Soccer & Society

Vol. 12, No. 1, January 2011, 27–41

Playing by the book: football in Latin American literature

David Wood*

Department of Hispanic Studies, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Soccer
10.1080/14660970.2011.530461
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1466-0970
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[email protected]
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2010 (online)

Sport has long enjoyed a prominent position in Latin American societies, and in
recent decades this relationship has increasingly been manifested in the region’s
literary production. While sports such as boxing, baseball, cycling and long-
distance running have all featured in this flowering of sports literature, it is
football that dominates this particular scene. This article analyses texts from
different periods, genres and nations to consider the ways in which football has
served as a means to explore a range of issues, such as politics, identity, race and
aesthetics. Attention focuses primarily on a sample of texts that will enable an
appreciation of the ways in which the sport’s literary representation has come to
constitute an important aspect of the region’s cultural landscape.

Following the appropriation of football by local middle and working classes around
the turn of the twentieth century, after its introduction by British sailors, merchants
and ex-patriates in the mid-nineteenth century, the history of football literature in
Latin America can be traced back to the early decades of the twentieth century, when
production was typically of celebratory poems inspired by an event, such as the inau-
gural World Cup,1 or by an outstanding individual, an example of which is considered
below. As the twentieth century progressed, with football firmly established in the
popular consciousness, a few authors included the sport in their creations, but its liter-
ary presence remained disproportionately small in comparison with its public and
media profile. Indeed, it was not until the 1970s that significant numbers of texts
featuring football were published, part of the literary phenomenon known as the post-
Boom that saw a marked shift towards works that were more accessible, both in terms
of content and style, with authors drawing on areas such as popular music, film and
soap opera, as well as sport. This can be seen in part as a reaction to the largely exper-
imental and abstract works of the 1960s Boom, in part as a response to the political
context of the period, which saw numerous military coups bring authoritarian regimes
to power across the region, and in part the result of a broadening of educational provi-
sion in Latin America that brought literature within the reach of the masses, both as
readers and as writers. More recently, this sense of heterogeneity has also been
expressed through the publication of crónicas (chronicles), short pieces of creative
writing that retell footballing incidents and events, initially in news media and, subse-
quently, as published collections. Another trend has been the publication of antholo-
gies of short stories on football by Latin American writers,2 and the move towards a
continental experience has also been taken a step further as Latin American authors
write about football outside the continent, thereby locating Latin America within a

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1466-0970 print/ISSN 1743-9590 online

© 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14660970.2011.530461
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28 D. Wood

global context and contesting colonial (and post-colonial) visions of the region.3
Similarly, their work is included in anthologies, such as that edited by Turnbull,
Satterlee and Raab,4 that offer a more global perspective on the literature of football.
For a number of these authors, it is clear that writing about football is a displacement
that follows the realization that they will never make it as a player at the highest level.5
While it may be tempting to see their writing as an attempt to impose themselves on
the game and its players in a way that was not possible in practice, the close connections
between their texts and well-known events and characters tend to problematize any
reading of their work as fantasy or as escapism. Narratives tend towards a realism that
has characterized much of the writing since the post-Boom, significantly enhanced by
the relationship between many of the shorter texts and their original publication in
newspapers and magazines, while poetic representations, with their basis in stars of
the past or present, remain similarly grounded. Several of these authors have reflected
on their particular practice and the challenges it raises, none more so than Juan Villoro,
whose collection of chronicles Dios es redondo [God is Round] includes a section enti-
tled ‘Writing football’, in which he suggests that:

Every now and then, some critic asks why there are no great football novels in a world
that holds its breath to watch a World Cup. The answer seems quite simple to me.
Football’s system of references is so codified and involves the emotions so effectively
that it holds within it its own epic, its own tragedy and its own comedy. It does not need
parallel plots and leaves little room for an author’s inventiveness. This is one of the
reasons why there are better short stories about football than novels. As football reaches
us already narrated, few mysteries remain to be published. The novelist who is not
prepared to conform with being a mirror prefers to look elsewhere. On the other hand,
the chronicler (who is interested in re-telling something that has already happened) finds
here inexhaustible stimuli.6

It would be rash to apply Villoro’s words as a generalization that can be applied

to all authors, and while he no doubt experiences the challenges of football writing as
set out above, it is not necessarily the case that others do, and we will consider below
a novel that incorporates football entirely effectively, thus contesting not only
Villoro’s reflections, but also the oft-repeated lament at the lack of footballing novels.

Juan Parra del Riego’s poetic homage to Gradín

The European origins of football are well-established, but this was not the only
cultural import to follow this path in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and in the literary field many writers looked – and went – to Europe, and to France in
particular, for inspiration during this time. As part of a drive towards Western moder-
nity, that was perceived to be in constant tension with local tradition, a key dimension
of cultural and political debates that revolved around civilization and barbarism, influ-
ential literary groups imported literary trends such as futurism and avant-garde poetics
from Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. An outstanding example of
such literature is to be found in the poetry of Juan Parra del Riego (1894–1925), who
moved from his native Peru to Uruguay in 1917. It was in Uruguay, in the years
following the First World War, that Parra del Riego found inspiration to write poems
such as ‘Oda a la motocicleta’ [‘Ode to a motorcycle’] in which he sought to reclaim
technology from the horrors of war for an optimistic futurism. At the same time, the
human body was elevated from trench warfare and its attendant slaughter to celebrate
physical endeavour. Football’s European origins and its perceived modernity offered
 Soccer & Society 29

Parra del Riego a means of exploring the various issues mentioned above in the poems
‘Oda al fútbol’ [‘Ode to football’] and ‘Polirritmo dinámico a Gradín, jugador de
fútbol’ [‘Dynamic polyrhythm to Gradín, football player’].7
Isabelino Gradín (1897–1944), subject of the Polirritmo dinámico a Gradín, juga-
dor de fútbol, was one of the very first black footballing stars, playing in the Uruguay
team that won the inaugural Copa América in 1916, in which he finished as top scorer.
Two of his goals came in a 4–0 victory over Chile, which led to protests from the
Chilean camp that Uruguay was fielding African players, protests that were ground-
less, but that reveal the prejudices in relation to issues of civilization and barbarism
mentioned earlier. Following a successful playing career with Peñarol between 1915
and 1921 during the amateur era, Gradín was involved in the founding of Olimpia FC
in Montevideo and played for a team that represented the Federación Uruguaya de
Fútbol, rather than the established Uruguay Football Association, an allegiance that
deprived him of a place in the team that won gold in the 1924 Olympic Games. In
addition to his outstanding footballing ability, Gradín was South American champion
at both 200 m and 400 m in 1919 and 1920, and is credited with demonstrating to the
Brazilian public in the 1919 Copa América that football was a game in which blacks
could excel at a time when considerable efforts were being made in that country to
maintain white hegemony in the sport.8
Parra del Riego’s poem, one of the earliest examples of football literature in Latin
America, is a fairly lengthy piece (72 verses) that locates the poet in a crowd that
admires and celebrates Gradín’s skill and a goal born of his individual brilliance. The
poem opens ‘Pounding and jubilant’ and proceeds immediately to compare the foot-
baller with an aviator, an image that typifies the vision of modernity and futurism that
the poet seeks to capture. The opening stanza, of five verses that follow a fairly
conventional poetic structure (verses are of 8, 15, 8, 13 and 15 syllables with a rhyme
pattern of ABAAB), also makes it clear that what has brought the poet to a state of
heightened emotion and artistic expression is this ‘marvellous player’. Following the
initial sense of uplifting, both emotional and physical, with references to the skies, the
second stanza breaks to a free structure with a series of adjectives that describe aviator
and striker alike: ‘agile/ refined/ winged/ electric/ sudden/ delicate/ devastating/ I saw
you play in the Olympic afternoon’. It is tempting to see in the mention of ‘Olympic’
a reference to Uruguay’s successes in the Olympic Games of 1924 and 1928, where
they won the gold medal in the football tournament on both occasions, but the poem
predates these events and, in any case, Gradín was not part of the team that travelled
to the Olympic Games following his allegiance to a rival Uruguayan federation.
Another interpretation could derive from Olimpia FC, the club that Gradín helped to
found in the early 1920s, although Parra del Riego’s arrival in Montevideo in 1917
and the original publication of the poem in 1922 make it more likely that the poet
watched Gradín play for Peñarol, where he starred from 1915 to 1921. Instead, it
would seem that the reference here harks back to classical antiquity and figures of
Greek mythology, linking in to the previous reference to ‘winged’ and subsequent
description of the footballer as a ‘live bronze’ and his movements as ‘Greek lines’. As
a counterpoint to these classical images, the footballer is likened to items such as a
piston, a scalpel, a balloon and a submarine, which clearly develop the futurism, and
its emphasis on technology, evident in the opening comparison with the emblematic
figure of the aviator. Football as cultural practice, and in particular Gradín as an
outstanding player, allow the poet to draw together the futurist vision of modernity
and the classical tradition of celebrating athleticism through art.
30 D. Wood

If the footballer’s body is able to transcend time, it is also able to transcend space:
having opened with references to the skies, the poem moves to the earth as Gradín’s
ability on the pitch dazzles, before moving back to the skies as Gradín heads the ball
upwards and is himself a balloon, then back to earth as he dribbles past opponents and
scores at the heart of the poem. In the later stanzas, we move to the seas as Gradín is
‘Acrobat fish that from the impetus of the most violent attack / slips away, arches,
floats / nobody sees it for a moment / but like a submarine it emerges over there with
the ball…!’ before finally moving into space as Gradín’s name is proclaimed to the
moon by ‘a luminous salvo of hats’. The notion of Gradín reaching the moon is clearly
part of the futurist discourse espoused by Parra del Riego, and if football is yet to be
practised there, the poet prefigures the ubiquitous popularity of the sport that stretches
to all corners of the earth.
Mention has already been made of some of the socio-political issues that arose as
a result of Gradín’s race, and attention is drawn to this area by a series of references
to colour that are to be found throughout the poem. The majority of these refer to
black/white, or to darkness/light, but do not always coincide with the expectations that
would be raised by the dominant politico-cultural views of the River Plate at the time.
Political and intellectual debates of the period revolved around civilization, associated
with Western, urban modernity, on the one hand, and barbarism, linked to racial others
and rural traditions, on the other hand. Gradín’s African descent places him firmly in
the ‘barbarous’ camp, and such racism underlies Chile’s protests against the presence
of Gradín and Juan Delgado in the Uruguayan team that beat them in the 1916 Copa
América,9 but Parra del Riego repeatedly defies expectations: it is the white poet
whose soul is ‘dark’ in the second stanza, while it is the skills of the black footballer
that lift him from this darkness into a state of enlightenment. Similarly, in the poem’s
final stanza, the crowd, which would have overwhelmingly white,10 is suffused by the
emotion of Gradín’s goal to become a ‘hoarse black swell’, while Gradín himself is
illuminated by the aforementioned ‘luminous salvo of hats’ and the moon. In addition
to these inversions, there are four occasions on which the use of colours goes beyond
dark and light: three of these refer to the colours of the shirts of the players on the
pitch, suggesting that to the colours of club or nation the shade of a player’s skin is of
no consequence, and offering an early optimism as to the racial egalitarianism to
which modern sport may aspire. The final example conflates colour and form as it
refers to Gradín as ‘live bronze of multiple attitude’, a metaphor that not only denies
racial connotations in his representation, but also connects again to the classical Greek
references mentioned above: in stark contradiction of what debates of the time would
have us believe, a black football player is worthy of – and indeed embodies – poetry,
celebration and artistic imagination. Perhaps of significance here is Parra del Riego’s
position as an outsider, whose place of origin (the small city of Huancayo in the
central Peruvian Andes) was dominated by discourses of race that revolved around the
white urban minority and the rural indigenous majority, meaning perhaps that he was
able to realize the mediatory capacity of football to occupy spaces between – or
beyond – conventional views, both in terms of his futurist expression and his
celebration of a sport, and a sportsman, not traditionally considered to be an appropri-
ate artistic subject.
A further dimension to questions of the body and race is to be found in the repre-
sentation of Gradín as erotic object. In the aftermath of the goal, the poet exclaims: ‘I
saw three of those women with hips like altars / throb shuddering with emotion!’, a
clear expression of the allure of the elite athlete to the opposite sex. Given Uruguay’s
 Soccer & Society 31

population dynamic and patterns of attendance at football matches, which were a

social event for the middle classes, it might be assumed with some safety that the
women were white, engaging head-on with the contentious topic of sexual attraction
and relations across class and racial divides.11 Challenging as this is in the context of
the time, even more daring is the homo-erotic depiction that follows immediately after
this, according to which that poet implores: ‘Gradín! steal from the lightning bolt of
your incandescent body/ that has today broken me into a thousand comets by a mad
uplifting, / another blue speed for my brow / and another wick to blow up my heart.’
The excitement caused by the scoring of the goal is clearly widely shared in the crowd,
male and female alike, but to establish a direct connection between the footballer’s
‘incandescent body’ and the poet’s heart strikes a challenge to convention and
suggests that through football both the individual and the collective can transcend the
normative discourses of contemporary society in relation to race, gender relations and
masculinity.
The poem’s structure and form are also worth considering briefly in terms of their
correspondence with the overarching themes discussed above. The poem’s 72 verses
are divided into nine stanzas of 5, 11, 8, 11, 5, 15, 5, 6 and 6 verses respectively, and
verses range from two syllables to twenty, with a preponderance of conventional
Hispanic metres of eight syllables (11 verses), twelve syllables (15 verses) and sixteen
syllables (11 verses). Further poetic convention is evident in the poem’s rhyme
pattern, which works both within and across stanzas, although only to a degree, as
there are also a handful of blank verses, which serve to highlight the expression in
these verses of key moments of the poem (it is not surprising that the verse at the heart
of the poem – in which Gradín’s shot hits the net – is not only free in terms of rhyme,
but is also the longest verse of the poem at 20 syllables). The prime example of this is
the stanza that precedes the scoring of the goal: ‘And discus-throwing winger,12/ you
pass one…/ two…/ three…four…/ seven players…’. It is clear that there is no pattern
here, either of metre or rhyme, and a strong sense that Gradín’s footballing ability
breaks free both from the opposing players and from the poetic convention that had
strained to contain the preceding action. The poem, like Gradín, is not entirely free,
but nor is it completely subject to conventions, and this temporary rupturing of struc-
tural constraints ably conveys the tensions between Gradín’s position on the football
pitch as a national hero and within society as a member of a subaltern minority.

Verses/versus Alianza Lima

Despite its title, Arturo Corcuera’s La gran jugada. Crónica deportiva que trata de
Teófilo Cubillas y el Alianza Lima [The Great Play. Sporting Chronicle about Teófilo
Cubillas and Alianza Lima] is a work of free poetic expression that takes its inspira-
tion from some of the best-known players and outstanding episodes in the history of
Alianza Lima, contributing at the same time to the growing collection of works that
explore the club’s origins and history from a variety of perspectives in the arts and
humanities and the social sciences.13 The creative dimension of the work is high-
lighted in a series of closing ‘credits’ (p. 114) that acknowledge that the author has
included extracts from poems by a number of other poets, typically of African descent,
such as the Cuban Nicolás Guillén and the Peruvian Nicomedes Santa Cruz, who
connect with the club’s tradition as one of the few cultural institutions in the country
to be closely associated with the Afro-Peruvian population. Parra del Riego is also
cited, his Peruvian origins and representation of Gradín as a black footballing star dual
32 D. Wood

points of reference, as is Manuel González Prada, one of the founding figures of indi-
genismo, which challenged the hegemony of the white coastal elite around the turn of
the twentieth century. Another textual source also cited is popular song, with numer-
ous compositions over the decades that celebrate individuals and teams alike. The
presence of photos and attention to design (the front and back covers form a football
pitch when the fly leaves are opened) also serve to place the text in a hybrid space that
brings together sports journalism, visual arts and work of literature to express a multi-
faceted cultural experience that reflects the visual dimension, the chants and the
discourses of a football match.
At the same time as numerous other works of Peruvian literature foreground Afro-
Peruvian culture from the late 1960s onwards as part of a continental project to give
a greater political and cultural space to traditionally sub-altern sectors of society,
Corcuera inserts football into this cultural space through a series of connections
between this most popular of sports and other cultural practices associated with the
Afro-Peruvian population. In the poem ‘la Ciudad de los Reyes’ [‘The City of Kings’],
for example, he compares the worship of ‘King Pelé’ to ‘el Señor de la Milagros’ (an
annual religious procession through the streets of Lima) and the figure of the black
saint San Martín de Porras (p. 20). These icons of black religiosity reappear alongside
others (Sarita Colonia and Padre Urraca) in a poem that commemorates the tragic plane
crash in 1987 that caused the death of the whole of the Alianza Lima team as they flew
back into Lima from a match in the provinces, thus strengthening the relationship
between football, popular culture and Afro-Peruvian cultural practices.14
Even more numerous than the references to popular religiosity of Afro-Peruvian
origin are those that relate to musical forms and styles that allow connections to be
made between race, long-standing cultural practices assimilated by the dominant
criolla society and football. Music is associated with several of Alianza’s players, a
reflection of the manner in which celebrated popular musicians wrote songs to and
about football stars (and whole teams) over the course of the twentieth century,15 but
is perhaps most closely associated with José María Lavalle, one of the first black stars
of Alianza Lima in the 1920s and 1930s. Lavalle, an outstanding winger, was famous
for celebrating his goals with an impromptu performance of a marinera, a local criollo
dance that features the waving of a handkerchief to court the female partner, the hand-
kerchief being duly produced to accompany the goal celebration. Corcuera describes
Lavalle, for example, as: ‘grazing goals and marineras on the pitch / extracting music
from his football boots: / until we have no floor left / to stamp you stamper, / I want
to become a handkerchief / I want to become a drum’ (p. 32). Through the use of
devices such as alliteration (‘sin suelo… zapatear zapatón),16 rhyme (suelo/pañuelo;
zapatón/cajón) and rhythmic effect (me quiero volver pañuelo/ me quiero volver
cajón), Corcuera captures the aesthetic experience of Lavalle’s skills and the acceler-
ating crescendo to a goal, while also conveying the musicality of the subsequent cele-
brations, all highlighted by following these verses immediately with a macumba (a
musical form of African origin) by Nicomedes Santa Cruz (1925–1992), the first
champion of Afro-Peruvian cultural production.
The long-standing relationship between musicality, orality and popular history,
evident in medieval (and more recent) troubadours, makes poetry an excellent
medium for an exploration of the place of Afro-Peruvian culture in national society,
and by adding football to this mix, Corcuera recognizes the ability of the sport and
its stars to draw together diverse traditions and move towards a new model of
national culture. Through the reproduction of a song by Lucha Reyes, known as ‘the
 Soccer & Society 33

golden dark woman’ (p. 79), that is played in the National Stadium, Corcuera under-
lines not only the relationship between football and Afro-Peruvian culture, but also
the penetration of this culture into the most symbolic sites of national identity. The
origin of the Afro-Peruvian population in the slave trade is made explicit in Lucha
Reyes’ song and elsewhere, and football, through Alianza Lima, is presented as an
affirmation of freedom in the face of this history: thus the strength of centre-forward
Valeriano López ‘knocks down walls shackles nets / breaks chains / (fragments of
chains / still stuck to the skin) (p. 80). While the great majority of references are to
players of African descent, other ethnicities are also bound into this narrative
through football, which is represented as a field of equality and integration, implic-
itly juxtaposed to the broader social position of Peruvians from these ethnicities off
the pitch. By placing a football ‘in the ancient Empire of the Sun / just here by the
Temple / of Pachacamac’ (p. 14), by identifying the mestizo César Cueto with vari-
ous forms of handcraft produced in the Andes (p. 66), and by comparing ‘chop-
stick’ Juan Chang to the pre-Hispanic ceramics from a valley to the north of Lima
(p. 90), Corcuera creates an image of the construction of racial, cultural and national
unity through football. Such efforts may appear somewhat obvious and clichéd
today, but it must be remembered that work on the poems began in the 1970s, when
football was far less commonly used in such symbolic ways, and moreover tied in
with a left-wing military government that sought to bring about a new sense of
national unity through the incorporation of non-traditional sectors into political and
cultural life.
Popular religiosity and Afro-Peruvian music are cultural practices that largely fall
outside the structures of Peru’s hegemonic (primarily white) society, and the same is
true here in relation to Alianza Lima’s style of play, which is characterized by its ludic
qualities that signify an implicit rejection of the ‘official’ function of competitive
sport, which is based on results. Eduardo Archetti reminds us that ‘there can be no
tradition on the basis of defeats’,17 and although some authors in Peru have suggested
that the notion of glorious defeat does indeed establish the basis for their country’s
footballing tradition,18 Corcuera’s collection of poems foregrounds a particular style
of play rather than the results it produces. This emphasis is apparent from the very title
of the collection and from the opening words, ‘The ball laughs and sings / the ball
hums and flies’, which also close the collection, thus acting as a structural framework.
The idea here is that football is a sphere of joyous expression, free from the constraints
experienced by descendants of slaves, with physicality used to an end chosen by the
players themselves rather than the labours determined by their employers or masters.
Football as cultural creativity is expressed via references to César Cueto as ‘el Poeta
de la Zurda’ (‘the Poet of the Left Foot’ – p. 66), to Pitín Zegarra ‘embroidering a
picture goal for the revelry of the stands’ (p. 86) and, especially, to star centre-forward
Alejandro Villanueva: ‘nobody will ever forget your feet / shaping goals and earth /
as if they were the hands of a sculptor / […] artist and saint […] maestro of maestros’
(pp. 28–9). This privileging of the ludic dimension in football is echoed in the literary
text through the use of various characters and fonts, as well as various strategies in the
composition of words on the page, all in a drive towards capturing the sporting
momento. For example, the word ‘pelota’ (ball) is usually presented with a superscript
‘o’ (pel o ta) that looks like a ball, while in the eulogy to Teófilo Cubillas the verses
are written around the four sides of a football pitch, with the words taking the place
of the fans in the stands (pp. 18–19). As the scene of the greatest drama, the goal
mouth enjoys special treatment in the context of these visual effects: goalkeeping
34 D. Wood

legend Juan El ‘Mago’ (the Magician) Valdivieso is described, ‘from post … to post/
picking the ball from the air’ (p. 42); while the eulogy to another outstanding goal-
keeper, Teódulo Legario, ends with: ‘suicidekeeper / legendary silhouette / of the
noisy / sunny afternoons of my adolescence’ (p. 73), the 11 words distributed on
the page in the style of a team sheet, with the first between the posts. The power of the
team’s attacking prowess is expressed in ‘Ugly Salinas blaster to the nets with keeper
and all’, in which the final word ‘todo’ (‘all’) breaks free from its line and disinte-
grates, with the final ‘o’, in the form of a ball, flying into the goal of arch-rivals
Universitario de Deportes (pp. 58–9).
A final aspect of the book worth mentioning is the inclusion of a glossary (pp.
111–13) entitled ‘Rules of the Game’, in which the extensive footballing terminology
used throughout is explained. The presence of this glossary attests to the hybrid nature
of the text, which – for some – will require explanations, and reveals the extent to
which the discourse of football was felt by the author, in the 1970s at least, to be alien
to literary texts and literary readerships. However, by describing his collection of
poems as a sporting chronicle, which draws on the visual tradition in football reporting
and which foregrounds the importance of a playful style, on the pitch as well as on the
page, Corcuera goes some way to dissolving the very boundaries that make such a
glossary necessary.

Antonio Skármeta: Soñé que la nieve ardía

Antonio Skármeta’s 1975 novel Soñé que la nieve ardía [I Dreamt the Snow Was
Burning] is a direct response to the military coup in Chile in 1973, an attempt in the
early years of the post-Boom to make sense of the country’s recent political landscape
and to offer a vision of resistance and hope in the face of the brutal Pinochet regime.
The novel centres on Arturo, a young soccer player who travels to Santiago from his
home in the south in order to gain a place in one of the top national teams and to gain
sexual experience: in short, ‘to triumph, that’s all’ (p. 13).19 Arturo’s grandfather, who
in the work’s opening pages bids farewell to his charge at a rural train station, is also
anxious at his grandson’s lack of sexual experience, but more fundamentally
concerned with his lack of political consciousness, and his keenest exhortation is
‘Let’s see if in the city you become a man of the left’ (p. 13). These three themes of
football, sex and politics – all portrayed as forms of power relations – dominate the
novel, and the manner in which they impact on each other contrasts with the treatment
of soccer in works such as Vargas Llosa’s Los cachorros and Bryce Echenique’s
Huerto cerrado, in which sport is left behind in adolescence in favour of sexual rela-
tions.20 Texts such as these appear to confirm stereotypical notions of work and play
as a dichotomy, with the practice of sport replaced by paid employment, although
sexual relations might be also seen as adult ‘play’, recreational and non-utilitarian use
of the body that thus shares important points of commonality with sport. Skármeta’s
simultaneous treatment of sport and sexual relations as forms of bodily freedom,
combined with intellectual engagement through politics, attests to a growing maturity
in the treatment of sport in Latin American literature, and is the area in which lies his
novel’s greatest interest.
Arturo initially sees football and politics as entirely separate worlds, and football
as a route to sexual conquests without emotional involvement, but the correlation
between these areas is forcefully expressed when Arturo explains his style of play to
the coach at the trial:
 Soccer & Society 35

Look, I’m a functional player. Advanced centre-forward. I pass the ball to one of the
wingers, and the first one to get to it takes it on and knocks it in to me trying to get it
more or less around the edge of the box, from there I’ll look after things myself. (p. 48)

His focus on the functional ties in with his utilitarian approach to relationships, an
attitude that is in marked contrast to the idealism of the novel’s other main characters,
who are closely involved in political activism. The same is true of his extreme indi-
vidualism, in which others are there merely to serve his personal goals – as in the text
quoted above – an attitude that is completely opposed to that of others in the novel,
who undertake collective and voluntary work as an integral expression of their politi-
cal and social solidarity. The presence of football, and in particular Arturo’s style of
play, is used to symbolize the political ideologies in conflict in contemporary Chile,
with capitalism based on the individual and on specialization of roles (significantly
‘playing away’ through Arturo’s status as outsider in the capital and in the football
team) vs. socialism as collective endeavour and voluntary solidarity.
Little by little, Arturo comes to respect the other characters’ political activism and
eventually offers to accompany his new friend el Gordo Osorio to the factory, where
he somewhat reluctantly agrees to be the coach of the factory football team. On the
way home from the factory with Arturo, el Gordo is attacked and severely beaten by
a paramilitary gang as punishment for his union activism while Arturo finds himself
unable to act in any way other than to turn and run. However, he is not untouched by
the incident, and the following day his performance on the soccer pitch is poor,
culminating in his sending off after he punches the referee, who had failed to award a
penalty for a clear foul on the protagonist. Arturo here is finally moved to act in
response to injustice, instead of simply accepting it. The decline of Arturo’s sporting
star, then, is directly related to his awakening political consciousness, and while the
brilliance of his individualism may have been dazzling in the short term, it is unsus-
tainable and cannot form the basis of long-term success which, the author implies,
must be founded on teamwork on the pitch, symbolic of communal action in the
political sphere.
As Arturo leaves behind his political naivety and his individualism in soccer, the
third aspect explored in the novel is simultaneously affected. Unable to come to terms
with el Gordo’s beating and his lack of response, he goes to the house of Susana, who
had previously been impervious to his particular blend of football fixation and
egotism, to share his anguish. As he admits his cowardice to her and breaks down in
tears it is clear that he has come to realize that he cannot function on his own and
needs to share his actions and emotions with others. This act of emotional and political
communion, transferred from the sporting arena to social relations, establishes with
Susana the bond of humanity, sincerity and common purpose that had previously been
lacking and she takes the initiative to sleep with him, as an act of fundamental
solidarity rather than of love. It is here that the similarities between sport and sexual
relations as complementary forms of ‘play’ are most evident, and for Skármeta both
can function as expressions of non-productive uses of the body that enable fulfilment
through simultaneous personal freedom and shared experience.
Skármeta’s choice of sport as a key theme in his exploration of conflicting political
ideologies and emotional engagement is highly effective and appropriate, in tune with
continental literary trends and local reality alike. The choice of soccer enables the
author to explore tensions between the brilliance, yet weakness, of the individual and
the decisive force of collective action, and to exploit its value as shared experience as
36 D. Wood

a means of establishing political and cultural allegiances. Contrary to those on the left
who tended to see soccer as the new opium of the people, Skármeta shows that it is no
more (and no less) a distraction than other cultural forms, no less able to convey ideas
and meanings than cinema, music or indeed literature. Moreover, it is able to produce
these meanings in response to local conditions, and in opposition to dominant
models: while ‘America’s sporting rhetoric in all its variety ultimately has been
concerned with status and power and opportunity, both material and spiritual, within
the American system of industrial capitalism’,21 this text for one functions outside
and against that system, contributing towards the establishment of another and of an
Other.

Javier García Galindo, Cámara húngara

Although there are other excellent novels that revolve around football,22 the trend in
recent years in Latin America has been towards shorter forms of football fiction,
evident in the appearance of several anthologies of football stories and various collec-
tions of football chronicles by authors whose pieces had first appeared in regular
columns in the printed media, as mentioned above. Chronicles were first introduced
to Latin America in the sixteenth century, when they were used to document – and to
contest – the Spanish Conquest, and have since been employed as a discourse that
lends a sense of realism to narratives that explicitly explore social and political aspects
of human existence. Aníbal González describes the Spanish-American crónica as ‘a
peculiar, middle-of-the-road genre [that] consisted of brief articles on virtually any
subject, written in a self-consciously literary style, that were meant to be entertaining
as well as informative.’23
González is considering here the work of Spanish-American Modernists in the late
nineteenth century, such as José Martí and Rubén Darío, but his description of the
form remains applicable through the twentieth century and into the present. Indeed,
authors as renowned as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez have drawn
on the chronicle to push literary convention and explore the limits of narrative form,
perhaps reacting against the experimentalism of the 1960’s Boom to seek a greater
degree of realism in their discourse.24 Borges, in his Crónicas de Bustos Domecq
[Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, 1967], written in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy
Casares, juxtaposes the chronicle with other forms similarly foregrounded in the titles
of previous works, such as Inquisiciones [Inquisitions, 1925], Historia universal de la
infamia [Universal History of Infamy, 1935], and Ficciones [Fictions, 1944]. In one
of the chronicles, ‘Esse est percipi’, Borges makes a rare foray into the world of foot-
ball as Domecq visits the president of Abasto Juniors, a football club in Buenos Aires,
to look into the disappearance of River Plate’s stadium. The club president informs
him that the decline of football is not limited to stadia, but that ‘The last football match
was played in this capital on June 24, 1937. Since that very moment, football, like a
whole range of sports, is a dramatic genre, run by a single man in a booth or by actors
in football shirts before a cameraman.’25 This nostalgia is also expressed by Eduardo
Galeano in his collection of chronicles El fútbol a sol y sombra, [Football in Sun and
Shadow, 1995] which opens with a lament that echoes the sense, if not the sentiment,
of Borges’ criticism of football as a mass-mediated industry: ‘The history of football
is a sad journey from pleasure to duty. At the same time as the sport has become an
industry, it has banished the beauty that is born of the joy of playing for playing’s
sake’ (p. 2).
 Soccer & Society 37

Despite its self-determination as a novel, Javier García-Galiano’s 2004 Cámara

hungara [Hungarian Chamber] shares many of the features of the chronicle, and
emerges from a national literary environment – Mexico – in which the crónica has
been particularly prominent as a literary form in recent years.26 To refer back to
González’s description of the chronicle as a ‘peculiar, middle-of-the-road genre’, it is
perhaps uniquely placed to draw simultaneously on the discourses of journalism and
narrative fiction, performing an especially important role in areas where the publish-
ing industry has not been significantly developed, or where the press is either weak
or dominated by the state, or both. And, given the history of football journalism in
the region, which stretches back to the start of the twentieth century, football may
represent a singularly effective subject through which to fuse these different
discourses, opening out texts to new readerships as well as new authors. García-
Galiano’s novel certainly demonstrates many of these features: written in an infor-
mal, even colloquial style, and divided into 24 short chapters that do not follow a
close linear narrative, it is an accessible text whose chapters could be read as self-
contained crónicas in many instances. Overall, however, the novel charts the rise and
fall of Ignacio ‘El Abuelo’ Sánchez, who comes to be the leader of Pachuca’s barra
brava and is involved in various episodes of violence and corruption. Violence is
portrayed from the outset of the novel as a pervasive element of football, with fights
taking place ‘on the pitch, then in the street and finally in the stands’ (p. 16). The
protagonist had been a poor player as a child, but had come to realize that he could
overcome his limitations by resorting to a transgressive physicality that would intim-
idate opponents and earn the respect of his team-mates, a strategy he subsequently
applies as a reluctant fan. Football is portrayed as being present and significant for
many sectors of society, including women and children, as well as people from vari-
ous social, economic and geographic constituencies, and the common denominator
that accompanies football is violence, be it sexual (El Abuelo’s rough sex with
Emma Saldívar who has been sent to infect him with AIDS), ritual (the staged fights
between rival gangs) or institutional (the beatings meted out by the police, or the
brutality sponsored by the club’s hierarchy). What is implied through the ubiquitous
portrayal of violence is that is part and parcel of daily life, an experience that is
systemic, to be found at all levels of a society that has been troubled in recent years
by drugs wars and human trafficking.
Although drugs are largely absent from the narrative, the movement of people in
exchange for payment, a daily practice along the U.S. border, is evident in the transfer
of players and of fans alike. The former is a widely accepted practice in the modern
era, even if it does lend weight to the views of those who, like Borges and Galeano,
lament the commercialization of the game, but the latter remains something of a taboo,
with loyalty to ‘your’ team conventionally taken to be a pre-requisite of fandom.27 In
the opening pages of the novel, however, it is made clear that El Abuelo has changed
his allegiance from Necaxa not because of betting, or women, or sporting frustration,
but because of money offered by Pachuca for him to join what is euphemistically
described as a ‘grupo de animación’ (p. 17), a phrase that combines a sense of cheer-
leading and motivational leadership. This group’s responsibilities include leading
songs in support of the team at home and away matches, and seeking to intimidate
officials and opposition players in an attempt to influence the outcome of matches
from the stands. In exchange for this, they receive tickets for matches (which they also
sell on), free transport to away games and various benefits through their close associ-
ation with the club (signed photographs of players, shirts, the pickings from organized
38 D. Wood

crime on match days and loans), all part of paternalistic relations widely practised by
many clubs in Latin American and beyond. At the same time as El Abuelo’s club
loyalties are exposed, his very status as a fan at all is brought into question as it is
revealed that he became a fan, not because of his enjoyment of football, but rather
because of the possibilities for socialization and violence that it brought with it.
However, implicitly questioned here are motivations for involvement in football in
general: if players are allowed to change teams for economic benefit, obeying the laws
of supply and demand, why should the same not be true of fans?
The choice of Pachuca as the team at the heart of the narrative is not coincidental,
as this area to the north-east of Mexico City is widely credited as marking the origins
of football in Mexico, which was supposedly brought by Cornish miners in the nine-
teenth century, leading to the founding of the club in 1901. If the connections to the
source of football in Mexico are left largely implicit, mentioned once as the team that
‘saw the birth of football in Mexico’ (p. 67), the same is not true in relation to the
models of fandom and the barras bravas at the heart of the novel, which have clearly
been imported from Argentina, via Costa Rica. The agent for this cultural import is El
Valdano, the leader of Saprissa’s barra brava, whose nickname mocks the cultured
image of the Argentine player Valdano,28 and who is persuaded by a member of
Pachuca’s hierarchy to move from San José to Mexico to develop this style of ‘12th
man’ for the Mexican club. Following the arrival of El Valdano, many fans are
attracted by his ‘South American style’ (p. 51), and take to wearing the shirts of clubs
from Buenos Aires, learning chants sung in Argentine stadia and throwing paper and
toilet rolls onto the pitch. The presence of violence around football is also expressly
connected to the mimicking of Argentine football culture, and the members of the
gangs even cultivate Argentine accents and forms of speech (the use of ‘voseo’, the
most easily identifiable feature of River Plate Spanish). For their part, the club’s exec-
utives open Argentine restaurants, and buy Argentine players in the transfer market.
If the on-pitch successes of the Argentine national team and clubs from Buenos Aires
made them a point of reference for other regions in Latin America, especially during
the 1980s and 1990s, then the corresponding off-pitch football culture, based around
the barra brava, is similarly embraced and emulated, offering a violent outlet to the
frustrations of a disenfranchised urban youth culture.
To some degree, all of this may be seen to displace the problem of football violence
(and perhaps social violence more widely) away from Mexico itself and onto external
agents, an interpretation that could be mapped onto anti-North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) discourses that were prominent in Mexican civil society in the
1990s. More fundamentally, however, the movement of players, fans and cultural prac-
tices across regional and national boundaries questions the basis on which football is
used as a mode for the construction of individual and collective identity. While El
Abuelo Sánchez and others like him undoubtedly find in football a structuring device
that gives shape to their existence and provides them with a sense of routine and
belonging that is otherwise lacking, the cycle of violence, petty crime and extortion
that they follow is portrayed as being short-lived and ultimately unfulfilling. As with
many of the chronicles written over the centuries, the episodes that constitute Cámara
húngara depict the shortcomings of a society, informing while entertaining, but they
offer little by way of a viable alternative. What might be termed ‘traditional’ fans
appear briefly on occasion, but such characters are never developed, meaning that the
reasons for their allegiances are never explored, and they remain shallow repositories
for local identities based around a club’s geographical location and its history.
 Soccer & Society 39

In conclusion, the works that have been considered here are testimony to the rapid
recent rise in the publication of football literature in Latin America, and, at the same
time, an expression of a long-standing interest in exploring how football relates to the
region’s societies through literary texts that goes back almost a century. The four works
analysed in detail (as well as others mentioned) represent a broad range of modes of
writing and literary discourses, from newspaper chronicles, to essays, poems, shorter
narrative fiction and novels, but what they have in common is the manner in which
they draw on football as a force that can draw people together or drive them apart. This
oppositional dimension, found both on and off the pitch, is a means of gaining access
to a series of tensions present in societies in Latin America and beyond, tensions that
are expressed in terms of race, gender, sexuality, identities and political ideologies.
Given football’s unrivalled ability for generating allegiances that are rarely surpassed
in their depth and breadth of feeling, it should perhaps come as no surprise that many
of the continent’s outstanding writers have adopted football as an important component
of their literary worlds as a means of engaging the reader and encouraging them to
challenge their view of the world in which they find themselves.

Notes
1. José María Delgado, ‘La nueva hazaña’, in Carbonell Debali.
2. See, for example, Salazar (ed.), 11 historias de fútbol; Fernández (ed.) También el último
minuto; or Apo (ed.) Y el fútbol contó un cuento.
3. Some of the outstanding authors here include Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay – El fútbol a sol
y sombra), Osvaldo Soriano (Argentina – Arqueros, ilusionistas y goleadores), Juan
Villoro (Mexico – Dios es redondo) and Fernando Iwasaki (Peru – El sentimiento trágico
de la Liga).
4. Turnbull, Satterlee and Raab, The Global Game.
5. Works by Galeano, García-Galiano, Soriano and Villoro all open with an account of their
frustrated playing careers.
6. Villoro, Dios es redondo, 21. Translations from the Spanish are mine throughout.
7. Parra del Riego, Polirritmos.
8. In addition to the numerous online articles that discuss Gradín, see Blixen, Isabelino
Gradín.
9. In a similar vein, in his historical novel El revés de morir, based on the life of the Alejandro
Villanueva, Thorndike describes one of the first black stars of Peruvian football, and how
the Peruvian footballing authorities preferred to send a team of white players to the 1930
World Cup in Uruguay to avoid giving the impression that Peru was in any way African,
or that it was a country in which blacks played a significant role. For further details, see
my article ‘Reading the Game: Football and Literature in Peru’.
10. The black population of Uruguay has always been small, and through the twentieth century
has constituted roughly 5% of the national population. As a key component of national
pride, football matches were very popular with white middle and working classes alike.
11. For white men to have sexual relations with black and mulatta women in particular has long
been seen in Latin America as an affirmation of masculinity and of exotic desire, but for
white women to desire a black man is seen quite differently, as threatening to hegemonic
norms in terms both of gender and race.
12. The Spanish ‘volante’ translates as ‘winger’ but also conveys a strong sense of flying (from
the infinitive ‘volar’). This again harks back to the futuristic figure of the aviator of the
poem’s opening as well as the winged figures of classical Greek mythology, a connection
highlighted by the reference to the discus thrower. The ideal translation here would
conflate winged and winger.
13. See, for example, Thorndike’s aforementioned historical novel El revés de morir;
Benavides Abanto, Una pelota de trapo, un corazón blanquiazul; Millones, Panfichi and
Vich, En el corazón del pueblo; or Panfichi and Thieroldt ‘The Football Clubs and barras
bravas in Peru’.
40 D. Wood

14. Benavides Abanto (pp. 91–2) confirms this connection between popular religion, espe-
cially el Señor de los Milagros, and the team ritual at the start of an Alianza Lima match.
15. The work of Felipe Pinglo Alva (1899–1936) is particularly well-known in this context.
16. In Latin American Spanish, the ‘s’ and ‘z’ are pronounced identically, without the differ-
ence evident in Peninsular Spanish.
17. Archetti, ‘Estilo y virtudes masculinas en El Gráfico’, 261.
18. See, for example, Sánchez León’s collection of essays La balada del gol perdido [The
Ballad of the Missed Goal].
19. Page numbers refer to the De Bolsillo edition (Barcelona, 2003).
20. For further consideration of these works, see Wood, ‘Reading the Game’ in note 1.
21. Oriard, Sporting with the Gods, 477.
22. See, for example, Goldemberg’s Tiempo al tiempo, discussed in my article ‘Reading the
Game: Football and Literature in Peru’.
23. González, Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative, 84.
24. García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold).
25. Borges and Bioy Casares, ‘Esse est percipi’ in Crónicas de Bustos Domecq, 141.
26. The work of influential authors such as Carlos Monsiváis and Elena Poniatowska has led
to the phenomenon of the crónica urbana, or urban chronicle.
27. For further details, see Armstrong and Giulianotti.
28. Valdano, scorer of the winning goal in the 1986 World Cup final, has also published a
biography and edited collection of short stories around football.

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