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I’ve long believed
that the Southern California suburbs that produced me have a hypocritical
relationship with the issue of Mexican immigration. A handful of Mexicans
and Americans of Mexican descent are the neighbors, friends, and co-workers
of San Diego, Orange County, and LA’s white bourgeoisie; however,
many more are the faceless gardeners, hotel maids and fruit-pickers who
help sustain the region’s economy through tireless and ill-paid
work. Yet it was here that the now-notorious Proposition 187 (which denied
California public services to undocumented immigrants until the law was
stricken down as unconstitutional) garnered strong support, and it is
here that suburban youth occasionally indulge in brutal violence against
immigrant worker encampments.
Sports can sometimes act as a feeble vanguard of change in racial and
ethnic relations, as was evident in the integration of professional baseball
in the 1940s and 50s. In a strange way, the peculiarly bourgeois sport
of American soccer has much to learn from Mexican fútbol, but the
two overlap and intersect only sporadically. White, affluent Southern
Californians may distrust Mexican immigration, and lobby for tighter border
controls, but they are missing the point: non-Hispanic whites are already
the minority in California, and that is not about to change. Suburban
housewives may pretend that Mexican-Americans are not a vitally important
part of the region, but the schedulers of international soccer matches
do not make the same mistake.
The Mexican
invasion
One need only note that the Mexican national soccer team plays
many of its home friendlies in San Diego to grasp the magnitude of this
phenomenon. On a Wednesday night during Spring Break, I was one of the
tens of thousands who flocked to San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium to
see Mexico take on Paraguay. In few, if any, other places in the United
States would an international soccer friendly draw 32,000 fans on a weekday
at $30 to $50 per ticket. For hours before kickoff, Mexico supporters
streamed into the stadium, filling the massive parking lot with tailgate
parties and causing the ticket lines to stretch to seemingly impossible
lengths. But still they came, from Los Angeles and Tijuana, clad in everything
from middle-management business casual to the famous green jerseys of
the Mexican national team and the shirts of the Mexican League’s
top sides—Cruz Azul, Chivas, UNAM Pumas, Club America, and more.
Stadium officials attempting to regulate the unruly queue for tickets
didn’t even bother to bark their instructions in English. A girl
I was in line with remarked in a hushed tone that she had yet to spot
another white female among the throngs of fans.
Barely two months
ago, the Super Bowl—the absolute pinnacle of American capitalist
sporting spectacle—was played on this very field. But on this night
the seats normally occupied by the Chargers’ and Padres’ faithful
were a sea of green, white, and red, dotted with fluttering Mexican flags
and resounding with the incessant noise of horns and whistles. Clearly,
the soccer field had been hastily laid and chalked; the touchline was
uneven in places and the shape of a baseball diamond could be seen clearly
under the grass. It would have been easy to deduce that, if only for a
few hours, a little piece of Mexico had come to occupy this bastion of
traditional American athletics and values. But of course, that would have
been a naive conclusion, and one guilty of confusing the permanent and
irreversible with the ephemeral. In Southern California, Mexico is already
here—it just takes an event of significant cultural magnitude (like
a match involving the country’s national soccer team, dubbed El
Tri after the three-colored Mexican flag), for the rest of us to realize
it.
¿Olé?
The game itself was an entertaining one, as it was a meeting
of two of the Western Hemisphere’s top teams. Both made it to the
second round of last summer’s World Cup, and even with the talismanic
figures of both sides—forward Cuauhtemoc Blanco for Mexico and the
outrageous goalkeeper Jose Luis Chilavert for Paraguay—rested for
the night, the players on the field were an impressive lot. Omar Bravo
and Jared Borgetti deputized up front for Mexico, and they spearheaded
an attack that sorely tested Chilavert’s replacement, Justo Villar,
throughout the first half. Mexico had the lion’s share of the possession,
dictating play and preventing Paraguay’s dangerous attackers from
getting any decent service. Roque Santa Cruz and Jose Cardozo, goal-poaching
scourges of the German Bundesliga and Mexican League respectively, were
effectively marked out of the game by the Mexican defense.
Fifteen minutes in,
a Mexico forward (likely Omar Bravo) had an open shot at the edge of the
penalty area, only to send the ball clear over the net and into the $50
seats along what would normally be the third-base line. And halfway through
the first half, Villar punched away a spectacular goal-bound header from
Mexican World Cup veteran Borgetti, who had out-jumped his defender twenty
yards from goal to redirect a long cross sent in from the right side of
midfield. These two chances were to prove symbolic of Mexico’s efforts
in the first forty-five minutes. Efficient, sometimes skillful work created
opportunities that were either wastefully squandered or bravely parried
by the Paraguayan keeper. El Tri’s dominance was near-complete,
but rarely eloquent. Only once did slick passing evoke cries of “¡Olé!¡
Olé!” from the crowd.
Postcolonial
wave
Some modern American nativists claim that unlike white ethnic
immigrants in the 19th century, Latinos tend to resist assimilation into
the U.S. mainstream. There is some value to this argument, even if it
is too often used as an excuse for racism and xenophobia. But if Spanish
was clearly the language of choice at the match, it was clear that Mexican
and Mexican-American sports fans have been influenced by the norms of
American sport. The most rousing act of crowd participation was not the
chants of “¡Mé-xi-co!” and ¡Sí se
puede! that occasionally rose above the din of the noisemakers, but rather
a series of spirited renditions of that classic American crowd gesture,
The Wave. And during half-time, the stadium was subjected to the market-driven
banality of a Spanish-language radio station’s penalty shootout
give-away contest; I’d seen something nearly identical transpire
at every minor league hockey game I’ve ever attended. To be sure,
there were a few brawls in the stands, but nothing to make the atmosphere
more rowdy than the average Manchester derby or Chargers
Raiders football
game.
The expectant crowd had to wait until the seventy-second minute
for the opening goal. Sustained pressure by Mexico led to confusion at
the periphery of the Paraguay box, and substitute David Patino struck
a hard shot that ricocheted off of a Paraguayan defender before finding
the back of the net. The goal was far from graceful, but it was enough
to send the stadium into raptures. Until then, the prospect of a goalless
match had seemed both bitterly disappointing and entirely possible.
Almost immediately
afterward, Paraguay equalized. The Mexican defense, hitherto nearly impenetrable
under the calm leadership of team captain and center-half Rafael Marquez,
left Jose Cardozo open to receive a pass deep in the left side of the
penalty area, and he barely hesitated before blasting it past the Mexican
goalkeeper. The crowd was silenced and the game slowly petered out, with
only a few ill-timed tackles (eliciting cries of cabrón! when a
Paraguay player was on the scything end of the contact) to round out the
remaining fifteen or so minutes. A few fresh Mexican players were thrown
onto the field, but they mustered little in the way of a last-ditch attacking
effort. For the players as well as the fans, it seemed, the experience
was more important than the result.
In his book Magical
Urbanism, radical urban critic Mike Davis argues that amidst significant
racism and marginalization, Latinos are reinventing and reviving American
cities, particularly in the Southwest. It seems that the Latin Americanization
(or rather, re-Latin Americanization) of Southern California offers the
hope of reinventing American sports as well. Soccer in the United States
may be slowly acquiring quality and reputation, as evinced by the national
team’s performance in last summer’s World Cup (where, significantly,
it knocked Mexico out of the competition), but what it still lacks is
verve and passion. Major League Soccer teams include few Mexicans and
other Latin Americans on their rosters, and if this changed the league
could be revolutionized, much in the way the English Premiership was by
the influx of foreign players in the 1990s. By and large, the sport remains
the province of America’s affluent white suburbs, but there is a
quiet revolution afoot that threatens the sterility of “soccer.”
From the public parks where immigrant cooks and gardeners gather for temporary
transformation into their heroes in green, to high-profile Mexico friendlies
at Qualcomm Stadium, fútbol is blossoming in the places soccer
barely touches. Like the Latino cultural influence generally, it will
enrich the American mainstream even if it does not become completely assimilated
into it.
Chris Hu B’06
takes (and misses) the penalty kicks for Third World Football Club.
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