Sports in South America: A History, Matthew Brown, 2023, Yale University Press
Sporting history makes much of winners and losers in the endless human endeavour to excel, yet the biggest winners of all have been neither competitors nor spectators—but nation-states.
There is an intimate relationship between the sporting culture we take as a natural feature of the social landscape and the emergence of national identities and statebuilding in a fateful synergy as a defining feature of modernity.
Nowhere is this exemplified better than in South America, where during the 19th century, as nascent states tried to throw off the legacies of colonialism, sport of all kinds became a performative language in which to reinvent themselves.
This theme is the beating heart of Matthew Brown’s eloquent history of sport in the continent between the latter part of the century and the 1930s, a critical period in nation-building in which the emergence of sporting prowess played a key role.
As Brown notes, that is because sport offered resources for the development of narratives that give form to the nation. A large number of scholars have made reference to the relationship in particular between football—soccer to our American peers—and nationalism, with Brown quoting Eric Hobsbawm, “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.”
Sport, quite simply, provides us with a powerful lens into the national imaginary. The author writes: “The histories of sports provide us with new understandings of empires, cultures, ideologies, technologies, and nationalisms.”
Above all, sport offered elites a tool with which to achieve what they craved most in a period in which racism was shaping social thought: civilisation based upon the model of white European societies that could defeat the barbarism of the indigenous hinterland.
This “civilising” role provided a means to induce fellow elites and their subordinates to move away from violent instability towards a controlled, consensual condition based upon rules.
Eugenicist ideologies often flavoured these perspectives as policies of immigration bringing white Europeans to South America combined with internal military campaigns against indigenous communities.
Of particular relevance was the quality possessed by football to demonstrate the republican aspirations upon which young nation-states were organised in rejection of the colonial yoke.
These countries were seeking to reimagine themselves in the vocabulary of equality, nationhood, and anti-imperialism, and a team of players had the capacity to project togetherness, strength, skill, and control rather than the legacies of inequality around class, race and gender that divided the continent’s societies.
Moreover, for these generally weak republics looking to assert themselves in an international system, sport offered opportunities for the underdogs that could not be found in other arenas of global competition.
As Brown notes, the fastest, biggest, strongest, smartest, and richest do not always win in football, complementing the designs of authorities in nations that were small, poor and diverse compared to European rivals.
He quotes the historian Brenda Elsey: “On the pitch, unlike in the global economy, South Americans have beaten the industrialised North at its own game.”
The best example of that was in 1930 when the first football World Cup, held in Montevideo was won by the home side Uruguay. The link with politics was emphatic: the country was chosen to host this inaugural event because it was celebrating the centenary of its first constitution.
While football has dominated the South American sporting story—the region is arguably the most soccer-mad place on the planet—that is only because of the founding status cherished by the British in its evolution, a fascination born of the role played by England and Scotland in establishing the game on the continent.
But as Brownpoints out, association football’s popularity fed on preexisting sporting cultures that have been forgotten or ignored, and his book goes beyond the relatively well-documented history of this particular game to other sports where the British “origin myth” can be challenged.
That is not to diminish the outsize role played by pioneers from or connected to Britain in the development of both football and sport more generally in the continent, especially in the Southern Cone, but it is to set the historical record straight and move the dial away from places where the low profile of football did not imply that these societies were somehow failing or absent from the history of sports.
In the author’s own words, he has taken off “the soccer-tinted glasses” in order to explore the role in history of other sports—from bullfighting to horse racing or indigenous ball games—beyond the 20th century’s hegemonic form of popular culture in South America. By this reading, many of the pioneers were not British but Dutch, German, Italian, North American or local citizens themselves.
Brown is especially keen to determine the role of sports—what they were for—and the tensions over the purposes assigned to it, in an effort to explain why some games prospered in South America and others did not. This effort is even more ambitious, aiming to strip away Eurocentric assumptions in this field of scholarship. His aim, is ultimately, decolonial.
As a result, the author turns his attention also to games played on the margins of society by indigenous peoples and slave-descended Afro-Latin Americans, which have been discounted in the corpus because they lacked written codes and rules.
He also examines sports predicated on violence against animals enjoyed by Iberian colonisers, such as cockfighting and bullfighting, which were also unfavourably compared with “civilised” counterparts.
Studying sports among indigenous and Afro-descended peoples is no simple task, given the scarcity of sources, but also how contemporaneous accounts may have been subversive ways of incorporating indigenous athleticism into elite nation-building projects.
Brown looks at target games like turmequé and tejo in highland Colombia and throwing and hitting ball games such as juego de sapo, pelotaris and frontón elsewhere. There is a rich record of the ball game similar to hockey called palitun (palin) still occasionally played by Mapuche in the south, a people that continue to suffer from the wounds of colonialism.
Sport could express transgressive possibilities, such as capoeira, brought to Brazil by slaves from West Africa in the 1700s, a hybrid between martial art, dance, and sport considered to be a representation of African rhythms and traditions.
Brown then considers sports in communities of European settlers and educational, club and commercial settings including more well known spectator sports of the colonial era, such as cock- and bullfighting and organised horse-racing. These often served a role as markers of these countries’ continuing relationship with their Iberian heritage.
Bullfighting in particular has had a long and often politicised profile in several holdout regions—it still takes place in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador, and within North America it has a love-hate relationship with Mexico, where it returned this year (2024) after a hiatus.
Brown examines the institutionalisation of sport in South America both through the establishment of clubs, leagues, and associations in the 1900s and the revolutionary expansion of public education—but also through the state’s increasing efforts to control an endeavour that could serve its purposes.
These phenomena were occurring as South American societies were integrating even further into the global economy, thereby internationalising and commercialising sport—one material sign of which was the rapid proliferation of stadia and other fixed venues.
In Part 2, the author unpicks the ends of sport in the emergent nation-states of South America, from beauty—the poetry of the body in motion—myths of resistance, endurance and even sacrifice, to the control of violence. Some sports like cycling, aviation and car racing tapped into ideas of modernity and technology, with organisers often requiring the use of radio to communicate over large distances.
Brown concludes his story with that 1930 World Cup which, he writes, “is the culmination of the intertwined histories of technologies, identities, politics, and sports traced in this book.”
The lessons he points to from the history of sport in South America include its distinct role in comparison to Europe and North America of transforming migrant and marginalised communities, by opening spaces for national citizenship to indigenous, mestizo and Black people.
He writes: “It is no exaggeration … to suggest that the achievements of these athletes and the status they gained provided a boost towards more inclusive and more populist politics.”
Above all, this story tells of the extraordinary growth of sporting cultures and how victories have come not from the intrinsic flair of South American people or a physical predispositions towards sport—but from the grip it gained over the national imaginary.
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Categories: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, South America, Uruguay, Venezuela