first twelve championships organized by the Argentine Football Association, from 1899 to 1911. The club was originally composed of former students from the English High School in Buenos Aires. In Chile, the MacKay and Sutherland School was a private institution that educated boys in the main port, Valparaíso. It offered a vision of Muscular Christianity that would equip the children to trade, to communicate, and to lead. It was the type of school—like Mackenzie College in São Paulo, the Colegio Guadalupe in Lima, St. George’s College in Quilmes (“a complete replica of a typical English Public School”), and

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the English High School in Montevideo—that sustained Mangan’s contention that sport in South America was the product of middle-class aspirations to civilize their children through rigorous exercise, competition, and respect for rule-based behavior. These ideals, developing on what parents believed to be the frontiers of the civilized world, had a lot to say about gender. Neighboring girls’ schools focused on domesticity and the creation of loyal mothers and housewives. The private boys’ schools were inspired by the exclusive English private schools such as Harrow, Rugby, and Eton, which were using sports to channel boys’ energy into characteristics such as loyalty, obedience, endurance, and sacrifice. By choosing to send their children to these schools, local elites were valuing a model of education that distinguished sharply between playtime, in which physical activities could be spontaneous, fun, and a release from the curriculum, and physical education, in which authoritative teachers trained the children in sporting drills.1 When they left school, the children of the 1890s formed and joined sports clubs. These were not unique: they formed part of a wave of associationism, the practice of founding and joining public associations to promote a range of activities, from charity to sport, from firefighting to history. The historian Hilda Sábato showed that this new “public sphere” in Buenos Aires created new ways for the working classes—“the many,” in her formulation—to influence the political and economic agendas of elites, whom she calls “the few.” The round ball was another public sphere, whose kicks, rotations, cheers, and crowds created new forms of allegiance among South American peoples. But any early sporting prominence of the elite schools and their British inspiration were quickly overtaken by the popularization of sports among the wider population.2

Physical Education and the Popularization of Sports Physical Education has a long history in South America, and it certainly did not begin with Watson Hutton, Poole, and other British pioneers. Even at the moment of its Independence from colonial rule, Venezuela’s 1819 Constitution stipulated that the state would be charged with the physical and moral education of children until the age of twelve. Simón Bolívar

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wrote that “useful and honest games were as necessary for children as food itself.”3 “Physical” Education was adopted in the 1870s and 1880s in the Salesian and Jesuit schools where, as noted earlier, the first football matches in Chile and Brazil. It was then the enthusiastic adoption of physical education in the state system that led to the step change that led to the popularization of sports. Rather than a miracle brought or wrought from abroad, Physical Education was the realization of the goals of hardworking campaigners in their communities. The first steps were taken alongside innovations in civic and personal hygiene, as in the work of Adolfo Murillo, a teacher in Chile. Murillo, like many others, felt that the key was to get children to practice gymnastics and games regularly and properly, in accordance with manuals, rules, and regulations. “For a long time, gymnastic exercises have elicited strong resistance among us,” Murillo wrote in 1872. “Gymnastics has become, for many families, a near synonym of words like contusions, falls, dislocations and fractures. Because this type of exercise has never been effectively taught here, we have only known the accidents, and very few of the benefits.” Starting with the advances in this area in Europe, as did most writers on the subject, Murillo wrote a long text explaining how not to drop or fall off gymnastic apparatus and recommending drill exercises for children that would teach them to employ their bodies in orderly, disciplined, wholesome ways. He noted that swimming was the best exercise, “employing the largest range of muscles,” but lamented that few Chilean schools would be able to teach “even the theory of it.” Fencing, however, was physically stretching and militarily useful and was to be widely adopted.4 The place of physical education within municipal and national schooling systems sat at the apex of ideological debate about what national education was for and how citizens should be formed. This meant that it developed in different ways across the continent. Ideological positions were often conveniently coded by their place of origin, though this can hide the distinct viewpoints they encompassed: for example, the noncompetitive Swedish individual gymnastics movement, the German turner movement and collective military drill, the French focus on fencing and shooting, Spanish bullfights, British team sports. A military imperative was often the key factor in

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Figure 4. Children parade around an athletics track in Montevideo, 1920s. Desfile de niños, pista de atletismo. Image reproduced thanks to the Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo, reference 0191FMHC https://cdf.montevideo.gub.uy/catalogo/foto/0191fmhc.

persuading states to actively promote physical education, gymnastics, and drill to condition young bodies.5 Nation-builders and liberals interested in opening up citizenship put their efforts into public education. In Argentina the Ley de Educación Común of 1884 reconfigured secular public education around the trinity of body, mind, and soul (figure 4). There had been local initiatives elsewhere, but it was the Argentine experience that was subsequently emulated across South America by other countries who witnessed it or heard of the national strategy through visits, the press, or international conferences. Often international models were used to legitimize change. In Colombia a decree was passed in 1888 by the “regenerating” conservative government of Rafael Núñez. In Chile in 1889 German instructors were invited to develop the physical education program in state schools. The model was Prussian, with gymnastics and drill aimed at creating military male bodies, until 1906,

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when the government of Pedro Montt, feeling more confident in the country’s military security vis-à-vis its neighbors, invited Swedish advisors instead. While there were differences in the political leanings and national origins, sports were being adopted as a central tenet of public education systems that aimed to equip states to compete in the international community of nations to which economic growth and technological change had given them unprecedented access.6 After 1900 the introduction of national laws making Physical Education compulsory in state schools reflected the new thinking of national governments about making citizens as well as being a recognition of the advances that had been made in private and religious schools. Many ideologies were at play around the promotion of physical education in schools, from nationbuilding to building the capacity of the armed forces. The pioneering work of Enrique Romero Brest, the son of a military veteran in the Corrientes region, in developing an Argentine system was distributed widely across the continent, as Pablo Scharagodsky has shown. Military promotion of physical education for boys came most visibly to the surface in moments of political crisis, as did the support of physical education for girls to improve culture as well as to cultivate healthy bodies for child-rearing. Romero Brest, the director of Argentine’s physical education programs in the early 1900s, founded the girls’ and women’s sports club Atalanta in 1902. The Bolivian government handed over control of the physical education curriculum directly to the military in 1909.7 Although its aims were national in the hands of governing elites, the promotion of physical education was experienced as a global revolution. Two delegates from Argentina, Alejo Peyret and José Benjamín Zubiaur, attended the 1889 International Congress for the Propagation of Physical Education in Paris, part of that year’s Universal Exhibition. Zubiaur went on to introduce outdoor physical education as headmaster of the Colegio Nacional de Concepción del Uruguay. A government agency, the Comisión Nacional de Educación Física, played a crucial role in Uruguay from 1911 liaising between international promoters like the YMCA and local schools and teachers. In 1914 two Belgian educators were contracted by the Bolivian state to educate local physical education teachers: Julien Fisher and Henri de Gents. In Ecuador the Liberal reforming governments of Eloy Alfaro

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(president 1895–1901, 1906–11) recruited international teachers to instill the new ideas: a Swede, Gösta Wellenius; a Chilean, H. Flores; and two Germans, Franz Wazawa and Elionora Neuma. Although the reach of the curriculum did not often go beyond the larger schools in the urban centers, and political change sometimes took power away from the initiators, some key individuals campaigned for further changes. The secular, liberal Colegio Mejía was opened in Quito by Alfaro’s administration in direct competition with ecclesiastical interests in the education of the city’s young people. Oral histories collected in the mid-1960s from Alberto Campuzano (then seventy-five) and Cesar Augusto Rodríguez (then seventy-eight) reveal how important sport was to the school where they studied in the early 1900s, but also how improvised their physical education could be. They remembered being handed a football in 1907 and “starting to use it in play, by pure intuition.” They divided themselves into two teams in El Ejido park and played from north to south on a field almost a thousand meters in length. “The ‘team’ who touched the opponent’s line most often was declared the winner.” It was only months later, they recalled, that they saw a copy of the rules of soccer and realized how large their first pitch had been.8 Most countries had a mixed economy of physical education provision. The laws and decrees had effect in some places but remained an aspiration in peripheral areas. Uruguay’s CNEF met weekly and promoted a progressive sport policy that included the construction of public sports grounds or plazas de deportes, free local sports guidance and the professional training of PE teachers, all of which was oriented toward “the formation of a democratic, participative and inclusive sporting culture.” Most countries subsequently founded institutes of physical education for the local training of specialized instructors. In Chile the Instituto de Educación Física y Manual was formed in 1906, the Bolivian equivalent in 1931, and in Peru the Escuela Nacional de Educación Física in 1932.9 The early pioneers of physical education, like Brest in Argentina, worked in the classroom and through writing texts to promote their vision. The influential Swede Wellenius was formally contracted by the Ecuadorean state in 1925—some three decades after his arrival in the country—to redesign the country’s physical education curriculum, further embedding the model of noncompetitive gymnastic exercise. As the author of Gimnasia and other

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promotional materials, Wellenius shaped the national state physical education regime toward an individual, hygienic model of exercise and away from the physical team sports that evoked parents’ and priests’ fears of violence.10 As a general pattern, one can say that areas with the strongest and bestresourced state institutions were most effectively able to introduce and implement laws on physical education: Uruguay and the principal cities of Argentina in the 1880s and Brazil in the first decade of the new republic after the abolition of slavery. This happened in the 1900s and 1910s in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Where states were weaker, more space was left for the private education sector to take up the slack. The spread of physical education in schools was often closely aligned with military priorities and thereafter overlapped with organizations with similar aims, such as the Boy Scouts from the 1910s, sports clubs, or the armed forces themselves. Those who saw sports as a pacifist endeavor designed to reduce rather than promote physical violence, like Wellenius and Coubertin with his international Olympic movement, had to engage with the parallel existence of other models for sports promotion. We can see these contradictory vectors in operation in two examples of the way people spoke about sports and education at the time.11 On the day of the inauguration of the Argentine Athletic Club in Buenos Aires in 1898, the minister of Justice and Public Education, a sober lawyer called Luis Beláustegui, gave a speech arguing that physical education was one of the most beneficial elements in the formation of character. Neglect of it had meant that “our social customs are effeminate. Our youths have not sufficient confidence in themselves; they shun all work which demands the application of physical energy.” The minister hoped that physical education could “give the boys the consciousness of their own worth and their own strength” and overcome what he saw as feminine characteristics. His speech clearly shows the way ideas about gender were central to setting out sporting frameworks.12 The following year an itinerant Colombian teacher, writer, miner, and arms dealer, Manuel de Jesús Andrade, wrote a defiantly pro-sport article in the Guayaquil newspaper El Tiempo. Writing from his base at some gold mines in Zarzuma, Ecuador, Andrade pulled together all the ideas about sport which were circulating among his networks at the time. Andrade was

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not an influential thinker by any means. The way he thought about sport perfectly illustrates the way in which its possibilities appealed to hopeful South American liberals and educators. Andrade marveled at countries that had made sports compulsory for every student and dreamed that physical education would enable South Americans to “complete our emancipation from the metropolis to which we still maintain our unconditional submission, in good part because of our decrepit educationalist movement.”13 Sports, to Andrade in 1899 and many others like him, would be a way of creating strong citizens who could overcome their “Spanish deformity” and elevate independent nations to true freedom in body and soul. These ideas attributing backwardness to Spain and its negative colonial legacy now merged with newer biological notions that ascribed backwardness to inherited weakness. Eugenicist ideas about national failure also saw sport as a possible solution. Schools could be the way to ward off Hispanic degeneration. It was crucial, therefore, that the embrace of physical education, which was seen to give nations the possibility to improve both morally and physically, took place at exactly the same time as the extension of state education in South America at the expense of what Andrade called the Catholic Church’s “semi-monastic schools.” An understanding of the competitive nature of contemporary geopolitics was important too. The intervention of the United States in Cuba and Puerto Rico and the defeat of Spain in the Spanish–American War of 1898 were seen as turning points. Journalists and politicians feared United States imperialism. “Schooling could still save us, if we can get our boys accustomed to the fight for survival from the age of seven,” wrote Andrade. Sports could produce a disciplined, strong male citizenry to defend the independence from colonial rule that had been achieved nearly a century earlier: “Our schooling produces vice-ridden, lazy and tired children, even today when the echoes of the glory of the famous battles of Carabobo, Boyacá, Pichincha, Junín, and Ayacucho can still be heard. We should turn all our efforts and energies to schools, so as to bring our unfinished Independence to its conclusion. Let us replace the colonial school with the modern school, that which has made the Anglo–Saxon peoples respectable, great, and prosperous. If we cannot make the storm disappear, at least we can make sure they don’t treat us like Filipinos.”14

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The promotion of sport was linked to racist, eugenicist thinking. Educationalists like Andrade wanted sport and discipline to make South Americans more like the Anglo–Saxons whom they saw as occupying a higher place in the international social scale. They also wanted to be less like the Turk and Filipinos whom they looked down upon. Sport would improve the individual body and soul, and it would also create a disciplined collective, or team, which would be the basis for military defense in the event of further imperial attack. This was a time of international peace in South America, when states had the freedom and sometimes the funds to attend to perceived military imperatives to conscript young men and construct new citizens. The school could be the space where this transformation would begin.

Sunday Schools Soccer stepped out of the schools and developed its place in politics and society in the 1890s and 1900s as a result of the efforts of schoolteachers taking advantage of state initiatives to promote physical education. Educationists like Watson Hutton were influenced by Muscular Christianity, and this ideology took on new forms in South America. Closely linked to the promotion of the British Empire, Muscular Christianity was linked to Thomas Hughes’s book Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and the writings of Charles Kingsley and involved the assertion of the vigor of masculine physical exercise in order to promote patriotic values of discipline, order, and expansion. There was a lot of woolly thinking about Muscular Christianity, and causation was held to go in both directions. British male bodies were held to be superior to foreign bodies on the grounds of race and because they did more improving physical exercise than lazy foreigners. The promotion of sports under a rubric of physical strength for political ends naturally fitted into a cult of the individual, which was complementary to the post-Enlightenment focus on self-control and self-improvement. Athletics, particularly sprinting, became the epitome of this goal of athletic improvement. In Melbourne, Australia, and in the United States, Muscular Christianity infused the development of national ball sports that embraced rough play. Across independent South America it was the subjugation of

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the physically strong individual into a collaborative, relatively noncontact team that proved most popular both in terms of participation and symbolic meaning. Inspirational Physical Education teachers were crucial to popularization, for example, Harry Welfare, who played football for Liverpool F.C. before traveling to Rio to work at the Ginásio Anglo-Brasileiro, where he taught at the same time as playing center-forward for Fluminense F.C.15 Soccer became the offspring of Protestant Muscular Christianity that even Catholics could learn to love. The focus on the collective through teamwork and the elevation of the team to civic and national symbol meant that the Catholic majority and even conservative Catholics could relate to this sport filled with nonpartisan religious language such as “service,” “sacrifice,” “communion,” and “endeavor.” The language of duty filled players’ lexicons. In Great Britain, where the Sunday sabbath day of rest was aggressively protected by the Church, soccer was played on Saturday afternoons, at times vacated by the liberal industrialists who hoped that playing and watching football would make their workers more productive. In England the Football Association had deemed that “a person who takes part in Sunday football in the United Kingdom shall not be recognized by this Association,” meaning that Sabbath-breakers would not be able to compete in its competitions; the same strategy was used for marginalizing women’s football in the 1920s. In South America, however, as in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, where Saturday remained a full working day, soccer was played on Sundays. Hence it competed with preexisting Sunday sporting activities like the bullfight. The arrangement was accepted and encouraged by the Catholic Church, who saw the communion and teamwork of football as a useful ally in their search to promote social cohesion and perhaps even a model of new muscular Argentine Christianity. This step produced some interesting tensions with the British footballers in South America, including Juan Ramsay in Chile, whose family came from Fife in Scotland and who in 1894 formed a team called Santiago Rangers Non Sunday Playing Club, which later merged with Santiago Athletic Club before, as Athletic Union, they eventually relented and played on Sundays. Protestant missionaries, through the YMCA and British schools, felt that sport was bringing young people along with their minds and bodies closer to God. Indeed, sports had often found their first openings on religious holidays: Venezuela’s first

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soccer match was on the day of the Virgen del Carmen in 1876, widespread athletics competitions took place at Carnival, and Buenos Aires had Easter cricket matches. As Walter Heald put it in 1868, “This day being a holiday, was set as a Football Day.” Church-sanctioned holidays created the space for sporting recreation at regular intervals throughout the year. Sporting practice was shaped by its place in the working week in time marked out by religious authorities. The Football Association of Santiago forbade discussion of religion in its members’ clubs until the 1930s, marginalizing the clubs run by religious communities. The hypocrisy of proponents of Muscular Christianity prohibiting explicit discussion of religion might be observed.16 Conflict between Church and sport was negotiated and avoided where possible. Soccer matches often kicked off before Mass on Sundays, sometimes as early as seven in the morning, especially in tropical places like Guayaquil, Belo Horizonte, or Caracas. The Limeños versus Chalacos soccer match took place on Sunday, 7 August 1892. A staggered sporting day left plenty of opportunity for players and spectators to attend one service or another. Both sport and religion recognized each other’s pulling power.17 The areas of largest and earliest soccer participation—for example, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and São Paulo—took place where the Catholic Church was historically weakest, compared to the viceregal centers of Spanish power and settlement such as Lima and Bogotá, where colonial sports like bullfighting persisted longer. These were also the areas where the sporting missionaries of the YMCA were most active. Myron Clark visited Brazil from 1891 and Uruguay and Argentina from 1900 to promote clubs and encourage sporting participation. These promoters were always keen to emphasize their achievements, such as when Phillip Conrad, the YMCA officer in Montevideo, recalled that “education in Uruguay will carry the mark of the North American Young Men’s Christian Associations, adapted to meet local conditions but following those highest principles.” Generally speaking, however, clubs and churches developed a working accommodation, setting the foundations for the oft-remarked twentieth-century fusion between soccer and religion, with worship of its heroes and saints, “temples of the earthbound gods,” passion, and symbolic rituals.18 Sports were adopted by teachers who sought a pedagogical tool that they hoped would encourage young men to develop healthy habits, time

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management, and respect for authority. This chimed with many of the Catholic Church’s goals, and physical education was assigned a key moralizing role in improving culture—and this meant hoping that soccer “could repair the supposed racial deficiencies of their nations,” exacerbated by the popularity of indigenous and African practices like capoeira in Brazil. Sport’s potential to produce strong, beautiful bodies aligned with eugenicist thinking as well as with social programs aimed at urban hygiene and public morality in the growing cities. Sport fitted into the “civilising process” being actively pursued in other areas of government. As the Peruvian journal El Sport put it in 1899, sports would “strengthen the body and hone the intellect.”19 Sports were always places of learning. When they emerged from school, these young people and their friends were influenced by the socialist and anarchist ideas circulating around South America’s cities as much as they were by the educational ideals of positivism and Muscular Christianity. When they went on to found and run clubs, therefore, idealism about social improvement ran through their efforts. The new clubs were collectively owned, and soccer was structured as nonprofit and amateur. They would make a virtue of their love of sports, and sports would make them virtuous. Looking back, the Peruvian construction worker Isaias Contreras recalled that “I spent all of the 1920s practicing sports and parts of my Sundays I dedicated to anarchism.” This form of organization continued into the professional era and through the twentieth century. Sports were understood as being for the people in several senses: to improve bodies and societies and to represent people’s communities. Because they were understood as public bodies, professional sports clubs developed distinct collective ownership models that emphasized their public social roles.20 The efforts to control soccer’s inherent violence coincided with the rise of state schooling in the early years of the century, especially in the south of the continent, and the rise of popular soccer correlates with the strength of some state schooling systems, for example, under the liberal reforming  governments in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. Physical education teachers took a lead in translating and disseminating the rules through their students and imposing a degree of sporting uniformity on this mass of play.

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Where state schooling was much weaker, for example, in Brazil and Peru, the popularization of sports took more regional, organic routes and could be shaped by the preexisting institutional frameworks like those of the Catholic Church. On South America’s northern Caribbean coast teachers were more receptive to baseball, which involved less running in the heat than soccer. In 1913 a regional baseball league organized in Cartagena featured teams from schools, the university, and social clubs. By the end of the 1920s baseball was beginning to compete with soccer’s popularity in schools.21 The stories told about the first footballers in Paraguay reveal a mixture of all the processes and factors sketched here: the determined foreign pioneer, the schoolchildren, the itinerant railwaymen, and the commercial product. Teachers like the Dutchman William Paats set up the fixtures, arranged the matches, and recorded the results, thereby creating a tradition of sport that could grow out of the classroom and into the clubhouse. Paats arrived in the country in 1894 from Rotterdam at the age of eighteen and was reputed to have founded the first team, Club Olimpia, in 1902. Other Paraguayan origin myths include British railwaymen in Borja playing as Everton in 1886, watched by local people; another has it that students at the Escuela Normal, wearing their school uniforms, played with a MacGregor ball bought in the Buenos Aires branch of Harrods in 1900.22 Even if British observers may have liked to believe they invented it, fair play was not an alien concept in South America, and it chimed with the language of civilization that surrounded sports promotion. Observers of animal sports knew there were right and wrong ways to prepare a horse or cock or to kill a bull. Judges regulated all those sports. The transition from animal sports to physical-contact team sports required players to regulate their behavior in order to avoid harming other participants. The referee who patrolled the pitch reminding players of the rules was important, and the institution of the club was central to embedding the codes of behavior that would make it possible. * * * Sport developed into a place in South American societies in the 1900s as a result of its centrality in the key moments of secularizing state education.

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The key drivers of cultural change were the educators and the institutions they worked in, regardless of their national origins. The schoolchildren of the 1890s grew up to be club members and administrators, and it was they who performed the crucial work in embedding and popularizing sports cultures. Physical educators understood South American sports as being about improving their republics and overcoming colonial legacies. An urge to compete internationally was a logical extension of these imperatives. Such a desire was a vital reason to remain within international sporting codes and rules rather than developing their own. The efforts of translators and publishers to communicate, explain, and disseminate the rules were essential to the appropriation of new sporting activities from abroad. The schoolchildren of the 1890s became the players of the 1900s and the administrators of the 1910s. These sportsmen sought to control the public development of the sports that had been taught to them at school and to shape the meanings that these activities were beginning to have. Their principal way of doing so was through the institution of the sports club.

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5

Clubs

sports clubs were crucial in fostering activity, discipline, and belonging to create communities and build social order in South America in the early 1900s. They filled institutional spaces hitherto left empty by impoverished, indifferent, or negligent states and provided a place ostensibly free of political and religious disagreements. Sunday matches were outlets as well as outings. Clubs harnessed the popularization of soccer and channeled it into urban, regional, and national frameworks. Soccer might have remained within the schoolyard or as a kickaround on the waste ground if it wasn’t for the adoption of the game by preexisting sports clubs, like Lima Cricket, Gimnasia y Esgrima in La Plata (whose name literally means gymnastics and fencing), and the São Paulo Athletic Club. This chapter traces the role of clubs in the development of sports, emphasizing the multisport nature of the earliest clubs, and the subsequent fractures between inclusive popular clubs and socially exclusive Country Clubs.

Clubs before Sports Before sports, the first clubs in South America were social clubs, the secular spin-offs of religious confraternities and freemasons’ lodges, both of which were noteworthy features of society in the mid-1800s. The first city-center gentlemen’s social clubs could be exclusive on class, gender, political grounds or all three, such as the Club de la Unión in Guayaquil

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and the Clube da Reforma and Clube Radical, founded by Liberals in Rio de Janeiro. The statutes of the Club Americano in Bogotá stated that it would “provide its members with recreations fit for a civilized society” and that the only games that were appropriate to this end were the likes of “billiards, chess, dominoes, draughts, whist, and other card games.” These inwardlooking, indoor social clubs, a distinctly masculine space in which time might be spent reading newspapers, playing cards, and enjoying privacy. Club cultures and pastimes continued wherever their members went, as in the case of the Argentinian naval officer José María Sobral, the first South American to reach Antarctica (1901–3). Sobral related the innumerable card games that kept his expedition occupied in the dark, cold nights.1 Like social clubs, sports clubs were envisaged as nonpolitical spaces, although their goals were clearly political in that they explicitly aimed to change and civilize their members’ behavior and to act as a force for good in wider society. As Sábato has argued for Argentina, this was a key moment of Associationism, in which individuals joined to form secular societies to advance their causes and their communities, part of a social modernization that looked to leave Church and old traditions behind. Clubs came to represent local barrios, or neighborhoods, and therefore assumed class-based identities when they took on local opponents. The social club revolving around sporting activity became a central piece of civic life in neighborhoods, often taking on institutional functions around health care, sociability, and political life.2 New sporting spaces sprang up everywhere in the early 1900s. Sports were entering an already crowded marketplace for entertainment. In Lima in 1902 sporting spectacles from soccer to bulls, cockfighting to acrobatic circuses (220 events in total during the year) were still outnumbered by theater, drama, opera, and dance (440 events). Sport clubs were part of the development of a civil society characterized by special interest groups coming together—from firemen and boaters, from religious evangelists to migrant and settler groups—by setting up their own associations and clubs as focal points from which to preserve their identities and lobby for their interests. If we conceive of the rise of sports as part of the rise of voluntary associationism in these years, part of the growing and thickening social fabric of expanding urbanizations, we can see that its social, political, and national

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aspirations were part and parcel of the same economic process. It was not that the workers’ clubs were political and everything else was purely sporting: all sport was perceived as being political, the off-the-field goals often as explicitly weighty as the on-field ones for the bosses’ clubs, the neighborhood clubs, the gentlemen’s clubs, the workers’ clubs, and everything in between. Urban directories reveal how most sports clubs did not have fixed grounds or headquarters, and finding one was among their main concerns.3 In port cities rowing clubs had both sporting and social functions. Their need for a clubhouse to store their boats was the impetus for building a permanent headquarters that could then acquire a social function. Rowing was advocated as the king of sports in Rio de Janeiro and an appropriate activity for both men and women. The seated position enabled a graceful movement of the body that took place at some distance from spectators, making the physical exertion less visible. Sport slowly moved from being an extravagance and oddity to fusing with new concerns around fashion, hygiene, and health. Regattas took place on the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires and Montevideo, in Rio de Janeiro, and in many sites along the Pacific coast. In 1888 the sporting elite in Rio de Janeiro organized a Regatta for Abolition, celebrating the end of slavery in Brazil. The Buenos Aires Rowing Club had a clubhouse at Riachuelo from 1873 and another at Tigre from 1877. The Tigre Boat Club was founded in 1888, and the Rowing Club Argentino in 1905, and, as Florencia Rolla has shown, an enormous amount of attention was put into the architecture and construction of these buildings. Photographs show crowds lining the beach at Botafogo in Rio following the action as closely as they could. Montevideo rowers began to be praised from afar as vigorous and enthusiastic, and Rio rowers were admired for the “Herculean musculature of their arms.” Their ethos and clubhouses fed into South American sporting cultures. Clube de Regatas Vasco da Gama in Rio offered rowing and sailing from 1898 before taking up soccer two decades later. In 1900 in the Peruvian port of Paita the Club Liberal organized a day of regattas to provide “a few hours of amusements and recreation” for the Ecuadorian families holidaying there. Club Mbigua was founded in 1902 to organize rowing and yachting on the River Paraguay out of Asunción. The national Brazilian Rowing Federation was founded in 1902, long before other national sports and Olympic bodies in 1914. The boathouse became

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the model for the sports club headquarters. Rowers, once organized, began to experiment with other sports.4

Multisports Clubs The first sports clubs came out of the social clubs playing cards and table games like billiards and chess and catered for rowing and the other sports practiced by expatriate communities. In Lima, Peru, for example, Lima Cricket was founded in 1859 and merged with the Lima Lawn Tennis Club in 1885. Its members played a game of Association Football in 1892, and in 1906 it became Lima Cricket and Football Club.5 The multisport club was an institution with broad social and sporting ambitions which emerged immediately after the graduation of sporting schoolchildren. In Buenos Aires the central elite multisport club was the Sociedad Sportiva Argentina, which came out of the horseracing community, the Sociedad Hípica Argentina. It expanded across the sporting landscape under the leadership of an Italian migrant, Antonio De Marchi, and with the economic and social support of the urban elite linked to presidents and politicians such as Julio Argentino Roca. Most clubs in the 1890s and 1900s were therefore founded as multisport institutions, and players dedicated themselves to several sports rather than specializing. Examples of such sportsmen included the footballer, boxer, shooter, and fencer (and radical member of congress) Héctor Arancibia Laso in Santiago, the cyclist and footballer (and mayor) António da Silva Prado Júnior in São Paulo, the cyclist and footballer (and minister) Pedro de Osma in Lima, and the aviator, boxer, fencer, and rower (and engineer) Jorge Newbery in Buenos Aires. Events complemented each other, and clashes tended to be avoided. The sporting programs published in the newspapers made it clear that combined sporting entertainments were often organized and well attended, such as horse racing/cycling, fencing/opera, bullfighting/ cycling, or hybrid events in which athletes raced against horses. Footballers could be practicing athletics an hour after their match was over and then cycling in the afternoon. Women’s running races were followed by women’s horse races. Walter Heald recorded in his diary how on one sports-filled day off in Buenos Aires he played cricket, ran some races, and practiced leap-

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frog as athletics training; on others he played soccer and boxed. The Club Ciclista Santiago stopped off on one of their rides for shooting, hopscotch, and somersaulting competitions. Multiple sports were perceived as complementary, and the public value of the entertainment spectacle was central. A canceled program of “Lion fights Tiger, followed by Rowing Races” at El Salado, Ecuador, caused “great disappointment among the crowds lured to the ground.”6

Institutionalizing Sports in Clubs A timeline gives a sense of key dates of foundation of soccer clubs that have survived or achieved a degree of fame (table 2). The takeoff moment for soccer in South America was the mid-to-late 1890s—some three decades after the codification of the laws back in London at Freemasons Tavern and the first hesitant attempts on the Palermo fields in Buenos Aires; at the same time, the formation of the major clubs in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere was taking place. The emergence of soccer clubs speaks to different processes of urbanization and migration in each place and to how these related to the preexisting clubs and sporting cultures. In the early 1890s we see some of the first spin-off soccer-only clubs, with Peñarol in Montevideo, Santiago Wanderers in Chile, and Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro leaving their cricketing and rowing sections behind. Railway clubs such as Peñarol, who played in a yellow and black strip inspired by Stephenson’s “Rocket,” an early steam locomotive, were crucial in expanding the geographical appeal of sports away from the ports. Other railway clubs founded in the 1890s included Banfield in Argentina, Oruro Royal in Bolivia, and Operarios Mafrenses in Santa Catarina, Brazil. At the turn of the century, a raft of clubs with names alluding to historical identities sprang up—Vasco da Gama in Rio de Janeiro, Germania in São Paulo, and Nacional in Montevideo—indicating the greater political importance sports were beginning to have. This was a foundational moment in the continental diffusion and institutionalization of sports, a consequence of the maturity of a generation of adults schooled by the educational pioneers and their emergence into cities being transformed by immigration and shaped by associationism in clubs.7

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Table 2. Timeline of the Foundation Dates of Some Major Soccer Clubs still in Existence Year

Club

City

Country

1887 1891 1892 1895 1896 1896 1898 1899 1901 1901 1901 1902 1902 1902 1903 1903 1903 1903 1904 1904 1904 1905 1905 1905 1908 1908 1908 1909 1910 1910 1912 1914 1914 1921 1924

Gimnasia y Esgrima Peñarol Santiago Wanderers Flamengo Banfield Oruro Royal Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama Club Nacional de Football Alianza Lima Cienciano River Plate Fluminense Montevideo Wanderers Olimpia Grêmio Guaraní Newell’s Old Boys Racing Club Argentinos Juniors Club Atlético Independiente Nacional Boca Juniors Estudiantes de La Plata Libertad Club Atlético Mineiro Club Atlético San Lorenzo de Almagro The Strongest Sport Club Internacional Corinthians Vélez Sarsfield Santos Independiente Palmeiras Cruzeiro Atlético Junior

La Plata Montevideo Valparaíso Rio de Janeiro Banfield Oruro Rio de Janeiro Montevideo Lima Cuzco Buenos Aires Rio de Janeiro Montevideo Asunción Porto Alegre Asunción Rosario Avellaneda Buenos Aires Avellaneda Asunción Buenos Aires La Plata Asunción Belo Horizonte Buenos Aires La Paz Porto Alegre São Paulo Buenos Aires Santos Medellín São Paulo Belo Horizonte Barranquilla

Argentina Uruguay Chile Brazil Argentina Bolivia Brazil Uruguay Peru Peru Argentina Brazil Uruguay Paraguay Brazil Paraguay Argentina Argentina Argentina Argentina Paraguay Argentina Argentina Paraguay Brazil Argentina Bolivia Brazil Brazil Argentina Brazil Colombia Brazil Brazil Colombia

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Year

Club

City

Country

1924 1925 1925 1927 1927 1929 1930 1930

Universitario Barcelona Colo Colo América de Cali Universidad de Chile Emelec Liga Deportiva Universitaria São Paulo

Lima Guayaquil Santiago Cali Santiago Guayaquil Quito São Paulo

Peru Ecuador Chile Colombia Chile Ecuador Ecuador Brazil

The appearance of Universidad de Chile, Universitario in Lima, and Liga Universitaria de Deportes in Quito in the 1920s speaks to an important distinction between South American, North American, and European sporting cultures in this period. Because of the relatively small number of universities at the time and the dominance of a letrado, intellectual model of university education that marginalized or even denigrated physical education (in contrast to the schools), institutions of higher education did not occupy the distinctive role in the spread of sports that they did at Yale in the United States or Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Instead, sports went straight from the classroom to the clubhouse. It was here that sporting behavior was controlled and policed.

Honor Codes in the Sports Clubs The sporting institutions created at the turn of the century were built on behavioral codes of honor and belonging. Individualism was often derided as an external import to be resisted, as in the Uruguayan writer Rodó’s Ariel (1902). Sports offered a way for individual bodies to be strengthened and improved in the service of a collective, the club, which from its very beginning was employed for its representative value, operating according to the rules and statutes set out in clubs’ books and libraries. There was a clear ideological continuity of control, education, and improvement between the schoolyard and the clubhouse. Clubs’ rules and behavioral models were

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understood as being essential in order to control the violence inherent in soccer and boxing and to channel the individualism of tennis or golf. This public-spirited sporting model came into conflict with the desire to win competitions.8 Clubs’ rules differed according to locality and to the political persuasion of the founders. In small towns one club might suffice for all residents, regardless of their backgrounds. These would be ethnically mixed, including migrants of many backgrounds, as in the founder members of Sport Club Concepción, in the south of Chile, which in 1904 included names like Gallegos, Concha, Leiva, Fahrenkrog, Nitsche, Ludwig, Berg, Soenksen, Turner, and Brown, showing a range of origins from German and Scandinavian to Hispanic, Italian, and Anglo. In cities, clubs could be presented as ethnically selective—Palestino in Santiago de Chile, Palestra Italia in São Paulo, and Club Atalanta in Buenos Aires—as Ranaan Rein has shown in his work on “the Jewish club.” Socialist clubs, district clubs, upper-class clubs were all to be found. All took care to promote the discipline of their collectives. A good example was the Morning Star Sporting Club, founded in Santiago de Chile to “promote the physical development of its members by means of different forms of sport.” Membership was prohibited to morosos, “drunks or those frequenting bad company,” and “anyone who has displayed poor conduct in public, either on the pitch or off it while representing the club.” The captain would keep a register of the members and their age, marital status, profession, address, and attendance (or lack of it) at club matches and functions. The club was imagined as a tightly bound social association. The captain was charged with “keeping an account of the conduct of his subalterns, cautioning them in private where necessary and informing the club about their behavior.” Teams should always be presented “wearing the appropriate ‘uniform’: clean, ordered and complete,” and players should be fined fifty centavos for “contravening this fundamental rule of sports.” Members would be bound by the “duty of compañerismo” and would find work for unemployed or unfortunate colleagues. The “28 September” Sport Club, founded in 1912 in Ibarra in highland Ecuador, went further. Sport, for them, was about furthering culture in all its forms. The object of the club was to “promote the physical culture of its associates by means of sporting games.” Members should be “known for their good conduct and social reputation, and should not have a contagious disease.” They should

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“have nothing to do, either directly or indirectly, with politics or religion” and upon joining should “donate to the Club’s Library a scientific, literary, or artistic work.”9 Given these idealistic regulatory impulses—found in club constitutions and statutes across the continent—a productive tension resulted between the letter of the law and the unwritten codes of honor and behaviors. These honor codes were demonstrated through gestures, poses, and attitudes. There were numerous examples of penalties being awarded but not claimed and of distaste and disgust at any perceived desire to win “at all costs.” The language of honor and class suffused commentators’ reports about players, teams, and their styles. The more popular sports became, the greater the potential for conflict.10

Popular Clubs Sports became more popular in the 1900s as working-class, Black, and Brown people started playing, spectating, and identifying in greater numbers. Elite sports clubs therefore had a choice to make as to whether, and on what terms, to admit these groups as members. Some of the elite sporting pioneers were uncomfortable with working-class, mixed-race women or Black players on the field and in the clubhouse, even when they were able to limit the physical contact involved.11 Clubs adopted a range of strategies or improvised responses to the popularization of sports. At issue was the question of regulation of sporting activity. Soccer had developed a less regulated and less gentlemanly aspect in the years following 1900, as its simplicity allowed it to be played without referees, out of reach of the first clubs. In São Paulo this was futebol de varzea, waste ground or floodplain soccer, with workers and children playing where they could, away from the curated recreational grounds of the elites, in a separate leisure sphere known as small soccer in opposition to big soccer. In Buenos Aires, as Frydenberg showed, soccer was “plebeianized,” as new migrants flocked into existing sporting clubs and often created their own. By 1907 Buenos Aires had over three hundred teams competing in more than a dozen “independent leagues” of amateur soccer (fútbol aficionado). These were “team-clubs” often consisting of “11, 12 or 13 players/ members/directors.” Young men were the driving force behind this burst

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of associationism, creating new clubs ever week. As Frydenberg has it, the aspiration of these new clubs was to compete on the same playing field as the historical clubs: they created club names, shields, mottos, and kits and aspired to mark off their own ground and enter the league system. To do so they had to play by the same rules. In Santiago de Chile, where workers’ clubs created a thriving amateur soccer scene through the Workers’ Football Association from 1906 in the shadow of the elite clubs, soccer became a central weekend social activity across the city. Socialist and other ideologically inspired teams run by printers, council workers, and other manual laborers were common.12 The sporting authorities linked to political elites sought to control this popular game being played on waste grounds and public spaces whenever time and players were available. Municipal grounds were created with linemarkings and civil oversight, and clubs were involved in translating and disseminating the rules of soccer. It was estimated that there were 5,000 soccer clubs in Argentina in 1914, and it was speculated that if on average just thirty people, including the players, cared passionately about each club, there would be around 150,000 people following the sport nationally, out of a population of around 8 million. In Chile in 1912 it was thought that there were 40,000 active members of sports clubs and 300 functioning soccer clubs. In Paraguay in 1911 the soccer teams Curupayty, Presidente Hayes, and Sol de América allowed themselves to be photographed for glamorous coffee-table books, their style and poise indicating the elite status of the participants. The names of the teams, gesturing toward indigenous history, a US politician and continental unity, respectively, show how sports clubs were coming to occupy a political space for the projection of multiple identities. Between 1926 and 1931 the membership of River Plate went from 3,661 to 15,686 and that of San Lorenzo from 2,347 to 15,616. This popularization of sports created the social and political value of these culturally hybrid practices.13

Country Clubs The political and cultural renown of the sports club was widely recognized. The Jockey Club was a center of political and social life. Horse racing’s popularity at the turn of the century was defined by its status as an elite as

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well as a popular spectator sport in which the best segments of society and especially their young women would be displayed in the exclusive areas of the Grand Stands. Photographs of grandstands in the English style—two tiers, wooden ornamentation, sloping roofs—flooded the pages of South American newspaper lifestyle sections as soon as the technology allowed it, with caption writers admiring the beauty, fashion—hats!—and visibility of elite women. Politicians took advantage of the opportunities offered by the social scene. President Leguía in Peru attended races, and photographs of him always appeared in magazines like Variedades and Mundial. Ambassadors, ministers, and presidents bestrode the winners’ enclosures, associating themselves with the wealth, success, and speed that this implied, appropriating “the sport of Kings” for themselves. Under the massive opening up of the potential of associationism, some of the old elites made their clubs more, not less, exclusive, privileging the social aspect as much, if not more than, the sporting role of the club. As cities grew and sports became more popular, some elite clubs moved to new locations on the urban fringes. They retreated geographically as well as socially, citing hygiene as well as social reasons.14 Public health concerns in unequal societies were among the triggers for the split between inclusive and exclusive sports. The use of organized sports to shape men’s and women’s bodies across the South American continent at the start of the 1900s had emerged from anxieties about ways in which life was changing: fears about military conflict between nation-states, about hygiene in towns and cities, and about the ways in which commerce and capitalism were transforming citizens into consumers. School systems used sports to toughen up and tone young bodies, kindling vigor and robustness as a means to counteract the supposed degeneration believed to be caused by material comfort, racial mixing, or tropical climate. In the growing port cities of South America these ideologies were compounded by the physical conditions in which growing migrant populations lived. Fresh air was, then as now, presented as an antidote to polluted skies and contaminated water supplies. Reasons for the elite sporting exodus from city centers included a yellow fever epidemic in Buenos Aires in 1871, a massive fire in Guayaquil in 1896, and a devastating earthquake in Valparaíso in 1906. Newspaper reports and clubhouse discussions of overcrowding, tuberculosis, and polluted water

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encouraged schemes to set up home outside the city. The Hurlingham Club outside Buenos Aires was perhaps the paradigmatic example, “a strictly British-only club” that in the 1890s became “a sporting mecca without parallel in Latin America.” In the words of Abraham and Coyne, it “would never have allowed a peon through the gate unless he was a cleaner.” In Rio de Janeiro, as Melo has illustrated, other sporting grounds moved to the outskirts through the 1920s in search of social order and peace within which to enjoy sports. The health benefits of fresh air outside the city were deemed preferable to regular physical exercise within the city limits. Often, as in the case of São Paulo, this itself further catalyzed urbanization, as lands opened up for tramways linked the new sports grounds to the center and were subsequently urbanized by developers.15 Central sports grounds easily accessible to the working population were ceded to municipal and popular sports, and new clubs were established on the outskirts of the city, often beyond the reach of public transport at the time. Bogotá’s Country Club dates from 1917, and Caracas’s from 1918. The Montevideo Country Club (now The Crossings) was opened in 1923. The Prince of Wales Country Club in Santiago is from 1925, following the move to the east of the city of the Club Alemán. The Lima Country Club was inaugurated by President Augusto B. Leguía in 1924, and Lima Golf Club was developed at the same time on the opposite side of the road.16 The development of socially exclusive country clubs from the late 1910s—characterized in Colombia, according to Quitián, by their “incredible snobbishness”—was also in part a reaction against the popularization of soccer. In Rio de Janeiro the writer Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto published a series of critiques of soccer and its on-field violence and was one of the founders of the Anti-Football League, which gathered critics of soccer’s foreign origins, violence, and the racism of its institutions in the 1920s. Lima Barreto not only reacted against the spectacle of team violence as entertainment but also linked the game to health problems for players and spectators alike, as Mauro Rosso and David Wood have shown.17 The reaction against the popularization of soccer can be viewed in the growth of golf in South America in the 1910s and 1920s. Golf courses had already been laid out at Hurlingham, Buenos Aires in 1893, and at the Dulley estate outside São Paulo in 1898. Golf became central to the marking out of new social and sporting spaces in the 1910s and to the de-

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velopment of socially exclusive country clubs. The presumption of the inevitability of the rise of soccer is based on mistaken notions of its intrinsic democracy, and the naturally exclusive nature of golf is just as misguided. Golf was an individual sport whose rhythms were slow and which was performed against the backdrop of an idealized rural landscape far from the stresses and conflicts of the city. In contrast to the collective spirit and physical vigour of soccer it rigorously enforced the standards of etiquette and fair play. Having the leisure to play such a long game became a mark of elite status as well as a way to spend time with visiting businessmen and diplomats. It was reputed, by its South American practitioners, to be an intelligent game, in opposition to unthinking soccer. The original spirit and ethos of the two games had been appropriated and transformed in different directions. At the end of the 1800s in Scotland golf was played on public courses, often on the coast, by working men and women. Some of them earned a living as blacksmiths, golf club manufacturers and golf professionals, teaching gentlemen the game and playing against each other for money. In England and the United States these origins were swept up as the sport moved into private hands and onto private land. In Scotland the historic links like St. Andrews and Carnoustie remained open to the public. In South America the expense of importing the materials of play—golf clubs, balls, and bags—encouraged an even more exclusive version, operating largely behind closed doors. Playing golf in South America came to epitomize elite sport and its civilized, exclusionary practices. The existence of just a few courses at a considerable distance from major population centers, requiring transport in order to play, cemented the social exclusivity of the sport. The Magallanes Golf Club was founded in Punta Arenas, in the south of Chile, in 1917 as a privileged social space for sportsmen and sportswomen from the local elite.18 Elite South American golf clubs recruited professionals from the game’s Scottish heartlands to coach their members and design their courses. Mungo Park Jr. (1877–1960) of Musselburgh, East Lothian, worked in Argentina as a golf professional and course designer (including San Andrés in 1907) between 1901 and 1914 and married Grace Morrison, the first Argentine women’s golf champion. In Venezuela the Scottish golfer William McMinn was engaged as a professional in 1922, bringing with him a driver, a club specially designed for hitting the ball long distances. It was inscribed

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with the slogan “The Original Kinghorn Tacky Grip,” and is in the offices of the Venezuelan Golf Federation. These people emerged from Scotland’s egalitarian golfing culture and were employed in South America by sports promoters who saw golf as a private game of which only the social elite were worthy players.19 The surviving archive of the San Andrés golf club in Argentina demonstrates how golf was imagined as an elite, aesthetic practice in the fresh air as a counterpoint to the popular, physical soccer of the cities. Nevertheless, golf retained the potential to be popularized. At Mar del Plata, Argentina, promoters had designed a seaside links course on the public Scottish model. Inland at San Antonio de Padua golfers admired the Brown caddies who carried the players’ bags, a practice which in Britain was already a recognized route for working-class players to enter the club and the sport. One even commented, “Will the Champion of the Future emerge from this group?” Even if they did not, the fact that Argentina’s most successful golfers—Roberto de Vincenzo and Ángel Cabrera—both started out as caddies reveals the way bag-carrying acted as an entry route into the sport. Even golf offered some promise of social mobility.20 While socially exclusive in class terms, golf was adopted as appropriate for women as well as men, and from the 1920s South American golfers achieved global success. The Uruguayan Fay Crocker started playing in 1920 at the age of six and won numerous international tournaments through a long career, including two major championships in the United States. Upper-class women golfers played and competed regularly. Photographs and commentary observed the aesthetics of their dress as well as their play. By the late 1920s they were playing “Argentinas vs Extranjeras” tournaments and subsequently interclub matches.21 Tennis became similarly ensconced within socially exclusive private clubs. It was a more urban and middle-class sport than golf, and bespoke tennis clubs were set up on the edges of public parks in many towns and cities. It opened opportunities for some upper- and middle-class women to play and compete, though the surnames of successful players confirm that it was an advantage to come from an English-speaking background. In Colombia tennis became the most popular elite sport, even before the institutionalization of soccer. President of the Republic Carlos E. Res-

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trepo awarded the female and male national champions with their cups in 1910.22 In Chile tennis clubs created space for some young women to push the boundaries of what was thought appropriate. In Viña del Mar the standout young tennis player was Ethel Sutherland Harper, who “used to cut and shorten the long dresses which women tended to wear to play, and accordingly received much criticism. She never wanted to take part in tournaments.” Anita Lizano became an international champion, having started out as the curious niece of a clubhouse manager in Santiago.23 * * * Sports were popularized and institutionalized as a result of the evangelical efforts of sports club organizers, administrators, and members who operated on the margins of the activities of the state through the 1900s and 1910s. This was the crucial period for the establishment of sports clubs, which were part of efforts to embed social order and national progress in the face of disorientating waves of migration and urbanization. The rowing and cricket clubs of British expatriates were notable forerunners in some places, particularly Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, but this was a wave of institutionalization of cultural practice that went well beyond the diffusion of sports from Britain to South America. Soccer did not dominate the sporting landscape anywhere even though by the end of the first decade of the 1900s it was becoming the most popular sport in terms of participation in many cities. Multicultural, multisports clubs had built new spaces for sociability and competition. By 1904, when the Annuario Comercial do Estado de S. Paulo listed all of the city’s sports clubs across eight densely typed pages, there were fifty-nine soccer clubs alongside the many multisports institutions as well as clubs dedicated to fencing, gymnastics, horse racing, pigeon-fancying, swimming, and rowing.24 These clubs took on many roles in the 1920s. Sometimes they would be seen as bulwarks against social change, where citizens could hide away and distract themselves. More often they would be at the forefront of state and civic efforts to build communities around new and more inclusive collective identities. They would do so under pressure from “the first globalization,” the waves of economic change that were transforming both societies and sports in South America.

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6

The Sports Business

as south america became more firmly integrated into global commercial and financial networks around 1900, the relationship between sports and business was transformed by the speed of communication and technological advances. Mapuche palitun contests had been meeting places for community exchange and gambling, just as the Spanish bullfights and Rio de Janeiro regattas had brought people together across political and economic networks. The arrival of international clerks, traders, and engineers with a passion for physical exercise strengthened the links between sport and business. Here, I pivot between the origins of the first half of the book and the ends of the second, as sports develop their powerful cultural, social, and economic roles into the 1900s. The popularization of soccer, cycling, and motorsports took place as part of the rapid growth in the nexus between South American societies and the global economy. South America was sending raw materials to the industrializing economies of Europe and North America, from the rubber and metals out of which new technologies were manufactured to the sugar, beef, and coffee that powered laborers. It is tempting to see sports as part of the same international exchange, in which bicycles, cars, and airplanes were then imported at huge cost for elites with little benefit to ordinary citizens. This would be too simplistic an interpretation. The bicycle and motorcar extended human range and capacity and

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could be democratic and accessible. Sports were appropriated by people from all manner of social backgrounds, producing hybrid, popular styles. The continent had a vast array of economies, some much more tightly linked to global financial and commercial global networks than others. I contend that a definition of sport for historical purposes—rather than for the contemporary political purpose of deciding which lobbies get to be represented in the Olympics and thus receive state-funding—needs to be more blurred around the edges than it has been in the historiography concerned with the modernity or otherwise of sports. If a sport is defined as a product of capitalism, then areas in which capitalism’s advance was patchy or fragmentary will be excluded by definition. Sports and business, as I will show below, had a long, entangled relationship in South America, culminating in the schisms around professionalism and gate-money of the 1920s.1

The Sporting Circus The traveling circus tent was a feature of South American towns in the late 1800s, and as elsewhere it was a space for the development of sports and spectatorship. We know very little about its players but press advertisements reveal that many sports were practiced, from horse tricks and boxing to gymnastics and swimming. These circuses, transnational enterprises by definition, opened a space for sporting entertainment well before clubs were founded, stadia were constructed, and grounds were enclosed. Olga Sorzano’s research on the Colombian circus has suggested continuities between indigenous entertainments and circus performances in Bogotá in the 1800s. Touring companies were very common. In Ecuador the Big English Nelson Circus was a professional outfit, advertising its “Notable Artists of Both Sexes” and “European and American Performers.” There were five ticket prices; boxes, chairs, benches, gallery, and children.2 Nelson’s Circus, which had at least a fourteen-year life up and down the Pacific coast of South America, was run by London-born Samuel Nelson. In Valparaíso in 1886 he advertised “horses, acrobatics, gymnastics, mime and clowns,” including “the Famous Flying Risley,” an acrobatic move in which one gymnast juggles another. It was still a feature in Guayaquil a decade later. The Quiroz Circus in 1897 featured “the Fish Man,” famed for

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holding his breath under water (otherwise known as Albert Dickinson, a swimming instructor from Exeter and holder of various English swimming records through the late 1880s). He challenged “anyone to a swimming race, for 1000 sucres.” Boxers fought challengers in circus tents on the urban fringes and were the template for later, more permanent boxing venues such as Luna Park in Buenos Aires.3 An astounding range of sporting activities was available at circuses and other pop-up venues. A single issue of El Grito del Pueblo in Guayaquil in 1900 advertised a Gran Fiesta in the parish of Carmen in Chimbo to mark the day of Our Lady of Monte Carmelo. There would be bullfighting, cockfighting, horse racing, a hot air balloon rising to twenty meters, two indigenous people demonstrating their skill with lances and arrows, cats with fireworks fixed to them (gatos encohetados), and slippery pole games. In a circus tent there was a “Great Boxing Challenge Match,” a “sensational luxury spectacle” featuring a three-round bout between Tess Mora and his Australian rival Edward Inman, as well as trapeze acrobatic gymnastics, and “the famous trampolining dog, Niro.” Here was a mixed and competitive sporting environment, one which already featured knowledgeable publics, gambling, national rivalries, and entertainment, including spectacular cruelty to animals. This was no blank page upon which soccer landed with its simple destiny. The circus would become a crucial reference point on the urban margins as sports clubs moved to enclose their grounds, charge for entry, and pay their performers.4

Gambling The gambling industry had a long history linked to sports on the margins of the law. Gambling occurred on the margins of social acceptability. In her doctoral thesis Emily Joy Clark has shown how gambling was transformed in the nineteenth century. It was welcomed by some South American writers as an opportunity for brave, masculine risk-takers to rise through society and feared by others as a disruptive addiction linked to criminality and vice. During the colonial period the Catholic Church had disapproved of gambling, and spaces for public entertainment were corralled into limited spaces. Gambling was heavily taxed, for example, through the impe-

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rial states’ monopoly on the sale of playing cards. In colonial Quito public games on holidays were organized by the local authorities and took place in the Plaza Mayor right under their eyes. The authorities, including bishops, attended and watched from the temporary stands, turning their eyes away from behavior they found disagreeable. What Wray Vamplew called “the traditional trio of alcohol, sex and gambling” was the background to sporting events.5 After independence, some administrations elected on religious or conservative platforms, such as that of Rafael Núñez in Colombia in 1886, insisted on banning gambling and then protesting as local authorities turned a blind eye.6 Sometimes the crackdown was fierce: Felix Murcia and Juana Alarcón were imprisoned for twenty-four hours in 1886 “for playing in the street” in Bogotá, presumably meaning gambling. Newly instituted policing organizations like those described by Max Hering Torres struggled to come to an accommodation with long-standing popular activities like this on the margins of the law.7 States played serious roles in legislating for and even promoting gambling, particularly through lotteries, as Clark shows. At the same time, however, some writers felt that “the uncontrollable nature of game playing even offered a threat to civilization” by corrupting men’s behavior, and public outcries were frequent. Women writers were prominent in activism against gambling. One of them was Teresa Gonzalez de Fanning in Peru, whose novel Regina presents financial risk-taking for “reform purposes, decrying gambling’s dangers to women and the family, and showing the direct destruction of the domestic space and, more concretely, women’s bodies.” The history of the illegal jogo do bicho lottery in Brazil explored by Amy Chazkel shows how gambling took place “beyond law and order,” just as games and play occupied spaces outside of work and social order. As commerce and finance remade South American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century the world of horses brought gambling from the margins into the mainstream.8

Enclosure South American horse racing opens a clear path into the thorny question of the relationship between sport and capitalism, conceptualized most

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recently by Tony Collins. As racecourses were enclosed and attracted political and economic elites, horse racing was at the forefront of efforts to regulate gambling and make it acceptable in respectable society.9 South Americans who studied or conducted business or diplomacy in Europe and North America often witnessed race meetings and were impressed by the aristocratic and royal patronage they received, such as the Colombian president Francisco de Paula Santander, who wrote in his diary about the “very well-attended, brilliant” races he went to at Hampton Court and Ascot in the 1830s. Few historians have occupied themselves with horse racing in South America, in contrast to the in-depth studies of England and France, which reveal how horse racing built social and economic links between cities and countryside. Most of our knowledge comes from the institutional histories of the clubs themselves, supplemented with evidence from the periodical press of the time. Two exceptions are Victor Andrade de Melo, whose work on the early history of horse racing in Rio de Janeiro details the affinities to the French scene, and Roy Hora, whose exemplary history of horse racing in Argentina reveals the relationship between the pampas and the lucrative horse-breeding industry.10 After 1860 existing horse-racing practices on plains and waste ground began to be modified and institutionalized into enclosed spaces—racecourses—with clearly identified grandstands and paddocks for particular groups of spectators and tightly controlled and licensed forms of betting through Jockey Clubs. Two related but separate horse-racing worlds developed: the elites running the Jockey Clubs and the rural carreras on the fringes, with gambling central to both: in a booth with marked-up prices in one and a verbal agreement in the other. The driving forces behind these changes were often people who had spent time in Britain or France. The first was the Foreign Amateur Racing Society in 1849 in Buenos Aires, promoted by the merchant and landowner James White. It organized long races around an oval track on White’s estate in the Belgrano district rather than the traditional A to B sprints of the carreras criollas. Presidents Rosas and Urquiza both visited its meetings. In the 1860s, as shipping communication improved, Argentinian landowners began to import thoroughbreds, and a number of horse-racing associations sprang up, often with links to Irish families. Miguel Martínez de Hoz and other landowners invested

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some of their growing wealth in horses, living, racing status symbols. In 1876 the future president Carlos Pellegrini attended the Chantilly Derby in Paris and resolved to organize something similar at home; and in 1882 the Jockey Club of Buenos Aires opened its doors, quickly becoming a center of sociability for the financial and political elites of Buenos Aires. In Rio de Janeiro turf enthusiasts petitioned successive governments for similar support, either for investment in their grounds and buildings or patronage of their races, arguing that a fully functioning racecourse was essential to making the city the equal of its peers in Europe and in neighboring Argentina.11 Horse racing was not limited to Argentina and Brazil. In Valparaíso a spring meeting was held every September from 1865, around the time of Chilean independence celebrations. The Valparaíso Sporting Club was formed in 1882, and its first director was the Englishman Hugo Plunckett Bourchier (1836–85). It had a Stud Book from 1884 and a Derby from 1885. In Colombia a hippodrome operated in Campo Alegre, Bogotá, in 1870. In 1875 in São Paulo the Club de Corridas Paulistano was formed to organize races at Mocca under the impetus of the urban reformer and sportsman Antônio da Silva Prados and the club’s first president, Rafael Aguiar Pais de Barros, who had apparently fallen in love with the sport during his travels in England. In Uruguay the improvised racetracks governed by a Reglamento de Carreras (1877) were formalized into the Hipódromo Nacional de Maroñas in 1889.12 The hippodromes constructed in the 1870s and 1880s were privately financed companies, with local investors supplying fenced-off entertainment for the growing urban public and, as such, operating under license from municipal authorities. By 1890 fully functioning hippodromes in cities in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay were attracting thousands of spectators to watch heavily regulated horse races. Not only was the space cordoned off to necessitate paying entry, but also the rules of competition and betting were strictly codified. Reglamentos de Carreras published in Santiago de Chile in 1892 explained how to adjudicate a contested decision and how to run a handicap system, and in 1903 the Quito Hippodrome set out the details concerning bets, forfeits, and fraudulent bookmakers. These racecourses were built very close to urban centers

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to facilitate the attendance of spectators in the absence of urban tramway systems reaching beyond the city limits. Racecourse owners promoted mass attendance, for profit, to increase gambling revenues, and as a decent form of public entertainment. Reports of prizes and wagers suffused the press reports. The extension of the telegraph system even allowed South Americans to gamble on the Epsom Derby and other big races, forming a global network of sports fans attendant on race results.13 The Jockey Clubs that emerged across the continent—Bogotá in 1874, Buenos Aires in 1882, Montevideo in 1884, and Caracas in 1893, for example—represented the most successful elite attempts to control and regulate popular participation in sports. Beyond the modernity their buildings affected and the apparent cosmopolitanism of the crowds, horse breeding, with its fetishism of lineage and genealogy, was complementary to the eugenicist ideas of racial engineering that ran through many of South America’s governing elites from the late 1800s. The horse-, sheep-, and cattle-breeding industries that flourished on the Argentinian pampas were a demonstration that strength, endurance, and ability could be bred. Breeders went to UK and French fairs to acquire the supposed best horses for their farms. The language of race was perhaps even more explicit in South American horse breeding and racing than in English, where it was often hidden behind euphemism. Stud books were published in Argentina and Chile detailing precise genealogies. Hippodromes advertised “great horse races with the best of our own and English breeds,” with the Spanish original caballos de las mejores razas del país e inglesas clearly differentiating between breeds. Thoroughbreds were translated as purasangres, literally, “pure bloods.” Argentinian racehorse owners throughout the “golden years” of the 1890s to 1930s sought the prestige of winning races in Europe and paid great sums to bring back thoroughbreds to their stud farms, where they could be dedicated to improving the nation, just as they were doing with Hereford and Shorthorn bulls. The promotion of horse-racing by elites sat comfortably with eugenicist ideas about human breeding and stereotypes about half-breeds. The obsession with breeding and sport is more clearly visible in the publications of Clubs Hípicos than in any other type of institution. As Nancy Ley Stepans showed in her classic book The Hour of Eugenics, South American eugen-

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ics was never a simple matter of hierarchical racism from White down to Black. The ideology valued form and beauty and insisted on the potential of individual as well as social improvement. Horse-racing reveals the bonds between racial thinking and sporting competition that would emerge even more explicitly in international soccer in the 1920s. Its success demonstrated that profits could be made out of the combination of public entertainment, licensed gambling, and media coverage of competition between breeds.14 The rapid emergence of enclosed sports stadiums on the model of the racecourse reflected, in the words of the geographer Chris Gaffney “the increasing organization and sanitization of urban life.” The trend, he argued, was “from less to more control, from a larger to a more limited public, and from less to more economic and architectural rationality.” In the early 1900s other sports clubs started to fence off their fields and to build new wooden stands that could shelter and comfort their paying customers.15 South America’s first velodrome, the Bellodromo Nacional in Rio, was built and inaugurated in 1892. The Jornal do Brasil described it in great detail, including the luxurious seating with room for 2,000 spectators, space for a “musical band, who should play during the races,” and the perfectly cemented track of 150m lap distance, illuminated with masses of electric lighting. It represented, according to Schetino, “a new era for the Republic, where modernity, progress and novelty would form part of the city.” It offered sport and entertainment to potential spectators: one of the first advertisements featured a woman roller skater smiling as she rolled around the track with her arms crossed, wearing a floppy hat and a knee-length red skirt.16 At this time the landowner Veridiana Prado and her son, the mayor Antônio da Silva Prado, were remaking the center of São Paulo. Inspired by their affinity with French culture and a desire to outdo their rivals in Rio de Janeiro, a velodrome was at the center of their plans. The Velodromo Paulista (also known as the Velódromo Consolação) opened on Prado’s land in 1895. The banked, outdoor track was 380m long (more than twice as long as the track in Rio) and was flanked by a wooden stand in a rustic style and a chalet-style outbuilding for gymnastics and fencing. Soon the president of the Republic, Campo Sales, was reputed to be riding there regularly.

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For popular meetings it accommodated 4,000 spectators, many of them standing in ways that Wilson Gambeta identifies as showing a clear continuity between the cultures of spectatorship associated with the world of turf, of which many of São Paulo’s cycling pioneers were also enthusiastic patrons.17 The year the Velodromo Paulista opened, there were already velodromes in Montevideo, and before the end of the century there were velodromes in Bucaramanga and Bogotá (next to the racecourse and polo grounds) in Colombia, Lima in Peru, and Caracas in Venezuela. By 1900 in Brazil alone, according to Gambeta, there were velodromes across São Paulo state (in Santos, São Carlos, Rio Claro, Campinas, Taubaté, and Jacareí) and across Brazil (including Manaus, São Luis, and Belo Horizonte as well as Rio and Porto Alegre). At the very least there were twenty-five velodromes across the continent in 1900, and probably many more.18 As Gaffney argues, “the development of institutionalized sport was a byproduct of inclusion in the global economy . . . and the development of stadiums and sporting cultures occurred simultaneously with the restructuring of the urban environment, the development of modern public space and an emerging civil society.” As the population of cities expanded, stadia were built in response to the adoption of soccer by popular classes and to their willingness to pay to watch the games take place.19 Between 1910 and 1930 soccer stadia were built across South America at an incredible rate. In Curitiba, Brazil, Club Internacional built theirs on an old military barracks in 1913. Fluminense’s Estádio das Laranjeiras was built in 1917 and was expanded to hold eighteen thousand spectators for the 1919 South American championships, combining “a neocolonial palatial style with the modernist functionality of a large public space.” Built next to the Guanabara palace, the former residence of Princess Isabel, “the stadium’s architecture,” in Gaffney’s view, “embodied messages of the colonial past and the modernist future while at the same time retaining notions of social privilege and exclusion. The general public was welcome, as long as they could pay and could remember their place was in the stands, not in the clubhouse.” Technological advances in construction materials such as cement and concrete allowed ever bigger structures to be built. Peru’s Estadio Nacional in the center of Lima was inaugurated with a capacity of sixty

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thousand in 1927 and Independiente’s fifty thousand capacity stadium in Avellaneda, Buenos Aires, in 1928 was the first to be built of concrete. Argentina’s Velez Sarsfield were the first to have electric floodlights, in 1928. All this came together in the architecture of the sixty thousand capacity Centenario in Montevideo, built for the first FIFA World Cup in 1930.20

Spectatorship Spectators packed into these stadia for the thrill of gambling, the enjoyment of the contest, and their identification with the protagonists—what Archetti called “the spectacle of identities.” Mass sports spectatorship was taking place in racecourses well before the first soccer matches were played. Spectators were encouraged to behave in a civilized fashion, but from the beginning the emotions of the crowd made the authorities anxious. Railway and tram lines facilitated the arrival of thousands of spectators, who relished the excitement of the event. In Argentina racehorses achieved massive popularity. In 1918 the celebrated singer, composer, and songwriter Carlos Gardel snuck out of a hotel in La Pampa while on tour and rushed six hundred kilometers back to the city of Buenos Aires, where he headed straight to the hippodrome at Palermo, alongside over fifty thousand other spectators. He simply had to witness the race of the century between Grey Fox and Botafogo. Gardel later wrote the celebrated tango Por una cabeza (By a Head) in homage to the excitement of the racecourse. According to Hora, “Horse-races brought together patricians and plebeians in a common passion that generated much discomfort amongst critics of the status quo.”21 The mass spectatorship, gambling, and competition of horse-racing attracted capitalists, intellectuals, and social reformers as well as tango stars. One of South America’s most influential thinkers, José Carlos Mariátegui, worked as a turf journalist in the 1910s, often under the pseudonym Juan Croniqueur, describing in his “Crónicas del Paddock” columns the melancholy, joy, volatility, and hypocrisy of sports fans and their gambling passions. He loved the social freedom of the racecourse and its stands, paddock, gardens, and stalls, creating an absolutely modern entertainment, in stark contrast to what he saw as the bottled-up aesthetics of the bullring. Nevertheless, Mariátegui was always drawn to critique the hypocrisy of the

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owners who spoke of fair play on the one hand while seeking every advantage for success and profit on the other, including through corruption and race fixing. Mariátegui’s horse-racing journalism recognized the potential of South American sports to supply entertainment and joy in unequal societies, while the commercial elites filled their pockets from the pleasures of the common man.22 As the numbers of spectators grew, clubs came to represent their communities in different ways. Fandom developed as part of particular urban histories, for example, when Alianza Lima came to be associated with the Afro-Peruvian community from its base in the barrio of La Victoria. Sports promoters recognized that attendances were higher when identities were held to be at stake. The visiting Corinthians team from England attracted big crowds when they challenged teams of “Brazilians.” Local derbies, or clásicos, were arranged between rival teams such as elite Fluminense and working-class Flamengo, first played 1912; River Plate and Boca Juniors, first played 1913, before River had become known as los millonarios; and Cerro Porteño and Olimpia in Asunción, Paraguay, also 1913. Representative sport was not just a way for communities to celebrate their collective identities. It was also a way of making money. Attendances grew year on year for the representative Lipton Cup match, played between nativos of Argentina and Uruguay from 1905. In 1908 “Argentinos” took on “Brazileiros” at a packed Fluminense’s Laranjeiras stadium in Rio. In 1910 Argentinians played the Uruguayans for “the Ministry of Justice’s Great Honourable Prize” in front of a packed grandstand at Palermo, demonstrating the extent to which the challenge had become an elite social occasion as well as a moneymaking enterprise.23 Statistics on ticket prices and clubs’ income remain hard to come by except in fragmentary surviving sources. In 1902 seven thousand spectators paid the ten-centavo price to watch a soccer match between Argentinos and Orientales, “and another thousand preferred to stay outside and listen to the roars of their wealthier colleagues.” In 1923 soccer clubs were making so much money from ticket sales in Rio de Janeiro that the local government introduced a tax on ticket offices that would be audited through a special system of stamps. In order to protect their profit margins, not long afterward the clubs of Rio’s Metropolitan League raised their ticket prices

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by 50  percent, claiming there was a rise in the cost of living. Critics argued that clubs like Fluminense were complicit in touts charging increased prices for tickets for key games.24

Gate Money, Popularization, and Professionalism When sports attracted more paying spectators a number of questions were raised about what should happen with the profits. Jockeys and circus performers were paid and so can be considered as professional sportsmen and women. Urban horse racing in hippodromes privileged the owner and the breeder of the horses—usually from a White, landowning family—over the often-anonymous jockey, who might be a child or drawn from the working classes or a migrant or both. Spaces were opened for these marginalized sportsmen through the visibility their endeavors achieved in the media. Images from early Venezuelan race meetings show Black as well as White jockeys, and newspapers in Argentina often commented that jockeys were darker-skinned than the owners. A few jockeys’ names survive, revealing the transnational sporting careers that emerged out of these low-status beginnings. The victorious jockey in two of the first three Derby races in Valparaíso, Chile, was a Peruvian, C. M. Zavala. Professional jockeys were admired but also pitied for their hard work and meagre wages. By 1895 a journalist in O Sport in Rio de Janeiro could comment that “a jockey is considered as a person of some importance. With prizes and tips, he can retire after ten or twelve years of work with a considerable fortune.” Nevertheless, as Melo has pointed out, even the most celebrated jockeys of the time, such as Francisco Luiz de Sá, still tended to die in poverty. Others, such as Marcelino Moreira Macedo and Domingos Ferreira, found work as starters at the racecourse, or Lourenço Alcoba, who led the horses out of the paddocks. As early as 1894 the celebrated Brazilian writer Machado de Assis had contrasted the risks taken by jockeys with the contempt with which they were treated by owners.25 In his brutal chronicle “El jockey Frank” set in Lima in 1916 Mariátegui describes a successful working-class jockey whose career is undone by his “orgiastic” lifestyle and the devious manipulations of his ambitious girlfriend and the jealous owner of the horses he rode. At the end of the story

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Frank is alone and sad, forgotten by the crowds who had praised him. The media focus on the cult of the jockey, driven by reproductions of photographs, did raise the profile of some successful jockeys, rising to a crescendo in the 1920s. Irineo Leguisamo, “an Uruguayan born in poverty and misery,” crossed the national frontier and became Argentina’s first sporting star, despite his “illegitimate birth, [being] almost illiterate, frequently considered indigenous, and never even addressed as Señor.”26 Professional sport was therefore already a social fact in horse racing, boxing, and cycling before soccer became popular and clubs sought to find ways to pay players so that they had time to train. “Perhaps nothing had a greater impact on Latin American soccer than the advent of the professional game,” Josh Nadel has argued. The legal acceptance of the often-hidden payments to players was a long, slow process. Institutional recognition of professionalism was recognition of the reality that most had known for many years. The working-class, Brown and Black players who gained prestige and status for their achievements brought into question exactly who the sporting elite were. In the period leading up to 1930, the question of professionalism was a constant thorn in the side of sports administrators.27 Whereas initially factory owners had used sport to educate and civilize the working class, popularization created new incentives for sporting entrepreneurship well before the legal recognition of payments to players. In the early 1920s clubs like Fluminense, Flamengo, and Vasco da Gama were contracting professional coaches, which created the need to raise further income to pay them through ticket sales and other commercial opportunities.28 In South America, as in continental Europe, the newly formed soccer authorities of the 1900s held fast to the ideal of the amateur athlete, of playing for the physical joy and aesthetic fulfillment of the game. Players and administrators who believed that the amateur sportsman was morally superior to the professional sportsman—for example, the jockey, the hunting guide, or the circus acrobat—saw professional soccer as the reduction of the practice to a lower plane. The rewards of gate income offered by the competitive game nevertheless induced clubs to incentivize the best players through other means, and so “shamateurism” or “dark amateurism” developed. Racialized dark amateurism spoke to elites’ often depreciative attitudes toward the ethnic background of footballers as the game became

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more popular and spread to the working classes. The SPAC gave up on soccer in 1912. In 1924 Vasco da Gama were effectively expelled from the Rio Metropolitan League after its success the previous season was attributed by rivals to the contribution of Fausto and other Black players. Vasco’s refusal to ditch its players is held to have contributed to the side-lining of explicit racism from soccer institutions, along with the potential exodus of players to Italy and recognition of professionalism in 1933.29 The split between amateur and professional was a blurred one which played out at many levels. Strict or pure amateurism was at best a discursive ideal: to be an amateur or professional was an indication of social status; “amateur rules were designed primarily to discriminate unfairly between the classes,” as Bolsmann and Porter have argued for the British case. When the English amateur side Corinthians visited Brazil in 1910 and 1913 they presented themselves as gentlemen representing “an idealized version of amateurism,” though their matches attracted big ticket-buying crowds.30 The income produced by the sale of tickets for these amateur activities created opportunities for patronage and the exchange of goods and labor away from formal accounting, and this introduced all sorts of irregularities, some players receiving more than others and no critical scrutiny of the accounts. By 1922, in Fortaleza, in northeastern Brazil, the best players were being tempted by underhand payments to drop casual soccer and move into the bigger clubs. In Argentina the top level of soccer split into separate leagues between 1919 and 1926, one asserting itself as the amateur league, a situation that was resolved only with the intervention of President Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear.31 Debates around professionalism in South America took place within a global context. In 1916 the São Paulo club Scottish Wanderers—formed by some members of SPAC who wanted to continue playing soccer—was revealed to have contracted workers in Scotland who just so happened to be excellent footballers, so that they could be employed by the J. & P. Coats mill in São Paulo during the week and turn out for the club on weekends. Rival media reported the alleged brown-envelope payments being offered and made to players. Soccer was effectively professionalized in Peru in 1922 as players began to be paid in so-called tips taken from a share of gate receipts. In Argentina the reality of professional soccer was recognized by the authorities in 1931, and in Brazil in 1933. In both cases this was the result

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of the fear of losing many players who were the children of immigrants to Italy. The tensions created by professionalism reveal how successful social elites were in maintaining control of local and national institutions and hence the representational value of their selections.32 Economic growth in much of South America during the 1920s tightened the links between sport, capitalism, and nationalism. The more people cared about teams the more likely they were to pay to watch them. Soccer, horse racing, and boxing were filling their stadia with paying customers. They attracted bookmakers and gamblers, too, in ways in which rugby, tennis, golf, or cricket did not. The fragmentary surviving sources indicate that the ability to gamble on the result was part of the attraction of these sports, and that disputes over the interpretation of rules were often linked to debts accrued by the “wrong” team winning or losing. Concerns about the commercialization of sport and the activities of gamblers around it were longstanding. However, the ability to attract paying spectators was essential to the success of clubs, stadia, and sporting events. Representative sport received a commercial boost when it was realized that spectators were more likely to pay to attend representative matches if they felt represented.33 The ability to travel in order to play sport was dependent on the ability of practitioners to raise the funds to finance the trip. At first, elite players financed their own journeys, as in 1875,when a team representing Rio de Janeiro’s Anglo–Brazilian Cricket Club traveled to São Paulo to play the São Paulo Cricket Club. When public transport networks developed, ticket sales paid for the players’ travel expenses. In the absence of integrated national transport systems, the income that could be generated by sports was greater in places where players and fans could travel for matches, maximizing opportunities for competition. Leagues therefore tended to be concentrated within single cities and their hinterlands, such as Valparaíso, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, where trams and bicycles enabled teams to visit one another’s grounds or where clubs and teams shared a centrally located ground. Before the 1930s leagues rarely incorporated provincial or faraway clubs, and this was more likely where urban and rural transport networks were developed, for example, in Argentina, with its thousands of kilometers of railways, or in areas characterized by rival urban conurbations, such as Valparaíso and Santiago in Chile. Here, intercity challenges

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were facilitated by the railway from the 1890s.34 Only places with a functioning railway system could aspire to anything approaching a regional or national league until the development of more affordable air travel in the 1950s. The first league in Colombia that aspired to be national came only in 1948, and Peru in the 1960s. Soccer in Argentina mirrored its transport network: heavily concentrated in Buenos Aires and radiating out along railway lines. Clubs in São Paulo competed within their federal state, as did their counterparts in Rio de Janeiro. The long distances involved shaped the development of South American states, nations, and economies in the early twentieth century—sport was no exception.35 Sports developed political significance because individuals and corporate interests promoted them for political and economic gain, not because South Americans were somehow naturally sporty and obsessed with politics. Utility companies, like those that furnished gas, water, and railways, recur in the names of those first clubs, and the workers or members who had the time and inclination to serve as secretaries or treasurers were the ones who embedded the institutionalization of sporting clubs within the urban infrastructure. There were many instances of this correlation of interests benefiting the company concerned: for example, in São Paulo the beer sold to spectators at the Parque Antárctica, owned by and situated next to the brewery; or the rise in workers’ morale and productivity when their team was successful, as with the Scottish Wanderers following the recruitment of semiprofessional footballers recruited by J. & P. Coats textile mill. Sports promoters came from a variety of backgrounds: some immigrants tried to replicate the feelings of joy and belonging they had felt through sport at home or at school and carried this on in later life by taking minutes, serving as referees, or donating gear. Many of these people, even when they worked in banks or trade, saw their sporting work as a form of philanthropy.36 The promotion of sports became a way of achieving wider goals, such as nation-building, education, and civilization at a time when unequal economic growth was creating demands for the political and economic inclusion of majority populations. Sports and especially soccer came to personify the ideal of the new man of action whose entrepreneurial, vigorous spirit would help the nation come together and progress, as Fanni Muñoz remarked in the Peruvian case.37

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The increasing symbolic association between sport and nation in the early 1900s stoked the desire for more international competitions. The most economically efficient way of bringing this about was the tournament, in which teams claiming to be representative all toured to the same place. Several sports used this formula. In 1907 international games were held in Montevideo. Athletes arrived on steamship from Brazil and Argentina, and Brazilian journalists sent back reports praising their athletes, such as the swimmer Abrahão Saliture, the São Paulo rowing team of Corri, Glovini, and Pastore, and the athlete Hermann Friese. These early sporting international tournaments “helped grow the rivalries against South American neighbour countries, hence increasing an “us versus them” mentality that helped create a nationwide patriotic ideology,” as Peres and colleagues have argued. Sport became one of the central spaces in South American life for the working out of who “we” and “they” might be, developing a tension between supporting a national team and club that represented a subnational identity, as Lever observed.38 Some clubs, like Boca Juniors and Alianza Lima, defined themselves by their open, democratic, participatory natures. This was part of the competition between groups for control of sporting institutions. Disagreement over the representative nature of sports was further complicated by regional competition: in Chile between associations based in Valparaíso and Santiago (not resolved until 1928); in Brazil between São Paulo, Rio, and the rest. Two separate Chilean teams were sent to compete in the 1924 Olympics, neither of which recognized the legitimacy of the other. Conflict over amateurism was a regular driver of disharmony in Argentinian soccer. For many years Chile had two competing governing bodies for soccer, one of which favored popularization and professionalism, the other leaning toward elitism and amateurism. These conflicts were not just petty political factionalism but competitions over power, meaning, and resources.

Advertising The popularization of sports not only drove the increase in the size of stadia and the rise in ticket prices that paid the players. It also enlarged the market for sports products, which in turn created an advertising industry

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that financed the growth in the sports pages of newspapers and then in specialist sporting magazines. As Hugo da Silva Moraes has shown for Rio de Janeiro between 1922 and 1924, soccer attracted a wave of advertising from a range of consumer goods firms, from cigarettes to furnishings.39 Newspapers and, later, specialized sports magazines were full of advertisements for sporting goods like balls, bats, and bicycles. In 1904 Casa Fuchs in São Paulo promoted its “footballs . . . of legitimate English manufacture, top quality, all sizes.’’ Illustrations of sportsmen and sportswomen were used to sell all manner of products, from whiskey and Quaker Oats to automobiles and aspirins. Most often they were linked to cleanliness, hygiene, and dreams of freedom and mobility.40 The new sports were popularized in the places most strongly attached to the Atlantic economy, which brought technology and competitors. The business of selling and marketing sports and their imported machines was integral to the consumption of new sporting practices. Sports news sold newspapers too. Daily and weekly publications expanded their sports coverage every year through the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s. Importers of foreign goods were prominent in the newspapers, and many kept stores in central shopping districts. Initially they proclaimed the recent arrival of stock from Europe or the United States. In Buenos Aires the bicycle importers Pratt, Cochrane, and Company positioned the expensive US bicycles they sold as status symbols. Subsequently they highlighted the local identity of their products and the activities associated with them. The cost of imported equipment was an important factor, one that shaped participation, though clubs could buy the balls, and bicycle rental schemes were common. Even soccer, which required only the simplest, cheapest equipment, could be prohibitive at the top level. The costs of sporting equipment were unaffordable for many footballers. As Bocketti explains, in 1921 a pair of football socks cost more than the average Paulista laborer’s daily wage, and the cheapest pair of football boots at the Mappin department store was over twenty days’ salary.41 * * * The business of South American sports was transformed in the 1910s and 1920s by the income generated from ticket sales for soccer matches,

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the direct consequence of the popularization of playing and spectating among the working classes in the continent’s rapidly expanding cities. The new stadia built to cater to these fans were located in residential neighborhoods and were themselves catalysts for transport infrastructure and property speculation. The enclosure of sports grounds drew directly on the precedent of racecourses, and gambling remained a centerpiece of these sports cultures. The allegiance fans felt for their clubs meant that competitions between them could be marketed as classic rivalries. Entrepreneurial sports promoters did not create fans’ attachment to their clubs, but they did make the most of the income it generated. The not-for-profit organization of most sports clubs in the early 1900s, however, with their clear public goals of well-being, activity, citizenship, and education, came into tension with the growing commercialization of the game. The subject that led to the most visible fracture in sports was the payment of players. Was this a dishonorable betrayal of the amateur tradition? or the overdue recognition of the contribution of men from outside the social elite? The compromise between the two, known derogatorily as sham amateurism or dark amateurism, suggests it was more the former than the latter. However, judged by several criteria of average attendances—from clubs playing in leagues to the ultimate success of national teams in global competitions of the 1920s—the South American soccer industries appeared to be getting something right. A strand of sports politics that eschewed commercialism and professionalism persisted and over time it found a home in the international Olympic movement. For David Foxley, one of the founders of Chile’s Everton, ‘‘sports are only practiced because of their educational value, and there should be no room for personal or party ambition in the soul of a true sportsman.’’ In the words of Francisco Juillet, the president of the Unión Ciclista de Santiago in 1925 and himself an Olympic competitor, any prizes should be ‘‘moral stimuli that recompense the desire to perfect one’s physical culture. The most valuable prize would not compensate for the prejudice to friendship, partnership, institutionalism, and one’s own conscience, when angry and passionate complaints are made.” Professional soccer is often seen as an epochal change, but the majority of people who played sports remained amateurs, and gambling went under the radar. Only at the most visible level

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of competitive sport did money change hands in exchange for the labor of players.42 Amidst this increasingly commercial context, what were the ideological underpinnings of sports that created the conditions for the continent to host and win the first men’s World Cup final in 1930? Sport could be beautiful, and it could create bodies that could endure testing physical situations and use violence in limited ways. From 1910 the continent hosted an increasing number of international sporting tournaments to mark the centenaries of independence from colonial rule. This wave of sporting tournaments in the 1910s and 1920s gave political meanings to the bodies that were now held to represent national states.

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PART TWO

the ends of sports

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7

Beauty

the beauty of the individual artistry of the male footballer was central to the way an idea of national style, which came to be known as ‘‘la nuestra’’ in Argentina, was built up by the journalists writing for El Gráfico in the 1920s. As Eduardo Archetti showed in his influential conceptualization, male footballers who were small and lightweight were valued when they were able to outwit and outmaneuver the bigger, stronger players associated with an English style. It became a commonplace that teamwork linking individual skill could be a thing of beauty. Commentators in the sports pages of mainstream papers like Crítica, Última Hora, and El Mundo used soccer to debate and try to form ‘‘a consensus about the fundamental characteristics of Argentine society and culture.’’ Elsewhere individual ball control, cunning, trickery, and dribbling were also appreciated as being beautiful by sportswriters. In Brazil this was the malandro, captivating spectators with unexpected, graceful movements. In the 1930s writers like Gilberto Freyre and Mario Filho theorized that racial mixture had created a hybrid form in which Brazilian men played the game that was superior to that practiced elsewhere because of its combinations of rhythm, grace, and power: futebol arte. In the mid-twentieth century the beautiful game, futebol arte and jogo bonito, became part of the global brand of Brazilian soccer. In places where print media was less accessible to the population these links were not made until much later. Across the continent, however, the relationship between beauty and sports had a long history.1

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Here, I want to dig into the historical roots joining beauty and sport in South America and show how sports promotion was shaped by racialized and gendered ideologies about human bodies in the early 1900s. Developing the insights of Gumbrecht in On Athletic Beauty, I reveal how sporting bodies were seen as potentially beautiful repositories of grace, rhythm, and art and how these determined which sports were deemed appropriate for men, women, and children. The concern with beauty was used both to exalt ways of playing certain sports as forms of art as well as to police who should play them. I conclude by reflecting on the ways women, who played sports were characterized as masculine. In soccer particularly players were marked as ugly, machonas, or tomboys. The relationship between beauty and sport up to 1930, following Goellner, Anderson, Elsey and Nadel, Wood, and others, illustrates how a binary of separate men’s and women’s sports was created through education, institutions, and the media. Controlled violence and forceful physicality for men were counterposed with grace and technique for women. The rise to dominance of men’s soccer in the 1920s and beyond represented the ascendance of a vision of sport that conceived of male physical effort, coordination, individual skill, and competitiveness as beautiful.2

The Poetry of the Body in Motion Newspaper chronicles of bullfighting had long emphasized the beauty of the performance, in Gumbrecht’s words, ‘‘The violent beauty of the drama that the bull and toreador jointly perform.’’ The connection between the performance of sporting bodies and the emotions of the observer was taken up by South American modernists from the 1910s. As David Wood has shown, these writers described sporting activity in terms of beauty and art. In 1918, for example, the Peruvian Juan Parra del Riego wrote “[A] Lyrical Eulogy for Football,’’ a popular, widely traveled piece of literature: written in Tucumán, Argentina, first published in Arequipa, Peru, and most widely disseminated in Montevideo, Uruguay, via Club Nacional’s magazine. The poem embraces the speed, movement, and complementarity of the players’ bodies. Men’s soccer teams were admired for the patterns they wove on the pitch and for using their bodies to evade physical contact as well to engage

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in it. To Parra del Riego, the joy, grace, and artistry of South American football contrasted with the declining, war-ravaged depression of Europe.3 The opposition of South American beauty against European decline was a favorite theme of the modernists, and in São Paulo it was artists who ‘‘set up the basis for seeing football as a newly imagined conception of the nation that drew on popular practices as the basis of Brazil.” Women writers were central to this reimagination of what sports were for. The Brazilian poet Anna Amélia de Queiroz in ‘‘O salto” (The Leap, 1922) compared the grace of the Fluminense goalkeeper Marcos de Mendonça to that of the ancient Greeks and marveled at the emotions the beauty of his movements triggered among the people watching. Beautiful female spectators were a mainstay of sports coverage in illustrated magazines, but women also led supporters’ groups and sustained the links between beauty and sports in their writings.4 Many intellectuals embraced the beauty to be found in sports. Clubs were named after poets, such as Mariano Melgar in Arequipa, Peru, in 1915 and Olmedo in Riobamba, Ecuador, in 1916. Poet-clubs complemented the already common tradition of naming sports clubs after historical figures (Vasco da Gama in Rio de Janeiro, 1898, Club Atlético Almirante Brown in La Matanza Partido, Buenos Aires in 1912, and Club Bolívar in La Paz, 1925). Writing about the beauty of the human body in motion drew on a range of historical models. To Anna Amélia de Queiroz this was classical literature. The Turnverein gymnastic clubs were another important reference point. These were established by German migrants in the mid-1800s to promote noncompetitive exercises: in 1853 in Santiago de Chile, in 1855 in Buenos Aires, in 1859 in Rio de Janeiro, and 1863 in Porto Alegre. These German gymnastic models were well established at the time of the educational reforms discussed earlier (see chapter 4) and upon the arrival of competitive sports linked to Britain, with which gymnastics promoters saw themselves, ironically, in competition. Often closely linked to the men and women of German settler communities, the focus on drill, stretching, and noncompetitive gymnastics retained a strong influence in sporting cultures across the continent. The mandated number of hours for physical education in school systems, for example, drew directly from the German, French, and Scandinavian gymnastics movements of Jahn, Amoros, and

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Ling. Toned muscles and coordinated movements were valued as beautiful, and sketches and photographs of them were reproduced in the press.5 Gymnastics initially functioned ‘‘both as social practice and as symbolic glue” for German migrant and settler communities. It was adopted by educational reformers who wanted to strengthen male bodies for combat and to tone female bodies for beauty and motherhood. As the 1899 Peruvian code on physical education set out, girls and boys could play the same games, but women should be taught hygienic and aesthetic gymnastics over those favoring strength.6 Conceptions of beauty in sports shared the racialized undertones of other aspects of society. In Bolivia, for example, it was hoped that gymnastics would “turn our Indians into little Swedes.”7 Beauty competitions for women and girls swept the continent in the 1920s, at the same time men’s soccer was becoming established as a representation of nation. These competitions were themselves built on racialized hierarchies that placed White women at the top and Black and indigenous women at the bottom. Research into competitive female beauty competitions has been conducted in disciplines that are quite different from work on men’s competitive sports, but the shared concerns with improvement, identity, and entertainment are clear. In Brazil most girls were steered toward beauty competitions instead of sports, at least until the introduction of physical education in the state school curriculum by the Vargas regime in 1932. Sometimes the ideologies of beauty, race, and sports came clearly into view. Supporters of Jeanette Campbell (1916–2003), the tall, blond, White Argentine swimmer and silver medalist at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, who was pictured in a color photo reclining in a swimsuit on the front page of El Gráfico, welcomed her being named as the Games’ most beautiful athlete by the Nazi organizing committee.8

Beauty in Violence Beauty could be found in even the most aggressive action, such as a charge or tackle. Jorge Brown, a footballer for Alumni FC and Argentina as well as a graceful cricketer, believed that “the soccer I played was a true demonstration of skill and energy; maybe a rough style of play, but virile, beautiful and thrusting.” Even the first footballers in the bombastically named Bolivian club Thunder (whose rivals named themselves The Strongest) combined

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physical strength with artistic moves: one of the most fondly remembered players, Luis Farfán, was recalled by his admirers as being “like a Russian ballet-dancer” in his deft footwork. Hegemonic masculinity was not as macho as it is sometimes presented, linked only to violence, danger, and misogyny. Sports enabled powerful bodies to be appreciated as beautiful. A better understanding of the links between beauty and sports can help us to lay simplistic binaries of masculinity and femininity to one side.9 Sportsmen’s bodies were held up, photographed, described, and fantasized over. The Brazilian men’s rowing champion of 1903, Arthur Amendoa, was described as having “a near perfect figure”: “medium height, brown, a beautiful figure, a beautiful athlete’s complexion, quite muscly, and possessed of such good humour, manners and politeness.”10 The visibility of these sporting bodies meant it was tempting for commentators to use them to talk about the nations they were coming to represent. Brown bodies like Amendoa’s could be used by White elites to celebrate mestizaje and the mixed societies that had resulted from colonialism and migration, as long as they were polite, beautiful, and good humored. In Brazil, spaces were opened up on the soccer field, the capoeira circle, and the national imaginary for the supposedly natural flexibility, invention, and creativity of Black bodies, as scholars like Guedes and Maranhão have shown. This shift raised questions. In what poses and places could a Black athlete be viewed as beautiful by White spectators? In what ways and for whom could a Brown footballer be a role model? The people who played sports both embodied and resisted the racialized, gendered, and classed identities that were imposed upon them by pioneers and promoters. An understanding of sports as being beautiful opened a door to some social acceptance of these athletes. Their achievements and the ways they were reported in the print media created unexpected sporting stories in which social barriers were both undermined and reerected. When perceived as beautiful, sports could inspire hope that mixed republics could prosper and flourish.11

Beautiful Style Beauty could be found in the harmony of grace and movement, and tennis was a space where this could be displayed by both men and women. Tennis spectators valued grace and beauty, and women were welcomed

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onto the court nearly as equals to men. The third edition of El Gráfico in 1919 featured women tennis players on its front cover. As a sport which emphasized and rewarded agility, movement, and grace rather than power and in which participants never had to touch or be in close proximity with one another, tennis was promoted as the ideal game for South American elites and particularly for women. These sportswomen practiced and played outside of national or international institutional frameworks, given that they were excluded from Olympic and other multisport competitions. Tennis offers a useful case study because it came to occupy a space somewhere between popular soccer and exclusive golf. Its combination of technique and style made it attractive to many in the expanding middle classes, and tennis clubs sprang up in major towns and cities, becoming associated with private clubs and social exclusion. It was initially conceived for social play and included mixed doubles, with one man and one woman on each team. South American tennis opened spaces for female sporting participation and international competition, and subsequently for women becoming directors of sporting institutions. In 1923, for example, the Ecuador Tennis Club yearbook listed an equal number of male and female voting members.12 Tennis became established for so-called decent girls at private schools, such as the pupils at the Immaculate Conception School in Quito, who were photographed in 1910 holding their rackets and wearing sensible midcalf-length black dresses. The sport combined the graceful movement and toned muscles developed in gymnastics with a competitive element. Silvana Goellner has shown how the female body was perceived by sports promoters in 1930s Brazil as “an art object to be sculpted through the practice of physical activities” for the dual purposes of satisfying the male gaze and producing a healthy vessel for motherhood. A beautiful sporting woman’s body had come to be seen as one which was preparing itself to bear children. The women who practiced sports involving physical contact may have troubled these ideologies, whereas graceful tennis players did not, as long as their exertions were not excessive.13 Because some of its players went on to global fame, Chile is a welldocumented example of the new spaces of sport and sociability opened up by lawn tennis. In his memoirs the tennis player Carlos Ossandón recalled the great parties and tournaments that merged into one another around courts in private gardens and the elegance, grace, and technical ability of

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Figure 5. The Chilean tennis player Anita Lizana pictured on a cigarette card issued by John Player and Sons, c.1936. Image © National Portrait Gallery, London, reference D47323.

the players, both male and female.14 Gradually, lawn tennis opened its doors, allowing the private, domestic, subordinate sphere to enter the public world. The first players made the effort to spread the game—the laws were translated into Spanish in Chile in 1900 and published in a pamphlet packed with advertisements promoting sporting materials and proclaiming

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tennis as the game for the beautiful sex. Mixed doubles enabled elite men and women to compete together and was enthusiastically reported on the society pages.15 The relatively limited physical exertions and avoidance of physical contact it entailed meant that tennis fitted with contemporary ideas about which sports were appropriate for women and where their beauty could be enjoyed by spectators. Participation was controlled on class grounds through club membership, though occasionally someone talented could break through. This was the case of Anita Lizana (1915–94), who gained access to the club in Santiago’s Quinta Normal, where her uncle Aurelio was the groundsman and caretaker. She became Chilean national champion in 1930 and went on to win the US Open in 1937, hailed for her technical ability and determination (figure 5). It was her movements and technique that were presented as beautiful; male commentators appreciated the function rather than the aesthetic of her body. Press reports, however, focused more on her humility and dedication than on her physical appearance, and when she retired to have children she was lauded for prioritizing family and domesticity over sporting competition.16

Appropriate Sports for Women The beauty perceived in sporting bodies depended on the ideologies about gender held by the viewer. Dominant ideas of femininity in South America in the early 1900s were those held by men in positions of political and sporting authority. In Bermúdez’s words, when they were performed in public, sports were “performative act[s] dependent upon the physicality of the body . . . the biggest statement of the expressive possibilities of corporeal behaviours.” When they were in front of spectators practicing physical sports that had been linked to masculinity in education and the media, therefore, women were pushing against the social and legal norms that limited the extent of their citizenship and their political rights.17 The dominant view in the daily newspapers was that women were most appropriately to be seen on the sidelines at sporting events in which physical strength was required to compete. Glamorous white female spectators appear throughout the elite sporting journalism and photography of the

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1900s and 1910s, with many writers commending organizers for attracting “beautiful and decorous female observers, the prettiest girls and the most distinguished gentlemen,” “emissaries of the chic and paragons of respectability.” In this view of sports, women should be detached from the sporting event, enjoying company and dressing up while men took to the field.18 Women educational reformers like Juana Gremler in Chile and Clara Korte in Rio de Janeiro fought for girls to have a dedicated physical education curriculum that went beyond beauty, as part of a broad vision of education including “hygiene, infant health and home economics.” Other women, like Micaela Lavalle in Barranquilla, Colombia, got stuck in the administration of sports, becoming one of the founders of Atlético Junior in 1924.19 Discussions about the appropriate sports for women took place around the world. The 1896 Olympic Games in Athens did not feature any women athletes at all. Coubertin’s preoccupation was with encouraging “male athleticism . . . with female applause as reward.” The 1904 Olympic Games, held in St. Louis without any South American participants in the official sporting program, allowed women to compete in archery only. South American women were doubly excluded from the international Olympic movement: as South Americans and as women.20 Nevertheless, women in South America cycled, played soccer and volleyball, fought bulls, and ran, as well as playing tennis and swimming. There is plenty of documentary evidence that women cycled in Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina before 1910, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the resistance they faced—they caused “quite a stir” when they appeared in the Bogotá velodrome—and it is probable that women were cycling in all the urban centers where there were bicycles. When we question the assumptions about the natural links between femininity and sporting weakness, beauty, and grace, and masculinity with sporting strength, vigour, and robustness, we can see that it was certain gendered characteristics that became associated with particular sports rather than sports being deliberately gendered from the beginning. Women did not play team sports in the same numbers men did, and their participation only infrequently was recorded in the surviving sources. A women’s cricket club was founded in Belgrano, Buenos Aires, in 1865. Hockey in Argentina was another exception, with

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Belgrano Ladies formed in 1909, widespread adoption in girls’ schools, and a Metropolitan Women’s Hockey League from 1924. Later, volleyball in Peru was another. Women athletes were often presented as exceptional freaks or derided as manly. In Paraguay in 1911 a woman footballer (whom the newspapers of the day did not name) played in a top-of-the-table clash between the two biggest men’s teams of the day: Olimpia and Nacional. A newspaper reported that “an amateur of the beautiful sex played for Nacional, being the first time that a woman player has played in a public match, which meant that the public came in great numbers to watch.” The report referred to her as un jugadora, feminizing the word player with the suffix a but leaving the masculine pronoun un unchanged. Nacional won the league, and neither the press nor the crowd expressed any discomfort. Elsey and Nadel have pieced together the fragmentary sources to show women playing soccer in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil in the 1900s and 1910s. Women’s clubs, matches, and players sporadically attracted the attention of the press, as in the portrait of Team Talca in Chile in 1900 and the action photos of a match between Team Argentina and Team Cosmopólita published in Fray Mocho in 1923. In 1927, upon the foundation of the Women’s Sports Association in Valparaíso, the new secretary, Azucena Villanueva, gave an interview to Los Sports promoting women’s sporting abilities and potential. Yet she accepted that there “are appropriate sports for women” and that soccer might remain peripheral because of “stale ideas” linking the game to masculinity. When women played soccer their participation seems to have threatened the growing association between the sport and beauty. A woman playing soccer roused considerable anxiety about what that implied for the beautiful masculinity of male footballers.21

Ugly Sports Sportsmen and sportswomen who troubled accepted understandings of beautiful sporting activity could be subject to marginalization, abuse, even violence. In some quarters the promotion of physical sports deliberately aimed to sideline the inactive, passive intellectuals who were in some places believed to monopolize local and national cultures, for example, the

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bacharels in Brazil and the effeminate dandies of dance halls and tertulias elsewhere.22 The diatribes against women bullfighters, footballers, and horse riders that pepper the surviving newspapers often reveal more about the people who were offended by them than about the sportswomen themselves (beyond the bare fact of their existence). The criticisms of sportswomen often spilled over into fantasies of sexual violence. In 1913 the conservative Ecuadorian newspaper El Dia reported that two male bullfighters had fought each other in a local police station over the honor of a female bullfighter known as Joseita, after she had been withdrawn from the program of a forthcoming meeting. El Dia observed that “any true fan of the bulls would be pleased” at Joseita’s absence. A month later the same paper ranted against feminist women riding horses in the same fashion as men, fantasizing about forcing them to ride on “a seat made from the groping hands of the dirty crowd” and sneering at their “disagreeable long steps, unshackled movements, and arrogant gaze.” To these critics and many others sportswomen represented an unacceptable step toward freedom, both in a physical sense and in freeing themselves from gender norms that held them as subordinate to men. These observers saw beautiful women become ugly when they practiced sports.23 The sight of a woman on a bicycle was disturbing to some men. Even when women’s legs were covered with a long dress, observers could not avoid noticing that they made the wheels go round, producing movement and exhilaration for the rider, even when she rode behind a man on a tandem. One Argentinian editor suggested that women should not cycle because it made them too masculine and that they deserved to be punished if they did.24 The Chilean pornographic magazine El Conejo, produced in 1913 in Valparaíso by the journalist Rafael Silva, showed illustrations of women playing tennis, fencing, and boxing while in various states of undress or evening dress. One featured a woman wearing high heels, stockings, and a short dress as she turned to face the viewer, having used her fencing sword to attack the genitals of a faceless, naked man who has clearly been emasculated by her. The heading was “Modern Sport.” This image and others like

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it, in the analysis of Ana María Ledezma, spoke to the fears and fantasies of some men via the destabilizing nature of women’s involvement in their activities.25 As sports were institutionalized at local and national levels through the 1910s and 1920s, sporting authorities moved beyond expressing their distaste and intervened to formally discourage or prohibit women from taking part. Soccer is the most celebrated case. Several countries followed the 1921 lead of the Football Association in England, and then FIFA, in stigmatizing women’s soccer and refusing to recognize clubs or associations that allowed women to play on their grounds or under their jurisdictions. In Brazil, for example, “women’s soccer came to be seen as anathema to the ideals of the country,” the polar opposite of men’s soccer, which was beginning to represent the nation to the world. Brazil prohibited women’s soccer in 1941.26 These bans demonstrate that women were playing soccer and other sports in lots of places prior to 1930, even without the support of the men’s national associations that came to govern and control the game. As the link grew between men’s soccer and national identity in the 1920s, women’s soccer became ever more transgressive and disturbing to male administrators, and turned even more so if the players were working-class, Black, Brown, or indigenous. Sports were therefore presented by some men as dangerous to the beauty of the female body and its reproductive functions. Supposedly scientific rationale was used to determine excessive or inappropriate sports. Long articles were published, shared, and disseminated on the risks to the womb in cases of impact from projectiles or to the weaker female heart or lungs. Over time, as sports became institutionalized, sporting ideologies hardened, and as authorities took up sports for nationalistic goals the idea that some sports were unsuitable for women became entrenched as common sensical and supported by international regulation. The professional sportswoman was an even more disorientating figure for this worldview. Her training might change her body in ugly ways, and yet she was being paid to perform physical activities in front of spectators. This was compared by some male journalists as akin to prostitution, and an unacceptable penetration of capitalist logic into the domestic sphere they purported to control as padres de familia.

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All this despite the well-documented excitement of many of those same men at attending theater spectacles and brothels.27 Some spaces remained for sportswomen despite this onslaught. Elsey and Nadel have uncovered evidence of the persistence of women footballers on the margins of clubs and institutions. The sport which created most space for women to play and to be recognized for their technique, grace, and beauty was, however, by no coincidence, the most socially exclusive: golf. Women were able to compete on the same courses as men and to be regarded as beautiful in their grace and rhythm. They were photographed in the press in their tweeds, with fashionable skirt lengths gradually rising through the 1920s. The best of them went overseas and won international competitions, such as the Montevideo-born Fay Crocker (1914–83), who started playing at the age of six in 1920 and turned professional in 1954, winning the US Women’s Open in 1955. Photographs of women golfers focused on their poise, balance, and grace after hitting the ball. Golf clubs were mixed spaces, even if playing was reserved for those who could afford club membership and expensive equipment. South American women golfers were coached and prepared by male professionals. Their sporting equipment was carried for them by paid caddies who, photographs show, were often darker-skinned than the women players they served. The beauty of these sportswomen was directly related to the leisure, confidence, and elite status they enjoyed.28 * * * The popularity of sports went hand in hand with a widely held belief that they could and should be beautiful. Sports were understood and promoted in order to improve bodies, communities, and societies, and the aesthetic dimension was central to the public provision of sports. The representational value of sports, which grew in accordance with the spread of photographic coverage in newspapers through the 1910s and 1920s, thus expanded to include the appreciation of the human body in sporting action. Both male and female bodies could achieve the imprecise qualification of beautiful, but over time considerations of beauty came to shape the appropriateness of some sports for men and others for women. By the 1920s stricter divisions

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were being enforced around gender and sports, and beauty was more likely to be valued in men’s sporting bodies than in women’s. The question of beauty in sports overlaps with the subjects of the next two chapters, which focus on the celebration of endurance in sports and on the control of violence. Because both endurance and violence could be beautiful too.

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8

Endurance

the ideal of aguante is at the center of much scholarship on South American sports. Spectators and footballers alike hold up the resistance, endurance, and sacrifice that is epitomized, for Pablo Alabarces, in the centrality of violence in fan cultures in twentieth-century Argentina. Here, building on Alabarces’s insights, I examine the origins of endurance sports in South America, showing that the significance of aguante was the creation neither of soccer nor Argentina. Practitioners on the continent pioneered long-distance running, cycling, and swimming, producing world record– breaking feats before 1930 which have been largely lost to history. Their exhausted bodies were seen as symbolizing humanity’s desire to push beyond physical limits. These feats drew on military and international roots. Mountaineers sought to withstand the extremes of the Andean heights, further cementing the links between sporting exertion, endurance, and resistance. This is a branch of South American sports history that has been largely ignored until now.1

Long-Distance Running During the 1910s and 1920s long-distance running, walking, and cycling in South America became extremely popular. Endurance athletics fed into the contemporary fascination with the limits of human endeavor, wherever it came from. At the turn of the century Buenos Aires newspapers marveled

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at the arrival and displays of the Italian runner Cesar Ferrari and other athletes. Great endurance feats were discussed, proposed, and executed. Vicente Martínez, Nicolás Millones, and Enrique Boro proposed walking out from Montevideo and around the entire South American landmass, including “swimming across the mouth of the Amazon.” (News of their completion of this challenge has not been found.).2 Endurance running and walking events were also held in cities. After the installation of gas lighting in the botanical gardens in Rio de Janeiro, the park hosted running races in the cooler tropical evenings. In Chile, as Pilar Modiano has shown, long-distance running was embraced by athletes who were celebrated as pushing the boundaries of human capacity. South American athletes were successful in these events as soon as they started competing internationally. At the 1918 South American Athletics Championships in Buenos Aires the Chilean Juan Jorquera broke the World Marathon Record.3 A good example of endurance running is Manuel Plaza, the Chilean runner and working-class athletic hero. Clean-cut and consistent, Plaza’s best in a global international tournament was second place in the 1928 Olympic marathon. His ability to resist and endure conditions that others could not was often linked to his racialized identity as a mestizo and to his working-class humility. In continental championships he was dominant over long-distance events, winning over 10,000m and other long distances in Buenos Aires in 1924, Montevideo in 1926, Santiago in 1927, and Buenos Aires again in 1933. A gushing media interview praised his humble background and his day job selling newspapers from a kiosk, including running to spend time with his beautiful daughter, before he ran off again to train in a public park, “where his lungs regained their health and life.” Smiling, he told his interviewer that “because of his poverty he could never have a strict dietary regime—he ate less when business went poorly, and ate more when it went well.” He presented a pure and simple face to the nation: delighted to compete on behalf of “my dear homeland,” amateur, and virtuous. Working-class endurance athletes like Plaza could become symbols of national success, though their bodies took the strain of the representational work. When he produced his superlative silver medal performance in the

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1928 Olympic marathon, the Chilean journalists in Amsterdam refuted suggestions that he was an Indian.4

Long-Distance Cycling Today, Colombia has a Tour de France winner and is famed for its cycling prowess. At the start of the 1900s long-distance cycling was promoted and embraced wherever road conditions allowed. Initially this was the work of individual pioneers, later taken up by clubs and promoters. Their activities have been largely forgotten. Alberto Justiniano Olid was the first person to make a transnational cycle ride over the Andes. His journey at the beginning of 1898 from Buenos Aires to Valparaíso took Olid ten days. A local newspaper named him campeón de la bicicleta. He remained fresh, having “proven his physical resistance” by riding 1,450km, crossing a mountain pass at over 3,200m above sea level, and even having been “suddenly attacked by a tiger on the pampa, which he shot fifteen times with his revolver, leaving it wounded.” His resistance and endurance were central to the stories told of him, though they have passed out of public memory.5 The vibrant Argentinian cycling culture of the late 1890s also produced Lucien Mazan, who has a good claim on being one of South America’s greatest ever sportsmen (figure 6). Mazan was born in France and migrated to Buenos Aires when he was eight in 1892. In 1899 he won races of 25km, 75km, and 100km, including the Luján–Buenos Aires race in 1900, and several national Argentinian championships thereafter. In 1902, after a formative decade on Argentinian roads, he traveled to France to compete there. Faced with a French press that insisted on calling him L’Argentin, he changed his name to Lucien Petit-Breton, emphasizing his place of birth in Britany. He claimed that he felt like “Moi, l’Outsider” and wanted to prove himself “a real Frenchman.” As Petit-Breton he presented his early years in South American cycling, like the “terrible, nauseating roads,” as something to be overcome rather than celebrated. In 1907 and 1908 he won the Tour de France, the pinnacle of world cycling then as now. This victory was forged in Argentina’s forgotten endurance cycling events.6

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Figure 6. The Franco-Argentinian cyclist Lucien Mazan, 1908, wearing a French cockerel on his sports top. From Comme je cours sur la route. Image reproduced under Creative Commons licence, https://fr.wikipedia .org/wiki/Lucien_Petit-Breton#/media/Fichier:Lucien_Mazan.jpg.

Cyclists endured not only long distances and steep mountains. When they tried to race on the roads in towns, they were pushed to the margins by what the historian Joel Wolfe called “autos and progress,” the enthusiastic adoption of motorized vehicles after 1910. They had to resist the pushes, shoves, and aggression of other road users. The magazine A Cigarra published an illustration in 1914 detailing the fate of the cyclist, dressed in racing gear, buffeted by potholes, squeezed between a tram and a car, averting their gaze from a corpse at the side of the road, and ending up in the hospital with broken limbs (figure 7).7 Endurance events took cyclists into the countryside and the fresh air, which was held to improve the bodies of those who exerted themselves in it. There is a lot of evidence of cyclo-tour excursions and long-distance cycling. Riders left Santiago de Chile at dawn, and in Bucaramanga in Colombia they rode out at five o’clock in the afternoon to avoid the hottest part of the day. These rides stretched cyclists’ understanding of their national spaces as well as raising their awareness of the content of the national territory. Olid

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had cycled over 1,400km from Buenos Aires to Valparaíso in ten days, but most cyclists did 50km or 100km on a Sunday ride. Olid probably followed the route of the Transandino railway, which was under intermittent construction at the time, while other cyclists used existing roads and lobbied for new ones. On the Sunday before Olid’s departure (which seems to have gone unrecorded by the Buenos Aires press) the Argentine Athletic Club held a major meeting that included bicycle races. At the same time rides out of the coastal resort of Mar del Plata were offering gold chronometer watches and gold medals to the winners.8 In Caracas, Venezuela, a Club Centro Ciclista Excursionista was going for 100km rides. A 13km race from Recoleta in Buenos Aires to Villa Devoto was organized by the Italian promoter and bike shop owner Antonio Franchi. Photographs show the group of amateurs wearing striped jumpers and caps and the professionals in workmen’s jackets, revealing a keen separation maintained between amateurs and professionals on these rides. The Chilean Club Velo Excursionista undertook long rides on bicycles, once or twice a month. A rival outfit, the Club Ciclista Valparaíso organized hill races up the port’s steep inclines at nine o’clock on Sunday mornings. Peruvian riders set off on adventures of up to 240km from Lima. Other longdistance adventures will survive in the archives of cycling clubs or their members’ descendants. We can observe substantial continuities with longer histories of pilgrimages, though these excursions were conceived of as secular activities, testing and improving the human body. The language of

Figure 7. Detail from the cartoon “As caras do cyclista” (The many faces of the cyclist), in the A Cigarra magazine, 1914. Reproduced thanks to Diarios Asociados. These final graphics show the cyclist “squeezed between a tram and a bus,” “about to crash,” and “in hospital.”

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endurance and suffering used to describe them bears the mark of their religious precedents, as Matt Rendell observed. In the early 1930s two South Americans cycled a tandem from Buenos Aires to Washington in the name of the Pan-American Union and were admired for their “two years and a half of privations which included being lost in the desert, attacks of tropical fever, etc.”9

Endurance Swimming The rise of long-distance running and cycling was complemented in coastal areas by the popularity of endurance swimming, with records set for distance covered and time spent in the water. South American athletes demonstrated their achievements on the global scale in this discipline. In the Pacific Ocean off Lima challenge races over several kilometers were regularly held and gambled on. Dedicated swimming clubs emerged in most ports, often out of rowing and sailing clubs. In the early 1920s the Argentinian swimmer Enrique Tiraboschi, born in Italy in 1887, was part of a group of swimmers linked to the Centro Náutico San Isidro who experimented with long swims in the Río de la Plata. In 1923 he smashed the record time for swimming across the English Channel, beating the time of the famed Captain Matthew Webb by over five hours. He completed the distance in sixteen hours thirty-three minutes. Tiraboschi became a global media sensation, winning a thousand pounds from the Daily Sketch.10 The San Isidro club harvested a generation of competitive endurance swimmers. Two of them, Anita Gutbrod and Lilian Harrison, were women. In 1924 they both sought to swim across the Río de la Plata. When Harrison did so she became the first person, male or female, to swim between the two shores, breaking the world time and distance records for female swimmers. Born in Quilmes, Buenos Aires, in 1904, she was educated at the Arundale School in England run by the Theosophical Society in Letchworth, Hertfordshire and returned to Argentina in 1920. She spent over twenty-four hours in the water before reaching Punta Lara on the Argentine side of the estuary, swimming 48km breaststroke sustained by orange juice, coffee, and sugar. Harrison was photographed for the front cover of El Gráfico, who awarded her its prize of five thousand pesos. News of her feat

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and the photographs of her tired, delighted, and unglamorous body were widely circulated as the epitome of endurance. To retain her status as an amateur athlete, she spent the prize money on expenses for further training and competition, including in the English Channel and the River Seine, as well as in the United States (figure 8). Success in endurance sports fitted into a framework of national competition, resisting exhaustion and achieving what other national bodies could not. “My first thought,” she recalled, “was of that Uruguayan who told me how crazy I was as I was setting out.”11 The achievements of Harrison, Gutbrod, and other women like them— achieving sporting feats such as swimming across the Río de la Plata, a triumph male swimmers failed to equal, and basking in the support and applause of their male club members—indicate that sports and women were by no means always separated in this period and that the military imperative behind sports promotion schemes was not the only one. Sports had become “socially recognized form[s] of ritualized embodiment,” as Laura Podalsky has observed, and “[they] serve a generative function—that is, a means by which to construct discursively and materially bodies that hold meaning in new ways, changing understandings of national, ethnic, racial and gendered identities.” Women endurance swimmers could be cover stars in this way, as their humility, abnegation, and self-sacrifice were characteristics often lauded in society more generally. They were photographed in their moments of weakness, dripping wet and wrapped in blankets at the end of a swim, presented as proof of human achievement rather than defined by or defying their gender.

Mountain Climbing There are rather more surviving photographs of mountain climbers who documented their achievements with scientific details than there are of the long-distance swimmers. Like the oceans, the high mountains provided the opportunity for humans to push against natural boundaries in the name of sport and science. Climbing the steepest slopes of the Andean mountains became possible because of innovations in metalwork that facilitated ever stronger clips, carabiners, and crampons. Scientists and military leaders like Alexander von Humboldt and Simón Bolívar climbed toward the

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Figure 8. The Argentinian swimmer Lilian Harrison emerging from the English Channel, pictured on the front page of El Gráfico, 1924. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence https://commons.wikimedia .org/wiki/File:Lilian_Harrison_-_El_Gr%C3%A1fico_266.jpg.

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5,869m summit of Cotopaxi in Ecuador. Subsequent mountain climbers carried scientific measuring instruments, justifying and supplying resources for their expeditions. The expense of these endeavors meant that it was foreign mountaineers, like the Britons Edward Whymper and Sir Martin Conway, who traveled to South America and made some of the first ascents. They wrote some gloriously illustrated books. Local climbers and guides worked with them, and Bolivian and Ecuadorean mountaineering clubs catalyzed by the ascents of major peaks were established and maintained among urban elites through the twentieth century. As the sport of mountaineering, invented in Europe as Alpinism, the contribution of Andean climbers has by definition been sidelined from the early history of the sport. Although andinismo was the subject of several books by pioneering climbers, most of the long history of Andean mountain ascents remain to be recovered. Climbing was not a popular sport because of the distance of the mountains from major population centers and difficulties with transport infrastructure. The characteristics of the mountains received as much attention as the endurance of the climbers who ascended them.12 Edward Whymper arrived in Guayaquil in 1879, already renowned as a polar explorer and the first climber of the Matterhorn. He scaled Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, and other great peaks in Ecuador, and his activities were reported in the Quito and Guayaquil newspapers (figure 9). Whymper’s Travel amongst the Great Andes of the Equator (1892) was the first sports book set in Ecuador. Nicolás Martínez, “the father of Ecuadorian mountaineering,” subsequently made many new ascents. His letters, which were published in the daily El Comercio, combined descriptions of endurance and resistance with the scientific quest for measurements.13 Whymper, who was an avid amateur cricketer, was aware of stories of Cotopaxi’s previous climbers. He distinguished himself from them as a “severely scientific” climber and sportsman. He camped by the volcano’s crater to measure the effects of the human body’s capacity for resistance to altitude. There is no doubt that these foreign gentlemen were driven to climb, conquer, and control the landscape, and they shared imperial worldviews which made this urge seem entirely natural. A central thread in Whymper’s sport and writing was the comparison between the Andean heights and British normality. At altitude near Quito he measured how long it took

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Figure 9. The mountaineer Edward Whymper and colleagues on the frozen heights of Antisana. En los campos helados de Antisana (1890). Image reproduced from a contemporary postcard thanks to the Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Polit in Quito.

him to walk a mile on a flat road, noting that he was fifty-four seconds slower than when he walked along the Brompton Road in London—though “this was partly caused by having to pass three times through a large flock of sheep.”14 The origins of mountain climbing in South America were shaped by the nationalism and imperialism of its earliest exponents, perhaps more so than any other sport. Both Florence Dixie and Walter Heald recorded the story of the unnamed British naval ensign who climbed to the top of Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf Mountain, “long considered inaccessible,” and planted the Union Jack, to the “anger and disgust” of the residents. Sir Martin Conway, an alumnus of Trinity College Cambridge, 1st Baron Conway of Allington, planted a British flag on the top of Illimani in Bolivia in 1898. Like Whymper, Conway was awarded medals by the Royal Geographical Society. Despite the affection he professed for the splendid South American mountains and the people who helped him, as founder of the Alpine Ski

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Club and the Himalayan Club he was fundamental in the marginalization of South America from the early history of the sport. In his books Bolivian Mountains (1901, dedicated to the president General José Manuel Pando) and Aconcagua and Tierra Del Fuego: A Book of Climbing, Travel and Exploration (1902), Conway made authorial ascents, with himself at the center and his local guides as much a nuisance as a support. Conway’s writing is full of frustration at his inability to discipline his indigenous guides and porters: “As they cared nothing about us and were comparatively indifferent to money our means of urging them on were restricted.” But his asides and numerous photographs demonstrate the extent to which these expeditions relied on and built on preexisting climbing cultures, in which indigenous and mixed-race climbers were essential. Commenting on José Amestoy, one of the supporters of his expedition to climb the Illimani mountain, Conway observed that he was “a most intelligent and kindly fellow . . . [they said] he was of Indian blood; if so he is proof of the capabilities of Ayamara Indians for civilization. He was a skilful mechanic, a good sportsman, and had a better understanding of the geography of the country than almost anyone else I met.” Conway’s respect for the knowledge of climbers like Amestoy was, however, shrouded by his fear and threatened sense of racial superiority: “Wherever a mountaineer goes in the Bolivian mountains his movements are sure to be carefully watched, and there is no chance of his hiding his property where Indians will not find it. The only way, therefore, to approach any of the great mountains is to do so with the assistance of some considerable body of the natives themselves. Travelling without them, would be liable to find himself raided by Indians, whose suspicions, and perhaps terrors, are aroused by an action on the part of white men to which they are not accustomed.”15 The adventure of going highest and establishing records meant that climbing was understood as a sport. Yet it was not all about proving masculinity. Women climbed too when they had the freedom and economic resources required for the long expeditions. One was the United States climber Annie Peck (1850–1935), who traveled to South America to seek out high mountains in deliberate pursuit of altitude records. Her book The Search for the Apex of America: High Mountain Climbing in Peru and Bolivia

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(1911) explicitly situated her achievements as part of the broader campaign for women’s suffrage and international recognition. She deliberately set out to beat Conway to the summit of Sorata.16 Whymper, Conway, Peck, and other scientific climbers distinguished themselves from the indigenous climbers who had gone before them by their use of technology, which enabled them to resist the landscape. Conway was scathing about the ease with which he climbed Aconcagua, the continent’s highest peak, which he described as “not a technical” climb: “there is not a single step that a child could not take. The ascent is a mere question of strength and endurance, physical and constitutional.” Many unnamed South Americans climbed these mountains, but they were reduced to the margins of their sport by the writings of foreign travelers. Their history remains to be written.17 * * * The importance of endurance sports in South America at the beginning of the twentieth century is perhaps the best example of activity that has been ignored by historians because of the focus on the national representative value of team sports, particularly soccer. Yet the achievements on the global stage of many South Americans, from Lucien Mazan in the Tour de France and Manuel Plaza in the Olympic marathon to Lilian Harrison in world long-distance swimming records, demonstrate the creation of a generation of athletes dedicated to endurance sports. The media reports and large numbers of spectators at these events reveal the recognition of resistance, or aguante, in sports even at this early stage, long before it became part of national soccer fan legends after 1930.

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9

Controlled Violence

the sports being promoted, played, and watched around 1920 were the results of attempts to channel or transform humans’ propensity for violence and play into social good. Elias and Dunning argued that modern sports effected “a profound sublimatory transformation of feeling” in which selfrestraint was required and valued in order to “steadfastly renounce the use of violence” in games as well as politics. This chapter examines efforts to control levels of violence in South American sports in the early 1900s. The paradox is that at the same time boxing, soccer, and other games were being regulated to limit physical violence in the ring and on the pitch, military regimes were looking to instrumentalize play in order to promote certain masculine characteristics: what Burstyn called “an exaggerated ideal of manhood linked mythically and practically to the role of the warrior.” As I show here in an analysis of boxing and soccer, elites’ racialized fears about the primitive or barbaric nature of Black and Brown people shaped the decisions made about violent sports. It was often in debates about a “spirit of the game” that codes of conduct were developed as governing bodies sought to control the behavior of players both on and off the pitch.1

Violent Masculinity The control of violence was central to the ways in which South American sports developed in the 1900s. Men’s sports in the 1910s and 1920s

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often epitomized a particular brand of masculinity: the strong, physical, domineering hero who bent opponents to his will through his command of his body and the ability to exploit weakness in his adversary. The cult of the male sportsman grew into a national model in Argentina with ramifications beyond the sports ground. Archetti’s pioneering scholarship has shown that achieving domination of the opposing team in soccer, the horse in polo, and the female partner in tango was central to ways of playing and being. Sport became “a powerful masculine expression of national capabilities and potentialities.” Talk about soccer was often about cojones or pelotas: having the “balls” to compete and fight for success. Pablo Alabarces went on to argue that the pleasure to be taken in defeating and even humiliating an opponent became central to Argentine soccer culture, which was then exported across the continent. Arguably, there are substantial continuities here with the animal-based sporting cultures that preceded soccer; in the appreciation of the domination of horses in rodeo events in the pampas and in the skill of the bullfighter in teasing their opponent in bullrings in the Andean countries. To be sure, many of the sources we have examined so far reverberate with a macho culture, and the popularity of boxing— “the highest expression of courage and virility,” according to Archetti—fits this model too. Soccer was described as a man’s game, and the display of physical strength, courage, and disciplined application were both lauded and feared. The first footballers in the Paraguayan town of Luque, in 1906, were arrested and jailed for public order offences, and instances of player and fan violence pepper the historical record.2 The discussion here picks apart the stereotypes of violence, soccer, and South America that emerged in the second half of the 1900s. These corrosive representations had deep roots. The Corinthians’ tours of Brazil are a good example. The English visitors complained to local English-language newspapers and in their subsequent memoirs of the violence of the South Americans who beat them, both hacking on the pitch and hissing from the crowd. Yet local press reporters in São Paulo claimed to be distraught at the excessive violence employed by Corinthians themselves, who charged the opposing goalkeepers with their shoulders, “which may have been acceptable in England, but was hardly ever seen on the harder grounds to be found in Brazil.” Argentinians accused Uruguayans of rough play and vice

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versa. Being able to control violence in sports became the key to success in competition and civilization.3

Strengthening Postwar Masculinities States’ promotion of physical exercise and sports coincided with periods of postwar reconstruction and military reform. This often began with the adoption of gymnastic exercises, known as drill, which aimed to tone, discipline, and distract the bodies of the boys who were imagined as the nation’s future defenders. The War of the Triple Alliance (involving Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, 1864–70) and the War of the Pacific (Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, 1879–83) shaped the thinking of the reformers who came to power in those countries in the 1880s and 1890s. They invited foreign military missions to guide them: French in Brazil and Peru, and German in Argentina and Chile. In Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela it was civil warfare in the 1860s and 1870s that convinced leaders that they needed to strengthen the bodies and minds of their future solders. The journal Brasil Ilustrado summed it up: “The desire to win sporting contests will train the will for the struggle for life; audacity in a dangerous play will translate later into civic courage on the field of battle.” Sports clubs were later followed by the Boy Scout movement in the 1910s and other protomilitary training institutions.4 European military officers promoted gymnastics in the armed forces, seeking to turn fighting bodies into agile, strong, coordinated units. Soldiers often exercised in public, and fencing exhibitions were common. The fencing and gymnastics club Gimnasia y Esgrima founded in La Plata, Argentina, in 1887 became a model of sporting clubs elsewhere, creating a template of individual improvement and competition in military-oriented terms and gradually expanding to include other sports beyond the core activities in the club’s name. In Caracas the influence of French fencing teachers in the promotion of the way Venezuelan fencers held their bodies was enthusiastically acknowledged.5 The role of military priorities in physical education was a focus of debate between those who presented sports in terms of self-expression and individual hygiene and those who saw them as a means to the goal of collective

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discipline. Soccer was believed to be dangerously indisciplined. Early Ecuadorian footballers recalled the scorn they received from passers-by, being “laughed at and insulted by several elderly ladies” in 1908. There were many concerns as to whether soccer players were being sufficiently disciplined. In Brazil, Lima Barreto and Carlos Sussekind de Mendonça promoted drill and rote training as part of their antisoccer campaign. Critics in Porto Alegre resented soccer’s “extreme virility and excessive violence—a massacre.” In Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador military cavalry officers promoted the sport of polo instead, which they saw as more appropriate for promoting strict discipline and rigorously observed orders. Polo was brought to Buenos Aires from India by British military officers, though its appeal lay in the estancias and farms of the rest of Argentina, as Horace Laffaye’s meticulous research has demonstrated.6 Military promoters made shooting a centerpiece of men’s sporting activities in this period. Shooters had poise and self-control, and they were potentially useful for the state. Across South America target-shooting clubs de tiro al blanco flourished with official support through these years, as in Peru after its defeat in the War of Pacific. The National Shooting Regulations, enacted in 1901, were held to mark the moment when “shooting ceased being purely a form of entertainment,” and “methodical training” was introduced. Previously, one observer commented, “enthusiasts had poured their hearts and resources into their societies just to gain shooting recognition as a sport.” Members of shooting clubs now included artisans and industrial workers, and they were praised for “clearly and definitively setting out the path for every patriotic Peruvian to follow.” The National Shooting competition to celebrate the Independence anniversary in 1905 featured contestants firing at silhouettes of human bodies in the final rather than at conventional round targets. In 1905, with the support of Minister of War Pedro Muñiz, who paid for the guns and ammunition, the winner of the Peruvian National Shooting Competition was a Corporal Champe, a short mestizo young man according to the photograph of him published in Prisma. A noncommissioned officer like Champe was certainly not the type of person usually celebrated as a great sportsman by the Peruvian media. In Brazil the National Shooting Confederation instituted in 1906 was directly linked to the Ministry of War. This was

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sport with explicitly violent targets: competition as preparation for military conflict.7 By the 1920s the presence of military officers on the sidelines of sporting events was commonplace. Photographs of soccer teams often showed white-clothed young athletes sitting alongside thoughtful intellectuals in glasses and besuited club members and managers, with a sprinkling of military men at the sides. These officers recognized that sports had both civic and military benefits, creating disciplined men capable of obeying orders and rules in order to use violence to protect the state’s interests. The potential military benefits—stronger, faster, fitter citizens—of increased sporting participation were clear to local authorities, and sport was widely promoted through the education system and municipal encouragement. Nevertheless, during the 1900s and 1910s, as Archetti showed, the military-promoted sports such as fencing, drill, polo, and gymnastics were gradually overshadowed in the press by the more popular civilian sports of cycling and soccer. The physical benefits of sports were recognized as being amplified by the moral advantages that were perceived to emanate from the right type of body practicing the most compatible sporting activity according to age, gender, ethnicity, and supposed level of civilization. The popularization of boxing and soccer illustrates how doors were beginning to be opened to Black and Brown men. Elites came to believe that these sports channelled violence that was intrinsic to those bodies. 8

Masculinity and Black Bodies on the Soccer Pitch The popularization of soccer in South America brought racialized ideas about sports and civilization into full public view. The ethnic diversity of South American national teams from the 1930s to 1950s and the celebrity acquired by Black players like Leônidas da Silva were unthinkable in European teams until much later. In Brazil, Venezuela, Paraguay, and the Andean countries, Black and Brown people were in the majority. Even in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, societies being transformed through immigration from Europe, sports made visible all ethnic groups and hence the space to question and challenge scientific thinking about Black and Brown bodies.

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Soccer was promoted out of a desire to limit the amount of violence seen on the field of play compared with other football codes, like rugby. Tripping, hacking, and charging were limited and prohibited until they were peripheral to the game, remaining instead in other, more physical codes such as rugby, Australian and American football, variants of which had been played in South America but which had faded to the margins by 1910. The association code that became more dominant in South America than anywhere else, especially after 1920, was the soccer version which allowed the least contact between its players. There was no scrimmaging between soccer players, no hugging—and indeed relatively little touching. Different national styles of playing the game developed. In Argentina the discouragement of the rough physicality associated with the English game led directly to the development of the short passing style known in Argentina as la nuestra (literally, “our own way”), which married “the pass as a measure of talent, collective coordination and strategy with la gambeta [dribbling] as an expression of individual genius.”9 Between 1890 and 1916 South American society was changing in many ways. Its major cities were urbanizing rapidly, and the social question concerned governments and councils. The popularization of soccer meant that footballers were increasingly Black and Brown as well as White. Soccer being a noncontact physical sport made sharing a playing field much easier for the White middle-classes to accept than rugby, for example. It is my hypothesis that one of the principal reasons for the enduring success of soccer in South America is its noncontact nature, the way it allowed mutually suspicious groups to coexist on the pitch in a manner that would not have been possible with a contact sport like rugby or American or Australian Rules (sports played elsewhere in which indigenous and Black players were segregated until much later). The same point can be made in the case of the development of baseball in Venezuela, a nontouching game in a multicultural society. As soccer became more popular, the best teams won more status and more ticket sales. Club directors therefore wrestled with the desire to have the best players on their teams, against racialized ideologies that presented Black, Brown, and working-class players as potentially violent and bad influences. Later, Gilberto Freyre proposed that the nation was characterized by “racial democracy”—the recognition of the potential

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equality of all regardless of ethnicity—and that the soccer field could be a model for Brazilian society.10 The presence of Black footballers on the pitch and in the media shaped the early history of South American soccer, especially in Brazil. From Arthur Friedenreich of São Paulo through to the pioneering Afro-Peruvians of Alianza Lima and the Black Uruguayan players of the successful teams of the 1920s, the initiative, talent, and resilience of Black players is a central theme of the history. As Roger Kittleson notes, soccer became one more “way of demonstrating pride in Afro-Brazilian culture,” and Archetti saw it as offering players the ability to “escape from the fate of race.” However, players encountered the barriers of racism at every turn: Black players at Fluminense F.C. in Rio de Janeiro whitened their skin with rice powder. The Brazilian national team visiting Buenos Aires in 1920 was subject to a campaign of racist abuse in the media and caricatured as monkeys. The players refused to take the field. The Chilean authorities complained about the fielding of players of supposed African heritage in South American championships. In Rio in 1923 players resigned, and some of the historic clubs organized another league in protest of Black men who played for Vasco da Gama and America Football Club.11 These examples of explicit racial prejudice were probably the tip of the iceberg. They had long-lasting effects: selectors for the Brazilian national teams of the 1920s preferred to pick White players when taking teams abroad to represent the nation. Soccer became a visible platform where social fractures were played out. The restructuring of clubs and leagues in the 1920s revolved around professionalism (see chapter 6) and around racial inclusion or exclusion. By the end of the decade the power of the racialized collective identities being mobilized around soccer were spilling into violence off the field too, for example, in the “Punch-Up Derby” (el clásico de los bastonazos) between Universitario and Alianza Lima. The clash is remembered for the five players sent off and mass brawl involving players and spectators. Fights between Uruguay and Argentina supporters also materialized around international matches.12 On the pitch a complicated triangular relation existed between race, rough play, and national playing styles. Many Afro-Brazilians and their White counterparts wanted the way of playing to be ordered, logical, and

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aesthetically pleasing, precisely to combat and overturn tired stereotypes of uncivilized, barbaric people of color. A rhythmic passing game based on skill and speed, in opposition to the kick and rush game of physical strength practiced by English teams of the 1920s, enabled soccer to be joined to a forward-looking, civilized nation in which the strength and skill of Black and Brown players were put at the service of the club and nation. Yet elites continued to be uneasy about these men, fearing they would break out of the established order and create violence rather than control it.13

The Physical Male Sportsman on the Margins: Race, Bodies, and Professional Boxing The sport that opened most opportunities to lower-status men to take part in sports, earn money from it, and hence achieve a degree of social mobility was boxing. Boxing was a commercial, transnational sport in which working-class men of all ethnicities were paid starting in the late nineteenth-century, first in prizefights on public grounds and in circus tents and increasingly in institutionalized boxing competitions. Boxing reputations crossed borders, and boxers traveled to fight and be remunerated, as both Taylor and Putnam have shown. Boxing relied on migrants for its practitioners, who “criss-crossed continents and oceans as part of a worldwide boxing labour market.” This market revolved around famous rings in New York, Paris, London, Madrid, Havana, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires. Boxing became a tremendously popular spectator sport in towns and cities across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela. Sometimes observers worried about the emotional and political consequences of allowing crowds to get excited watching the bodies of working-class males, but the media responded to public enthusiasm, and there was a lot of money to be made from entrance tickets and betting.14 Boxing played this role above all in countries where the institutionalization of popularized soccer took longer. One might also speculate that the survival of the Afro-Brazilian sport of capoeira slowed the growth of boxing in Brazil. Boxing and its Queensbury rules came, like soccer and golf, from nineteenth-century Britain. The 1867 rules of boxing were, like the 1863 rules of the Football Association, concerned with limiting rather than pro-

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moting violence. They specified which parts of the body could be hit as well as which limbs could be used to attack—only the hands were weapons, not the head or feet. Boxers held their self-control up as an example of the positive role of sport in civilizing practitioners. Media and spectators often just saw men hitting each other, and when these were Black or mixed-race men they might excite and confirm lazy stereotypes about natural physicality and barbarism. The irony of British sports promoters encouraging people to punch each other in the head in the name of restraint, civilization, and fair play was not lost in South America. One newspaper under the headline Diversiones inglesas ridiculed the so-called civilized and gentlemanly British and their boxing rules. Others, seeing them as akin to public brawls, lamented “the impossibility of preserving moderation in contests of this kind.” The question of the imposition of purported civilized fighting rules upon some men’s supposedly innate barbaric fighting urges was never far from the surface. A bout between two young Ecuadorians, Villalonga and Méndez, was singled out for degenerating “from punches to sticks and stones, then revolvers and knives into a true combat.”15 Boxers were transnational figures on the margins of the law and thus were often drawn from social groups who were already marginalized in terms of ethnicity, class, or geography—or all three. The boxing ring opened a space for legitimate and controlled use of violence as sport and entertainment. Professional boxing was accepted, and then fully recognized, in the 1920s, meaning that boxing forged a trail for professional soccer to follow. Yet the early boxing champions remain unheralded figures compared to footballers because of the reluctance to promote or remember violent sports as national icons, despite the massive, paying crowds they attracted. Boxing may have attracted paying spectators in such numbers in some part because of the exoticism of the spectacle of watching Black men inflict violence upon one another. Boxers fought alone and partially naked. Their flesh, muscles, skin, and blood embodied their sports and the identities related to them. The surviving newspaper reports show that boxing was a big sporting entertainment on Friday and Saturday nights in many towns. As a nighttime activity it was marginal to and separate from the healthy daytime, open-air games. Its origins in the circus and big tents created a special, more intimate environment. It came to attract the participation of

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Afro–South Americans who were excluded from other sporting cultures, especially in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. In Colombia, as in Argentina and Venezuela, “the sport had one set of roots in informal and unregulated street fighting and its ties to loosely-organized bare-knuckle prize-fighting.” Racialized thinking yoked to eugenicism suggested that Afro-Colombians might be better suited to the brute force of boxing as opposed to sports requiring technique or intelligence. Marginalized Afro-Colombian men took up the opportunities offered by boxing’s status as a spectator sport to prove these stereotypes wrong.16 Furthermore, one can hypothesize that boxing occupied some of the space for physical demonstrations of masculinity defined in terms of courage and virility that soccer vacated as it moved toward an emphasis on skill, teamwork, and dexterity.17 Boxing took place on the margins of socially more acceptable sports. It was formally banned in Buenos Aires between 1878 and 1924, though it persisted in neighboring Avellaneda and Barracas. Newspapers around the continent reported both the big fights and the prohibition laws, recognizing that boxing stood at the forefront of debates about the appropriateness of sports for South Americans within a global context. It persisted in amateur clubs under the guise of exercise, practice, and sparring, sponsored by influential White sportsmen such as Jorge Newbery, and in illegal venues tolerated by the civic authorities, including with the highly promoted visit of the Black US heavyweight Jack Johnson, who fought the Brazil resident Jack Murray at the Sociedad Sportiva Argentina in 1915. The victories of Black boxers in Colombia and working-class migrant boxers in Argentina were perceived as a threat by sports authorities—according to spectators at the time, that was part of the attraction of the events.18 Boxing’s transnational nature meant that its institutions eluded national organization throughout this period, creating ways of playing and competing “in the intercultural sporting crucibles of migrant destinations.” The general acceptance of gloved fighting and the Marques of Queensbury Rules through the second half of the nineteenth century were not accompanied by the hegemony of any putative national or international regulating body. As Taylor has it, “Boxing floated in a murky space somewhere between legitimacy and prohibition” because of fears about its appropriateness for civilized men, and “constantly shifting colonial, state and city

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laws and jurisdictions.” The imposition of the Colour Line in boxing in the United States reverberated through the rest of the Americas, where fighters from diverse backgrounds were meeting regularly and where African American boxers from the United States often came to prove themselves or seek gainful employment. The international boxing circuit created opportunities for social mobility for marginalized men across the hemisphere. A good example is Dublin-born Willie Gould (1883–1953), whose seven-year fighting career from 1908 took him to Paris and New York. He fought a Colombian in Buenos Aires in 1908 and a Turkish boxer in Madrid in 1911. His friends at the Buenos Aires Jockey Club paid for a gravestone reading Campeón sudamericano 1910–1916 todos los pesos. The popularity of nighttime boxing bouts between individual men fighting for money while representing nothing more than themselves and their bodies was a challenge to the perception of sport as patriotic and apolitical. Boxers represented an alternate sporting environment based on “bottom-up practices of connection”—indeed, that was exactly what made it so exciting. When boxing entered the Olympics fully in 1920, Argentina’s strength in and commitment to the sport were demonstrated by the many medals won in 1924 and 1928 (see table 6).19 As Putnam has observed, sport “among migrants functioned both as a symbolic realm for boundary-formation and as a social realm in which skill could cross borders of race, language, and citizenship, even though those borders were not, by those crossings, redrawn.” The city of Buenos Aires attracted migrants and therefore boxers and potential boxers because of the opportunities it was thought to hold. Discrimination and exclusion were at work here too: because of its racialized history boxers did not attract the support of their poorly articulated national sporting institutions in this period. Peruvian and Colombian boxers did not participate in any international Olympic Games until 1948 and 1972, respectively.20 Luis Ángel Firpo (1894–1960) was the “heroic figure” who took Argentinian boxing into the world scene and who became the model for those who succeeded him. His 1923 fight of the century with Jack Dempsey in front of eighty thousand spectators at the New York Polo Grounds was avidly followed in Argentina and across the continent on the radio and in the press. The writer Adolfo Bioy Casares recalled his “incredulity and desola-

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tion” at Firpo’s defeat. Firpo was born in Junín, in the Argentinian pampas, and began boxing at the International Boxing Club in Buenos Aires at the age of twenty. As a tough White male from the periphery of the global economy, he was immediately transnational: he boxed foreign visitors to Buenos Aires, where his opponents included the Australian Frank Hagney and the Panama resident and Barbados-born Black Gunboat Smith. In the border town of Mendoza he fought the Chilean Alberto Coleman. In 1918 and 1919 he twice defeated the African American Calvin Respress. Between 1919 and 1921 he fought the African American Dave Mills three times for the South American Heavyweight Championship, losing once and winning twice. In the United States he fought in Omaha, Newark, and Philadelphia in the build-up to his fight against Dempsey. Firpo lost the fight but knocked down the favorite. That moment was captured in George Bellowes’s celebrated painting Firpo and Dempsey (figure 10).21 Boxing boomed, as it encouraged brave physical demonstrations of masculinity, played out within agreed gentlemanly rules but on the fringes of legal, institutionalized activity. Victors such as Firpo and Rodríguez Jurado were hailed for their strength and courage and their primed, rippling muscles, to be sure, but also for their resistance and technique and for the skillful ways they ducked physical blows. Other boxers, like Juan Budinich, did not easily fit the representative models available to sporting heroes in the early 1900s. Born in the northern Chilean port of Coquimbo in 1881 to a local mother and a Croatian migrant father, Budinich was taught rudimentary boxing by an Irish blacksmith called McDonald. After an itinerant career as a young man sparring in the United States, in 1902 he organized Chile’s first official fight, in a Santiago theater, knocking out Frank Jones, a Black boxer from the United States. While paying audiences clearly relished local fighters knocking over the unofficial representatives of the United States, this was a counterpoint to, and a far cry from, the vision of masculinity harnessed in teamwork that took center stage in nation-building sporting projects through soccer.22 The sport of boxing developed in South America at one remove from the classical, amateur Olympic spirit of athletics. With its long-standing professional status and transnational practitioners, it was much more difficult to pin down and institutionalize. Boxing often took place in tents and

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Figure 10. George Bellowes, “Dempsey and Firpo,” 1924. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence thanks to the Whitney Museum of American Art, purchased with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt. Whitney, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dempsey_and_Firpo#/ media/File:Bellows_George_Dempsey_and_Firpo_1924.jpg.

temporary fighting spaces, and multiple associations competed to award national and continental championship prizes. Titles were awarded by popular acclaim as much as by institutional approval. The institutional nature of boxing, with the strong presence of commercial interests, was weaker than the amateur associations of athletics, soccer, and tennis, whose roots lay in the private clubs and economic backing of landowners, statesmen, and businessmen. There was much ambiguity about who could organize a South American Boxing Championship, and because such uncertainty has continued during boxing’s conflictual institutional history worldwide, record keeping is not as advanced as for other sports. Surviving accounts suggest that Chileans and Peruvians challenged Argentinian hegemony in the 1920s. Heriberto Rojas, a huaso, or peasant, from Colchagas in the

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south of Chile who migrated to the capital to become a policeman, was apparently recognized as South American heavyweight champion between 1913 and 1915. Luis Vicentini, a lightweight from Chillán, moved to the United States to fight after being proclaimed South American champion. In 1926 the elegant Chilean featherweight Carlos Uzabeaga defeated the Peruvian Kid Capitán in Buenos Aires and held on to the South American championship for two years.23 The press was important in promoting the links between sports, race, patriotism, and masculinity, and thus the ideologies and prejudices of writers were crucial in emphasizing some sporting heroes and sidelining others. For example, in Chile, Luis de la Carrera highlighted how sports could assert national difference in his regular column. Because boxers tended to come from the most marginalized Black, indigenous, or mixed-race backgrounds and because of their professional status from the beginning of the sport they were rarely accorded the same level of national heroism as footballers or athletes.24 * * * Sports were regulated to control violence, and the spaces they opened created opportunities for monetary reward and even social mobility for some marginalized men. The relationship between sports and violence in South America was about control, fear, and freedom. As David Shenin has shown, boxing played an important role in working out regional and racialized identities. This was most visible in Afro-American boxers whose bouts attracted paying spectators, and Black, Brown, and working-class footballers who benefited from the opportunities of unofficial professionalism in the 1910s and 1920s, racialized as dark amateurism across the continent. In its early transnationalism compared to other sports, boxing created opportunities for the media to promote competitions between sportsmen of different backgrounds, of which the most celebrated was Firpo versus Dempsey. In its exaltation of the human body unadorned but for shorts and a pair of padded gloves, boxing tapped into ideas of corporeal improvement that were shaped by both currents of military utility and eugenicist thinking about race. Afro-American boxers were hailed for their supposedly natural pugnaciousness. Because boxing developed on the fringes of elite sporting gover-

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nance in federations, schools, and clubs, the sport created more spaces for nonelite sportsmen. These boxers worked to overturn stereotypes of class and race through their dedication to controlling violence through technique. They are a good example of the use of sports for the civilizing process in South America and of how this was a bottom-up process in some areas. They used boxing to tone and push the limits of their human strength and endurance. At the same time, many boxers and footballers, including Jorge Newbery of the Buenos Aires Boxing Club, were turning to technology to push those limits even further.25

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10

Technology

the “most celebrated sportsman” of his generation, Jorge Newbery, died when the Morane-Saulnier monoplane he was piloting crashed into the ground in Mendoza, Argentina, on 1 March 1914. Newbery was killed when he failed to loop the loop in a borrowed plane in front of a group of admirers. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked into the streets to pay tribute to “a martyr to his own heroism” at his funeral in Buenos Aires. The crowd was just like the huge turnout and emotional outpouring upon the death of the tango singer Carlos Gardel in another air crash two decades later. Newbery was amongst the founders of three Buenos Aires sporting institutions: the Aero Club, the Baseball Club, and the Boxing Club. He was by all accounts a tremendous athlete, boxer, and footballer (for Gimnasia y Esgrima) and his Hellenic toned body was much commented upon. The Huracán soccer club was named after his hot-air balloon. He was mourned in death as the epitome of the virile Argentinian man who had never ceased pushing his physical limits.1 The enthusiastic embrace of technology enabled South Americans to excel in sports to an extent that has been neglected by previous histories. The chapter starts with aviators like Newbery and Jorge Chávez who competed in Europe and North America. It then discusses motorsports and cycling, before moving to the transformative effects of communications technologies: magazines, films and the sporting commentaries by radio that were broadcast across the continent in the late 1920s.

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Sporting Martyrs: Aviators Modernizing social elites embraced the possibilities of technological innovation. The dangers of these sports created heroes and martyrs. The most spectacular of these was the Peruvian aviator Jorge Chávez, the first human to fly over the Alps in an aeroplane, in 1910. Taking off from Brig, Switzerland, and keenly observed by spectators at resorts through the mountains, he demonstrated great endurance in navigating the extreme altitude, cold, clouds, and wind that had made his European competitors give up. He crash-landed at Domodossola in northern Italy. The day after the accident and now hospitalized he told French journalists that “the pain I felt when I found out the fate of my poor machine, was greater than that in my legs.” Interviewed by a journalist before he died from his injuries four days after the accident, Chávez remarked that he was never scared and he never looked down, “focusing entirely on the task at hand.” His death was communicated by telegraph around the world. He was praised at home for putting Peru on the map through his sporting feats, for representing the best about its people. El Comercio eulogized him as having dominated a machine that enabled him to defeat natural limits: “After his extraordinary feat, having conquered the Alps, having passed the highest peak, on his descent from the majestic mountain, Chávez has fallen, in his struggle for an ideal, in his effort to make that sublime ascent which linked him more to the gods than to men, and which enabled him to intervene in the beautiful dialogue between the Creator and nature.” Chávez was an adventurous and historic sportsman. Like other pioneering aviators, Chávez was a member of a cosmopolitan social elite. He was born in France, and his grandfather had been a British naval captain who served and died in the Peruvian wars of independence. Their family and educational links to Europe and the United States gave sportsmen like Chávez and Newbery the opportunity to learn about aviation and to promote it as a modern, technologically advanced form of recreation. Chávez died after winning a competition to cross the Alps organized by the Aero Club of Milan. Newbery died performing acrobatics in the air to entertain his friends after an enjoyable lunch. Both were modern sporting martyrs memorialized as national heroes.2

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Sports were promoted in South America as endeavors that were selfconsciously modern and part of the remaking of societies in which leaders sought to throw off the old traditions that were rooted in colonial times. Technological advances in travel and communication facilitated new sporting encounters and created new knowledge in the form of verified records. Who could fly the highest and the furthest? Who could ride the fastest or the longest? Sometimes the example of European innovation was held up by South American intellectuals as they looked down upon their fellow citizens, “silent Indians who couldn’t invent anything,” in the words of one journalist describing early Colombian aviation. Aviators, cyclists, and car drivers were all considered to be modern sportsmen who should be supported and praised: the physical demands and skills required were held to surpass even those of boxers, swimmers, and footballers. The considerable resources in the hands of elite pioneers like Newbery and Chávez meant that they could compete with and exceed the European so-called inventors of their sports.3 The sport of aviation thrived in South America, producing some of the world’s most successful designers and pilots, most famously the Brazilian Alberto Santos Dumont, whose feats in Paris won him worldwide acclaim. There were Aero Clubs in many South American cities in the early 1900s, and the deaths of practitioners were recorded in fantastic, morbid detail. “Flying men are perhaps the only ones who daily attract the attention of the entire world,” marveled a Colombian newspaper that printed a “martyrology of aviation,” listing thirty-eight global deaths in 1910, including that of Jorge Chávez. Sports chroniclers recognized the macabre element of this popular fascination: “More than the looping the loop,” noted Mariátegui in 1916, “we remember the crash.”4 Aviation as recreation and entertainment had a long history that preceded the celebrity of Chávez, Newbery, and Santos Dumont. Newspapers record anchored balloon trips across the continent throughout the 1800s. Municipal authorities were generous supporters of these events, to the extent that entrepreneurs came to expect patronage from local bigwigs. Even in Portoviejo, a small Ecuadorian river port, a balloon flight formed part of the anniversary celebrations of the local fire brigade in 1889. Aeronauts were particularly attracted to the Andean highland capitals, for example,

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Quito, where the ground was at 2,800m above sea level, and La Paz at 3,640m. They competed for the prizes offered by local businesses to break height records. Balloons marked special events, such as the opening of the Guayaquil–Quito railway line in 1909, and newspaper editors chose imposing images of balloons watched by large crowds for their covers or spreads.5 Aviators became international stars and toured their flying displays around anniversary celebrations and National Exhibitions. Crowds flocked to the grounds of the National Exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1898, for example, to see the Norwegian aeronaut Franz Frandsen (who went by the name of Francesco Cetti) go up in his untethered balloon, the Nansen, named after the Polar explorer. This was part of the local sporting calendar: his passengers included the cyclist Demarchi and the fencer Pini, both of whom eventually had to get out of the balloon so that it could rise. Aeronautics was considered one of the “most democratic forms of entertainment,” as everyone in the city could see it, not just ticket holders. The popularity of the events as spectator sports supported by municipalities and widely photographed and shared shows how meaningful the competitive exploration of “our skies” and landscapes was to local audiences. Sports clubs, roads, and airports were named after the aviators.

Motorized Sports The technological innovations that created motorsports in the early 1900s enabled humans to go further to attract even greater media attention than the endurance sports (see chapter 8). Many of the first celebrity motor racers in the 1900s and 1910s were the same people who had cycled and excelled in other sports. The bicycle’s egalitarian character became a bore and a drawback in the eyes of the wealthier elites, and they moved beyond it. They pushed against the limits of the human body, “the slavery of pedals” as it was characterized by the Spanish writer José Echegaray in 1895, to be replaced by “the energy of hydrocarbons.”6 The motorbike was at first a popular, improvised way of lengthening the distance of cycle rides. In the beginning motorbikes were imported into South America and then produced in São Paulo and elsewhere. By the mid1920s the National Sporting Moto Club of Chile was organizing dozens of

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rides and excursions each year, including a transnational Santiago–Buenos Aires–Valparaíso–Santiago ride on Harley Davidson motorbikes. The most famous of these long-distance “raids” was Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s ride out of Buenos Aires in 1952 on a Birmingham-built Norton 500cc machine, described in The Motorcycle Diaries. Less well-known is an earlier, 2,800km journey Guevara made through northwestern Argentina in 1950 on “a bicycle fitted out with a small Italian Cucchiolo engine.”7 Mechanized sport fitted into modernizing attempts to incorporate farflung territories into the national imaginary. The Club Automóvil Argentino was founded in 1904 by a group of sportsmen, bankers, and businessmen led by Dalmiro Varela Castex, who had imported the country’s first automobiles in the 1890s. The Touring Club de Paraguay was founded in 1924 by Asunción’s major sportsmen, including the soccer teacher William Paats. Its goal was to promote road building and tourism, “reaching the least accessible sites, guided by our indomitable will and an entrepreneurial and patriotic spirit.” The same year in Lima the Touring Club de Perú was brought into being, supported by engineers, the Rotary Club, and prominent members of the Italian community. It wanted to facilitate travel, commerce, and sport away from and between urban centers, bringing countries as well as cities into closer contact.8 Long-distance motorized races were known as raids, sporting incursions into the interior of the country conceived as enemy territory, which would be photographed and recorded before the racers returned to urban society. Its roots were in the premechanized era, when horseback raids were popularized by Walter Scott’s novels, which probably explains the use of the term by sporting or military enthusiasts of the early 1900s. In 1906 Club Pichincha was still organizing horseback raids into Quito’s countryside, timing the riders and awarding prizes. In Brazil the earliest motorized raids, for example, from São Paulo to Santos, were painfully slow because of the rocky roads and difficult terrain: in 1908 the 66km route took the drivers 37 hours to complete. Long car races across the Argentine pampa were both romantic and modern affairs, covering heroically long distances and overcoming landscapes, crashes, and mechanical malfunctions. The rise of team sports and their popular, collective ethos made the elite of established sportsmen “even more snobbish,” and gave individual and espe-

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cially expensive technologically enabled sports a heightened cultural value, as Gambeta has noted. Raids were as deliberately inaccessible as country club golf. The first events were triggered by the arrival of the French sporting aristocrat Lesdain in 1908. He drove from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro (700km in 35 days) to promote his family’s Brasiers car brand and drove one up the Corcovado mountain along the train track. When a 75km motorized race around São Paulo was organized by the Automovel Club de São Paulo in 1908, socalled professional sportsmen were prohibited from participating, which included working and middle-class “salaried mechanics,” which is to say, the very people who were the experts in building, fixing, and driving the machines. Motor sport was an exclusive innovation just when soccer was becoming inclusive. Cars were imagined and promoted by leaders as being synonymous with national progress, most famously by the Paulista sportsman turned President, Washington Luis, whose maxim was “to govern is to build roads.” In Argentina the Santa Fe newspaper promoted its own motorcar raid in 1917, embedding a journalist in the “daring” expedition which it claimed would “support the progress of the province’s people.”9 By the 1920s urban car races were well-established parts of the sporting environment too, as thousands of spectators lined the pavements of the fantastic Gavea circuit in Rio with its astounding descents of the Avenida Niemeyer. The drivers came predominantly from the elite, but some social mobility was opened for talented and persistent practitioners from the middle- and working-classes. The best example of a sportsman who emerged from this culture of mechanical improvisation was Juan Manuel Fangio. Born in the agricultural pampa town of Balcarce, Argentina, in 1911, he started a mechanic’s apprenticeship at the age of eleven and in the 1930s began a long racing career that took him from the dusty Argentinian roads to the Formula 1 World Championships, which he won five times in the 1950s in Alfa Romeo, Mercedes, Maserati, and Ferrari cars. Many observers named him the world’s best driver ever, attributing his success to a romantic authenticity: a combination of physical endurance, a mechanic’s modern technical sensibility, humility, control, and beautiful racing intuition.10 Motorsports were explicitly militarized in World War I. The amateur sportsmen who served in the British and French armies in the war were

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praised for putting their lives on the line, carrying their sporting determination into battle: hence the popularity of the Duke of Wellington’s apocryphal line that the Battle of Waterloo was won “on the playing fields of Eton.” The cyclist Mazan fought for France and the cricketer Harold Garnett for Britain, one of many Anglo-Argentinians and Anglo-Chileans who returned to fight in the British forces. The Anglo-Bolivian tennis player, Frederick Charles Patrick Stanton, was awarded the Victoria Cross for his efforts in the war.11 Autosport was appropriated by techno-modernists and militarists in order to reach nationalist goals, often cloaked in a discourse of international friendship. This accelerated into the 1920s, and the airplane raid became a regular feature in the newspapers. In 1922 the Chilean captain Diego Aracena and his mechanic Arturo Seabrook flew over two weeks from Chile to Brazil via Mendoza and Buenos Aires in Argentina and Montevideo in Uruguay, with the mission of delivering a message of congratulations on the centenary of Brazilian independence from colonial rule. This was widely reported across the continent as a sporting gesture of unity and co-endeavor. Upon arriving in Porto Alegre, Aracena remembered, “we were greeted with such enthusiasm, affection, and spontaneity, that despite my cold and severe nature, for the first time I felt emotional.” In 1924 the Argentinian aviator Pedro Zanni sought to be the first human to fly around the world. He made it from Amsterdam to Tokyo, via Hanoi, before his plane “The City of Buenos Aires” was rendered unusable. His local paper reported his hopes of “doing his countrymen proud.” These Inter-American and global raids were part of transatlantic aviation innovations. Those organized from Spain had the clear intention of uniting South America with Spain as its axis, such as the Plus Ultra raid of 1926, which called at Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. Its leader, Commander Ramón Franco, carried “a circular letter of credit issued by the Madrid branch of the Anglo–South American Bank” and sought praise for “a glorious achievement that gives pride to the Hispanic race.” This was “much more than a sporting achievement”: it was designed to carry a message of “fraternal Hispanic friendship” and to cement political ties between the Spanish republic and its former colonies in the Americas. (Ramón Franco later served the Spanish republican state of the 1930s, joined the rebellion of his brother

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Francisco Franco, and died in a plane crash during the Spanish Civil War in 1938.) Bolivian and Paraguayan sportsmen fought against one another in the Chaco War in the early 1930s. Rafael Pabón, a Bolivian aviator who had trained in the United States and wrote a book about aviation with a prologue by a British Royal Air Force pilot, was one of those who lost their lives. The sporting aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, devasted by the militarization of his sporting innovations, committed suicide in Petropolis, Brazil, in 1932.12

Distance, Time, and Records: Sporting Technology Aviators and car drivers built on the establishment of cycling as a sport which tapped into both modernity and simplicity. The first bicycles had arrived in South America not long after they appeared in Europe and were adopted as the cutting-edge of technology-enabled human progress. In Brazil this was in 1885, as a result of the close links to France and Francophile culture of the imperial capital in Rio de Janeiro. Later published photographs focus on the technological innovations: the bicycles themselves as well as lap-o-meters, leaderboards, and timing apparatus.13 The machines could be repaired by skilled hands, and bicycles dispersed from cities onto terrain often thought unsuitable. The cyclist occupied a middle ground between the modernity of aviation and the automobile, where the brave pilot and wealthy driver guided the machine, and the inclusive popularity of sports-for-all like soccer, swimming, and athletics. Cycling innovations in gears and tires were the regular subject of speculation regarding technological progress. As its place in the vanguard of technological innovation was supplanted by the motor car and the airplane, however, the bicycle came to sit between the purity of human exertion and the lure of mechanized mobility. In Colombia a poem by Abdalasis Gomez Jaime evoked a bicycle coming to life at night “dreaming and racing without a care across the plains.”14 In the 1900s new technologies were used to place limits on the older games and make them more suitable for the limits on time and space created by urban living. Whereas the length of the bullfight had depended on how long it took to kill the bulls, which could be quick or long, the

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soccer match ended with the referee’s whistle after ninety minutes. Cocks had fought within the movable confines of the cheering crowd; whereas the soccer match took place within lines drawn, painted, or marked with flags according to the regulations. A bullfighter or rodeo rider was commended via the comments and cheers of spectators; a footballer scored by kicking the ball between two poles specifically erected for the occasion. Cyclists’ and athletes’ achievements were measured with the stopwatch; mountain climbers’ altitude was measured with scientific equipment. Games and sports acquired new ways of measuring success beyond the aesthetic qualities of fulfilling norms of behavior in accordance with tradition or expert knowledge. Winning was now judged in terms of fulfilling criteria according to technological measurement and regulations as well as by performing for informed judges of quality. Reports on cycle and motorcar meetings dwelled on the recordmen who won races and broke local and national speed records. Such advances are what made it more civilized, as per Elias’s definition. The aesthetic forms created in sports—a lobbed ball, an arched back, a curved leg, an extended forearm—were part of the beauty created for participants and spectators. The technology that augmented these forms came from elsewhere. Cyclists were reliant on the import of bicycles from manufacturers abroad. Aviators went to France and England to build and practice on their machines, returning to tour and display them at home. Footballers were able to maneuver around the limited technology required by their new sport. Jerseys were often imported from British manufacturers, but local versions could be produced. These examples from the world of sport show how modernity was patchy across South America. While the elites had airplanes and cars, many footballers played without imported boots, most famously on Rio’s beaches. Later, a virtue would be made of how South American footballers acquired their skills without the latest manufactured sports goods. Playing barefoot was held to allow greater connection with the ground; playing with improvised, lighter balls enabled tighter skills and sharper technique. This was often racialized as natural flair and talent.15 The rising popularity of sporting practice was a result of the new communication technologies. Technology could intervene in the passage of

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time and shape states’ relationships with their citizens, as scholars like Jens Andermann have shown. The photographic camera could freeze time in an image and then circulate it through the printed newspaper and magazine. The moving film could capture a series of moments, edit them, and reproduce them for new audiences. Excitement could be shared beyond the immediate audience. From the daguerreotype in the 1830s through to the first public screenings of moving films in the 1890s, this period saw both increased interest in humans moving faster as well as great dedication to stopping them in time on film.16 Photographs of cyclists and aviators with their machines filled illustrated magazines such as Caras y Caretas, Sport Ilustrado, and El Cojo Ilustrado. They shared pages with sketches and paintings of boxers and fencers, the new technology of one complementing the tired, battered faces of the other. Sports’ relationship with time created difficulties where new precision timekeeping was rarer than in industrial urban centers. For example, the novelty of timekeeping was such that a club in Iquique, in northern Chile, couldn’t think of a word in Spanish for it, and in their regulations explained to players what this part of the referee’s responsibility—the “Temer Keeper”—would be. Conventions differed everywhere. The German-born athlete Julio Killian was left standing at the start of his first race in Santiago, in 1914, when he thought the waving of a handkerchief was someone saying goodbye and good luck rather than the signal to run (he was waiting for a starting pistol, though he still won the race). At the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam the Chilean cyclist Alejandro Vidal missed out on qualification for the final because no one in his team understood the French-language regulations governing the timing of events. His bike was in pieces being cleaned when he was called to the starting line.17 Record-adjudicating bodies were located half a world away from South America, which made it hard for local feats to be recognized globally. The Chilean Rodolfo Hammersley claimed a world record time of 10.4 seconds for the 100m sprint in 1910, but it was never accepted or recognized by the European holders of the record. Juan Jorquera broke the world marathon record in 1918 in Buenos Aires with a time of 2 hours 23 minutes 5 seconds, but never had his feat recognized because of disputes about the measurement of the course.18

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The cycling boom in Montevideo was captured, uniquely, on film in 1898. Three velodromes were constructed in the Uruguayan capital in the mid-1890s, and one of them is featured in Carrera de Bicicletas en el Velódromo de Arroyo Seco [Bicycle Race in the Arroyo Seco Velodrome], produced by the Spanish filmmaker Felix Oliver. The surviving archive footage shows a banked velodrome, a race involving four bicycles advancing sometimes as a group, occasionally separately, with some fancily dressed women crossing between the racers to award prizes and bunches of spectators clustered around the track. The machine-augmented speed of cyclists was for a moment the most exciting aspect of modernity. The inauguration of the Velódromo Paulista was a celebration of its harmonious lines, electric lighting, and being “the meeting point for the city’s elegant society.” Specialist cycling publications shared action photographs long before soccer and El Gráfico.19 The images circulated in magazines had a wider multisport role beyond their oft-commented centrality to football. Front-page images on display in roadside kiosks legitimized sports and their practitioners. Readers in countries with high literacy rates like Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay engaged with the texts about sporting styles. Front covers from El Gráfico in 1924, for example, included post-race photographs of dirty, smiling cyclists, the face (missing several teeth) of the featherweight boxing champion Pedro Quartucci, the aviator Pedro Zanni, the Hungarian chess grandmaster Ricardo Reti, and the US swimmer Florence Chambers. El Gráfico clearly differentiated between clean-cut sporting heroes like the smiling, “admirably formed” Chambers in a swimsuit and the tired, beaten bodies of the cyclists and boxers. Reaching a peak circulation of several hundreds of thousands with its vision of global sporting cultures and South America’s place within them, El Gráfico and the sportswriters of the 1910s and 1920s shaped the way a generation of South American intellectuals thought about sport.20

Radio–Sharing Sporting Commentaries The innovation of radio communication in the mid-1920s enabled sports commentaries to reach beyond newspaper readers and, through medium wave and shortwave, into the ears of illiterate listeners even in previously

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inaccessible regions. Because the nature of the oral archive is more ephemeral than that of its print counterpart, we know much less about the role of radio in building sporting imagined communities. Anecdotal reference and the fame of the first locutores, or radio commentators, suggest that radio had a much greater influence on the popularity of sport than has been recognized in the scholarship. Radio was part of the creation of “imagined communities,” nations scattered over huge distances that could be brought together through the shared experience of listening to sports. It also seems likely that boxing, cycling, and soccer played a role in popularizing the radio itself. By the 1940s radio was an established medium bringing societies together through sports—whether soccer in Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil, as attested to by Galeano, Benedetti, Soriano, and Pelé, or Colombia’s famed cycling commentaries.21 In the late 1920s, as shortwave and medium wave radio transmissions began to spread across the South American continent, sports became a central aspect of regular programming. Live commentators drew on oral storytelling traditions to embrace listeners in their retelling of the game or race. Radio spoke directly to illiterate rural audiences in ways that newspapers never could. Transmissions reached beyond geographical distance and could be listened to collectively, making the imagined community of the nation possible in ways that were unthinkable in the days when print-based sporting culture reigned.22 Radio and its poetic reconstructions of heroism and collectivism were the final stimulus to making popular team sports national in the 1920s. This sporting movement toward embracing the representative significance of soccer was dependent on the technological advances of radio and print culture. It was facilitated by the popular adoption of the game by workingclass communities across the continent and owed its power to the construction and enclosure of stadia, often by state or municipal authorities, who saw the political, social, and health value of participation and spectatorship in sport. As Borges and Bioy Casares observed, the radio-mediated national story of sport became more important than the physical game itself. Their 1937 story of a commentator who continued to provide unknowing listeners with match descriptions, regardless of the matches being canceled, spoke to how embedded the custom had become.23

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On 14 September 1923 Argentinian radio broadcast a live translation into Spanish of the English-language commentary of the world heavyweight championship fight in New York between Jack Dempsey of the United States and Luis Ángel Firpo of Argentina. This was “the key turning-point for Argentina’s nascent radio industry,” as thousands packed into bars, shops, and squares to hear the fight. The world’s first live radio broadcast of a soccer match took place in Argentina the next year, and games became regular parts of the schedules by 1927. In 1928 the Olympic soccer semifinal between Uruguay and Argentina was broadcast by radio, in parallel with telegram-linked chalkboard and loudspeaker updates outside newspaper offices in both capitals. While the first games were somber, formal descriptions, young locutores like Horacio Martinez Seeber soon developed a lyrical narrative style that was emulated elsewhere and made famous by such chroniclers—on radio and in text—as Fioravanti and Borocotó. Oneoff boxing extravaganza shows pioneered the capturing of public interest in sporting radio performances, and soccer normalized this with scheduled Sunday afternoon broadcasts through the 1930s. Soccer was ideally suited for the new broadcasters. Its time-limited ninety-minute format meant that radio stations knew when their programs would start and finish, and listeners could arrange their days around the matches. The pitch had the same size and markings wherever it was played. For the 1930 World Cup the Uruguayan Servicio Oficial de Difusión distributed a plan of the stadium divided into thirty rectangles and identifying the stands and entrances to aid radio listeners as they pictured the action in their minds’ eye.24 * * * The initial reliance on the import of technologies from outside makes it tempting to see the South American sports of aviation and motorsports as practices characterized by their coloniality, limited to the incorporation and adaptation of a European invention by European elites. However, these technologically enabled sports were part and parcel of a sporting landscape characterized by transnational connections and nation-building projects. Years before South American victories in international soccer tournaments, sportsmen from the continent were the first to achieve global sporting challenges such as flying around the Eiffel Tower and over the Alps. They had

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the confidence and the funds to set out to circumnavigate the world. Motorized sport elevated its practitioners to national hero status and created a future world champion in Juan Manuel Fangio. Communications technology transformed the simpler and more popular sports too. The new cameras appeared to freeze time, and their images could be widely circulated. Newspapers and magazines and then the radio shared sporting commentaries that connected readers and listeners, encouraging allegiances and identities that could be sustained outside as well as within the stadium. The foundations were set for the fusion of sport, modernity, technology, and nationalism in South America. This happened with the wave of international sporting competitions that accompanied the centenaries of independence from colonial rule from 1910, culminating with the first FIFA men’s World Cup, hosted by Uruguay in 1930.

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11

International

below i explain how and why south americans pioneered international sports in the 1910s and 1920s. The first FIFA World Cup in Uruguay in 1930, hosted and won by the Uruguayans, was the culmination of two decades of international sporting tournaments in the continent, which were held to celebrate the centenary of independence from colonial rule. The Olympic revival and international sporting tours fed into a circuit of commemorative tournaments. These South American sporting histories were crucial in the creation of a global sporting culture of international competition in the 1920s, though they have been absent from most Eurocentric histories of sports.1

The Olympics in South America Pierre de Coubertin, the French aristocrat famed for rediscovering the Ancient Olympics and launching the Modern Olympics, did not live in a vacuum-packed historical time pod. Greek history was a reference point for promoters of civilization across Europe during the nineteenth century, and South American intellectuals also appropriated classical motifs to support their modernizing visions. The Olympic spirit in South America came from readings of the classics, as well as being part of a worldview that looked approvingly at the achievements of late nineteenth-century Europe.2

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Because of the distance from Europe and the cost of travel, the Olympic movement first flourished in South America at local rather than international scales. Though very few South Americans competed in the first modern Olympic Games, held in Greece in 1896, “Olympic” was already a widely used metaphor, equated with heroic acts, with political struggle, and with strong physical condition. Brazilian sporting journalism of the 1890s cast athletes as Homeric, as Titans, as able to perform Herculean tasks. The classical framework for sporting achievement was a central part of its appeal. Hellenic and Olympic sports clubs abounded (Asunción’s Club Olimpia was founded in 1902). “Olympic” had come to represent the pure, virtuous, vigorous spirit held to be integral to the classical idea of sport, linked to disinterested gentleman amateurs. The word was being widely used before Coubertin got his tournament off the ground. As Miller and Laird have shown, classical traditions were strong referents in political, economic, and cultural life. The crucial innovation of 1896 and Coubertin’s people was the internationalization of the Olympics. Running, throwing, and wrestling were at the heart of the reinvention of simple, classical athletic sport. The human body was central to the Olympic sporting endeavor—the only animal involved was the horse. Iberian sports of bullfighting and cockfighting were excluded. South Americans were initially marginalized from the institutionalization of the events, even though they shared the ideology of Olympism.3 Women often participated in these noninternational Olympic games. Coubertin was hostile or indifferent toward women athletes, but local clubs and associations often encouraged female Olympians. There are numerous examples, among them the Fluminense Athletic Club award of a gold bracelet to the winner of the 300m handicap race for girls between the ages of eight and twelve in 1887; and the Guayaquil Employees’ Association encouraging women to run and jump on its Multisports Day in 1912.4 These local Olympics were pretty open as to what could take place. On 6 August 1911 some Olympic Games were held in a park in central Bogotá to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Boyacá (7 August 1819). The events included an assisted jumping competition, in which a circle of people holding a large blanket threw an athlete as high into the air as possible.5

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The international Olympics in their first years revolved around Northern European and North American athletes who had the leisure and funding to travel to the games and who anointed themselves the heirs to classical Greek athleticism. The only South Americans participating in the 1896 Olympics in Athens were those who, like the wealthy young Chilean Luis Subercaseaux, were present in Europe at the time. In 1904 in St. Louis, USA, South Americans were limited to the Anthropological Exhibition, as the athletic tournament was closed to them (as noted in chapter 1). Women and non-European peoples were excluded from the first international Olympic Games simply because they were not invited. What’s more, they were disadvantaged by cost and distance. Stand-alone Women’s Olympic Games were organized in Europe in opposition to Coubertin’s initiative through the 1920s, but South American women, for the same logistical reasons, were never able to take part in them. Yet when South Americans were incorporated within the International Olympic Committee’s institutions in the 1910s and 1920s, they already had a long tradition of their own international competitions to build on.6

Sporting Tours Increased opportunities for travel made sports tours possible and enabled representative sport to take many forms. Clubs, countries, regions, cities, ethnicities, and genders all at different times were prioritized by the states, nations, and ideals being represented or embodied. National sports can provide insight into the societies that create them—for Eakin, “to understand soccer is to peer into the soul of Brazil and into the heart of this lusotropical civilization.” So how, when, and why some sports and not others came to be representative is of crucial historical importance. The centenaries of independence would be key to this, but they drew on long traditions. In 1868 the Buenos Aires Cricket Club played its Uruguayan equivalent, the Montevideo Cricket Club at La Blanqueada. The fixture then took place regularly and over time became recognized, by the participants and their friends in the newspapers at least, as international. “Argentina” played “Brazil” at cricket in 1888 and “Chile” in 1893. These were small, informal affairs set up by clubs in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro,

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and pretty much everyone who turned up could play. As the sports became more popular, however, captains had to select who would play, hence the origin of the term selección/seleçao, which was used for club and city teams first and subsequently for national teams. Those first representative cricket teams had no formal link to the Marylebone Cricket Club, which governed cricket in England, and thus there was no international recognition of the legitimacy of their representative nature. This is not because international sporting competition was not taking place, but because it was taking place away from the remit and interest of the self-appointed authorities based in Europe. The question of representation had internal consequences in terms of the racialized and gendered version of the nation that new sporting authorities were prepared to promote. It also had an external component, which created the conditions for sporting nations to test themselves against their neighbors and visitors.7 Naval forces were involved in playing sports when visiting other ports, for example, when the Argentinian navy played soccer with Puerto Rican nationalists in 1914 and then raised toasts to each other and their shared Hispanic pasts. British Royal Navy officers and sailors continued to play cricket and soccer when they were in South American ports. The practice is recorded in a surviving British Pathé film, “Football at 110 degrees: In the Shade!,” filmed in São Paulo in 1922. It shows the sailors of the Royal Navy Cruiser Squadron playing with Union Jack flags in the center of their chests, making clear their claims to represent their nation-state, while the opponents, the Brazilians, are wearing white shirts with a crest.8 The growing representative value of sports combined with elites’ political desire to commemorate the centenaries of independence and amplify loyalties to the nation-state. Social clubs were already involved in promoting dramatic and musical performance as part of national festivities in the 1800s, as Kraay has shown for Rio de Janeiro, and sports clubs inherited this public-facing aspect of their activities. The Clube Regatas Guanabarense staged a regatta and fireworks display with support from the Rio de Janeiro council as early as 1885. These activities fused together to create a new phenomenon in the 1910s and 1920s: the Independence-themed Sporting Tournament with international guests. The 1930 FIFA World Cup, held to mark the Centenary of Uruguay’s political independence, was

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the culmination of this trend of the use of sport and ritual for political ends in the South American republics. This fact is often forgotten when 1930 is seen as the beginning of a global process of international soccer competition. At the time, it was the conclusion to a continental process central to national-identity formation in South America, of which Uruguay was the final piece in the jigsaw.9

Centennial Heroes The action got started in earnest in 1910, when Uruguayan and Chilean teams traveled to Buenos Aires to participate in the Copa Centenario Revolución de Mayo, commemorating the anniversary of the May Revolution of 1810 that expelled Spanish power from the port. Packed crowds of six thousand, twenty-five hundred, and eight thousand spectators came to watch the three games respectively. The scorers included members of British families like Hayes, Campbell, and Watson Hutton as well as the children of Italian migrants like Viale and José Piendibene.10 One of the reasons for the popularization of sports during the 1910s and 1920s in South America was the state and municipal support of competitions and tournaments. Sports were used to liven up days that had become stuck in a rut of political speechifying and te deums. This refreshed the pattern set by feast day bullfighting and cockfighting, which survived in some independence centenaries. Horse racing, too had attached itself to the celebrations of the Chilean national independence day by the mid1800s. After 1900 animal sports were gradually displaced from the center of commemorative national sporting competition, though they persisted with great popularity in some areas. Such was the case of high-jumping horses, a favorite in Chile, where in 1923 the famous horse La Chilenita jumped 2m 12cm and broke the South American record previously held by a horse named Foot-Ball. The links between national heroes and the key moment of the assertion of sovereignty were a crucial boost to the correlation between team sports and nationalism, and the emergence of the individual sporting hero to social preeminence. They built on the National Exhibitions, from the 1870s, which had often incorporated sports alongside art, folklore, and national history.11

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The coalescence of sporting and national celebration for the centenaries took place at the same rhythm as the independence victories back in the 1810s. Quito, Buenos Aires, and Caracas declared their independence in 1809 and 1810, and Paraguay in 1811. Chile and Colombia celebrated political declarations from 1810, and military victories from 1819. Peru’s declaration of independence in 1821 was confirmed by the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824. Brazil’s negotiated exit from Portuguese colonial rule took place in 1822, which meant that Brazil took a significant step toward representative sport in 1922, followed by Bolivia at its own centenary in 1925. Uruguayan independence came last of all, as a consequence of the conflict between Buenos Aires and Brazil, and was commemorated in 1930. Sports became ever more important through the centennial celebrations. In Caracas in 1910, under the military dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, the commemorations were dominated by military marches and exercises. In Chile that year municipalities and private clubs organized sporting competitions: in Santiago there was a fencing tournament and military horse races. Popular celebrations paid for by the city included wrestling, bicycle races, and soccer matches. Local committees organized bicycle races in Concepción and rowing in Valdivia and Lebu.12 In Argentina José Figueroa Alcorta’s government spoke of the Olympic Spirit as the ideal focus for celebrations of a centenary of national independence. The Sociedad Sportiva and Club Hípico hosted sporting festivals designed to showcase the physical prowess of national bodies and their aspirations. The Juegos Olímpicos del Centenario, or Centennial Olympic Games, were a big attraction for spectators, and the Italian Dorando Pietri came and won the marathon. As the 1910s continued, independence, politics, and sports were ever more interwoven. In 1911 baseball teams from Cartagena and Barranquilla played their first interdepartmental match to commemorate the centenary of calls for independence on the Caribbean coast. Tennis tournaments were a centerpiece of the centenary celebrations in Quito in 1909, and in Colombia 1919 the Caldas Lawn Tennis Club in coffee-producing Manizales hosted a championship. In Antioquia’s Sonsón, however, the centennial tennis celebrations had to be called off because of bad weather. Tennis symbolized cosmopolitanism, glamor, and self-control, as did golf. Both sports

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required equipment, meaning that sports goods firms were involved in promoting the patriotic events. Advertisements for tennis racquets, bicycles, footballs, and specialized footwear were almost as frequent in the 1920s press as patriotic historical articles on the merits of Bolívar, San Martín, and the other liberators.13 Sports provided a convenient space for the promotion of a Creole vision that emphasized “the integrating, mixed-race identification of the nation, under a hierarchical social structure.” Footballers and soccer administrators used the national team to advance their Creole nationalism, where members of the traditional White elites retained control of the sporting institutions, while working-class, Black, and mestizo players were granted a place in the side.14 After the end of World War I, networked South American sports administrators seeking to maximize the national relevance of their activities set about fully emplanting sport in the upcoming centenary celebrations of the military victories over Spain in 1819, 1821, and 1824. South American soccer championships featuring Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile were held in 1919 in Rio de Janeiro to mark the centenary of Argentinian and Chilean independence. The Estádio das Larenjeiras was inaugurated for the event, and matches were attended by all manner of aristocrats and dignitaries. The musician Pixinguinha wrote a song, “Um a zero/One-Nil,” relishing the idea that “the whole world has fallen in love with the art” of soccer. In the match against Chile, the Uruguayan goalkeeper Roberto Chery suffered a serious hernia injury while trying to stop a shot and died as a sporting martyr a fortnight later. Brazil won the tournament, and the link between success and potential national unity was embedded with the winning goal scored by the Black forward Arthur Friedenreich.15 All these events were organized by elite sporting authorities with close ties to the state and with a shared vision of a classical, amateur, virtuous sporting ideal. They were supported by national media, for example, La Razón, published in Argentina. In 1922 Peru’s 30,000–capacity Estadio Nacional was constructed in the Santa Beatriz district of Lima as part of a larger sporting complex neighboring the hippodrome and velodrome. The land was donated by the British community for that purpose.

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Representative sports were largely open to all, in contrast to the more exclusionary color lines imposed on sports in the United States. At the 1919 South American athletic championships in Montevideo, for example, the 100m was won by the Anglo-Uruguayan Henry Bowles, and the 200m and 400m were won by the Afro-Uruguayan Isabelino Gradin. Gradin repeated his victories in 1920 in Santiago de Chile. These were international championships claiming to be continental and open, though, like the nations that competed, this could be an aspiration rather than a reality. Although transport connections had improved considerably with rail links, it still took several days to travel between Lima and the Río de la Plata, for example, and much longer from highland Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. In addition to the geographical divisions, social prejudice remained explicit and visible. In the south of Brazil Black-only soccer leagues existed in Porto Alegre, Pelotas, and Rio Grande. Chilean delegations often complained about the Afro-American players on other sides, and, as noted earlier, racial abuse and prejudice were a central part of team selection and spectatorship in the 1910s and 1920s, most notably when Brazil visited Argentina in 1920 and were depicted as monkeys in the press. This infamous macacos incident led the Brazilian president Pessoa to order in the early 1920s that all-White national teams be selected, leaving a legacy of ill feeling.16 The early victories of Afro-Uruguayans like Gradin and working-class athletes like Manuel Plaza, and the goals of footballers like Friedenreich, however, served to reinforce the potential representative value of athletics for continental international competition, even while these athletes were not competing or achieving victories at the international Olympic events held in Europe or the United States. Competition at the South American championship events became fierce and nationalistic, the 1922 games, for example, being marred by crowd invasions, athletes refusing to accept the decisions of umpires, and disputes over timing and distances.17 The growth in representative athletics championships ran alongside and sometimes coincided with representative soccer. The 1922 soccer tournament took place alongside what were called the Latin American Olympic Games. Held in Rio de Janeiro to mark the centenary of Brazilian independence, the games were a high point of coalescence of interest between the

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Table 3. Selected South American Athletics Champions and Medalists 1919–29 Year, Place (Competitors)

100m

1919, in Montevi- Henry deo (CHI, URU) Bowles URU 1920, in Santiago de Chile (ARG, CHI, URU)

Marcelo Uranga CHI

Augusto 1922 Latin de Negri American Olympiads, Rio ARG de Janeiro (ARG, BRA, CHI, MEX, URU)

200m

Long Jump

Discus

10,000m

Isabelino Gradín URU

Ricardo Müller CHI

Alberto Warnken CHI

Gilberto Martínez URU

Isabelino Gradín URU

Ricardo Müller CHI

Jorge Llo- Juan Jorqubet Cullen era CHI ARG

Ramiro García CHI

Ramiro García CHI

Jorge Llo- Manuel bet Cullen Plaza CHI ARG

Félix Esco- Ramiro bar ARG García CHI

1924, in Buenos Aires (ARG, CHI, URU)

Miguel Enrico ARG

1926, in Montevideo (ARG, CHI, URU)

Eduardo Eduardo Valerio Albe ARG Albe ARG Vallanía ARG

1927, in Santiago Juan Piña Juan Piña Oscar ARG ARG Alvarado de Chile (ARG, CHI CHI, URU) 1929, in Lima Hernán (ARG, CHI, PER) Spinassi ARG

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Hernán Spinassi ARG

Juan Moura CHI

David Martín Estévez URU

Manuel Plaza CHI

Jorge Llo- Manuel bet Cullen Plaza CHI ARG Pedro Elsa Manuel URU Plaza CHI Héctor Benaprés CHI

José Ribas ARG

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Table 4. South American Football Championships Year

Hosts

Winners (Other Competitors)

1916 1917 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1929

Argentina (Buenos Aires) Uruguay (Montevideo) Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) Chile (Valparaíso) Argentina (Buenos Aires) Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) Uruguay (Montevideo) Uruguay (Montevideo) Argentina (Buenos Aires) Chile (Santiago) Peru (Lima) Argentina (Buenos Aires)

Uruguay (BRA, CHI) Uruguay (CHI, BRA, ARG) Brazil (CHI, URU, ARG) Uruguay (CHI, ARG, BRA) Argentina (BRA, PAR, URU) Brazil (CHI, URU, PAR, ARG) Uruguay (ARG, PAR, BRA) Uruguay (ARG, PAR, CHI) Argentina (PAR, BRA) Uruguay (BOL, ARG, PAR) Argentina (BOL, URU, PER) Argentina (URU, PAR, PER)

soccer and athletic authorities. Five countries took part over two months, including a delegation of sixty-three Uruguayans. Historians have noted how “the Olympic ideals were used as background to transformations in the national imaginary about global sports”—they also observe that this tournament was intended as a distraction from an uncertain internal political situation. Paraguay participated for the first time in 1922 amid violent political conflict at home. Indeed, a rival Paraguayan national team set out on a continental tour raising awareness and money for the Red Cross while the tournament was being played.18 In the 1922 Latin American Olympic Games, held the same month as the soccer tournament, gold medals were won by all four of the competing countries. The Uruguayan Gradin won the 400m again. The Chilean Manuel Plaza won the 3,000m, 5,000m, 10,000m, cross-country, and marathon. The Argentinian Enrique Thompson won the 400m hurdles, and the Brazilian Willy Seewald won the javelin. In soccer the growing semiprofessionalism of players gave Argentina and Uruguay a considerable advantage in the 1920s. In 1922, for example, the Chileans were still drawing many of their footballers from historic amateur clubs such as Badminton and

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Green Cross and were outplayed by the more efficient, fitter, better trained teams. National squads were measuring themselves against one another, and innovations were adopted, for example, the hiring of foreign coaches to improve tactics. As the national value of these competitions grew through newspaper reporting, so did the tension between spectators and players. Allegations of injustice were never far from the surface. In the final match in 1922 all the Paraguayan players left the field in protest against a penalty awarded late in the game to the hosts and eventual champions. When Bolivia joined the tournament in 1926 and Peru in 1927, the South American championships expanded to encompass Andean nations with very different historical sporting cultures.19

The Global Contexts for Institutionalizing Sporting Representation The South American sporting tournaments organized as part of the commemoration of the centenaries of independence from colonial rule made institutional frameworks necessary. South American sportsmen institutionalized their associations and Olympic committees within local and regional contexts in which sporting bodies competed for hegemonic national jurisdiction. This was the case with the Federación Sportiva Nacional, Asociación de Football de Santiago, the Football Association of Chile, and the Rio and São Paulo associations in Brazil, who competed with one another to organize leagues, select players, and set the rules. These regional power struggles mapped onto global processes of interinstitutional competition for control of sports and their rules within ongoing geopolitical and imperial tensions before World War I. At the regional, national, and global levels these institutions were “messy spaces,” in Chris Gaffney’s words, where racialized ideologies around the purposes of sports coincided with individual egos and diplomatic power politics.20

International Institutions: The FA/FIFA/CONMEBOL The Football Association of England (the FA), founded in 1863, conceived of itself as the world governing body of soccer on a British imperial model

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similar to that of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club and the Marylebone Cricket Club. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), founded in 1904, challenged this English body by proposing a collaborative, federal model of global sports governance instead. South American soccer developed between the Anglophilia of those who looked to England and the F.A. for legitimacy and order and the internationalism of others, who saw soccer as a global game as much as a British one, given their schooling by Dutch, Swiss, German, French, and Italian teachers. Both the English F.A. and the international FIFA used South American institutions as pawns in their empire building, but the South American associations were also adept at using the international institutions for their own ends. It was the universal FIFA model that triumphed.21 Alexander Watson Hutton was reputed to have requested Argentinian affiliation to the F.A. in 1893, but Argentina did not appear as affiliated members until 1903. The F.A. barely recognized this link, as Argentina was never represented on the F.A. Council and enjoyed neither voting rights nor invitations to meetings.22 In 1912 the Argentine F.A. applied to join FIFA while maintaining its membership in the F.A., which caused an immediate rupture. The F.A. Council decided that “as the Association had become members of the International Federation of Football Associations, their membership in The Football Association had ceased.” The English F.A. recognized the incompatibility of their imperial model with FIFA’s federal structure.23 The application of the Federación Sportiva Nacional de Chile to join FIFA in 1912 caused a similar tension because the Chilean F.A. remained an affiliated member of the English F.A. By 1914 the federal governance of FIFA had defeated the English F.A.’s aspiration to act as the global governing body. As Europe fell into war the South American administrators got on with organizing themselves into the world’s first continental governing body: Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol, or CONMEBOL. CONMEBOL was formed in 1916 by the Asociación de Football de Chile, the Confederação Brasileiro de Deportes, the Asociación Argentina de Football, and the Asociación Uruguaya de Fútbol. The acronym CONMEBOL reflected its three-language hybrid status (its Spanish/Portuguese/ English mix beyond even the English/French name of FIFA). CONMEBOL was a big institutional advance for South American international sport,

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well in advance of similar regional bodies in Europe, where the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) was set up only in 1954. The only other country to have a national soccer association at the time, Paraguay (founded in 1902), was overlooked by the leaders of the movement, the Uruguayan Colorado politician and president of Montevideo Wanderers, Héctor Rivadavia Gómez, and the Argentinian José Susán. The grouping was formalized in order to organize an inaugural South American championship in Argentina in 1916. The event marked the centenary of the declaration of independence by the Tucumán congress from Spanish rule and was won by Uruguay.24 CONMEBOL was a secure foundation from which to engage with FIFA after World War I and established a power base for South American soccer within the global organization. By 1926 FIFA’s annual congresses had been attended by representatives from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, reflecting the increased ease of travel and the availability of finance to support the trips. A list of all the delegates at FIFA annual congresses between 1906 and 1929 is a who’s who of sporting elites, from the Anglo-Argentinian sporting goods importer F. R. Guppy to the Paulistano club member and Olympic rower Fernando Nabuco de Abreu, and the Peruvian Alfredo Benavides Canseco, a veteran of Unión Cricket in Lima who was reputed to have played in the very first Peruvian soccer match. Benavides had founded the Club Tennis Terrazas de Miraflores and chaired Peru’s Olympic Committee. The internationalization of sports relied on overlapping personal networks that could coincide in the bodies of a few influential men like these.25

International Institutions: The IOC Whereas the productive relationship between CONMEBOL and FIFA defined and facilitated South American soccer strength at the global level, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sought to exert its control over the Olympic movement in South America much more aggressively, and this led to flash points, exclusions, and institutional forgetfulness. Coubertin and his internationalists had initially courted South Americans, selecting the Latin American region as “one of the main axes for the international expansion of the Olympic Movement.” The Argentinian school inspector

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José Benjamín Zubiaur was named as a member of the IOC’s first governing council in 1894, but it was “probably without his knowledge or permission.” He never attended a meeting. Zubiaur’s labors were focused on South America rather than on Coubertin’s vision of internationalism. The status quo changed only gradually. In 1905 the IOC awarded an Olympic Merit diploma to the Brazilian aviator Santos Dumont, even though he never competed in the games. In 1913 the Brazilian ambassador to Switzerland was elected delegate to the IOC even before the Brazilian Olympic Committee had been formally established. Cesar Torres argues that an “Olympic explosion” of South American engagement with the IOC games responded to state efforts to promote participation, especially in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.26 Thanks to the efforts of promoters from the IOC and the YMCA, athletics was booming in Argentina and Uruguay in the early 1920s, as Torres and Matsuo have shown. This led, however, to struggles for control of institutional governance. Coubertin had expelled Argentina from the IOC, angry over their misuse of the Olympic brand after organizing the Centennial Olympic Games in 1910 without permission. In 1914 the Uruguayan chair of the Physical Education Commission, Juan Smith, wrote to Coubertin asking for guidance on sports policy and was dumbfounded to receive a furious response at his usurping of the Olympic name in Uruguay’s proposed athletics championships. Nevertheless, South Americans continued to insist on their right to call themselves Olympians whether they traveled to Europe or not. The first continental athletics championships, calling themselves the South American Olympiads, were held in Montevideo in 1919 as a competition between Chile and Uruguay. More contentious South American Olympiads were held in Santiago de Chile in 1920, the very same year the supposedly international IOC Olympic games took place in Antwerp, followed by the 1922 Latin American Olympiads in Rio de Janeiro. These South American Olympics can be compared with CONMEBOL’s South American soccer championships. While the latter have a long institutional history as the forerunners to today’s Copa América, the alternative Olympiads have been airbrushed from the official IOC history because they were not sanctioned by the committee at the time. These early institutional conflicts over the power to assemble sporting bodies on tracks and fields

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Table 5. Institutionalization of National Football Associations and Olympic Committees

Country Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Paraguay Peru Uruguay Venezuela

First Game of National Football Soccer Recorded Association 1867 1896 1884 1892 1892 1899 1886 1897 1881 1877

AFA FBF CBF FFC FCF FEF APF FPF AUF FVF

National Football Association Joined Founded CONMEBOL 1893 1925 1914 1895 1924 1925 1906 1922 1899 1925

1916 1926 1916 1916 1936 1927 1921 1925 1916 1952

National Olympic Committee Founded

Athletes First Competed in IOC Olympic Games

1923 1932 1914 1934 1936 1948 1970 1924 1923 1935

1900 1936 1920 1896 1932 1924 1968 1900 1924 1948

around the continent confirm that “the inexorable connections between sport, politics, ideology and the exercise of power have always been part of the Olympic Movement” in South America.27 In the 1920s elite South Americans cemented their control over the institutions of their sporting governance, and South American athletes began to surmount the barriers of indifference, exclusion, and expense and to compete at the IOC Olympics. Their success demonstrated the extent to which strong, competitive athletics circuits had been built over the previous decade. The South American medal winners at the IOC games were predominantly Argentinians, but Brazilians, Uruguayans, and Chileans achieved success as well. Participation in the Olympic games held in Stockholm in 1912, Antwerp in 1920, Paris in 1924, and Amsterdam in 1928 were prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest, most ambitious, or lucratively supported sports, such as polo, cycling, and, latterly, soccer. Most Olympians stayed home. Brazil’s first Olympic national hero was Guilherme Paraense, an army officer and member of the Fluminense sports club, who won a gold

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Table 6. South American Medalists at IOC Olympic Games before 1930 (All Men) Year

Games

Name

Country

Discipline

1920

Antwerp

Brazil

1920

Antwerp

Guilherme Paraense Afrânio da Costa

1920

Antwerp

Brazil

1924

Paris

1924

Paris

1924 1924

Paris Paris

Guilherme Paraense, Afrânio da Costa, Sebastião Wolf, Dario Barbosa, Fernando Soledade Arturo Kenny, Juan Miles, Guillermo Naylor, Juan Nelson, Enrique Padilla José Leandro Andrade, Pedro Arispe, Pedro Casella, Pedro Cea, Luis Chiappara, Pedro Etchegoyen, Alfredo Ghierra, Andrés Mazali, José Nasazzi, José Naya, Pedro Petrone, Ángel Romano, Zoilo Saldombide, Héctor Scarone, Pascual Somma, Humberto Tomasina, Antonio Urdinarán, Santos Urdinarán, Fermín Uriarte, José Vidal, Alfredo Zibechi, Pedro Zingone Luis Brunetto Alfredo Copello

Shooting: 30m Gold military pistol Shooting: 50m Silver free pistol Bronze Shooting: 50m team free pistol

1924

Paris

Héctor Méndez

1924

Paris

Pedro Quartucci

1924

Paris

Alfredo Porzio

Brazil

Medal

Argentina Polo

Gold

Uruguay Soccer

Gold

Argentina Triple Jump Argentina Boxing: Lightweight Argentina Boxing: Welterweight Argentina Boxing: Featherweight Argentina Boxing: Heavyweight

Silver Silver Silver Bronze Bronze (continued)

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Table 6. (continued ) Year

Games

1928

Amsterdam Víctor Avendaño

1928

Amsterdam Arturo Rodríguez

1928

Amsterdam Alberto Zorrilla

1928

Amsterdam José Leandro Andrade, Juan Peregrino Anselmo, Pedro Arispe, Juan Arremón, Venancio Bartibás, Fausto Batignani, René Borjas, Antonio Campolo, Adhemar Canavesi, Héctor Castro, Pedro Cea, Lorenzo Fernández, Roberto Figueroa, Álvaro Gestido, Andrés Mazali, Ángel Melogno, José Nasazzi, Pedro Petrone, Juan Piriz, Héctor Scarone, Domingo Tejera, Santos Urdinarán Amsterdam Ludovico Bidoglio, Ángel Argentina Soccer Bossio, Saúl Calandra, Alfredo Carricaberry, Roberto Cherro, Octavio Díaz, Juan Evaristo, Manuel Ferreira, Enrique Gainzarain, Alfredo Helman, Segundo Luna, Ángel Medici, Luis Monti, Pedro Ochoa, Rodolfo Orlandini, Raimundo Orsi, Fernando Paternoster, Feliciano Perducca, Natalio Perinetti, Domingo Tarasconi, Luis Weihmuller, Adolfo Zumelzú

1928

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Name

Country

Discipline

Argentina Boxing: Lightheavyweight Argentina Boxing: Heavyweight Argentina Swimming: 400m freestyle Uruguay Soccer

Medal Gold Gold Gold Gold

Silver

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Games

1928

Amsterdam Víctor Peralta

1928 1928 1928

Name

Country

193

Discipline

Argentina Boxing: Featherweight Amsterdam Raúl Landini Argentina Boxing: Welterweight Amsterdam Manuel Plaza Chile Marathon Amsterdam Raúl Anganuzzi, Carmelo Argentina Fencing: Team Foil Cámet, Roberto Larraz, Héctor Lucchetti, Luis Lucchetti

Medal Silver Silver Silver Bronze

medal in 1920 in the 30m military pistol competition. This victory was highly prized at home as it demonstrated (along with his teammates’ silver in the 50m free pistol and bronze in the team 50m free pistol competitions) Brazil’s sporting ability and military preparation. The combination of sporting success with military prowess was irresistible, with writers riffing on the medals for many days and the shooters becoming instant national heroes. An image of Brazilian shooters using Europe for target practice was printed in the O Malho journal.28 During and immediately after World War I, therefore, South American countries’ sporting infrastructure and experience grew massively. South America’s presence on the global international stage expanded accordingly once sporting institutions received central political backing and, sometimes, financial support. Argentina sent the biggest South American contingent of athletes to date to the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. President Alvear, himself a keen sportsman, intervened to support the initiative because “sport was an important aspect of western-style modernization.” Alvear’s backing was recognized as crucial to the success of the team, as they won gold in men’s polo, a silver for the Rosario-born post office administrator Luis Brunetto in the men’s triple jump, and two silver and two bronze medals in boxing. Uruguay won the gold medal in soccer. These successes gave South American sports a hitherto unrecognized international presence in Europe.29

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South America’s belated arrival on the international Olympic scene was confirmed in 1928, when Argentina won golds in men’s boxing and swimming, silvers in boxing and soccer, and a bronze in fencing. Uruguay again won the gold in the soccer, and South American dominance was recognized as being overwhelming. South America was now globally pioneering in both organizing and winning international sports tournaments. Rather than a late and sudden adoption of sport, this was the arrival in the global arena of well-established and relatively inclusive sporting cultures.30

European Sporting Tours South American national success in the European Olympics of 1920, 1924, and 1928 can also be explained by the willingness of South American club teams to tour Europe in the same period, reflecting their desire to use sport to present their cities, nations, and identities on the world stage and to learn from the experience. During these years South Americans played far more matches against Europeans in Europe on their tours than they did at home against European visitors. They took charge of representing themselves to the world. The innovators were the Federación Argentina de Polo, which organized tours of the United Kingdom and the United States in 1922. Both were triumphant, promoting and celebrating a hybrid sporting style that was heralded as a model when a gold medal was won at the 1924 Olympics. The polo effect and the wider interest in South American sports shown in Europe at the 1924 Olympics catalyzed a run of club tours that lasted longer and were more international than anything previously attempted by the British clubs, which had tended to visit only Buenos Aires and perhaps one other destination (as noted earlier). As Alabarces has it, “The mirror of international sport had started to work, and everyone wanted to be reflected in it, and to be seen.” In basketball the Hindú Club left Buenos Aires for Europe in 1927, but it was the soccer tours that garnered most media attention. Boca Juniors, Nacional, and Paulistano all set off on ambitious tours, acting as “ambassadors for their respective republics.” According to Campomar, 1925 was “the defining year for South American football, the year in which it would outshine the European game.”31

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Boca Juniors of Buenos Aires played nineteen matches in Spain, Germany, and France in 1925, all of which were reported in great detail both in the local press and back home in the pages of La Nación and Crítica. The journalists who accompanied the team “sought to give their readers an intimate connection to the traveling players by emphasizing the bonds of national identity that joined fans and athletes in a cohesive community.” That same year Nacional of Montevideo in Uruguay played thirty-eight matches in France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and Portugal and were watched by over eight hundred thousand people in total. Club Athletico Paulistano, an elite São Paulo outfit, played in France, Switzerland, and Portugal. The one constant in these three tours was a stop in France. During May and June 1925 a Parisian could have watched six matches featuring South American teams in their city, an opportunity not to be repeated until the 1998 FIFA men’s World Cup.32 The newly formed Colo Colo took their brand of soccer to Europe in 1927, celebrating a mixed-race Chilean national identity under a symbolic brand of indigenous warrior heritage. Theirs was the most global of all these tours, as they played in Ecuador, Cuba, and Mexico before reaching Spain (nineteen matches, including one against a Catalan selection) and Portugal and then playing in Uruguay (three matches, including two against a Uruguayan national selection) and Argentina (one) on the way home. The tour was marked by the tragic death in Valladolid of Colo Colo’s founder and talisman, David Arellano, the day after being injured in a match. His death was reported in terms that framed him as a sporting martyr equal to previous South American sportsmen who had died in Europe, such as the Peruvian aviator Jorge Chávez. Arellano had sacrificed himself for his club, his teammates, and his country. The legends that grew up around these heroic tours to conquer Europe, as in Oswald de Andrade’s 1925 poem “Europe bows before Brazil,” helped to sustain the interwoven growth of soccer and nationalism through the 1930s and beyond.33 The late 1920s also witnessed a group of European sporting tours that surpassed the reach of earlier tours by Exeter, Corinthians and Third Lanark. In 1925 the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, toured “West Africa, South Africa and South America” on his “African tour.” Historians have not dedicated much attention to the tour of this buffoonish English

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aristocrat, but his visit to Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile left a trace in the society pages and helped to solidify an image of certain sports—cricket, hunting, and golf—as the preserve of a high-status, amateur elite. The tour catalyzed the foundation of the Prince of Wales Country Club on the eastern fringes of Santiago de Chile and gave succor to the exclusive country clubs on the urban fringes whose memberships boomed into the 1930s. In 1926 the cricketers of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) toured South America for the first time, expanding significantly on their 1912 visit to Buenos Aires. This trip included the future British prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, who played against the Montevideo Cricket Club. The tour claimed to have covered fifteen thousand miles by sea and three thousand by land, playing in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Valparaíso, and Lima and stopping for excursions in Santos, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. The captain of the team, Plum Warner, reflected that “surely no cricket team ever saw so many cities and men in the course of three months,” with “not a single game played within the British empire—another proof that cricket has set a girdle around the earth, and that it has become the interest not only of the British race, but of half the world.” The team marveled at being thought of as “not only ambassadors of cricket, but of Empire” and raised their MCC flag in every harbor. In Rio we “danced on a glass floor, won money at the Casino, and bathed in a glittering sea.” In Buenos Aires they were “treated like Royalty,” and the presidents of Argentina and Peru, Alvear and Leguía, both watched games. Yet this cricket tour now fell outside the global institutional frameworks (FIFA and the IOC) that linked South American sports to the rest of the world. The sporting empire’s reach was constrained.34 The Spanish team Real Madrid played five matches in Argentina in 1927 before heading to Montevideo, Lima, Cuba, and Mexico. Real Madrid’s was the most truly international tour of South America by a European club to date, but the media coverage it collected for Real was far more significant than the impact on local sportsmen. By now South Americans had their own international sporting tournaments to build on.35 * * * Preexisting sporting connections were transformed by the centennial celebrations of the 1910s and 1920s into international continental cham-

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pionships that were pioneering on the global scale. Attention has understandably focused on the victory of the Uruguayan soccer team at the IOC Olympic Games in 1924 and 1928 their celebrated vuelta olímpica (literally, the Olympic lap, still used in Spanish and Portuguese for “lap of honor”) and the role this played in bringing the first FIFA soccer World Cup to South America. Looking back rather than forward, however, the success of the Uruguayan team at the Olympics can be seen to have stemmed from the continent’s less visible international sporting traditions. The Olympic movement had a checkered history in the first quarter of the 1900s in South America. Clashes over legitimacy and authority resulted in the exclusion of continental events from “official” Olympic history. These local Olympics continued, however, given the long distances and high expenses that separated South American competitors from the international games. For example, national Olympic Games involving decathlon, soccer, and a range of other athletics events were held in Riobamba in Andean Ecuador in 1926. Sporting authorities were asking themselves, why can we not do this at home? Similarly, Colombians did not participate in a single IOC event until 1932, but their absence did not mean Colombians didn’t practice Olympic sports: far from it. The local games held in Bogotá and elsewhere in 1911 developed into bigger national arenas in which the country’s regions could compete against one another. In December 1928 and January 1929, for example, Colombia held its own National Olympic Games. The city of Cali hosted competitions in basketball, tennis, javelin, athletics, and soccer that featured delegations from several regions. Colombia did not formally institute an Olympic Committee until 1936, despite the Olympic-orientated sporting movement of amateurism and competition. The Colombian and Ecuadorian examples show an alternative sporting trajectory from the IOC/FIFA model followed in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Their Olympics were national, not international. Their absence from sports history is the result not of a lack of sporting activity but of “the monopolization of the word Olympics” by the cosmopolitan European internationalists.36 The multidirectional sporting tours of the 1920s have also revealed how clubs, ad hoc selections, and associations competed for representative value in these years. The Marylebone Cricket Club and Real Madrid Football Club

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acted as sporting ambassadors for Britain and Spain, and Paulistano, Nacional, Boca Juniors, and Colo Colo were following a similar model for Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. The tours had economic rationales which inspired future emulation, although other examples show that the national model was not hegemonic. The tour of England and Scotland by a representative South America cricket team in 1932–33 and the European tour of the Pacific Combination of Chileans and Peruvians that visited Spain, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and France in 1933–34 demonstrated that the national selection was still not set as the dominant sporting form. It was the 1930 World Cup that crystallized the representative value of international soccer tournaments. South America’s international tournaments and their consolidated political meanings shaped around celebrations of national independence could now be opened to competitors from elsewhere.37

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12

The 1930 World Cup

a team of uruguayans won the men’s Association Football tournament at the Paris Olympic Games in 1924 and in Amsterdam in 1928. The Uruguayan authorities, emboldened by the successes on the field and rich on the profits of livestock industry exports enabled by nonparticipation in World War I, lobbied FIFA to be chosen to host the first men’s soccer World Cup in 1930. Their campaign succeeded, meaning that the tournament would mark the centenary of the country’s independence from colonial rule. A huge new stadium, the Centenario, was built with state funds. The finished structure was a futuristic concrete monument that would not have looked out of place in Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Berlin of a few years later. What happened on the pitch at the Centenario was very different from the sporting visions of European fascists, however. The Uruguayans used the 1930 men’s soccer World Cup, and their victory over Argentina in the final, to show how at ease they were with their diverse ancestries and independent history, the result of their acknowledgment and celebration of difference among the team. One of their key players was José Leandro Andrade, known as La maravilla negra, the Black Marvel. His triumph was hailed as demonstrating national equality and citizenship in comparison with tired, hierarchical, monarchical, fratricidal Europe. The symbolic realm of international competition in the 1920s offered new states like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the South Americans the possibility of competing on a level playing field. Uruguay’s Olympic

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victories had demonstrated that athletes of all backgrounds could achieve success against the odds. This chapter explains how the 1930 men’s FIFA World Cup played in Uruguay was the culmination of a decade of ever more popular and politicized centennial-themed sporting celebrations across the continent. It uses the biographies of the participants in the tournament as a point of reflection on the themes that have emerged through this book, from the indigenous and colonial sports that sit behind soccer’s popularization in South America, through to the themes of violence, beauty and endurance that were refracted through sports by new technologies and nationalism. These processes all came together so that the first World Cup became “one of the foundational moments of modern global football,” fusing “nationhood, politics and sport under the South American hosts” and participants’ aspirational, universal, and global vision. South American representatives took a leading role in international soccer governance, just as they engaged constructively with the universalist aims of the League of Nations in the same period. In the face of British indifference and ambivalence (the F.A.’s “conservative and insular tendencies,” in Beck’s words) and European distraction after World War I, the Argentinian, Uruguayan, Brazilian, and Chilean delegates lobbied successfully for greater international connections, building on their experience with CONMEBOL. FIFA decided in 1928 to host a global tournament every four years, independent of the Olympic Games. There would be free access for both professionals and amateurs, lancing the tension that had run through soccer’s role in the more strictly amateur Olympic Games. The Uruguayan Enrique Buero joined the FIFA executive committee that year and immediately pitched to host the event. The coincidence with the forthcoming centenary of Uruguayan independence was too good to miss and was a natural successor to (and improvement upon) Argentina’s Copa Centenario de la Revolución de Mayo in 1910 and Brazil’s Latin American Olympiad in 1922 for the neighboring centenaries. The Argentinian delegate Adrián Beccar Varela supported his neighbor’s proposal on exactly these grounds: (a) Uruguay’s Olympic successes in 1924 and 1928; (b) the “enormous development of soccer in South America and Uruguay”; (c) celebration of the centenary of Uruguay’s political independence in 1930; and (d) that “in

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charging Uruguay with the organization; (e) all the South American associations would be honored.” The tournament chimed with an ideology of nation that, according to Stefan Rinke, was being “imagined in new and socially more inclusive ways.” It became the physical manifestation of “football nationalism,” which was also demonstrated by the huge numbers of spectators in the stadia and a wave of soccer-related poetry and art catalyzed by Uruguayan victories and recognition in Europe during the 1920s. In the words of the Uruguayan historian of football Florencia Faccio, the 1930 World Cup was the “icing on the cake” of sporting globalization.1 The Uruguayan organizers committed to paying the travel and accommodation costs of the visiting teams. Even so, the necessary time off work was an obstacle to many amateurs, and in the end the Europeans who traveled were from Romania, France, Yugoslavia, and Belgium. The United States (who included several Scots in their squad) and Mexico were the only others from outside South America. No Africans or Asians were invited. The British associations turned their noses up at what they saw as foreign arrivistes appropriating their sport: “As the game took a grip on the world . . . Britain stayed at home, . . . ignoring this tournament as if it were some slightly comic argument being conducted on the fringes of our sport,” in Tomlinson’s words. The northern South American states did not yet have national associations who could organize representative teams, and the Guayanas remained colonies of Britain, France, and the Netherlands, respectively. Seven South American teams participated: Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Peru, each of whom had previously taken part at least once in the South American Championships during the 1920s.2

Beauty, Violence, and Endurance The World Cup took place in modern, enclosed stadia as thousands of spectators bought their tickets and headed to the stands. Several grounds across Montevideo were used, not just the Centenario (where ten matches were played in thirteen days), and attendances averaged 30,000. A total of half a million spectators passed through the turnstiles during the tournament, at a time when the population of the country was estimated at around two million. The official attendance at the final was 68,346, though

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estimates suggest upward of 90,000 were present. Film footage captured by the eight official camera operators shows excitement and commotion outside, as spectators arrived on foot, bicycle, and motorcars. In Tony Mason’s phrase, “Buenos Aires and Montevideo were ravished by the passion for football” during the tournament. Strict dividing lines between players and fans were enforced. The nation-on-the-terraces was kept at bay from the action-on-the-pitch by large fences and a moat. This was no unlimited sporting carnival of freedom and joy. Photographs reveal barbed wire strung between poles at a lower level to restrain spectators in the cheaper standing sections.3 Sports had long been used to control fears of public violence (as noted above). In the buildup to the tournament there was some anxiety about violence on as well as off the pitch and debate over how respect for the laws of the game would be ensured. Each of the national associations had been using their own translations into Spanish or Portuguese, with no official approved versions. The language of the laws therefore remained English, despite the absence of the British teams and their respective Football Associations. The tournament regulations stated that the rules of the International Board (set up in 1913 and dominated by the British and Irish associations) would be used and that if there was any confusion caused by translation or doubt over their interpretation the English language version would be definitive. The Organizing Committee passed a resolution on Good Play (Buen Juego) before the action commenced: “It was resolved to pass a note to the World Cup referees, so that they are aware that on the field of play, they should ensure the faithful adherence to the rules of the game, in order to avoid any potential dangers to the physical integrity of the players.” After thirty years of working to limit physical violence on their respective pitches at home, the South American organizers made the control of rough play their final word.4 Nevertheless, John Langenus, the Belgian referee for the final, entered the field of play with reassurances about his security ringing in his ears. He carried two balls, one chosen by each team because they would not compromise on which one to use. Outbursts of violence in the streets responded to the heightened nationalism in media reports. While the question of which ball to use had been the issue of contention pre-match, ques-

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tions about civilization and rough play reemerged during it and afterward. Alfredo Rossi, an Argentinian journalist for El Gráfico, noted that the referee “let the Uruguayans go unpunished with violent challenges, while the Argentinians were doing what had previously been agreed, to play fair and not to make violent fouls.” In defeat the Argentinian players and journalists took solace in seeing themselves as more civilized than their violent neighbors.5 Violence continued to be a thorn in the side of sports. Commentators agreed that the referees had generally failed in their attempt to limit rough play and to control uncivilized peoples” propensity to violence. A writer for Los Sports, in Chile, lamented that “the referees have not strictly applied the rules, and they let many fouls go.” Accounts of the outbreaks of street violence around the final “contributed to the British Foreign Office’s somewhat jaundiced view of Latin American football” for many years to come.6 The tournament was designed to be a beautiful affair. The construction of the modernist Centenario stadium in Montevideo by the Comisión Administradora del Field Oficial, another bilingual hybrid acronym, was understood to be a work of art itself. The aesthetics of the stadium, designed by the architect and Peñarol fan Juan Scasso, presented Uruguay to the world as a harmonious, forward-looking nation. The Centenario was “an amazing achievement,” according to Rinke, built of concrete imported from Germany, with stands named the Olímpica, Amsterdam, and Colombes in honor of the Uruguayan team’s victories at European international tournaments. At the opening ceremony the president of the Nacional club cast the tournament in terms of “universal fraternity” in front of a smartly dressed crowd of women, men, and boys drawn from across the city’s ethnic groups. The squads were invited to a public event celebrating “the centenary of the country’s institutional life” held around the statue of the hero of Uruguayan independence, José Artigas, and then paraded carrying massive national flags. These flew from the top of the stadium tower throughout the tournament. The iconic poster and its media branding presented the country as a prosperous, modern nation. The many surviving photographs and films of the tournament show packed crowds, predominantly though not exclusively male, wearing their Sunday-best dark suits, flat caps for the working classes and white panama hats for the upper classes. Women were on the margins

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of this national iconography, as when girls in silk dresses from the Instituto Nacional de Señoritas school presented bouquets of flowers to the team captains before the semifinals. Art and music suffused the championships. The tango performer Carlos Gardel sang for the Argentinian team before the final in their hotel.7 Alongside promotion of beauty and the control of violence, the ideology of endurance was also present at the championships. Military metaphors proliferated. The Uruguayan captain, José Nazassi, was a marble cutter who was nicknamed the Grand Marshall. His team overcame an early deficit to win a 4–2 victory in the final, demonstrating physical strength and force of will—he was held to have turned his individual desire into collective victory like the best citizen-soldier imaginable. The official report of the match stressed how the players had come together “in fraternal unity, joined by their shared goals.” This ideology of sporting endurance was encapsulated during the 1930s as a fighting spirit known as the garra charrúa. Uruguay’s sporting will to survive and win was held to harness the power and resistance of the indigenous Charrúa people.8 The indigenous warriors were present only metaphorically, however. Uruguay’s victory was greeted by an aviator’s flyover, flag waving, and clenched fists. The players left the pitch as they had entered it: under a sabre arch formed by the swords of a military guard. The blueprint for the militarized epic rituals of international men’s soccer of the future was set.9

The Finalists Observers extracted many moral and nationalistic lessons from the tournament. At a banquet for the winners, Uruguay’s president Raúl Jude declared that “every one of us should do in our lives as every one of these brave boys has done in theirs; then we will be able to say without vanity and without bragging that Uruguay is the first nation among all nations on earth.” The presence on the victorious Uruguayan team of the Afro-Uruguayan midfielder José Leandro Andrade reinforced a sense of Uruguayan nationhood as universal, fraternal, and aspiring toward the fulfillment of the dreams of equality believed to have inspired the moment of independence (figure 11).10

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Figure 11. One of the silver medals awarded in the 1930 World Cup final. Reproduced courtesy of Paul Atkinson and The National Football Museum, Manchester.

This foundational dream of Uruguayan unity and national achievement has remained a central motif of FIFA marketing and institutional wishful thinking for nearly a century. Uruguay’s subsequent victory in the 1950 World Cup cemented a vision of fraternal national identity achieved through endurance and collectivity, while other South American states, most notably Brazil and Argentina, remained in jealous hock until their own World Cup victories in 1958 and 1978, respectively. It established the hegemony of River Plate soccer across the continent, many of the finalists enjoying transnational careers. Argentina’s top scorer, Guillermo Stábile, who was already a championship winner with Huracán, signed for Genoa in Italy. His teammates Fernando Paternoster and Carlos Peucelle are counted among the principal promoters of soccer in Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, and Ecuador in the 1940s and 1950s, working as coaches, managers, and administrators. Many of the finalists had already toured Europe, either to the Olympics in Paris and Amsterdam or in the tours of Boca Juniors or Nacional. Héctor Scarone, an Uruguayan who was one of Nacional’s legends, had already played a season for Barcelona in Spain. He later played at Inter Milan and managed Millonarios in Colombia and Real Madrid in Spain in the 1940s and 1950s. Several Argentinian players signed professional contracts in Italy after the competition, and El Gráfico lamented that the event left “a sad and devastating memory in our hearts.”

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The victorious Uruguayans and their Argentinian rivals may have been the World Cup finalists, but inspection of the biographies of the other South American participants reveals more about the tournament’s transnational ties and the class and geographical identities it displayed. As Rinke observed, “The first World Cup remains proof of the high degree of transnational cultural entanglement in this phase of globalization.” But the final was not even the half of it.11

Popular Participants The stories of the less celebrated South American representatives in 1930—those of Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, and Peru, who did not reach the final or become World Champions—illustrate some of the effects of the popularization of sports in 1900s South America.12 The national coaches reflected the transnational, global competitive athletic world of which South America was already an integral part. The Chileans were managed by a Hungarian, György Orth, who had played for Olympic Marseilles in France. The Bolivian coach Ulises Saucedo claimed to have studied in London and was the club manager of The Strongest in La Paz. Saucedo’s experience was so wide that he was called on to referee and run the line in several matches of the 1930 finals. Paraguay were managed by the Argentinian José Durand Laguna, a legend at Argentina’s Huracán who had played for three years with Club Olimpia. The Peruvian Football Federation was in economic crisis in the late 1920s, and the military officer newly appointed as its president contracted a Spanish coach, Francisco ‘Paco’ Bru Sanz, an ex-Barcelona player and Olympic silver medalist from 1920. The Brazilian manager Píndaro de Carvalho Rodrigues had played for the victorious Brazilian team at the 1919 South American championships. The teams selected by these coaches and their directors to act as representatives of the nation took various forms and reflected the different paths toward the institutionalization of sports each country was taking. Peru’s team drew from a range of clubs from the capital city and included Hispanic, Afro, Chinese, and indigenous-descended players. There were eight from working-class Alianza Lima; seven from middle- and upperclass Universitario, including some of the students who were its founder

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members; one each from Lawn Tennis de la Exposición, Sport Progreso, the railway club Sportivo Tarapacá Ferroviario (patriotically named after the region Peru had lost to Chile in the War of the Pacific in the 1880s); and the tobacco factory club Sporting Tabaco. Two players were of Chinese descent: Julio Lores, who had left Club Ciclista Lima in 1928 to play in Mexico for Necaxa, and Jorge Koochoi Sarmiento, the son of a wealthy Chinese Lima baker, who worked as a taxi driver until the 1950s (figure 12). Mario de las Casas was one of the Universitario founders who made it to the World Cup—he was a multisportsman, a founder of the Peruvian basketball federation and an active bullfighter, water polo player, and sports administrator. José María Lavalle, an Afro-Peruvian from Alianza Lima, was celebrated at the finals for metaphorically dancing the marinera, a local dance associated with former slaves, around the Uruguayan defense. Another Afro-Peruvian who played was Alejandro “Manguera” Villanueva, hailed by many as the inventor of the chalaca overhead bicycle kick. Villanueva was a charismatic personality and an alcoholic who died of tuberculosis at the age of thirtyfive. With its bullfighter, migrants, and working-class players, the Peruvian team was deliberately assembled as an inclusive cross section of Lima’s sportsmen with the best chance of achieving victory.13 The Peruvians’ journey to Uruguay was itself an act of endurance. They embarked at the port of Callao, sailing south to Valparaíso in Chile before traveling—with the Chilean team—on the Transandean railway to Buenos Aires, where they arrived after a journey lasting ten days.14 The Chilean squad that traveled to Uruguay with the Peruvians was built around a core of eight Colo Colo players who had toured Europe in 1927. Beyond that it was explicitly claimed to represent the nation, with a series of trial matches leading to a selection of amateur players drawn from the capital city (immigrant club Audax Italiano and Club Deportivo Santiago) and beyond. Players came from Rangers in Rancagua, La Cruz FC and Everton in the central port of Valparaíso, and from Lord Cochrane, Club Deportivo Arturo Fernández Vial, Club Federico Schwager, and Deportivo Naval from the southern ports of Concepción, Talcahuano, and Coronel. There was also a player from Boca Juniors Antofagasta in the north. It was a tremendous effort at the integration of players resident many thousands of kilometers apart.

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Figure 12. The Peruvian footballer Jorge Koochoi Sarmiento pictured on the front cover of Sport Grafico. Lima, 2 May 1931, from the Colección Aldo Panfichi at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú under Creative Commons license. (http://repositorio.pucp.edu.pe/index/ handle/123456789/168211), with many thanks to Professor Panfichi and the PUCP for making these incredible resources freely available.

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The military conflict between Peru and Chile over control of the nitrateproducing Atacama desert, where the fighting had stopped in 1883, had not been formally resolved until 1929. The two countries did not play each other in the World Cup, but there is a revealing subtext: Plácido Galindo, Peru’s captain, was the first player ever sent off in a World Cup final. The referee asked him to leave the field in the second half because of his violent conduct, which had culminated when he intentional kicked a Romanian player. The referee who sent Galindo off the field of play was the Chilean actor, sports administrator, and discus thrower Alberto Warnken Benavente. It is not impossible that Warnken’s decision to send Galindo off (it went discreetly unrecorded in the official tournament record) was shaped by the border disputes, national rivalry, and a racialized sense of Peruvian barbarism and inferiority. Los Sports chided Warnken for not having installed his authority over the Peruvians’ propensity for violent conduct and rough play earlier in the game.15 The Chilean and Peruvian squads were picked as demonstrably national, featuring players from a range of regional, social, and ethnic backgrounds. In contrast, the Brazilian squad was comprised principally of players from Rio de Janeiro, many of whom were from the elite Flamengo and Fluminense clubs. There were fewer Black and Brown players than observers expected. The São Paulo clubs boycotted the tournament, feeling themselves disadvantaged by the Rio selectors, and this “kept some of the country’s best talents off the national team simply because they played in the wrong city.” Brazil’s national team was basically a Rio de Janeiro-combined eleven. The squad featured players from Fluminense, Vasco da Gama, Botafogo, Flamengo, America-RJ, Ypiranga, and São Cristóvão. The captain, Preguinho, was a multisport amateur who was a renowned swimmer, water-polo player, athlete, and a stalwart of Fluminense. He was the son of the famous writer Henrique Maximiano Coelho Neto, an important figure in Brazilian debates about the national value of amateur sports and who in 1908 had published Esphinge (Sphinx), the first Brazilian work of literature to include soccer as a feature. This educated, elite Rio–Brazilian squad projected a much Whiter aspect to the world in 1930 than it had through the 1920s, when, as Jackson suggests, representative teams often served to subvert elitist visions of the nation. It was not exclusively White, however.

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Fausto, known as the Black Wonder, played alongside Preguinho. Like the Peruvian Villanueva, Fausto was a gifted player who would die of tuberculosis in his midthirties. Through the 1930s Black players were increasingly selected to represent the nation, and Gilberto Freyre and others henceforth used the representative value of the national soccer team to debate the value of African heritage to the Brazilian nation. Eventually Freyre would propose celebrating a hybrid Afro-Indo-Anglo identity of Brazilian soccer style—the beautiful game—that could act as a model of Brazilian racial democracy. This was a long way from the predominantly White players the country took to Uruguay in 1930.16 Just sending a representative Bolivian team to the World Cup was a major achievement for their national sporting authorities. The contrast between the directors and the players could not have been starker, however. Several of the players had physical features associated with the indigenous people of Andean Bolivia, whereas photographs of the Bolivian delegates show White officials, one of whom is apparently accompanied by his wife, who wears a glamorous fur coat. Observers took the opportunity to compare national and ethnic impressions. Having an average height of 1.68m, the Bolivians had the shortest squad in the tournament. Even the tallest, Diógenes Lara, was only 1.74m, in comparison to the Brazilian star Fausto, who was 1.86m. The Bolivian team came primarily from the cities of Oruro and La Paz and demonstrated a strengthening club scene. There were five players from Oruro Royal and four from Club Bolívar, which had recently been founded in La Paz to mark the centenary of Bolivian independence from colonial rule. All the players were amateurs and relatively inexperienced—the main teams, Club Bolívar and The Strongest, had existed for only a couple of years.17 In contrast the Paraguayans had a well-established soccer scene by 1930, their squad featuring several footballers who had played together in the South American championships. Most were from Asunción. There were five players each from the capital’s Olimpia and Libertad teams. Sportivo Luqueño and Nacional supplied three each, there were two from Cerro Porteño and the local version of River Plate, and one each from Presidente Hayes (named after the US president) and Guaraní. Many of the players already had transnational careers, and many went on to play in Argentina,

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including Delfín Benítez Cáceres, who went to Boca Juniors and later managed in Venezuela and Colombia, where he spent eight years in the Caribbean port of Barranquilla. The possibility of war between Paraguay and Bolivia over the disputed Chaco region hovered over both squads’ preparations. When a devastating war did break out in 1932, one of the Paraguayan players, Romildo Jorge Etcheverry, fought as an aviator. Another, Aurelio Ramón González Benítez, turned down the possibility of playing professionally in Argentina in order to serve his country in the armed forces.18 The South American footballers participating in the first FIFA World Cup finals in 1930 came from outstandingly diverse backgrounds, the result of the popularization of sports in the first decades of the century. There were workers and bosses, rich and poor, coming from capitals and provinces. Given the indigenous-, Afro-, Chinese- and European-descended players, it is no wonder the sporting and political authorities sought to exploit the competition to showcase their national cultures and identities. The Uruguayan victory over their regional neighbors and the world was a headline story that has passed into history. The lesser-known stories of thousands of kilometers of travel and of the struggles over selection and representation demonstrate how significant sport had become both for individuals and nations.

Toward a New Sporting World of Technology and Nationalism South America’s representative men’s soccer boom of the late-1920s was amplified by rapid technological innovations in communication and media. In 1928 the Amsterdam correspondent of the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa spent ten thousand francs sending hundreds of fifteen-word telegrams to keep his compatriots up to date on Argentina’s first match at the Olympics. La Nación boasted that one of their telegrams took just fifty-two seconds to reach home. In 1929 Paraguayan fans in Asunción bought tickets to the Teatro Nacional, where they listened to the supposedly live commentary of their match against the Olympic champions: it was being read from behind a curtain by an improvising journalist who had a team of runners delivering him telegrams sent from the stadium in Buenos Aires. For the World Cup final Argentinian fans back in Buenos Aires crowded into

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the public square outside the newspaper offices to hear the coverage read out from the balcony. These technological innovations reached out from preexisting spaces of entertainment and communication—the theater and the balcony—to bring citizens closer together in their shared engagement with the success and failures of representative national teams. Again, we see the links between technological innovations and the development of nationalism: from Anderson’s insistence on print-capitalism in the 1800s to the beginnings of live radio sports coverage in the 1930s. Readers and listeners felt that the experience brought them together across national boundaries. The day after the final, El Liberal newspaper in Asunción reflected that “Paraguayan sport is on its feet alongside its South American brothers, overwhelmed by the most frank joy and happiness in these solemn times.”19 The 1930 World Cup is the culmination of the intertwined histories of technologies, identities, politics, and sports traced in this book. The concrete curves of the modernist Centenario stadium embraced the mass spectacle, and telegrams and radio waves sent commentary to supporters around the continent. National anthems and flags framed the sporting contest, and women’s role was to applaud from the sidelines. Teams represented their nation-states. Black men represented Peru, Uruguay, and Brazil. Andean indigenous heritage was observed on the bodies of the Bolivian and Peruvian players. Chilean players were deliberately recruited from all corners of the national territory, while institutional conflict largely limited the Brazilian selectors to footballers from Rio de Janeiro. The games were as much about who was playing and how they were performing as they were about who was winning. The international World Cup supported by FIFA was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to sports in South America in 1930. The Uruguayan success communicated to the outside world what everyone there knew already: sports history mattered.20

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EPILOGUE: WORLD CHAMPIONS, LOCAL HISTORIES

south american soccer became a global reference after Uruguay’s two Olympic victories, the late 1920s tours of Europe by club teams, and the 1930 men’s World Cup. The establishment of soccer leagues in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil that were professional by definition in the 1930s generated the revenues that confirmed soccer’s popularity and symbolic value. Within the continent, Argentinian and Uruguayan methods became models elsewhere. Many of the finalists moved on, and several represented Italy in the 1934 World Cup. Luis Monti lost in the final for Argentina in 1930 and won it for Italy four years later. South American soccer became a sun that cast the continent’s other prior sporting histories into the shade. I have shown above how the South American “soccer culture” that became the envy and fantasy of much of the rest of the world in the twentieth century sprang out of societies that were already playing and watching games in public well before the British pioneers arrived to tell everyone about the sports they had invented. Here, I expand on the relevance these histories have elsewhere, and I summarize what insights sports can provide for histories of South American societies. At its most simple level this book calls out to historians of global sports that South American sports existed. With the exception of the celebrated soccer World Cup winners, often the achievements of South American sportsmen and sportswomen have been erased from the history books, and these pages give evidence that the continent occupied a full and often

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pioneering place in the global transformation of sports and leisure at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The first person to cycle over a mountain pass of more than 3000m anywhere in the world was a Chilean man, Alberto Justiniano Olid. The first person to swim across an open-water river crossing of more than 30km was an Argentinian woman, Lilian Harrison. I also refute the continuing sway of British sporting diffusion as an interpretation of the globalization of sports. Pioneers like Charles Miller, Alexander Watson Hutton, and Isaac Newell did play important roles in establishing leagues and clubs in Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere. But here, however, they are contextualized within the massive currents of migration of the period: Miller was born in Brazil, as was his Rio counterpart Oscar Cox, and all of the British surnames peppering Argentina’s first national football teams were those of Argentina-born children of migrants. The parents of many other early sporting stars, like Lilian Harrison, Jorge Newbery, and Juan Manuel Fangio, were born elsewhere. Newly-arrived migrants from Britain played and organized alongside Germans like Hans Nobiling in São Paulo, the Swiss who founded Independiente de Medellín, and the immigrants from France and Italy who promoted bicycle races. I hope this book shows that any global history of sports that doesn’t engage seriously with South American histories is incomplete; and also that Anglo-centric histories will be informed and improved upon by more careful engagement with the longer, broader histories of the racialized global circuits that informed the expansion of sports. To see Miller and the rest as British pioneers is to hone in on the least interesting part of their stories. Their sporting activities were remaking what it meant to be Argentinian, Brazilian, and Uruguayan, and the identities of the players who walked off the field were transformed by their actions on it. The role of sports in transforming migrant communities is perhaps the most visible difference of the sports histories traced here in comparison with those of Europe and North America. South America pioneered international sporting competition along a different trajectory from Coubertin’s Olympic Games and Great Britain’s home internationals. South American jockeys, cyclists, and boxers all regularly traveled across international borders to compete in the early 1900s, to the extent that one can suggest that South American sports were by nature transnational. The first South Amer-

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ican soccer and athletics international tournaments in the 1910s took place while athletes elsewhere were dying in trenches or recovering from the devastation of war. It should be no surprise, therefore, that in the 1920s South American athletes took so many of the spoils of Olympic competitions on the occasions when they were finally able to compete on a level playing field. Put simply, some South American states were taking sports as seriously as anyone, if not more so, in the 1910s and 1920s. The consequence of this development was that sports played a central role in opening spaces for national citizenship for Black, mestizo, and indigenous people in South America. South American states were very much in advance of Great Britain, for example, in the area of sporting representation, in contrast to the even more resilient elitism and social exclusion of British sports well into the second half of the twentieth century. The celebrated examples of José Leandro Andrade and his “sensational athletic energy” in Uruguay and Carlos Alberto at Rio de Janeiro’s Fluminense are but the most exceptional examples of Black players occupying public space and starting to shape the terms of public debates about citizenship.1 Across the continent— to varying degrees, of course—sports fields were platforms that enhanced the visibility of groups from outside the traditional social elites. This triggered the many examples of racism and marginalization these athletes had to overcome, most obviously in the biased selection for national teams and traditions of racist abuse on the parts of sports fans like the macacos scandal in Buenos Aires in 1920. It is no exaggeration, however, to suggest that the achievements of these athletes and the status they gained provided a boost towards more inclusive and more populist politics (not always the same thing). States and municipalities were encouraged to invest in sporting infrastructure and compulsory physical education in schools, strengthening the competitive bodies of their citizens and by extension, their nations. Sportswomen were an active part of all of this, though hostility to their participation grew through the 1920s, and restrictions were increasingly placed on what and how they could play. After 1930 sportswomen were channeled toward tennis and golf, shaped by the ideologies of beauty and gender that saw the exertions of some sports as inappropriate or unhealthy. Their origins left a mark in the nature of club ownership in South America. Sports clubs were often multisports rather than specific to individual

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disciplines, and ownership was only rarely left to a particular business or factory owner. The centrality of community ties and identity formation was so widely recognized that participation in the ownership and administration of the club was generally regarded as a given. Sports clubs became central pieces of the urban fabric with clearly politicized understandings of their social role away from the field, in a way that was different from emerging models in Britain, North America, and Europe. Grounds and tracks were laid out at the heart of rapid expansion of towns and cities in this period, confirming Bale’s hypothesis that “sports landscapes do matter” both in terms of the collective identities they generate and the economic and political uses to which they can be put.2 The final area of useful comparison with elsewhere concerns payment for sports. We have seen how the commercial aspects of South American sports in the twentieth century show strong continuities with the nineteenth century, especially the gambling on horses, bulls and cockfights that jumps off the pages of contemporary newspapers. South American racetracks, soccer stadia, and velodromes of the 1900s became the new foci of a thriving if often invisible gambling industry. The uneven consumption of sporting goods across the continent was determined by geography and by the extent of integration into globalizing networks of industrialized production. Many of the profits of the belle époque commercial booms created by the export of meat, coffee, nitrates, and other products in the 1920s were gambled on sports, as Mariátegui’s horse racing journalism shows so clearly. (The local and national variations of gambling cultures deserve a study of their own.) The path of professional sports was unique in South America compared to North America and Europe. The amateur ideology and its ethos of fair play did reach the continent with the British pioneers, but competitive sports already had their own meanings, which were barely dented. Richard Holt’s adage that “moral arguments were a means of class exclusivity” holds firm in South America, and they acquired racialized meanings too. Professional football may seem to have arrived relatively late in South America, compared to Britain and France, for example, but the issues of who could be paid to play depended on the willingness of local spectators to pay for tickets within the context of preexisting entertainment and sporting cul-

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tures. Sports spectators became voracious consumers of the identities created and represented on the field. The Brazilian phrase para inglês ver, literally, to do something so that the Englishman could see it, captured a broader social disjuncture between formal rules and actual behavior that went beyond the British origins of some of the sports being played. The use of rules to control and limit onfield violence was often at issue. There were many tensions and conflicts around the implementation of sporting rules in international competitions between Britain and South America. They reached their pinnacle in highprofile cases such as the 1966 men’s soccer World Cup quarterfinal and the sending off of Antonio Rattin and the England manager’s angry jibe that South Americans were animals. The divergent understandings of the rules of sports and the amateur codes that accompanied them had their roots in the early twentieth-century local and national adoptions and in the different translations that circulated in each town, city, and region. Local histories always matter.3 Over the course of the half century covered in this book, sports expanded into many public and social spaces. When the folklorist Daniel Aeta Astorga published a sporting dictionary in Chile in 1930, his definition of sport confirmed the broad, diverse understanding of what it included: “The idea of happiness, distraction, diversion, physical exercise of practical utility, entertainment, play, occupation, pastime, pleasure, recreation, practical work, etc., and today applied not only to these activities but also to the struggle for life.”4 South American sports administrators of the early 1900s insisted on a universal language of respect between opponents, one that fitted with their visions of human progress, development, liberalism, and republicanism within a global context. This explains the agency that South Americans took up within the international soccer federation, FIFA, instead of developing or protecting their own footballing codes, as happened in the United States, Australia, or Ireland. In many ways this book is a meditation on the relationship of sports to Britain’s informal empire in South America, a question which was peripheral to the conference and book I organized on the subject a decade ago. This book does not use the concept of informal empire much, because it does not seem to explain what happened. As we have seen, sports already

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existed in South America before the arrival of the British. What happened was the transformation of existing practices and the development of new meanings shaped by ideologies of civilization rather than the adoption or emulation of anything British. The significance of British origins to Argentinian sports was central to Eduardo Archetti’s influential formulation of criollization in the 1920s and beyond. When we contextualize the role of British pioneers elsewhere, however, we see that this model does not hold up to being rolled out across the continent. When the origins of sports were transnational and entangled with migrant networks and local societies, the desire to locate foreign pioneers became a political quest to find something to rebel against. Buenos Aires was in many ways unique with its considerable English-speaking British community, which had attempted to replicate its cricket and clubs. Elsewhere, sporting cultures were hybrid from the start, with indigenous and Afro- sports like tejo and capoeira and colonial sports of bulls and cocks providing reference points and competition for state recognition and spectators. The popularization of sports, especially of soccer, in terms of both participation and spectatorship in the 1910s and 1920s remade the political uses to which they could be put. As Hendrik Kraay showed, “The empire and the republic needed a povo to symbolically legitimize the messages of their civic rituals, but they could not accept a povo whose members celebrated the nation on their own.” States increasingly looked to control the sporting practices of the masses, Uruguay being a pioneer in the 1910s and 1920s. After 1930 populist sports programs were famously developed by presidents Vargas in Brazil and Perón in Argentina as they sought to maximize and exploit the loyalties, meanings, and values that citizens had come to attach to the places where sports were played and the ways in which competitions were staged.5 It is fitting to end with some words on the possibilities for decolonizing sports history in South America that this research has identified. Sports were always political, hence the debates around bulls, gambling, and representation in soccer, the attempts to control violence on and off the field, and the promotion of racialized ideologies of beauty, endurance, and citizenship. The marginalization of women within sporting cultures, reflected

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until recently in the peripheral place occupied by women in the historiography, responded to political imperatives of nation- and state-building that elevated the strong, dexterous, flag-waving teammate male as the model citizen. The decolonization of sports history will involve more, therefore, than reducing the British pioneers to a less prestigious place in the story and bringing the sports of indigenous peoples back into the picture. The increasing digitization of newspapers and pamphlets is expanding the range of material to be consulted, which will create a further imbalance of the available sources toward those produced in the big cities with newspapers financed by advertising. Rare sources will continue to be found in forgotten archives or the collections of clubs and institutions that have hitherto kept them under lock and key. If we want to understand the histories of sports in South America and elsewhere we will need to work to open archives and make them accessible to researchers of all disciplines rather than preserve them solely for the aggrandizement of individual heroes, clubs, or nations. The generosity of spirit that has benefited me so much in writing this, my contribution to the decolonization of sports history in South America, becomes ever more necessary with the passing of time.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Langenus, Fluitend door de wereldl; Van Loock, Terug naar Montevideo. E549.1 “Match ball from the 1930 World Cup final, formerly belonging to Juan Peregin Anselmo,” from The Neville Evans collection (Not on Display), and E857.90 from the Priory Collection “One of two footballs used in 1930 World Cup final between Uruguay and Argentina in Montevideo. This ball was supplied by the hosts and used in the second half as Uruguay came from behind to win by four goals to two at the Estadio Centenario,” National Football Museum, Manchester. This interpretation has been questioned in Paul Brown, “Hell for Leather,” When Saturday Comes, June 2018. 2. Hopcraft, The Football Man, 178; Villoro, God Is Round, 246; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 158. All translations from Spanish and Portuguese are my own unless otherwise stated. I capitalize the racialized identities Black, Brown, and White in line with current practice. 3. There are great introductions in Alabarces, Historia; Miller and Crolley, eds., Football; Melo, “History of Sport in Brazil and in South America,” 399–404; and Melo, “Amador,” 19–44. 4. Brown, “Association Football.” Nadel provides a great revisionist account in Fútbol!, 42–68. Galeano, El fútbol, 31–34; Mason, Passion of the People; Taylor, The Beautiful Game; Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round; Bellos, Futebol; Wilson, Angels. 5. Mascarenhas, Entradas, especially 60–62; Mills and Miller, Britain and US Hegemony; Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America.” 6. There is a review of this scholarship in Brown, Elsey, Wood, “Football History.” 7. Bethell, “Brazil and ‘Latin America.’ ” 8. Sarmiento to H. E. Oxenford, 12 October 1875, Buenos Aires, cited in Raffo, El origen, 187.

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9. Guttman, Sports. On play, see Huizinga, Homo Ludens, and Schiller, Letters. 10. On sporting subcultures, see Donnelly, “Toward a definition,” 269–74. 11. Elias and Dunning, The Quest; Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics; Wood, Football, 6. On liberals and development in this period, see Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 1:22, 57–58, 69–70. 12. Elias and Dunning, The Quest, 151. 13. Dietschy, “Making Football Global?”; Taylor, “The Global Ring?” and the more Anglo-centric Bass, “State of the Field”; Kitching, “The Origins of Football.” 14. Quiroga, “Juan Polti, half-back,” discussed in Wood, Football, 16–19. Elsey, “Breaking,” 131–45. 15. I draw on Osterhammel The Transformation of the World for its insights into changes in time and space during this period, though it does not mention sport at all.

Chapter 1. Sports from the Margins 1. Campbell et al., eds., Empty Spaces. Guttman, Games, 44, 144, 179: the chapter titled “Traditional Sports” does not feature any examples from South America. Podalsky, “Introduction,” in Shenin, ed., Sports Culture, 2. The Oxford Handbook of Sports History does not mention South America in its medieval or premodern chapters. 2. Miller, Republics of Knowledge; Coletta, Decadent Modernity. 3. Elias and Dunning, The Quest, 160–67; MacKenzie, Nature; Thomsell, Hunting Africa; Hamilton, Reminiscences. 4. Bonelli, Travels, 1:90, 151, 2:114; Dixie, Across Patagonia, 212; Hudson, The Purple Land, 52–53. 5. South American Handbook, 435. 6. El Dia, 8 November 1913, Quito; Bonelli, Travels, 2:246; Dixie, Across Patagonia, 7, 146, 160, 161, 181. Thanks to David Wood for the reminder about ostriches. 7. For hunting tourism examples, see Hills and Dunbar, The Golden River, 20–21, 34–35, 40, 68, 79–80, 140; Fleming, Brazilian Adventure; South American Handbook, 440–42. Hills, My Sporting Life, contains a short chapter titled “Coursing in Uruguay.” 8. Elias and Dunning, The Quest, 156. 9. Ryan Larson, “Constructing,” 62. 10. Plath, Juegos; Ortiz, “Estudio”; Rodriguez, “El juego de Tejo,” 169–98; Baudin, Daily Life, 213–14; Tufino, El juego de pelota, 4; also Liga de Pelotaris. 11. Baudin, Daily Life, 109–13. On numerical data recorded in quipus, see Hyland, “How Khipus Indicated.” 12. Latcham, “La organización social,” 224, 293, 453–54. 13. Crow, “Negotiating Inclusion.” Crow’s innovative work on the networks formed by Manquilef and others can be explored at http://interculturalconversations .com/. Manquilef, “La jimnasia nacional,” Comentarios, 43, 73–74, 88, 151. The biographical information on Manquilef comes from the preface by the anthro-

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pologist Rodolfo Lenz. On trümen, see Brown, “Translating.” A footnote to the Spanish original explains that some of the rules were reproduced from an actual message sent by the leader of Pelal community to his counterpart in Tricauco, both in Huilio, Temuco. 14. Gaffney, Temples, 56–58. 15. Ortiz, “Estudio”; Estatutos de la Liga de pelotaris; on bola queimada, Franco de Lima Santos, Jogos tradicionais, 78–84; Juegos Autóctonos y deportes del Ecuador, 12–15; Tufiño, El juego de la pelota, 6; Collins, Sport and Capitalist Society. 16. Baquerizo Maldonado and Carrera Drouet, Historia del movimiento olímpico, 12; Campomar, Golazo, 19–20, Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round, 9–13; Franco de Lima Santos, Jogos tradicionais, 69–83; Conway, Bolivian Mountains, 273. 17. Bonelli, Travels, 1:231–35; Ker Porter, Diario, 10 February 1839, Caracas; El Telegrafo, Quito, 1 March 1897; Chasteen, “The pre-history of samba”; Kraay, “The Barbarous Game”; Chazkel, “Beyond Law.” 18. Assunção, Capoeira: 83–95; Reid-Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 73–74, 168–69; Kraay, Days, 21, 326–29; Wesolowski, “From ‘moral disease,’ ” 161. 19. Ker Porter, Diario, 29 December 1836, Caracas, 782; for Brazil, see Barman, Citizen Emperor, 136; Brown, “Soldier Heroes.” Casal, Gran Guía, 59. Kennedy, Sporting Sketches. 20. Slatta, “The Demise of the Gaucho.” 21. Darwin, cited in South American Handbook (1924), 439; also Larson, “Constructing,” 70–73. Cunninghame Graham, “Charlie the Guacho” (1936), “Gualaguaychú” (1906), in Walker, ed., The South American Sketches, 142–52, 177. 22. “The Races,” Chilian Times, Valparaíso, 22 October 1882. By 1886 this race meeting was being reported on as far away as Bogotá, as in El Telegrama, Bogotá, 6 November 1886. 23. Brownell, “Bodies before Boas,” 48–49. 24. Parezo, “A ‘Special’ Olympics,” 90–99. 25. Ibid., 110. 26. Bale, “From the,” 324. 27. Guarani FC, “Fundação”; Club Guaraní, “Historia”; Volpe, “Remaking the Brazilian Myth”; on Sport Club Inca, Alvarez, “La difusión,” 130. 28. Hora, Historia, 131, 147; Mascarenhas, Entradas, 234.

Chapter 2. Colonial Sports 1. Tschudi, cited in Pacheco, “Las peleas de gallo.” In his seminal “Deep play” Geertz argued that these moments revealed intimate and profound aspects of society. 2. Elias and Dunning, The Quest, 131. 3. Muñoz Cabrejo, Diversiones públicas, 152–54; Fuentes, Guía histórico-descriptiva, cited in Pacheco, “Las peleas de gallos en Lima.” 4. Geertz, “Deep play,” 60; Myers, Life and Nature, 19, 102, 112; Davis, “Cockfight nationalism”; La Revista, 14 June 1890, La Paz.

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5. For rats, see El Comercio, 5 August 1909, Quito. For cats, see EGDP, 26 July 1900. For a sensational and Anglocentric view on feudal sports with animals, which includes some excellent evidence from newspaper archives of the 1800s, including bearbaiting, see Brooke-Hitching, Fox-tossing. 6. “Nueva apertura,” El Telegrafo, Quito, 1 October 1901; El cojo ilustrado, Caracas, 1 October 1892; Gabriel García Márquez described the central place of cockfighting in early twentieth-century rural Colombian life in his El coronel no tiene quien le escriba. 7. García Múñoz, Estampa, 73–80. 8. La Ilustracion Sud-Americana, Montevideo, 5 August 1894; Geertz, “Deep play,” 62. 9. Myers, Life and Nature, 231; El Tiempo, Quito, 2 June 1900; El Dia, Guayaquil, 9 September 1913; Escovar et al., Atlas histórico; Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest, 3. 10. South American Handbook, 437–38. 11. Córdoba, Tinta Perdida, 5; García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, 43. 12. Shubert, Death and Money; El Telegrafo, Guayaquil, 9 December 1897; Guttman, Games, 162–65. 13. Walker, Smouldering Ashes, 168–70; El cojo ilustrado, 1 June 1892, 1 February 1894; Cunninghame Graham, “Los niños toreros” (1936), in Walker, ed., The South American Sketches, 267–72. 14. Guttman, Games, 163–65; Walker, Smouldering Ashes, 170; Muñoz, Diversiones, 151. 15. Melo, Rio Esportivo, 30–31; “Anuncio de corrida noctura,” 6 August 1879, in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 33; Correio Paulistano, São Paulo, 28 June 1864, 24 August 1865, 20 September 1865, 17 October 1868. 16. The secular, liberal government of José Batlle y Ordoñez prohibited bullfighting in Uruguay in 1912. On the prohibition in Argentina, personal communication from Klaus Gallo, 8 July 2019. 17. El Dia, Guayaquil, 4 September 1913; El Tiempo, Quito, 7 June 1899, 19 May 1900.

Chapter 3. The Pioneering British 1. Bolsmann and Porter, English Gentlemen. 2. Brown, “Informal Empire in Latin America,” 1–16. 3. Frydenberg, Historia social, 32. El Dia, Montevideo, 1893, reported by Alabarces, Historia, 63. Muñoz, Diversiones, 211, also Serrano, “Santiago Wanderers,” 292– 93; Dubois, The Language, 5, 30–31; Melo, “Apresentação,” 32; for “sportswoman” and her sense of honor in gambling, see Mariátegui, “El match,” in Mariátegui Chiappe, 2200; Gaffney, Temples, 56. 4. For more on sporting translations, see Brown, “Translating.” Nimbles appear in Mesa, La epopeya, 20–21. 5. Isaac Newell was baptized in North Aylesford, Strood, on 15 May 1853. His parents were Joseph Savage Newell and Mary Ann Goodger. They appear to have sepa-

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6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

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rated soon after, and both remarried. Isaac does not appear in the UK census for 1861, though he is reputed to have arrived in Buenos Aires in 1869. Molina Achondo, ed., Valparaíso Sporting Club, 88–90; also Fray Gerundio, Quito, 12 July 1912. For an extensive discussion of cricket in South America, see Abraham and Coyne, Evita, and for Brazil, Brown and Melo, “Cricket in the Country of Football”; Beckles, The Development. On cricket in 1806, see Evita, 226–27. Chilian Times, 7 January 1882, 15 April 1882, 22 April 1882, 8 December 1881, 11 May 1889. Harris, cited in Guttman, Games, 35; Abraham and Coyne, Evita, 1. The authors report (271) the existence of an 1881 translation into Spanish in Buenos Aires, La Tranca: Juego Atlético, but I have not been able to access it. “Cricketers on the Georgetown Parade Ground,” photograph dated c.1866, BL 10470.i.3(6); Warner, Long Innings, 14; James, Beyond. Szymanski and Zimbalist, National Pastime. Early Venezuelan baseball still awaits its historian—all existing studies start with professionalization and the 1940s. There are some notes in Leonte Landino, “Origenes.” For Colombia, see the meticulous research of Porto Cabrales, Memoria histórica. Dubois, The Language, 3–11. The Rules of Association Football. I was able to track down the UK Census records thanks to the work of Victor Raffo in the Argentinian sources, particularly the newspapers, as summarized in El origen, which I cross-referenced with British censuses and marriage and birth records. Raffo records Barlow Smith as Thomas rather than Theodore, but the Census states that it was the latter. Heald is the best known because his papers and personal diary survive in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. He appears in the 1861 UK Census living at 12 Bailey Street, Manchester, age fifteen, an “apprentice to printer.” “The Standard,” 23 June 1867, reproduced in Raffo, El origen, 65–66. On the guest houses, see Heald, “Diary,” and Boyle, ed., A South American Adventure. Ramsbotham is probably the John Ramsbottom who married Ann Stell in Stand on 20 July 1859. Thomas Hogg was baptized in Skelton on 6 April 1843. Barge was baptized in Manchester on 15 December 1844. Uniquely among these footballers he appears on both the 1861 and 1871 Censuses, age sixteen in Salford in 1861 with no occupation, living with his “Merchant, Cotton, Print” father and mother and a cook, waitress, and a housemaid. In 1871 he was back in the house, which still had three servants, at age twenty-six, and Barge still had no occupation. He does not appear again, suggesting he returned to Buenos Aires. On the Smiths, see Cowen, The Story. No occupation has been identified for the other two players, E. S. Smith and R. Ramsey. On 7 August 1874 Boshetti was in London getting proof of his birth and age in order to enter the British Civil Service. He married in Islington in 1876. Heald, “Diary,” 20 June 1867; Alcock, Football Annual, in Library Box 15, FAAWS; Weekly Standard, 13 May 1874, cited by Raffo, El origen. 151.

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19. Most of these stories are discussed in Alabarces, Historia, 49–56, 75–82. In addition, see Bestard, Paraguay, 17–18. The Venezuela story has persisted for decades, but the historian Eliécier Perez now believes it is an unreliable invention: see his “Se desvanece el mito de 1876.” The original version was El Correo del Yuruari, 16 July 1876, Segovia Sanchez, Historia del deporte, 39, and Lopez Velez, Detrás, 17. I have cross-referenced the names of the people who organized the first matches, cited here, with the online registers of Eton College and Harrow School for 1871–99 and found no matches. 20. Dos Santos Neto, Visao do jogo, 13–26. The author draws on the school’s archive, including unpublished accounts by the teachers themselves; see also Mascarenhas, Entradas, 54, and Kittleson, The Country, 19. 21. Collins, How Football Began, 48; Brown, “Watson Hutton, Alexander,” ODNB. For more on the school, see BAEHS, “Historia.” (2017) and on the first league, Gorgazzi, “The Argentine Association Football League 1893.” 22. Elias and Dunning, The Quest, 151–56; Goellner et al., “Strong mothers make strong children.” 23. On the Brown family in Buenos Aires, see Puyol, Qué jugadora. 24. Biographical information on Poole is from the census and his obituary, also passenger lists on “Highland Pride,” departing 27 February 1913; “Herschel,” departing 2 February 1925; and “Linnell,” departing 2 September 1929; “Professor W. L. Poole,” The Times, London, 6 November 1931. Poole’s birthdate is given as 7 November 1866. He enrolled at Cambridge University in 1883, according to Cambridge University Alumni, 1261–1900 [database online]; Alabarces, Historia, 60. 25. Elsey, Citizens & Sportsmen, 33–37; Alvarez, “La difusión,” 4–10. Alejandro Garland went on to be an influential author on geopolitics, for example, his South American Conflicts. Baquerizo Maldonado and Carrera Drouet, Historia, 21; Leal, El fútbol, 15. Also involved was Ernesto Stagg, an import–exporter, and grandson of Admiral Leonardo Stagg, a naval hero of Ecuadorian independence. I would like to link him to Amos Alonzo Stagg, a pioneer of Muscular Christianity and American football in the United States who, according to Collins, “embodied the tight interplay of the Christian ideal and sport,” Sport and Capitalist Society, 35. I have as yet been unable to do so. On the hybrid code played in Ecuador, see Brown, “Translating.” 26. “El Ejido, escenario insólito,” El Nacional, Quito, 5 February 2000; Baquerizo Maldonado, and Carrera Drouet, Historia del movimiento olímpico, 22. The best works on the early years of football in Colombia are Ruiz Patiño, La política del sport, and López Vélez, Detrás del balón. There is a good overview in Quitián, “Del invento inglés,” 295–308. On Lemly, see Brown, “The civilising process and Colombian sport.” 27. Arias-Escobar, “Bogotá, 1892”; Esquivel Triana, “Influencia liberal”; Ruiz Patiño, La política, 33–38; Lemly, Ejercicios gimnásticos. See the photographs of Gumersindo Cuéllar, available at http://babel.brepcultural.org/cdm/search/collection/ p17054coll19.

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28. Biographical detail on Miller is from Hamilton, An Entirely Different Game, and Mills, Charles William Miller. He appears in the UK 1891 Census as a boarder at Bannister Court school. He frequently appears on passenger lists leaving the UK in the 1920s. SPAC’s archive remains at the club and contains a wealth of sources attesting to early sporting activities. 29. Mazzoni, A historia; Bocketti, The Invention, 1–7. 30. Gambeta, Os primeiros pasos, 12, and 36–44 for Nobiling’s memoir. In the 1881 Census Thomas was living at Burtons Land, Mearns, Busby, Renfrewshire with his father, Thomas, Dye House Worker, and his mother, Mary Ann, both born in Ireland. The three children John, Ellen, and Thomas (the youngest, at eighteen) were all listed as Printfield Workers. In the 1891 UK Census Thomas and Eliza were living at Burnside Terrace, Mearns, Busby, Renfrewshire. Thomas was age twenty-seven (born 1864), occupation Calico Printed Dyer, and Eliza was age nineteen (born 1872), no occupation given. She traveled to Rio from Liverpool on the Liguria on 16 August 1894. On Bangu, Melo, Rio Esportivo, 182. Rodrigues Ferreira Antunes, “The early days,” 17–29; Collins, How Football Began, 164. 31. Luzuriaga, Memoria del Albion, cited by Alabarces, Historia, 62–63, 67; also the ongoing doctoral research of Martin da Cruz; Frydenberg, Historia, 87. 32. Keys, Globalizing Sport, made important steps in complicating the history of these transfers but did not include South America. Mason’s chapter “English Lessons,” in Passion of the People, 15–26, set out the paradigm for this interpretation, followed in Mangan, “The Early Evolution,” 12. 33. Daily Mail, London, 30 April 1929. Bolsmann and Porter, English Gentlemen, does a great revisionist job. 34. The Standard, 11 June 1910, Buenos Aires; Sabanes, “Lions: Los viajes”; Barnade and Raffo, Buenos Aires Cricket y Rugby Club; Collins, The Oval World. 35. Bolsmann, “White Football”; Bolsmann and Porter, English Gentlemen, 115–35, 121 citing O Paiz, 25 August 1913. 36. Mangan, “The early evolution,” 13; Brown, “Association Football”; Frydenberg, Historia social; Alabarces, Historia, 50–55; Soares, “História e a invencção.” 37. Federico More, Cascabel, Lima, 18 May 1935, cited in Drinot, The Allure, 168; Guedes, “On criollos.” 38. Very little is known about Trudgen or whom he swam with. These lines rely on Terret, “Professional swimming.” Taylor, “The Global Spread of Football,” 183; also Mangan, “The Early Evolution”; Clevenger, “Sport history.” 39. Muñoz, Diversiones, 116–20. The influence of García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, is synthesized in Giulianotti, Sport; see also Sibaja and Parrish, “Pibes, Cracks and Caudillos.”

Chapter 4. Education 1. Mangan, “The early evolution,” 29; Silveira, “Educating,” 33–34. 2. Sábato, The Many and the Few. 3. G. Bastidas et al., “Educación física”; Segovia, Historias.

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4. 5. 6. 7.

Murillo, De la educación física, 14; Mockus, Educación Física; Góis Jr., “Gymnastics.” For Bolivia, see Callejas, “Breve historia.” Nunn, Yesterday’s Soldiers. Scharagrodsky, “El padre de la educación física”; Scharagrodsky and Varea, “Tracking”; Elsey and Nadel, Futboleras, 22–23. 8. Torres, “The Early History,” 60–63; Iño Daza, “La reforma educativa”; Aldas Arcos and Gutierrez Cayo, “La Cultura Física”; Morales Loachamin, “Desde la educación física”; Matsuo, “Sport Policy”; “Aficionado,” “Pioneros del fútbol en Quito,” Estadio Ecuatoriano, 82, January 1967; El Comercio, Quito, 1 January 1906, 4 March 1906. 9. Levoratti, “El “deporte” “; Matsuo, “Sport Policy,” 15–16, 28. 10. Wellenius, Gimnasia; Wellenius, Apuntes. 11. Hentschke, “Argentina’s Escuela Normal de Paraná.” Photographs of early gymnastics, swimming, and lifesaving in Uruguay are at ISEF, “Historia.” Herold Jr. and Melo, “Escoutismo y deporte.” 12. Southern Cross, 11 February 1898. 13. Andrade, “Educación pública,” 16 June 1899, El Tiempo, Guayaquil. 14. Ibid. On degeneration, see Coletta, Decadent Modernity. 15. Holt, Sport and the British, 92–93. Tom Brown’s Schooldays was translated into Spanish in Madrid in 1923 by José Ortega y Gasset, so it seems that its influence was primarily through the English original. It would be useful to find out whether it was serialized in South American newspapers after first publication in 1857. On the different codes, Collins, How Football Began, 82–86. On Welfare, see Hamilton, An Entirely Different Game, 79–95, drawing on the Fluminense archive. 16. Taylor, The Association Game, 201–2; Muñoz, Diversiones, 228; CYC, 2 September 1899; Heald, “Diary,” 9 July 1867; Bocketti, The Invention, 69–74; Benedetti, “Puntero izquierdo”; F.A. Council Minutes, 4 December 1911, in Minute Book 1911–12, FAAWS, Minute Box 2; Southern Cross, 4 February 1899; Elsey, Citizens, 63–64; Alabarces, Historia, 107; Frydenberg, Historia, 108. 17. Deustua, Stein, and Stokes, “De la invención.” 18. For example, Estatutos del Morning Star; Gaffney, Temples; Matsuo, “Sport Policy,” 21–22. 19. Elsey, “Global Latin America,” 132–33; El Sport, Lima, 1899, cited in El Comercio, Lima, 10 June 1899. 20. CEDHIP oral history, cited in Drinot, The Allure, 73. On the political significance of public ownership of institutions (though not sports clubs), see Miller, Republics of the Future. 21. Porto Cabrales, Memoria histórica, 31, drawing on El Porvenir, 49–62. 22. Bestard, Paraguay, 17–18, citing La Tribuna, Asunción, 7 July 1900.

Chapter 5. Clubs 1. Kraay, Days, 241–42; Reglamento del Club Americano; Sobral, Dos años entre los hielos, 223.

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2. Sábato, The Many and the Few; “Espíritu de Asociación,” El Comercio, Quito, 16 March 1906; Horowitz, “Football Clubs”; Frydenberg et al., “Sports Clubs.” 3. Nadel, Fútbol!, 121–22; Muñoz, Diversiones, 140, 230; Brown and Lanci, “Football”; El Ecuador: Guía Comercial, 700–710. 4. La ilustración sudamericana, 20 November 1894, Montevideo; The Express: The River Plate Daily Mail, 27 March 1888, Montevideo; Melo, Cidade Sportiva, 14–15, 50–51, 73, 113, 142, 146; Historia del movimiento, 13; Kittleson, The Country, 20; Rolla, “Ser británico,” 70, 87–103. Carta de Paita, EDGP, 23 April 1900. A photograph from 1911 of the Comisión Directiva of the Club Mbigua appears in Album Gráfico, 328. The club lost its archive in a fire in 1921. 5. Heald, “Diary,” 12 May 1866; 13 April 1867; Alvarez, “La difusión,” 2, 5, 15. 6. Modiano, Historia, 69, 79, 93–94; Elsey, Citizens & Sportsmen, 40–41; Melo, Rio Esportivo, 58; El Mercurio de Valparaíso, 6 June 1898; EGDP, 19 March 1900, 30  June 1900; El Dia, Quito, 17 September 1913; Chilian Times, 18 May 1889; El Espectador, 23 September 1911; Heald, “Diary,” 15 August 1867; El Mercurio, Santiago, 17 October 1905. 7. On Peñarol and Stephenson’s “Rocket,” see The Guru of Guru-Guay, “Peñarol: “New Manchester” of Uruguay.” On railways and soccer in Bolivia, see Mesa, La epopeya, 19. 8. Torres, “The Early History,” 65. 9. Elsey, Citizens; Rein, Fútbol, 51–61; Pierini and Beecher, Los británicos; Estatutos y Reglamentos del Sport Club Concepción; Estatutos del Morning Star Sporting Club; Estatutos del SPORT CLUB “28 de setiembre.” 10. Frydenberg, Historia social, 81; Correio Paulistano, 1–8 June 1914, discussed in Brown and Lanci, “Football”; for Miller deliberately not scoring from a penalty awarded to him against the UK Corinthians in his last match, see Hamilton, An Entirely, 76. 11. Goldblatt, The Ball, 130. 12. Frydenberg, Historia, 47; Elsey, Citizens, 30–31. 13. Mason, Passion, 56, drawing on Iwanczuk, Historia, 243; Album Gráfico, 328; La Argentina, 11 May 1914, cited in Frydenberg, Historia, 113; Sport i Actualidades, Santiago, 4 August 1912, cited in Modiano, Historia, 99. 14. La ilustración sud-americana, Montevideo, 5 October 1894; Muñoz, Diversiones; Melo, Cidade Sportiva, 107–48. 15. Abraham and Coyne, Evita, 243–44, 269; Melo, Rio Esportivo, 98, 166; Brown and Lanci, “Football.” 16. Modiano, Historia, 107, citing Album de los Clubes Sociales de Chile. In the absence of any South American golf history scholarship the evidence comes from the websites of the legacy institutions. Leguia’s first wife, Julia Swayne, was the daughter of the Fife-born sugar merchant Henry Swayne Wallace, born in Dysart. He had first traveled to Peru in 1824 and was a stalwart of the horse racing scene, like Leguía, when in Lima. Muñoz, Diversiones, 129, and Anon., “A Scotsman in Peru.” 17. Quitián, “Del invento inglés,” 300; Wood, Football, 49–53.

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18. “Club Life,” Venezuela (Detroit Publishing, 1900–6) http://www.loc.gov/pictures/ collection/det/item/2016798998/; “As nossas praias,” in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 105; Vamplew, “Sharing Space.” The Gávea Golf Club, built in the outlying São Conrado district of Rio de Janeiro in 1926, is perhaps the paradigmatic example. Melo, Rio Esportivo, 158–59, followed by the Itanhangá Golf Club in 1933, where President Getúlio Vargas played. Magellan Times, 21 October 1915, 8 September 1917: founding members included Bermudez, Campos, MacDonald, Mathisen, Tweedie, and Urrutia and two women, Mrs J. McLean and Miss McGregor. 19. On William McMinn, see Passenger Lists for “Crijnssen,” Dover to La Guaira, 29 May 1926, occupation “golf professional,” home address in Ayr, Scotland, also Behrens Dalla Costa, cited in Revista Fairway, https://www.caracascountryclub .org/; on Mungo Park Jr. in Argentina, see the San Andres Golf Club website http://www.sagc.org.ar/mobile/esp/historia.html. 20. Photograph of caddies at San Antonio de Padua, Argentina, 1931, https://eap.bl .uk/archive-file/EAP375–1-1–224. 21. On Crocker winning the Argentine Women’s Championship, see SAGC, BL, EAP638/1/1/126, 2, 146, 160. 22. El Espectador, Bogotá, 3 December 1910. 23. Ossandón Guzmán, Diario de un tenista, 176; Cavalla, Historia del tenis en Chile; Club Inglés Viña del Mar Lawn Tennis Club. 24. Goldblatt, The Ball, 135; Annuario commercial do Estado de S. Paulo, 503–11.

Chapter 6. The Sports Business 1. This chapter casts an envious eye back to Vamplew, Pay Up, for the breadth and depth of the sources available for the economic history of sports in the UK. South American sports before 1930 still await their own economic history drawing on fragmentary and dispersed local and club archives. 2. El Tiempo: Diario Radical, Quito, 2–6 June 1900. On the transnational circus performer and military officer Suresh Biswas’s journey from Bengal to Brazil, see Holt, Sport, 217–18. 3. Sorzano, “Circus,” 139–46; El Mercurio de Valparaíso, 11 November 1886; Carelli Lynch, and Bordón, Luna Park. Research into the Nelson circus family and company provides no detail on the South American tours (Anon., “The Nelson Family”). A press report of the acrobat Reynita Nelson y Valenzuela suggests that at least one local woman had married into the family business. El Dia, Guayaquil, 11 June 1900; El Telegrafo, Guayaquil, 28 July 1897, 4 September 1897. 4. EGDP, 26 July 1900. 5. Descalzi, “La Vida Social,” 36–52; Cunninghame Graham, “Feast Day in Santa Maria Mayor,” in Walker, ed., The South American Sketches, 219–21; Clark, “Gambling.” Lopez Rey, “Gambling,” is dated but has a good overview of legislation on lotteries at the continental scale. Vamplew, Pay Up, 69. 6. Clark, “Gambling,” 4. 7. El Telegrama, Bogotá, 15 October 1886, 11 November 1886; Hering Torres, 1892.

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8. Chazkel, “Beyond Law”; Clark, “Gambling,” 101–6, 106. 9. Hora, Historia, 39–40; Collins, Sport and Capitalist Society. 10. Hora, Historia, 281; Melo, Cidade Sportiva, 31–36, 59–66, 83–92; Santander, Santander en Europa, vol. 1, 19 June 1830, 173, and vol. 2, 9 June 1831, 114; Huggins, Horse-Racing; Brown, Adventuring, 100, 173–74. 11. Hora, Historia, 45–52; also Murray, “Horses and Horse-Racing,” 59–66; Melo, Cidade Sportiva, 91, 116. 12. Molina Achondo, ed., Valparaíso Sporting Club, 12–14; Anon., “Hipódromos de Colombia”; Anon., “Historia,” Hípica Global; and Devoto Passano, Breve historia. 13. Hippodromo “Quito,” 70–85; Club Hípico de Santiago, Reglamento de carreras. El Comercio, Lima, 5 June 1902, reported that “thanks to the speed of the cable, in Lima we received the news even before many towns in England.” On the changes wrought by the telegraph system, see Caimari, “News.” 14. “Hipodromo Nueva Temporada,” El Tiempo, 4 July 1899, Quito; El Telegrafo, Guayaquil, 24 October 1901; Jackson, El stud book de Chile; Hora, Historia, 76, 155; Ley Stepans, The Hour of Eugenics; Butler, “The British Role.” 15. Gaffney, Temples, 13–16. 16. Schetino, Pedalando, 122–24, citing the Jornal do Brazil, 8 December 1892. See also the Revista Illustrada, Rio de Janeiro, 1 December 1892. For the roller skater, see “Cartaz do Bellodromo Nacional,” 1892, National Library of France, reproduced in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 20, 109. 17. Gambeta, “A bola rolou,” 38–126; Fernandes da Silva et al., “História do ciclismo,” 41; EGDP, 25 Jun. 1900, 8 July 1900; La Nación, Guayaquil, 7 July 1900. 18. Gambeta, “O bola,” 70–75; Anon., “Escarabajos de dos ruedas”; Reglamento para las carreras de caballos, cited by Salazar Rodriguez, “De encajes,” 98. A photo of the Valparaíso velodrome from 1922 was in Zig-Zag, reproduced at http://www .memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-127835.html. 19. Gaffney, Temples, 182–83. 20. Ibid., 52; Goldblatt, The Ball, 270. 21. Hora, Historia, 9, 24. 22. Melo, Rio Esportivo, 188; Mariátegui Chiappe, ed., Mariátegui Total, vol 2. Muñoz, Diversiones, 150–51. El Turf, 27 July 1916, cited in Muñoz, Diversiones, 233; Miller, Reinventing Modernity, 143–86. 23. “Foot-Ball—Argentinos versus Brazileiros,” Revista Fon-Fon, 1908, in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 117; on the Copa Lipton, see Nadel, Fútbol!, 29. 24. The Standard, 22 June 1902, Buenos Aires, reproduced by Pablo Kervasen in “Argentina y Uruguay”; also Da Silva Moraes, “En tempos de crise,” 59, drawing in O Imparcial for 1923. 25. O Sport, Rio de Janeiro, 1895, cited by Melo “Apresentação,” 35, also 39; Melo, Cidade Sportiva, 119–22. 26. Mariátegui, “El jockey Frank,” in Mariátegui Total, vol. 2, 2200. Eduardo Galeano wrote about the Uruguayan footballer Obdulio Varela in a similar way seventy years later, in his classic El fútbol a sol y sombra, 100. Hora, Historia, 179.

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27. Nadel, Fútbol!, 145–66. 28. Ferreira Antunes, “The Early Days of Football”; da Silva Moraes, “Em tempos de crise,” 64. 29. Drummond, “O `dissídio,” 74–79. 30. Carbonell Debali, ed., Album; Modiano, Historia, 101–4; Frydenberg, Historia; Alabarces, Historia, 63–65; Mills, Charles William Miller; Bolsmann and Porter, English Gentlemen, 81, 135. 31. Quitián, “Del invento inglés,” 306–7; Iwanczuk, Historia; Morais Pinheiro, “Notas,” 163–66. 32. Brown and Lanci, “Amarodes”; Mills, Charles William Miller, 278–79; Modiano, Historia, 101–4; Muñoz, Diversiones, 230; Kittleson, The Country, 26; Alabarces, Historia, 169–83. 33. See the editorial “El Juego” in El Comercio, Quito, 2 June 1906. 34. El Gráfico, 1 July 1911, Bogotá; Chilian Times, 7 January 1882; Heald, “Diary,” 8 September 1866. Heald umpired the match, after which “we had leapfrog and running.” Correio Paulistano, 27 May 1875. 35. Modiano, Historia, 39–44; and for Peru, Muñoz, Diversiones, 237. On the comparison with league formation in Europe and North America, see Cain and Haddock, “Similar Economic Histories.” 36. Brown and Lanci, “Football.” 37. Muñoz, Diversiones, 229–35. 38. Peres et al., “Olympic,” 1386; Nadel, Fútbol!, 119–21; Lever, Soccer Madness. 39. Da Silva Moraes, “En tempos de crise,” 58. 40. Advertisement in Antarctica Illustrada, São Paulo, 5, 23 April 1904. For Quaker Oats and aspirins in 1920s Colombia, see the reproductions in Ruiz Patiño, La política, 143–47. 41. Bocketti, The Beautiful Game, 69; also Ruiz Patiño, La política, 110–12. 42. Foxley, speech in 1909 on the tenth anniversary of the club in Gatica Labra, Historia; de Souza Gomes and Morais Pinheiro, eds., Olhares; Unión Ciclista de Santiago, Estatutos y reglamentos.

Chapter 7. Beauty 1. Archetti, Masculinities; Richey, “Playing,” 24. 2. Gumbrecht, On Athletic Beauty; Wood, “The Beautiful Game?,” 567–70; Williams, A Beautiful Game; Anderson, “Sporting Women,” 703. 3. Gumbrecht, On Athletic Beauty, 208; Wood, Football, 19–21; Wood, “The Beautiful Game?,” 569. 4. Wood, Football, 60–61, 195–96. For examples, see A Cigarra, 26, 14 September 1915, São Paulo; A Notícia, 25 August 1910, Rio, cited in Bocketti, The Invention, 164, 166; “Um grupo de senhoras na festa sportiva” at the Clube Esportivo da Equitação, 1913, in Revista Careta, Melo, Rio Esportivo, 75; Tricolor, 4, February 1928, in Acervo Flu-Memória, cited in Bocketti, The Invention, 21–25, 177. 5. Bocketti, The Invention, 38–42, 50–51; Rojas Flores, Boy Scouts de Chile; El Dia, 12 September 1913, Quito.

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6. 7. 8. 9.

El Comercio, Lima, 16 December 1899; Martínez, “Que nuestros indios,” 372. Guttman, Sport, 152–54; Martínez, “Que nuestros indios.” Kopelovich, “Juegos olímpicos”; Stanfield, Of Beasts and Beauty; Ochoa, Queen. Abraham and Coyne, Evita, 257; Archetti, “El deporte,” 3; Mason, Passion of the People?, 103–6. The quote on Farfán is from Ángel Salas, cited by Meza, “Aquellos magníficos hombres,” 3. Bestard, Paraguay, 28. Gutmann, Changing Men. 10. A Canogem, 1 July 1903, Rio, cited in Melo, Cidade Sportiva, 78, and Kittleson, The Country, 20. 11. Bocketti, The Invention, 35–36; Guedes, “On criollos”; Maranhão, “Apollonians,” 519; Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, 135–70; Coletta, Decadent Modernity, 30–56. 12. Wilson, Love Game; Ecuador Tennis Club, Estatutos. Elsey and Nadel, Futboleras, 25. 13. Guía Comercial Ecuador, 1223; Goellner, “Body.” 14. Ossandon, Diario, 22, 173–79, 194. 15. Ultimas reglas del juego de Lawn Tennis; “Concurso de Sport,” Andes Tennis Club, El Comercio, 28 July 1909, Quito. 16. Revista As, Seminario Deportivo, July 1935, available at http://www.chileparaninos .gob.cl/639/w3-article-320958.html; Modiano, Historia, 76–77. 17. Bermúdez, “Popular Culture,” 180. 18. Patria, 18 September 1907, Guayaquil; El Comercio, Lima, 16. Dec 1899. Wood and Johnson, eds, Sporting Bodies. 19. Elsey and Nadel, Futboleras, 66, 17–20; Goellner, “Mulheres e futebol”; Bocketti, The Invention, 168–69; Nadel, Fútbol!, 215–17; on Lavalle, see El Heraldo, “Hinchas expresan.” 20. The Standard, 8 January 1898; Revista Careta, in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 71; Llewellyn Smith, 1896; Matthews, America’s First Olympics; Torres, “Spreading the Olympic Idea”; Goldblatt, The Games; Coubertin, “Les femmes aux Jeux Olimpique,” 1912, reproduced in IOC, Pierre de Coubertin, 713. 21. Abraham and Coyne, Evita, 234; Elsey and Nadel, Futboleras, 27–41, and their citation of “Los deportes femeninos en Valparaíso,” Los Sports, 8 July 1927. On the amateur Vasco da Gama women’s football teams in the 1920s, see Bocketti, The Invention, 167; Bestard, Paraguay, 41, citing El Nacional, 21 July 1911 and El Diario, 21 July 1911. On hockey, Eric Weil, “Una trilogía para la historia, I”; CYC, 9  December 1899, 30 December 1899, 15 January 1900; El Comercio (Lima), 7 June 1897; Salazar Rodriguez, “De encajes, sedas y moños,” 78, citing Revista Ilustrada, Bogotá, 4 August 1898; Wood, “Representing Peru,” 419; Gambeta, “O bola,” 64; Lopez de D”Amico et al., Women and Sport, 3–52. 22. Bocketti, The Invention, 24–28. See the excellent image of a male football spectator from the program of sports events at Fluminense, 21 July 1916, held in the Acervo Flu-Memória, reproduced in Bocketti, The Invention, 28. 23. El Dia, Quito, 20 September 1913, 23 October 1913. 24. Editor’s Table, The Standard, 3, 11 February and 5 March 1898. Also El Gráfico, Bogotá, 1 April 1911.

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25. El Conejo. Valparaíso 1913, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. I am grateful to Ana María Ledezma Salse for sharing these sources. Her analysis of El Conejo is in “Pornografía.” 26. Elsey and Nadel, Futboleras, 11–12. 27. Drinot, Prostitution. In Empire and Sexuality, 72–73, Hyam draws a link between empire, masculinity, sports, and sex for the British case that merits further investigation elsewhere. 28. Stewart, “Golf,” in Greville, ed., The Gentlewoman’s, 91; Zorilla, Veraneo, 82– 83. Photographs of women golfers in late-1920s Argentina are at SAGC BL, EAP638/1/1/126. For golf in São Paulo, see Mills, Charles William Miller.

Chapter 8. Endurance 1. Alabarces, Crónicas. 2. CYC, 11 November 1899; EGDP, 20 July 1900; The Standard, 9 March 1898, 11 November 1899; “Excursión pedestre por Sud-America,” El Telegrafo, Quito, 15 November 1912. 3. “Jardim Zoologico de Vila Isabel, em 1914,” Revista Careta, in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 56; Modiano, Historia, 117. 4. Los Sports, 23 March 1923, Santiago; Modiano, Historia, 126–31; Vinker, Jesse Owens, 25–37; Torres, “A Golden.” 5. “De Buenos Aires a Valparaíso en bicicleta,” El Mercurio de Valparaíso, 19 February 1898. 6. Material on Petit-Breton comes from his own account, published in “Sur route et sur piste,” La Vie au Grand Air, 9 January 1909 and 16 January 1909, collected in Comment je cours. 7. A Cigarra, 25 May 1914; CYC, 2 September 1899. 8. Muñoz, “The New Order,” 158, citing El Comercio, Lima, 20 May 1897; see also Góis Jr. et al., “The Rise of Modern Sport”; Mangan, “The Early Evolution”; El Ciclista, 17 June 1899; El Mercurio, 17 October 1905, Santiago, cited by Modiano, Historia, 93; The Standard, 8 February and 13 February 1898. 9. The Standard, 17 February 1898; Aureliano, “Un poco de historia”; CYC, 19 November 1898; El Mercurio de Valparaíso, 19 January and 27 January 1898; Rendell, Kings of the Mountains, 8; Muñoz, Diversiones, 224. A photograph of Victor Scarraffia and Vincente Gregori of 1936 by Harris & Ewing is held at http://www.loc .gov/pictures/resource/hec.33721/. 10. These were not always identified with Swimming in their title, as in the Club Náutico in Buenos Aires or the Sport Club Concepción in Chile, founded in 1904 with the declared objective of “encouraging young people to practice all physical sports, especially swimming.” Sport Club Concepción, Estatutos y Reglamentos; New York Times, 13 August 1923; also The South American Handbook (1924), 434. 11. El Gráfico, Buenos Aires, 22 December 1923; McCallum, in “Una historia,” draws heavily on an interview with Harrison’s sister, the long jumper Patty Harrison. See also El Gráfico, 1940, reproduced at https://www.elgrafico.com.ar/articulo/

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

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1088/32132/1923-la-piba-que-derroto-al-rio-de-la-plata. Anderson, “Sporting Women,” 700–720; Ruiz Moreno de Bunge, Silvina, “Tigre y las verdes islas,” 176. I am grateful to David Couzins at St. Christopher’s School Old Scholars Club for the information shared about Harrison’s schooling. On the “Ascending Club” at the Colegio Rafael Borja in Cuenca, Ecuador, in the 1870s, see Luna Yepes, Cinco Siglos de Historia, 154; Logan, Aconcagua, 17–36. The image of Whymper on Antisana is from a contemporary postcard held in the BAEP in Quito. Whymper’s biographer was scathing about his Ecuadorian hosts and is unhelpful. Smythe, Edward Whymper. The original El Comercio report of the Cotopaxi ascent is 27 January 1880. Whymper, Travels. Rachowiecki, “Mountaineering,” 150–52, has no citation. For Martínez’s ascent of Chimborazo described in three full columns per day, see El Comercio, 24 May—1 June 1906. Abraham and Coyne, Evita, 178–81; Whymper, Travels, 37, 78, 93, 160. Whymper’s papers, including many unpublished notes on his travels in Ecuador, are held at the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/ data/gb15-edwardwhymper/edwardwhymper/papers. Dixie, Across, 15; Heald, “Diary,” 1 April 1866. Conway, Bolivian Mountains, 110, 117, 127, 156, and Conway, Aconcagua. Conway’s letters and diaries are held in eighteen boxes at Cambridge University: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/ gb12-ms.add.7676. Peck, The Search for the Apex of America, 7. Conway, Aconcagua, 43.

Chapter 9. Controlled Violence 1. Elias and Dunning, The Quest, 167, 173; Burstyn, The Rites, 4; Callois, Les jeux; Bowman, Soldiers at Play. 2. Archetti, “The spectacle,” 117, El potrero; Alabarces, Cuestión de pelotas and Fútbol y patria. 3. Bolsmann and Porter, English Gentlemen, 121–22, citing Jornal, 3 September 1910. 4. Nunn, Yesterday’s Soldiers. 5. Lemly, Ejercicios gimnásticos; El Cojo Ilustrado, 1 February 1892; El Espectador, 26 November 1910. The “social glue” quote is from Putnam, “The Panama Cannonball’s,” 419. 6. Serrano et al., Historia de la Educación, 436–42; The Standard, 8 February 1898; Círculo Militar; Bocketti, The Invention, 32–33; Mascarehnas, Entradas, 60–68; Laffaye, Polo, especially 9–27 for the origins. 7. Llewellyn Smith, 1896, 6; PRISMA, 16 August 1905; Wood, “La modernidad en juego,” 463–65, particularly El Perú Ilustrado, 1 September 1888; Drinot, The Allure, 72–73; “Tiro Nacional,” Careta, 1917, in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 180–81. 8. El Comercio, 3 August 1909, Quito, for the shooting and the centenary of independence; Archetti, “El deporte,” 2; “Educación Física,” El Comercio, 25 July 1909, Quito.

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9. Guedes, “On criollos,” 153. On national style, see Wilson, Angels, 45–54, and da Cruz, PhD thesis under development. 10. Leite Lopes, “Class, Ethnicity.” 11. Amaro and Helal, “Football.” 12. Kittleson, The Country of Football, 24; Archetti, “The spectacle,” 118; Elsey, Citizens & Sportsmen, 22–27; Alabarces, Historia, 190. 13. Leite Lopes, “Successes,” 65; Wood, “From Right-Wing to Midfield”; Richey, “The Macaquitos Affair,” 174–81; Archetti, “Estilo.” 14. Putnam, “The Panama Cannonball’s”; Taylor, “The global ring?,” 231; Allen, The History of Boxing in Mexico; LaFevor, Prizefighting and Civilizing. 15. “Anuncio,” 1878, in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 37, featuring roller-skating, Roman wrestling, and boxing challenge matches sponsored by Harry Clark; Diario de Quito, 27 March 1895, Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, Quito; The Southern Cross, 13 January 1898; EGDP, 3 March 26, March 17 May, and 27 July 1900. 16. Ruiz Patiño, La política del sport, 91–106; Shenin, “Boxing.” 17. Archetti, “El deporte”; Knijnik, “Com as mãos nuas.” 18. Archetti, “El deporte,” 24; “Supresión del boxeo,” El Cojo Ilustrado, 1896; Runstedtler, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner; Shenin, “Boxing,” 140–41. 19. Putnam, “The Panama Cannonball’s” 403–8; Taylor, “The global ring?,” 74–75, 252–53. See the memories of Alberto Mongiargini in a 1934 interview, published in El Gráfico, Buenos Aires, 28 November 2018. Gravestone in the Chararita British cementery in Buenos Aires, visited in December 2018. For fragmentary data on Gould, see http://boxrec.com/en/boxer/151262. 20. Putnam, “The Panama Cannonball’s,” 404; Taylor, “The global ring?,” 253. 21. Archetti, “El deporte,” 23–24. The fight can be viewed at https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=9NN0vGHnCLo courtesy of ESPN Classic. Information on boxer nationality and fights on www.boxrec.com. 22. Archetti, “El deporte,” 25–26; also Walter Heald “putting on the gloves . . . and succeeded in not being touched,” “Diary,” 15 August 1867; Modiano, Historia, 59–60. Budinich translated the Queensbury Rules into Spanish and published them in La Unión newspaper, according to Fluxá, “La increíble historia.” 23. Gomez, “Chilenos campeones.” 24. Modiano, Historia, 90, 124; A. P. Herbert, “Foul Is Fair,” Punch, 9 July 1930. 25. Shenin, “Boxing,” 140–43.

Chapter 10. Technology 1. CYC, 21 March 1914; Larra, Jorge Newbery. 2. News of Chávez’s success in crossing the Alps was reported by El Comercio the same day as his breaking of altitude records in Blackpool, England, the previous week. Hence the apparently absurd front-page headline the day of his crossing and crash, “Chávez en Blackpool.” El Comercio, 24 September 1910, Lima. Also Flight, London, 6, 13, and 20 August 1910; Le Journal, 24 September 1910, Paris; Corriera della sera, 24 September 1910, Milan.

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3. Hiatt, The Rarified Air, places Chávez within his historical context of the Peruvian aviation boom and its place in society. El Gráfico, 24 June 1924, Bogotá. On modernities, see Miller, Reinventing Modernity; de la Roche, “Historia, modernidades”; Merchant and Bollington, eds., The Limits of the Human. 4. El Gráfico, 25 February 1911, 22 July 1911, Bogotá; Mariátegui, “Looping the loop,” in El Tiempo, 20 November 1916, Lima, 2757. 5. El Comercio, 13 January 1909, Quito; El Horizonte, seminario Manabita, 12 June 1889, Portoviejo; El Telegrafo, Quito, 11 June 1897; La Ilustración Ecuatoriana, 20 February 1909. 6. See Echegaray, “La bicicleta,” in La ilustración sud-americana, 5 March 1895, Buenos Aires. 7. Elena, “Point of Departure.” 8. The League of American Wheelmen, and Good Roads Bulletin, 3 July 1896, Boston; National Sporting Club, Revista Programa, 31 May 1925, Santiago. Information drawn from the institutions” websites and Archetti, “El deporte,” 15–18. On the Touring Club of Peru, see Rice, Making Machu Picchu. 9. El Comercio, 20 April 1906, Quito; Archetti, “El deporte,” 16; Gambeta, “O bola,” 298–303; Wolfe, Autos and Progress; Melo, “Before Fittipaldi”; Santa Fe, 31 May 1917, Santa Fe. 10. Melo, Rio Esportivo, 150–53; Archetti, “El deporte,” 19–21, citing the Sunday Times and Stirling Moss, among others. 11. Abraham and Coyne, Evita, 260; Mills, Charles William Miller, 278. I am grateful to Alan Shave for the data about Stanton. 12. Wolfe, Autos and Progress; Aracena quoted in Revista Los Sports, Santiago, 21 March 1924; Santa Fe, 2 August 1924; The Affiliated South American Banks Magazine, April 1926, BL YA1991.b.7173, and Marcilhacy, “La Santa Maria del aire.” On Ramón Franco Bahamonde (1896–1938), see Romero-Salvadó, Historical Dictionary, 134. On raids linking the nation into a series of “interrelated regions,” see Campbell, “Four fishermen.” Pabón Cuevas, La ciencia y arte de volar; Anon., “95 aniversario”; Mesa et al., Historia de Bolivia; Del Priore and Melo, História do esporte no Brasil, 250. 13. For an extensive discussion, see Brown, “Cycling in South America,” and Melo and Schetino, “A bicicleta.” In 1889 Doña Isabel’s three children were photographed on bicycles outside their palace in Petrópolis. See Barman, Princess Isabel, for photos. CYC, 11 November 1899. 14. EGDP 16 April 1900; El Telégrafo, Quito, 6 November 1897; El Comercio, Lima, 7 June 1897. See also Fortuny, “La locomoción en el siglo XX” (1900), the frontispiece to Coletta, Decadent Modernity. Gomez, “La bicicleta,” El Ciclista, 17 June 1899. 15. Kittleson, The Country, 54, 158. Muñoz discusses the 1923 Al aire libre in this sense, in Diversiones, 212. 16. Andermann, The Optic of the State, does not discuss sport. Its insights regarding technology, sport, and spectatorship have been developed by Tucker, “Spectacles of Inclusion.”

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17. Estatutos y Reglamentos de la Sociedad Filarmonica y Foot-Ball Club; Los Sports, Santiago, 30 January 1925, in Modiano, Historia, n. 275, 180–81. 18. 40,200m, not 42,000m. Modiano, Historia, 115–17. 19. The film can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO05tjyk2N8. Gambeta, “O bola rolou,” 73. A Bicycleta, São Paulo, 1896. Some images are reproduced in Nascimiento, “A bicicleta,” including an advertisement for “Velodromo Paulista” from 1898. 20. El Gráfico front covers are accessible at www.elgrafico.com.ar. 21. The best examples of the role of communication in shaping football cultures come from the later period, for example, Eduardo Galeano in 1950 in El fútbol, 100, Pelé, The Autobiography, 46–49, and Soriano, “El penal más largo del mundo,” in Fútbol, 41–50. See also Potter, Wireless Internationalism. 22. Brown, From Frontiers, 81–82. 23. Borges and Bioy Casares, Esse est percipi; Villena, “Fútbol, mass media.” 24. Karush, Culture of Class, 61–62; Rein, Fútbol, 53; López and López, “Primeros apuntes,” 30–36; “Plano de referencia,” in the appendix to 1930: El Primer Mundial.

Chapter 11. International 1. For example, Keys, Globalizing Sport, 40–63. 2. Sotomayor and Torres, eds., Olimpismo. 3. Llewelyn Smith, 1896, 3–6; Peres, “Olympic,” 1384; Archetti, “El deporte,” 5, 16, 19; “Ciclistas do Velo Esportivo Helênico,” Beira-Mar, 19 December 1931, Rio, in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 136; Miller and Laird, Antiquities. 4. Elsey and Nadel, Futboleras, 10; “Anuncio das corridas no Clube Athletico Fluminense,” 1887, Revista Semana, in Melo, Rio Esportivo, 60; El Telegrafo, Guayaquil, 7 November 1912. For further photographs of women athletes in Buenos Aires, see The Affiliated South American Banks Magazine 7:26 (April 1926), 71. 5. El Gráfico, Bogotá, 12 August 1911. For similar events, see Correio Paulistano, 23 June 1891; Magellan Times, 21 January 1915, Punta Arenas. 6. Medak-Saltzman, “Transnational Indigenous Exchange.” Houghton, “Latin America,” 26–27. Women’s Olympic Games were held independently in Monte Carlo and London in the 1920s. 7. Eakin, Brazil, 163; Alabarces, Historia, 193. 8. Sotomayor, “The Nationalist Movement,” 77. “Football at 110 degrees—In the Shade!” (1922), British Pathé film archive http://www.britishpathe.com/video/ football-at-110-degrees. Titles read: “St Paulo, Brazil. Football At 110 [degrees] In The Shade! then our Cruiser Squadron Team were only just beaten by Brazilian International Team.” “MS panning on Brazilian football team; then on British. Football match in progress. Pan on spectators; a mixed & multiracial group of British & Brazilians. MS a few people in the crowd; some sailors are teasing a black man; can’t tell if it’s meant & taken good-naturedly or if it is racist cruelty.” 9. Kraay, Days, 298, 364–69.

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10. Alabarces, Historia, 54–55. 11. Earle, “Padres de la Patria,” 784; Silva da Motta, A nação; Modiano, Historia, 109, citing Los Sports, 23 November 1923, Santiago. 12. De Freitas, Centenario; Reyes del Villar, Chile en 1910, 284, 292, 306, 311–12. 13. Torres, “The Early History,” 70; Porto Cabrales, Memoria histórica, 28; “Concurso de Sport: Andes Tennis Club,” El Comercio, Quito, 28 July 1909; 1819–1919 El Centenario de la batalla de Boyacá en Manizales, 9; Sonsón en el centenario de la batalla de Boyacá, 10; El Telegrafo, Quito, 14 January 1911; 7 November 1912; Guía del Ecuador, 904, 914. 14. Muñoz, Diversiones públicas, 230, 239. 15. Pixinguinha, “Um a zero” (1919), reproduced in Malaia Santos, “Rio de Janeiro,” 83; Wood, Football, 47; Gaffney, Temples, 51–56. 16. Miller and Wiggins, eds., Sport and the Color Line. On the Peruvian poet Juan Parra del Riego’s poem “Polirritmo dinámico a Gradin, jugador de fútbol” (1922), comparing Gradin both to the future modernity of aviation and the ancient tradition of classical athletics, and excellent analysis of Gradin’s significance beyond football, see Wood, Football, 24–28, 46–47. Mascarenhas, Entradas, 235. 17. Torres, Jogos olimpicos latino-americanos. 18. Malaia dos Santos et al., “Celebrando a nação”; Nadel, Fútbol!, 95–96; Peres et al., “Olympics,” 1382, 1389–90; Torres, Jogos olimpicos; Matsuo, “Sport Policy,” 26. 19. Moraes dos Santos Neto, Visao do jogo, 87; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1922 _South_American_Championships_in_Athletics_(unofficial) 20. Gaffney, “Conclusion,” 187. 21. Dietschy, “Making Football Global?,” 280. 22. “Rules of the Association,” FAA WA Minutes 1911–12, Minute Box 2; Bolsmann and Porter, English Gentlemen, 60; Alcock, ed., The Football Annual, 1904–5, 65; Alcock, ed., The Football Annual, 1905–6, 62. 23. FA Minutes of Consultative Committee, 2 September 1912, 14. October 1912, in FAA WS Minutes 1911–12; Beck, Scoring for Britain, 58–60. FIFA Congress minutes, 30–31 June 1912, Stockholm, in Minutes 1912, FAA WS; Woolfall, Presidential Address, FIFA Annual Congress Minutes, Dresden, 4–5 June 1911, in Minute Book 1911–12, Box 2, FAA WS. 24. Lamentably CONMEBOL still awaits a professional institutional history. The institution’s own webpage has some cursory publications http://www.conmebol .com/libros. 25. FIFA, Souvenir Book, FIFA 1906–1929 (1929), inside back cover list of delegates, Library, Box 1, FAA WS. Fernández Páez and Pineda R., Copa América de fútbol; Miller, “Introduction” to Football, 7. I have not been able to access the CONMEBOL archive in Asunción. 26. Dacosta, “In Search,” 165; Torres, “The Latin American ‘Olympic Explosion’”; Torres, “The Early History of Olympianism,” 60–63, 71; Peres et al., “Olympic,” 1387. 27. Matsuo, “Sport Policy,” 18–19; Gaffney, “Conclusion,” 185.

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28. Peres et al., “Olympics,” 1388–89; O Malho, 14 August 1920, Rio. For this and Fluminense’s pioneering role in Brazilian shooting, see Melo, Rio Esportivo, 120. 29. Torres, “The Early History,” 85–86. Not everyone though: after forging an agreement between regional sporting institutions for the Andean and coastal regions, the Federación Deportiva del Ecuador selected a team for the 1924 Olympics and sent three athletes to Paris: Alberto Jarrín from Cayambe and Belisario Villacís from Quito took part in the 10,000m running, but the track judges asked them to withdraw once they had been lapped by the leading athletes several times. Adolfo Jurado from Guayaquil took part in the 100m sprint, and the long jump. Ribadeneira, 200 años, 22–23. 30. Rinke, “Globalizing Football,” 54; Torres, “The Early History,” 87–88. 31. Archetti, “El deporte,” 24, 28; Alabarces, Historia, 196; Torres, “Solving,” 111; Campomar, Golazo, 112, 109. 32. Details on dates from rssf.com. Karush, “National Identity,” 16; Campomar, Golazo, 108–13. None of the tours visited England. 33. There is a lot of hagiography about Arellano, including Santa Cruz, Crónica de un encuentro, 30–34, and Modiano, Historia, 125–28. Alabarces, Historia, 195–96. On Andrade, see Wood, Football, 57. 34. J. H. Paul on the front page of El Gráfico, 10 January 1925, Buenos Aires; Daily Telegraph, 7 March 1927; Warner, Cricket Between Two Wars, 51–56. 35. Ball, White Storm, 72. 36. Vasconcelos, “Las primeras “Olimpiadas” nacionales”; López Vélez, Detrás del balón, 53–56; Peres et al., “Olympics,” 1382. 37. Wisden, “South Americans in England”; Wood, “From right-wing.”

Chapter 12. The 1930 World Cup 1. Rinke, “Globalizing Football,” 50; Campomar, Golazo, 135; McPherson and Wehrli, eds., Beyond Geopolitics; Dietschy, “Making Football Global?”; Beck, Scoring, 67, 143; Carbonell Debali, ed., Album, 54; Wood, Football, 35–36; Faccio, “El primer,” 49. 2. Campomar, Golazo, 133; Tomlinson, “Going Global: The FIFA Story,” 84; Hopcraft, The Football Man, 215; “Match regional de foot-ball,” El Comercio, 2 August 1912, Quito; Gumersindo Cuéllar, “Partido de futbol entre Escuelas Internacionles y Asociación, 1929,” http://babel.banrepcultural.org/cdm/singleitem/ collection/p17054coll19/id/632/rec/115. 3. On the moat, see Campomar, Golazo, 137, described as a trench in Carbonell Debali, ed., Album, 13; Beck, Scoring, 145. The barbed wire appears in “Público en el Talud de la Tribuna Amsterdam.” Mason, Passion, 40. 4. “Reglamento para el campeonato de football mundial: Articulo 3: Reglas de juego,” in Carbonell Debali, ed., Album, 16; “Resoluciones tomadas por el Comité Organizador,” in Carbonell Debali, ed., Album, 20. 5. Carbonell Debali ed., Album, 117; Goldblatt, The Ball, 252–53; Rinke, “Globalizing Football,” 64; Rossi, El Gráfico, cited by Wilson, Angels, 74. British disdain is in Daily Mail, 31 July 1930.

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6. Maluenda, “Detalles inéditos,” Los Sports, Santiago, 25 July 1930; Beck, Scoring, 145. 7. “Vista aerea del Parque de los Aliados,” in 1930, n.p.; Delgado, Sport: Discursos, versos, semblanzas, Montevideo (1943), 39, cited in Rinke, “Globalizing Football,” 60. For the concrete, see Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round, 248. For the Artigas event, Carbonell Debali, ed., Album, 37–39. “Público en el Talud de la Tribuna Amsterdam,” in 1930. A splendid selection of photographs of the tournament can be found at http://cdf.montevideo.gub.uy/exposicion/1930-el-primer-mundial. 8. Wilson, Angels, 68; Carbonell Debali, ed., Album, 88–92. On the garra charrúa, see San Román, “La garra charrúa.” 9. From the official FIFA film of the event: https://www.fifa.com/worldcup/videos/ uruguay-v-argentina-the-final-1930-fifa-world-cup-uruguaytm. 10. Debali et al., Primer Campeonato, 117; Goldblatt, The Ball, 252–53. 11. Rinke, “Globalizing Football,” 65. 12. Carbonell Debali, ed., Album contains photographs of all the teams on arrival in Montevideo and before each match. 13. Jaime Pulgar Vidal, “Perú en el mundial del 30”; Campomar, Golazo, 139; Thorndike, “Villanueva: El hombre que murió dos veces,” discussed in Wood, Football, 178–80. 14. On Galindo, see Pulgar Vidal, “Perú en el mundial del 30.” 15. J. A. M. Los Sports, Santiago, 25 July 1930. Given the dearth of historical studies on these players (even Elsey, Citizens & Sportsmen, has nothing on World Cup 1930 players) data has been sourced from their Wikipedia entries unless otherwise noted. It is therefore indebted to the wor.k of fans and amateur historians such as @1930WCblogger. One hopes that the 2030 World Cup leads to a serious rediscovery of these players and their life histories. 16. Kittleson, The Country, 34; Barbosa Jr., Preguinho; Wood, Football, 45; Peters, “Formation of regional relations.” Among the less-celebrated players were Moderato Wisintainer, an engineer and golfer from Alegrete in Rio Grande do Sul. Jackson, “Malandros,” 41–44. 17. Mesa, La epopeya del futbol, 27. 18. Bestard, Paraguay, 97–98. 19. Wilson, Angels, 64; Karush, “National identity”; Acuña, “Scoring for the Nation”; “Un partido de fútbol transmitido,” in Bestard, Paraguay, 93–96. 20. The citation from El Gráfico and translation are from Wilson, Angels, 74–75. Maranhão, “Apollonians.”

Epilogue 1. Gumbrecht, In Praise of, 248. 2. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 2. 3. Holt, Sport and the British, 104; de Souza Gomes and Morais Pinheiro, eds., Olhares, 13–14. 4. Astorga, Juegos y deportes, reproduced in Modiano, Historia, 174–86. 5. Kraay, Days, 390.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Libraries and Archives Consulted Arquivo Histórico do Município de São Paulo Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo Archivo Nacional, Quito Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Polit, Quito Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá Biblioteca Mario de Andrade, São Paulo Biblioteca Municipal, Guayaquil Biblioteca Nacional, Bogotá Biblioteca Nacional, Lima Biblioteca Nacional, Santiago de Chile Biblioteca Nacional, Quito Biblioteca Santiago Severín, Valparaíso Bristol University Library British Library, London Club Atlético River Plate, Buenos Aires Clube Atlético São Paulo (SPAC) Club Santiago Lawn Tennis Comité Olímpico Ecuatoriano, Guayaquil Fluminense FC, Rio de Janeiro Football Association, Wembley Stadium, London F.C. Barcelona, Guayaquil Fundação Patrimônio Histórico da Energia de São Paulo Glasgow University Library Instituto Riva-Agüero, Lima

243

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John Rylands Library, Manchester London Metropolitan Archives Mackay School, Viña del Mar Museo de Futebol, São Paulo National Archives, Kew, London National Football Museum, Manchester Queen Elizabeth School, Bristol River Plate, Buenos Aires Santos Atlético Clube Scottish Football Museum, Hampden Park, Glasgow

2. Online Genealogical Resources I accessed transatlantic passenger lists, UK Census material for 1851–1901, and UK Births, Marriages, and Deaths certificates using www.findmypast.com and www .Ancestry.co.uk.

3. Digitized Archives Many of the libraries and archives listed above have excellent digitized platforms, particularly the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (http://www.memoriachilena.cl/) and the Biblioteca Nacional Brasil (http://bndigital.bn.gov.br/acervodigital/). I accessed digitized primary sources through the national collections of each South American country. In addition, specific digitized collections were: Eton College, student registers for 1871–99 Harrow School, student registers for 1871–99 Colección Aldo Panfichi, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú https://reposi torio.pucp.edu.pe/index/handle/123456789/137429 San Andrés Golf Club [1920s–50s], British Library, EAP638 https://eap.bl.uk/ archive-file/EAP638–1-1–126San_Andres_Golf_Club_[1920s–1950s San Antonio de Padua [1820s–1940s], British Library, EAP375 https://eap.bl.uk/ archive-file.

4. Newspapers Listed below are the newspapers and magazines that I cite in the text, which I looked at firsthand either physically or digitally. Not listed are the newspaper sources relied on by the historians whose work I have cited or the many newspapers I read but did not cite.

Argentina Caras y Caretas (CYC), Buenos Aires, 1898, 1899, 1900, 1914 El Gráfico, Buenos Aires, 1923, 1925, 2018 Santa Fe, Santa Fe, 1917, 1924 The Standard, Buenos Aires, 1867, 1868, 1898, 1899, 1902, 1910

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The Southern Cross, Buenos Aires, 1898 The Weekly Standard, Buenos Aires, 1874

Bolivia La Revista, La Paz, 1890

Brazil A Bicycleta, São Paulo, 1896 A Cigarra, São Paulo, 1914, 1915 Arte & Sport, São Paulo, 1903 Correio Paulistano, São Paulo, 1864, 1865, 1868, 1872, 1875, 1882, 1883, 1891, 1913, 1914: 1864–1930 O Estado de São Paulo, 1897 Revista Illustrada, Rio de Janeiro, 1892

Chile Corre Vuela, Santiago, 1908 El Mercurio de Valparaíso, 1886, 1898, 1900 El Mercurio, Santiago, 1905 El Sport Ilustrado, Santiago, 1909 El Sportman, Santiago, 1907 El Conejo: revista humorística, Valparaíso, 1913 La Cachimba Sportiva, Santiago de Chile, 1913 Los Sports, Santiago, 1923, 1930 La Tercera, Santiago, 2012 Magellan Times, Punta Arenas, 1914, 1915, 1917 Revista As, Seminario Deportivo, Santiago, 1935 The Chilian Times and Mercantile and Shipping Gazette for the West Coast of South America, Valparaíso, 1881, 1882, 1889 Zig-Zag, Santiago, 1909, 1922

Colombia El Ciclista, Bucaramanga, 1899 El Espectador, Bogotá, 1887, 1910, 1911 El Gráfico: Ilustración, información, literatura y variedades, Bogotá, 1911, 1924 El Telegrama, Bogotá, 1886, 1892 El Tiempo, Bogotá, 1927

Ecuador Diario de Quito, Quito, 1895 El Comercio, Guayaquil, 1880

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El Comercio, Quito, 1906–12 El Dia, Quito, 1899, 1913 El Grito del Pueblo (EGDP), Guayaquil, 1900, 1901 El Horizonte, seminario Manabita, Portoviejo, 1889 El Luchador, Esmeraldas, 1905 El Nacional, Quito, 2000 El Telégrafo, Guayaquil, 1897, 1901, 1911, 1912 El Tiempo, Quito, 1899, 1900 Fray Gerundio, Quito, 1912 La Hora, Quito, 2000 La Ilustración Ecuatoriana, Revista Quincenal de Ciencias, Artes y Letras, Guayaquil, 1909 La Nación, Guayaquil, 1900 Patria: Revista Quincenal Ilustrada, Guayaquil, 1907

Peru El Comercio, Lima, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1902, 1910 El Sport, Lima, 1899 El Turf, Lima, 1916 PRISMA: Revista Social, Ilustrada, de Artes, Letras, Sport, Lima, 1905 Sport Gráfico, Lima, 1931, 1932, 1933

Uruguay La Ilustración Sud-Americana, Montevideo, 1894, 1895 The Express: The River Plate Daily Mail, Montevideo, 1888

Venezuela El cojo ilustrado, Caracas, 1892, 1894, 1901

Elsewhere Corriera della sera, Milan, 1910 Daily Mail, London, 1929, 1930 Daily Telegraph, 1927 Flight, London, 1910 Le Journal, Paris, 1910 New York Times, 1923 Punch, London, 1930 The Affiliated South American Banks Magazine, London, 1926 The League of American Wheelmen, and Good Roads Bulletin, Boston, 1896 The Times, London, 1927, 1930, 1931, 1932 Wisden, London, 1933

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Webpages The online statistical archive of the International Olympic Committee (www .olympic.org/athletes), the Boxing Database (www.boxrec.com), and the Rec.Sports. Soccer.Statistics Foundation (www.rsssf.com) provide good data of matches and performances. They opened a way into other sources. Some of these are linked to www .Wikipedia.org. In addition to the public documents archived through www.Findmypast.com and www.Ancestry.com, some public genealogy sites allowed me to triangulate data, for example, www.geni.com. Some historical films are on YouTube and the pages of FIFA, the British Film Institute and Pathé Films. Historical sports twitter feeds have also helped alert me to sources: including @viejosestadios, @1930WorldCup, @PabloKersevan and @rhdelfutbol. I cautiously used blog and online encylopedias produced by fans and family for biographical data about understudied historical figures, cross-referencing to cited sources wherever possible.

Articles and Books Abello Rodriguez, Gabriel. “El juego de Tejo ¿Un símbolo nacional o un proyecto incluso?” Historia y Memoria (2013): 169–98. Abraham, Timothy, and James Coyne. Evita Burned Down Our Pavillion: A Cricket Odyssey Through Latin America. London: Little, Brown, 2021. Acuña, Pedro. “Scoring for the Nation: Sport Policy, Print Media and Discourses of Race and Gender in Chilean Football, 1930–1948.” MA diss., University of California, 2011. ———. “Snapshots of modernity: reading football photographs of the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay.” International Journal of the History of Sport 36, 9–10 (1918), 832–53. Aeta Astorga, Daniel. Juegos y deportes. Santiago, 1930. AFA. Guide to the Football Field. Buenos Aires: AFA, 1903. Aguirre, Carlos. Bibliography on Soccer in Latin America. Oregon, 2017. Alabarces, Pablo. Historia mínima del fútbol en América Latina. Mexico DF: Colegio de México, 2018. ———. Cuestión de pelotas, fútbol, deporte, sociedad, cultura. Buenos Aires: Atuel, 1996. ———, ed. Futbologías: Fútbol, identidad y violencia en América Latina. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2003. ———. Fútbol y patria: El fútbol y las narrativas de la nación en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2008. ———. Crónicas del aguante: Fútbol, violencia y política. Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2012. ———. “Football and Stereotypes: Narratives of Difference between Argentina and Brazil.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 37, no. 5 (2018): 553–66.

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INDEX

This index provides references to individuals, places, and some themes and concepts that run through the book. Given the continental and transnational approach there are no entries for individual South American countries (readers desperate to only read the sections about, say, Peru, should therefore look for Chávez, Galindo and Mariátegui, or Callao, Cuzco and Lima). Neither are there entries for themes or subjects that run through the book—such as bodies, men or women, play, athletics, football, clubs, soccer, race, gender, class, Black or White. Amendoa, Arthur, 125 América de Cali, 127 Amestoy, José, 145 Andinismo (don’t see Alpinismo), 143 Andrade, José Leandro, 191–92, 199, 204, 215 Andrade, Manuel de Jesús, 75–77 Andrade, Oswald de, 195 Anglophilia, 49–50, 57, 187 Animals, 22–24, 38–46, 81, 148, 177– 80. See also bulls; cats; cockfighting; dogs; tigers Antarctica, 84 Aracena, Diego, 168 Archetti, Eduardo, 107, 121, 218 Arellano, David, 26, 195 Argentine Athletic Club, 75, 139 Argüedas, José María, 42 Arica, 22

Aconcagua, 145–46 Advertising, 99–100, 104–5, 114–16 Aesthetics, 96–97, 153–54, 170–71, 203 Aeta Astorga, Daniel, 217 Africa, 29–31, 64–65, 195, 200 Afro-Latin America, 30–31, 153–56, 160, 183, 210–11 Aguante, 35, 146 Air, Fresh, 93–94, 138 Alberto, Carlos, 215 Albion F.C., 49, 59, 63, 65 Alfaro, Eloy, 73–74 Alianza Lima, 88, 108, 114, 153, 206–7 Alumni F.C., 50, 58, 65, 69, 124 Alvear, Marcelo Torcuato de, 111, 193, 196 Amateurism, 65–67, 91–92, 110–16, 167–68, 185–86, 196–201, 209–10 Amazon, 24, 29, 136

269

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270

ind e x

Armed forces, 73–75, 149–51 Arsenal, 63 Art, 26, 42, 91, 121–34 Associationism, 70, 84–89 Asunción, 85, 88, 166, 210–12 Athletics, 8, 61, 72, 77, 135–37, 183–85, 190, 197. See also Olympics; Races Aviation, 163–69 Balloons, 100, 162–65 Balls (both pelotas and cojones), 1–2, 29–30, 50–52, 115, 148, 170, 182, 202 Bangu, 61–62 Banks, 55, 113, 166–68 Barbarism, 7–10, 21–24, 39, 147–54 Barbed wire, 202 Barrios, 84, 108 Baseball, 35, 52, 65, 81, 152, 162, 181 Basketball, 194, 197, 207 Beauty, 8, 42, 93, 105, 121–34, 170, 201–4, 215 Beccar Varela, Adrián, 200–201 Beláustegui, Luis, 75 Benavides Canseco, Alfredo, 188 Benítez Cáceres, Delfín, 210–11 Bicycle Kick, 207 Bicycles. See Cycling Billiards, 84, 86 Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 157–58 Blankets, being wrapped in or thrown into the air on, 141, 177 Boca Juniors, 63, 88, 108, 194–98, 205–7, 211 Bogotá, 25, 43–45, 60, 84, 94, 99, 101–6, 129, 177, 197 Bolas, 29, 32, 35–37 Boots, 61, 115, 170 Borges, Jorge Luis, 173 Bosco, artist, 42 Bowles, Henry, 183–84 Boxing, 49, 100, 147–49, 154–61, 173–74, 191–94 Boy Scouts, 75

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Bristol, 26 Brown family, 58 Brunetto, Luis, 191, 193 Bru Sanz, Francisco, 206 Budinich, Juan, 158, 236 Buenos Aires, Football Club, 50, 54, 56 Buero, Enrique, 200 Bulls, 42–47, 79, 81, 100, 104, 122, 131, 148–49, 170, 207 Cali, 89, 197 Callao, 22, 207 Cameras, 171–75, 202 Campbell, Jeanette, 124 Capitalism , 93, 99–102, 112 Capoeira, 30–31, 80, 125, 154 Captains, 28, 90, 179, 196, 204, 209 Caracas, 40, 45, 52, 94, 139, 181 Card games, 84 Carlos III, 42–43 Carnival, 30, 50, 68, 78–79 Carreras criollas, 32–33, 102 Cars, 167, 170, 202 Cats, on rockets, 40, 100 Centenaries of independence, 168, 179–83, 188, 199–200 Centenario stadium, 199–203, 212 Charity fundraising, 61, 70 Chávez Dartnell, Jorge, 163–64, 195 Chelsea, 48, 64 Chery, Roberto, 182 Children, 26, 61, 69–73, 82, 122, 126, 128 Chilenita, La (horse), 180 Chueca. See palitun Church, Catholic, 42–45, 76–81 Cigarettes, 115, 127 Circuses, 39, 43, 46, 84, 99–100, 155 Civilization, 9–10, 35, 40, 46, 81, 101, 145, 148–49, 151–55, 202–3, 218 Classics, 123, 176–78, 182 Club Guaraní, 36–37, 88, 210

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ind e x Club Olimpia, 81, 88, 108, 130, 177, 206, 210 Cockfighting, 38–42, 44, 47, 100, 177 Coelho Neto, Henrique Maximiano, 209 Colo Colo, 36–37, 89, 195, 198, 207 Colonization, 7, 35, 38 Commerce, 61–63, 93, 98–117 Conejo, El, 131–32 CONMEBOL, 186–89, 200 Conservatism, 44–45, 72–73, 101, 131 Conway, Martin, 30, 143–46 Córdoba, J. Guillermo, 44 Corinthians, 63–64, 88, 108, 111, 148, 195 Cotopaxi, 143–44 Coubertin, Pierre de, 35, 75, 129, 176–78, 188–89, 214 Country Clubs, 92–97, 195–96 Cox, Oscar, 51, 61, 214 Creole, 4, 32, 65, 68, 182 Cricket, 50–52, 64–65, 86, 112, 129, 178–79, 196–98 Crocker, Fay, 96, 133 Cunninghame-Graham, R. B., 32–33, 45 Curitiba, 106 Cuzco, 43, 88 Cycling, 97–98, 112, 129, 139, 165–66, 169–72, 181–82, 202, 214 Darwin, Charles, 10, 32 Da Silva, Leônidas, 151 Decolonization, 48, 218–19 Dempsey, Jack, 157–60, 174 Discipline, 28, 58, 61, 71, 77, 145–51 Discus, 183–84, 209 Disease, 90–91 Dixie, Florence, 22–23, 144 Dogs, trampolining, 100 Donohue, Eliza and Thomas, 62 Douglas-Home, Alec, 196 Dunbar, Ianthe, 23–24

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271

Dunning, Eric, 9–10, 147 Durand Laguna, José, 206 Easter, 30, 38, 78–79 Elias, Norbert, 9–12, 22, 28, 39, 170 El Salado, 87 Emelec, 89 Empires, 9, 48–49, 66–67, 77, 187, 196, 217–18 England, north of, 54–55 Entrudo, 30 Estádio das Larenjeiras, 182 Etcheverry, Romildo Jorge, 211 Eugenics, 76–77, 80, 104, 156, 160 Everton, 63–64, 81, 116, 151, 207 Exeter, 64, 100, 195 Fair play, 63–67, 95, 107–8, 155 Famous Flying Risley, 99 Fandom, 28, 123, 131, 135, 148, 153, 212 Fangio, Juan Manuel, 167, 175, 214 Farfán, Luis, 125 Fausto, 209–10 Femininity, 127–33 Fencing, 71, 86, 97, 105, 131, 149, 151, 181, 193 FIFA, 1, 186–88, 190, 200, 205 Fife, 78 Film, 172, 202 Fire brigades, 164 Fireworks, tied to cats, 100 Firpo, Luis Ángel, 157–60, 174 Fish Man (aka Albert Dickinson), 99–100 Flamengo, 87–88, 108, 110, 209 Floodlights, 105, 107 Fluminense, 28–29, 64–65, 108–10, 123, 153, 190–91, 209, 214 France, 137, 163, 169, 195, 198 Franco, Ramón, 168–69 Frandsen, Franz (aka Francesco Cetti), 165 Freedom, 8, 30, 107, 115, 131, 160, 202

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272

ind e x

Freidenrich, Arthur, 153, 182–83 Freire, Ramón, 46 Freyre, Gilberto, 121, 152–53, 210 Frontón, 25 Fur coats, 210 Futbol aficionado, 91 Futebol de varzea, 91 Galindo, Plácido, 209 Gambling, 27–28, 33, 38–42, 100–104, 216 García Moreno, Gabriel, 46 García Múñoz, Alfonso, 41 Gardel, Carlos, 107, 161, 204 Garra charrúa, 204 Gate money, 109–14 Gavea, 167 Gay, Claude, 26 Georgetown, 51 Germania, 62, 87 Germany, 62, 195, 198, 203 Gimnasia y Esgrima, 83, 88, 149 Golf, 94–96, 133, 182, 215 Gómez, Juan Vicente, 181 Gómez Jaime, Abdalasis, 169 Gonzales de Fanning, Teresa, 101 González Benítez, Aurelio Ramón, 211 Gould, Willie, 157 Gradin, Isabelino, 183–85 Gráfico, El, 121, 124–26, 142, 172, 205 Great Britain, 49–53, 78, 201, 217–18 Greece, 123, 176–78 Gremler, Juana, 129 Grounds, enclosure of, 101–7 Guarani, 36–37, 88, 210 Guayana, 23, 51 Guayaquil, 29, 43–44, 60, 75, 89, 100, 143, 177 Guevara, Ernesto, 166 Guiana, British. See Guayana Gutbrod, Anita, 140 Guttman, Allan, 8, 21, 45

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Gymnastics, 27, 71–75, 99–100, 123–26, 149–50 Hamilton, John Potter, 22 Hammersley, Rodolfo, 171 Handicaps, 103, 177 Harley, John, 63 Harris, Lord, 51 Harrison, Lilian, 140–42, 214 Hats, 93, 203 Haya de la Torre, Víctor, 44 Heald, Walter, 54–55, 79, 86–87, 144 Heroism, 160–62, 173 Hippodromes, 33, 36, 103–9, 182 Hispanidad, 37–47, 168, 179 Hockey, 27, 129–30 Hogg, Thomas, 54–56, 59 Hopscotch, 87 Honor, 28, 32–33, 51, 89, 91 Horses, 31–33, 102, 108–9, 131, 180 Hudson, W. H., 23 Hunting, 22–24 Hurlingham, 94–95 Hybridity, 49–51 Hygiene, 25, 66, 71, 80, 85, 93, 129, 149–50 Hypocrisy, 79, 107–8 Iguazú, 23 Illimani, 144–45 Imports, 98–99, 115, 165–66, 170, 203 Indigenous, 23–30, 33–37, 99–100, 124, 145–46, 152, 195, 204, 210 Informal Empire, 48, 61, 66, 217–18 Institutions, 186–94. See also CONMEBOL; FIFA; IOC; Schools; and specific clubs IOC (International Olympic Committee), 188–94, 197 Iquique, 171 Italy, 111–12, 140, 163, 205 Itu, 57

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ind e x Jockey Clubs, 33, 92–94, 102–4, 157 Jockeys, 109–10, 214 Jogo do bicho, 101 Joy, 8, 30, 34, 108, 110, 113, 212 Jude, Raúl, 204 Junín, 157–58 Ker Porter, Robert, 32 Kerosene, on rats for entertainment purposes, 40 Kinghorn, 95–96 Korte, Clara, 129 Langenus, John, 1, 202 La Paz, 40, 49–50, 88, 123, 164–65, 210 La Plata, 83, 88, 149 Lapometers, 169 Las Casas, Mario de, 207 Laso, Héctor Arancibia, 86 Latcham, Richard, 26–27 Latin American Olympiads 1922, 184–86, 189 Lavalle, José María, 207 Lavalle, Micaela, 129 Laws, 51–54, 73–75, 127–28, 156–57 Leagues, 61–67, 91–94, 108–13, 153, 183–86 Leapfrog, 86–97 Leguia, Augusto B., 93–94, 196 Leguisamo, Irineo, 110 Leisure, 9–11, 41, 53, 91, 95, 178 Lemly, Henry Rowan, 60 Libraries, 14, 89, 91 Lifestyles, orgiastic, 109–10 Lima, 43–44, 88, 106–8, 150, 182–85, 207 Lima Barreto, Afonso Henriques de, 94, 150 Lipton, Thomas, 63 Liverpool, 58, 63, 78 Lizana, Anita, 127– 28

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273

Locutores (radio commentators), 172–74 Lores, Julio Rodrigues, 207 Lotteries, 101 Luiz de Sá, Francisco, 109 McMinn, William, 95–96 Macacos, 1920 incident, 183, 215 Machonas, 122 Malandros, 121 Manquilef, Manuel, 25–28 Mantero, José, 57 Mapuche, 25–28, 31–32, 36–37 Mar del Plata, 96, 139 Mariátegui, José María (aka Juan Croniqueur), 107–9, 164, 216 Martyrs, 162–65, 182, 195 Masculinity, 125, 129–30, 145–60 Mazan, Lucien (aka Lucien PetitBreton), 137–38, 146, 168 MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club), 51, 65, 179, 187, 196–97 Mechanics, 145, 167–68 Medellín, 88, 214 Media coverage, 105, 115, 123, 96, 211–12. See also newspapers, radio Mendoza, 158, 162, 168 Mestizaje, 68, 125, 136, 182 Migration, 6–9, 62–63, 90–91, 123–24, 154–58, 207, 214–15 Military. See armed forces Miller, Charles, 6–7, 61–62, 65–66, 214 Mining, 57, 75–76 Modernity, 9–11, 21–22, 26–29, 105–6, 122–23, 164–72, 203 Montevideo, 49, 59, 63, 71, 114, 172, 178, 184–85, 201–4 Monti, Luis, 192, 213 Morality, 31, 39, 76–80, 113, 116, 151, 204, 216 Moreira Alves dos Santos, Joaquim, 58

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274

ind e x

Morrison, Grace, 95 Motherwell, 64 Motorsports, 98–99, 138, 165–69, 174–75 Mountaineering, 30, 141–46 Muisca, 25 Multisports, 86–88, 97–98, 177, 207, 209, 215–16 Murillo, Adolfo, 71 Muscular Christianity, 9, 69–70, 77–80 Museums, 14 Music, 105, 179, 182, 204 Myers, H. M and P. V. N., 40 Nacional F.C., 17, 87–88, 122, 195, 198, 203–5 Nationalism, 180–82, 195, 199–212 Navy, Royal, 3, 179 Nazassi, José, 204 Newbery, Jorge, 86, 162–64 Newell, Isaac, 50, 58, 214 Newell’s Old Boys, 3, 50, 86 Newspapers, 12–13, 84, 114–15, 133, 186, 219; being sold by Olympic medallist, 171 Nimbles Sport Association, 49–50 Nobiling, Hans, 61–62, 214 North, Colonel John Thomas, 51 Nottingham Forest, 64 Nuestra, La, 121, 152 Núñez, Rafael, 72, 101 Olid, Alberto Justiniano, 137–39, 214 Olympics, 33–35, 129, 136–37, 176–80, 188–97, 199–200 Operários Mafrenses, 87 Origin stories, 3–6 Orinoco, 57 Orth, György, 206 Oruro Royal, 87–88, 210 Osma, Pedro de, 86

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Ossandón, Carlos, 126–27 Ownership models, 80, 215–16 Paats, William, 81, 166 Pabón, Rafael, 169 Pacific Combination, 198 Palitun (aka Palin, Chueca), 26–29, 98 Palmeiras, 64, 88 Panama, 52, 60, 158 Paraense, Guillermo, 190–91 Para inglês ver, 217 Park, Mungo, Jr., 95 Parra del Riego, Juan, 122–23 Patagonia, 23, 34 Pato, 32 Paulistano, 64–65, 188, 194–98 Peck, Annie, 145–46 Pedro II of Brazil, 32 Pellegrini, Carlos, 46, 103 Pelotaris, 25 Peñarol, 49, 87–88, 203 Photography, 92–93, 124–25, 140–41, 169–72, 202–3 Physical Education, 70–77 Pietri, Dorando, 181 Pigeon-fancying, 97 Píndaro de Carvalho, 206 Pixinguinha, 182 Plaza, Manuel, 136–37, 146, 183–85, 193 Plymouth, 64 Poetry, 122–24, 169, 195, 201 Polo, 148–50, 191–94 Poole, William Leslie, 58–59 Portoviejo, 164 Postmen, 193 Prado, Antônio da Silva Júnior, 86, 103, 105 Prado, Veridiana, 105 Preguinho, 209–10 Prince of Wales, aka Edward VIII, 94, 195–96

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ind e x Professionalism, 66, 109–14, 153, 160, 185 Prohibition (of bullfighting, women in sport, boxing, drunks), 42–43, 58–59, 90, 132, 152, 167 Protestants, 9, 27, 58, 77–79. See also Muscular Christianity Public health, 93–94 Punta Arenas, 95 Quaker Oats, 115 Quieroz, Anna Amélia de, 123 Race, ideologies about, 34–35, 104–5, 151–55, 162, 182, 195 Races, running, 25, 27, 29–30, 61, 77, 86, 135–40, 171. See also Athletics; Olympics Racism, 10, 94, 104–5, 110–11, 153, 215 Radio, 157–58, 172–75, 212 Raids, 165–68 Railways, 24, 33, 53–55, 87, 107, 112–13, 139, 165, 207 Ramsay, Juan, 78 Real Madrid, 64, 196–98, 205 Recordmen, 170 Records, 25, 140–41, 145–46, 164–65, 169–70 Religion, 49, 54, 79, 91. See also Carnival; Church, Catholic; Easter; Muscular Christianity; Protestants Rentals, 115 Representation, 30, 36, 112, 124, 133–37, 179, 186–88 Repression, 30–31. See also Prohibition Restrepo, Carlos E., 96–97 Rhythm, 133, 153–54, 181 Riobamba, 43, 123, 197 Rio de Janeiro, 45–46, 61–65, 88, 94, 108–9, 129, 182–85, 189 Rivadavia Gómez, Héctor, 188 River Plate, 49, 88, 92, 108

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Roca, Julio Argentino, 86 Rodeo, 42, 46, 148, 170 Rodó, José Enrique, 7, 89 Rojas, Heriberto, 159–60 Romero Brest, Enrique, 73 Rosario, 50, 64, 88, 193 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 102 Rossi, Alfredo, 203 Rowing, 8, 85–87, 114, 125, 140, 181 Rugby, 56, 62, 65, 152 Rules. See laws Running, 25, 27–30, 35, 61, 77, 86, 135–40, 171. See also Athletics Sack races, 61 San Andrés, 95–96 San Antonio de Padua, 96 Santander, Francisco de Paula, 102 Santiago de Chile, 90–92, 123, 138, 183–84, 189, 196 Santiago Wanderers, 50, 87–88 Santos, 14, 88, 166, 196 Santos Dumont, Alberto, 164, 169, 189 São Paulo, 14, 57, 61–62, 88, 91, 103–6, 111–15, 123, 166–67, 179, 195, 209 Sapo, Juego de, 25 Sarmiento, Domingo, 7–10 Sarmiento, Jorge Koochoi, 207–8 Saucedo, Ulises, 206 Scarone, Héctor, 191–92, 205 Scasso, Juan, 203 Schools, 9, 57–61, 69–82, 124, 126, 130. See also Teachers Scoring, 29–31, 53 Scotland, 53, 62–63, 78, 95–96 Scottish Wanderers, 111 Seewald, Willy, 185 Selections, selección, seleção, 111–12, 183, 197–98, 204–11, 215 Sending off, 153, 209 Shooting, 9, 23, 87, 150–51, 191 Shot Put, 35

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276

ind e x

Slavery, 7, 31, 46, 75, 85, 165 Slippery poles, climbing 100 Sobral, José María, 84 Socialism, 80, 90–92 Socks, 115 South African F.A., 64–65 South American Athletics Championships, 136, 183–84 South American Boxing Champions, 159 South American Football Championships, 185 South American Handbook, 23, 43 SPAC (São Paulo Athletic Club), 6, 50, 61, 64–65, 111 Spain, 42, 45, 76, 168, 195, 205 Spectators, 26–28, 38–39, 41–47, 92–93, 103–9, 128–29, 154–55, 167–72, 201–2, 216–17 Sport, definitions, 8–9 Sport Club Concepción, 90 Sport Club Inca, 36 Stábile, Guillermo, 205 Stadia, 28–29, 105–7, 115–16, 199, 203 St. Louis, 33–35 Stormers Sporting Club, 49–50 Stronger, faster, fitter, 151 Stud books, 103–4 Subercaseaux, Luis, 178 Sucre, 49 Sundays, 40, 61, 77–80, 139, 174 Sussekind de Mendonça, Carlos, 150 Sweden, 71–74, 124 Swimming, 27, 67–68, 71, 97–100, 136, 140–41, 192 Swindon, 64

Tehuelche, 34–35 Tejo, 25, 36 Telegraph, 35, 104, 163, 174, 211–12 Tennis, 86, 96–97, 125–28, 131, 168, 181–82 The Strongest, 49, 88, 124, 206, 210 Third Lanark, 64 Thompson, Enrique, 185 Throwing, 25, 29–30, 35–36, 177. See also Discus, Javelin, Shot Put, Tejo Thunder, 124–25 Tickets, 39, 99, 108–16, 152–54, 216–17 Tigers: fighting lions, 87; shooting, 137 Tigre, 85 Timing, 166, 169–71, 183 Tiraboschi, Enrique, 140 Titles, 1, 62, 158–59 Tottenham Hotspurs, 64 Tour de France, 137 Tours, 63–65, 148–49, 178–80, 194–96 Translations, 2, 25, 49–51, 59–60, 67, 82, 104, 127–28, 202, 217 Transnationalism, 43, 62, 99, 109, 137, 154–60, 165–66, 174, 206, 218 Trinidad, 51, 57 Trudgen, John, 67 Tug–of–War, 35 Turnverein, turner, 71, 123

Tandems, 131 Tango, 107, 148, 162, 204 Tax, 39, 67, 100–101, 108–9 Taxi driving, 207 Teachers, 27–30, 50, 57–61, 70–75, 78–81, 149, 187

Valparaíso, 49–50, 62, 69, 88, 93, 99, 103, 112–14, 130–31, 137–39, 185, 207 Valparaíso Wanderers, 49 Varela Castex, Dalmiro, 166 Vasco da Gama, 85–88, 110–11, 123, 153, 209

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United States of America, 7, 52, 60, 76–77, 145, 157–58, 163, 169, 183, 201 Universities, 52–54, 58–59, 81, 89, 206–7 Urbanization, 53, 84–89, 93–97 Utility companies, 113

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ind e x Velodromes, 105–6, 129, 172, 182 Villanueva, Alejandro, 207, 210 Villanueva, Azucena, 130 Viña del Mar, 33, 97 Violence, 9–11, 22, 31, 94, 124–25, 147–49, 152–59, 202–3 Virility, 124, 148–50, 156, 162 Vocabulary, 9, 49–51. See also Translations Vuelta olímpica, 197 Walking, 15, 135–36 Walters, William, 58 Wars, 7, 9, 31, 76, 149, 167–69, 211 Warner, Plum, 196 Warnken Benavente, Alberto, 209

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277

Water polo, 207 Watson Hutton, Alexander, 50, 58, 66, 77, 187 Welfare, Harry, 78 Wellenius, Gösta, 73–75 Whymper, Edward, 143–44, 146 World Cup, 174, 199–213. See also FIFA World War 1, 167–68, 182, 187, 193, 215 YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), 73–74, 78–79, 189 Zanni, Pedro, 168, 172 Zavala, C. M., 109 Zinucati, 28–29 Zubiaur, José Benjamín, 73

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