Perspectives on the U.S.-Mexico Soccer Rivalry Passion and Politics in Red, White, Blue, and Green (original) (raw)
Perspectives on the U.S.-Mexico Soccer Rivalry
2017
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Red, White, Blue and Green: Perspectives on the U.S.-Mexico Soccer Rivalry, 2017
In 2012, Mexico’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey staged an exhibition, Futbol: Arte y pasión, featuring over seventy artists who represent soccer and its symbolic value. Two years later, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened a comparable show, Fútbol: the Beautiful Game, tracing the game’s significance in the work of over thirty artists. Despite similar curatorial premises, the exhibitions diverged in how they framed soccer and its significance to their respective countries. A close examination of the artists featured in these two shows elucidates the complexities of the soccer rivalry between Mexico and the United States, particularly the sport’s cultural impact. This chapter offers an art historical perspective on the battle for North American footballing supremacy, tracing the competing narratives created by artists from each country. Soccer remains emblematic of the sociopolitical aspirations of both nations, and in unique ways, artists have projected and contested their nationhood through soccer, utilizing the game as a loaded metaphor for patriotism, immigration, and identity. While some directly represent the rivalry, others clarify the deep meanings attached to soccer and competition between Mexico and the United States. The centrality of soccer to Mexican identity has been asserted by many, with the curators of Futbol: Arte y passion declaring, “contemporary Mexico has three great phenomena: The Virgin of Guadalupe, drug trafficking and soccer.” Indeed, a diverse group of artists represent the game as an intrinsic part of their culture. Through painted soccer balls, Dr. Lakra combines several Mexican cultural traditions—soccer, the graphic arts, tattooing, the Day of the Dead holiday—to localize futbol with a distinct aesthetic. Likewise, printmaker Dewey Tafoya recalls the Mesoamerican origins of ball games like soccer, suggesting the continuity and significance of sport as a sociocultural spectacle. The football pitch recurs throughout Pablo Lopez Luz’s photographic “portrait” of the Mexican landscape, revealing the transformation of urban and natural spaces into sites of play and competition. The place of soccer in our mass consciousness extends beyond the ubiquity of soccer fields in Mexico, as Jonathan Hernandez utilizes newspaper clippings for collages about the game’s popularity, media saturation, and political agency. The nationalistic potential of futbol surfaces frequently in Mexican contemporary art, with Miguel Calderon creating a television broadcast of a fictional match where his home country defeats Brazil by an implausible scoreline. By airing this montage in São Paulo, Calderon challenges the pride Brazilians maintain in their country as well as his own fantasies about Mexican supremacy. His compatriot Gustavo Artigas explored the link between sports and national identity, staging a competition by basketball and soccer teams on the same court at the same time. That the basketball team came from San Diego and the soccer team was from Tijuana suggested how American and Mexican identities are associated with particular sports, and by synchronizing their contests, he demonstrates the fluidity of national identity and complications of immigration in these border towns. Where many Mexican artists link soccer to local and national identities, several Americans further associate the game with Latin American demographics, particularly within the context of immigration. Mark Bradford connects the sport to class stratification, utilizing soccer balls as emblems of immigrant culture and the persistence of local allegiances. By casting balls in bronze, Jeff Koons plays with advancements in sports technology but also the ways in which athletics affords social mobility. Conversely, Michael Ray Charles transforms the black panels of a ball into caricatures of racial minstrelsy, drawing awareness to the pervasive discrimination that mars the sport. The global implications of soccer motivated Julie Mehretu to trace human history through sport in her painted triptych Stadia. Suggesting that gatherings to contest football have replaced religion in the public consciousness, she represents the spectacle of such displays of nationalism and illustrates how athletics and stadia structure our social and political lives. Greg Colson’s recreation of the solar system furthers this idea, particularly with a soccer ball assuming the central position of the sun, around which other sports orbit. While these examples suggest the symbolic potency of the sport within each nation, Michael Shultis directly represented the footballing rivalry between Mexico and the United States. In his mixed media installation, The Flop (2014), consumer advertisements represent America’s global influence while a soccer goal morphs into a barbed wire fence reminiscent of those constructed to prevent illegal immigration. The connotations of this match are overt, particularly as one in a series of artworks depicting fictional matches between the United States and their global adversaries, including China and Iraq. As such, Shultis links patriotism and capitalist imperialism to America’s long quest for footballing relevance. As these examples suggest, today’s artists employ the iconographic potential of soccer to critically reflect upon national identity and its ramifications. A major vessel for nationhood, soccer enables Mexican and American artists to revisit their contentious past and assert cultural distinction in an age of globalization.
Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 2004
Este artículo presenta una crítica local del clientelismo en México, expresada en el lenguaje de jugar al fútbol y la forma de animar. Los miembros jóvenes y varones de un club de aficionados al fútbol, que apoyan a un equipo conocido por la juventud de sus jugadores, conceptualizan la durabilidad, la rigidez y la extensión del clientelismo a través de una analogía con la manera aburrida y cautelosa de jugar y animar que tienen los jugadores y aficionados de los equipos rivales. Los miembros del club aseguran que ellos y los jugadores de su equipo, a diferencia de la mayoría de los miembros de la sociedad mexicana, viven fuera de la influencia del clientelismo, puesto que aún no se han transformado en clientes gracias a su juventud. Su alternativa al clientelismo no es la democracia moderna o la racionalidad burocrática, sino más bien, un juego de fútbol, la animación u otra actividad inspirada en el ferviente amor y caracterizado por la espontaneidad, pasión y creatividad. Esta crítica local sirve como un recordatorio de un comentario social serio que no sigue la forma de una ideología política y que es encontrado en otros contextos, como por ejemplo, en el estadio de fútbol, frecuentemente no tenido en cuenta por los científicos sociales.
Mexico 1970: football and multiple forms of modern nation-building during the 1970 World Cup
Soccer & Society, 2020
ABSTRACT From 1940 onwards, Mexico experienced economic growth and appeared politically stable. For more than three decades, the Mexican Government tried to disseminate the achievements of the ‘Mexican miracle’ through cultural diplomacy. Sport was one of the many avenues used to present modernity and development. The 1968 Olympic Games and the 1970 World Cup were only two years apart; nevertheless, the people behind their organization and the strategies they implemented were different. The 1968 Olympic Games was an ambitious governmental project to reshape the image of Mexico. In contrast, the 1970 World Cup displayed a different image of modernity. The organizers used television broadcasts to sell football both domestically and abroad. The organizers’ control over professional football and television broadcasting in Mexico influenced the changes that resulted from the World Cup. The study of the people and ideas behind Mexico ’70 is relevant to understanding the development of the Mexican television complex and its repercussions on the public sphere, while it also sheds light on how local networks contribute to the commercialization and commodification of football.