Brenda Elsey

The Independent Republic of Football: The Politics of Neighborhood Clubs in Santiago, Chile, 1948–1960

In the 1950s, amateur sports clubs in Santiago, Chile created a magnetic icon of the popular barrio or neighborhood football player. This figure became a charismatic symbol of working-class ingenuity and class injustice. It represented an alternative construction of masculinity based on ones physical labor, creativity, and political militancy. Popular neighborhood clubs integrated working-class men into urban politics, connected them to parties, and served as sites of political critique. This article argues that barrio football clubs contributed to radicalization in working-class neighborhoods, key to the growth of leftist parties on a national level. It begins with an analysis of San Miguel, a center of barrio football, and then moves to examine the relationship between amateur and professional clubs. Professionals, led by corporate executives with strong connections to the state, sought to de-politicize and de-localize football to create a profitable business. Shaped by Cold War rhetoric, battle lines had been drawn between those who embraced professionalism as part of economic modernization and progress and the amateur footballers who criticized its materialism and corruption. Moreover, practices surrounding womens participation, use of state resources, and the proper place of political expression created lasting divisions.

Introduction: Marking the Field

Football, or soccer as it is called in the United States, is a global cultural practice. This volume argues that the study of football’s history provides a unique opportunity to understand the human condition. Football has so pervaded language and popular anecdotes that it is difficult to write without using a metaphor or euphemism related to the sport. Critical scholarship on football has emerged from a wide variety of fields in the humanities, social sciences, business, law, and sport medicine. Research structured around football, therefore, is at once discrete and broad. Because of this paradox, the study of football provides fertile ground for interdisciplinary initiatives. This volume explores the disciplinary boundaries that are shifting “beneath our feet.” Traditional disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have come to embrace diverse research methodologies. The increased scholarly attention to football over the past decade reflects both the startling popularity of the sport and the trends in historical scholarship that have been termed the “cultural,” “interpretive,” or “linguistic” turns. This volume uses new work on football to create a dialogue between history and other disciplines, including art criticism, philosophy, and political science. It also includes work on gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, which already blurs disciplinary fault lines.

Cultural Ambassadorship and the Pan-American Games of the 1950s

Abstract This paper examines the history of the early Pan-American Games, held in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Chicago. The history of the Pan-American Games demonstrates the decline of goodwill between the US and Latin American sports organizations, audiences, and journalists during the Cold War. Despite the diplomatic failures of the Pan-American Games from a US-centred perspective, they are vital to understand the history of women’s participation in sport and solidarity among Latin American delegations.