In an age of mass communications, mass marketing, and what an
Englishman might describe as the “massive” surge
in worldwide interest in “his” nation’s game
(Hornby 21-24), it is not just football (a.k.a., soccer) that
has gone global. Our combined conception of the nation-state
and hence national identity have followed suit, as developments
within the academy over the last decade would confirm. During
that time, interdisciplinary humanities and social science scholarship
in and of the United States proper has experienced a decisive
shift away from self-contained study of “America” toward
what scholar John Carlos Rowe terms a “New American Studies.” In
this “new” view, geopolitical borders generally – but
those of the United States in particular – have been translated
into permeable “contact zones” where two-way exchange
between proximal native and non-native cultures has achieved
the kind of normative status to which fans of the most international
of games long since have adapted (Rowe 51-64).
My claim is that the two trends – world football’s
global growth, and Americans’ deepening cross-cultural
awareness – are mutually reinforcing. On the one hand,
the New American Studies’ ascendance has been synchronous
with football at last finding a U.S. niche. On the other hand,
the close overlap between them suggests a relational co-dependence
that warrants our attention. I do not wish in what follows simply
to repeat that soccer has come to the United States to stay.
Instead, I seek to bring to current discussions of American Studies
as a field, America as a post-national nation, and popular culture
as manifested through sport what Brazilians call the jogo
bonito. Evidence suggests that “the
beautiful game” has impacted
the United States’ sense of itself in relation to its neighbors – intensifying,
if not initiating, the very border-crossing mentality that now
defines American cultural studies. Football, in other words,
not only has arrived on these shores; it has redrawn America’s
boundaries and so reconfigured the regional meaning of “border."
***
Notwithstanding the claims of football’s global reach,
commentary on its popularity in the West has been sporadic. To
cite but several examples of the sport’s hemispheric acceptance,
consider that the U.S. national squad now has qualified for four
consecutive World Cups, football’s quadrennial showcase
tournament; that “Soccer Moms” have altered the country’s
demographic landscape; and that Major League Soccer (MLS), the
nation’s top-flight league for professionals, celebrated
in 2005 its tenth anniversary with the addition of two expansion
franchises. The foreign import once called soccer today resides
somewhere not far from Main Street, and close to the U.S. mainstream.
In the midst of this rezoning, players and spectators on and
off the pitch have confirmed in the arena of sport that aforementioned “New
American” paradigm that today permeates university campuses
as much as it does contemporary media coverage of football. We
might begin at the level of language to test this assertion,
with the following observation: even as an increasingly common
phrase like “the Americas” has begun to collapse
the semantic distinction between the North, South, and Central
components of the shared longitudinal land mass that is “America,” football
north of the Rio Grande, and south of Canada’s Hudson Bay,
has become fútbol among savvy regional (and regionally
savvy) enthusiasts. Thus, we now find little hint of irony when
non-Latinos roll the Latinate expression for football off their
tongues; rather, with one loaded vocal gesture, fútbol speakers pay what seems to be genuine, if perhaps unwitting,
homage to the fervor and flair with which Latin Americans historically
have celebrated the game during the last century. Witness the
gleefully trilled r’s that broadcasters in Fox Sports’ Toronto
office indulge in newscast coverage of Argentina’s two-legged
apertura (opening) and clausura (closing) football seasons as
but one instance of this phenomenon. As our geographic senses
have shifted, so, too, has the linguistic register with which
we articulate the collective cultural expression that is soccer.
More important is the cognate translation whereby “America” subtly
has become the Spanish-inflected América in close correspondence
with football’s growing U.S. popularity – a result,
I want to suggest, not only of the sport’s having bridged
what once seemed an insurmountable, transatlantic football gap
with Europe, but also of its having achieved of late such widespread
favor either side of the equator. For, if the enhanced currency
of an expression like fútbol reveals a growing cosmopolitan
appreciation for the game, then the phrase fútbol América only highlights through verbal juxtaposition what today exists
as geopolitical, economic, and cultural fact: porous U.S. borders,
hemispheric free trade, and Spanish-speaking Republicans all
metonymically suggest a cross-continental consciousness whereby
the West figures less as an organization of “American” states
and more as an array of borders that constitute consummate “contact
zones” as posited by adherents to the “new” American
Studies. What one scholar calls “tomorrow’s transnational
megaregion” has dawned in the form of fútbol (Hise
547).
This is more than a question of metaphor. What’s
at stake in this state of affairs is the autonomy, which is to
say the
integrity, of nation-statehood. When sport directs fans’ attention
outside their respective national spheres – when U.S. and
Canadian fans can manifest multi-lingually their emotional investment
in a game whose heritage and appeal owe so large a debt to Latin
America (Houston 333-63; Moctezuma 88-95) – then “contact’” across
the “zone” of the Americas has moved well beyond
hypothesis. From the vantage of where we stand in the West, fútbol
América already has begun to erode national (and nationalist)
distinctions which otherwise might inhibit meaningful American
multiculturalism. No doubt fierce football rivalries continue
to serve as reminders of the differences and divides that persist
between separate states (Elias 23), and in this respect must
qualify talk of some seamless, aggregate entity – América – as
if it were or ever could be a fully realized absolute. But once
U.S. society has effected through soccer what U.S. diplomacy
has hardly ventured – which is to say, a sense among civilians
that the United States is but a part of a greater American whole – then
surely a new plateau has been reached in society and sport alike.
***
We might describe the view from these heights
as follows. The place is Frisco, Texas, about a day’s drive
from the U.S.-Mexico border. The time is mid-afternoon on a sunny
Sunday, the thirteenth
day of November 2005. Gathered together at Major League Soccer’s
newest field, the soccer-specific Pizza Hut Park of suburban
Dallas, are two sides squaring off in the league’s annual
winner-take-all championship final. On the surface, it is a match
not like any other, save for an impressive attendance of over
21,000. Beneath that surface, the 2005 MLS Cup Final is an Américan
moment that reveals those “contact zones” which cross-culturally
connect the western hemisphere.
Figure
1
We only need consider the two teams involved for a glimpse of
zonal American “contact” in action. The first is
the New England Revolution, based in that cradle of the U.S.
nation known as Massachusetts: the “New England” of
their name, mixed with the red, white, and blue color scheme
of their official kits (see figure 1), creates a parochial feel
perhaps ill-suited for the global game; the “Revolution” to
which their name refers, however, is by contrast explosively
expansive, recalling as it does a “shot” heard not
only “‘round the world” but that was heeded,
hemispherically, by neighboring freedom-fighters engaged in Latin
America’s nineteenth-century colonial independence movements.
Facing New England’s Revolution are the Los Angeles Galaxy:
the name this time defies any hint of the microcosmic, connoting
instead a self-titled self-importance perhaps justified by the
club’s past success. Theirs is an aggressive team spirit
that, if wrapped in their opponents’ stars and stripes,
might be interpreted as a kind of cultural imperialism. The organic,
earth-tone green and yellow of their jerseys nevertheless soften
the Galaxy’s Big Bang threat (see figure 2), without quite
alleviating the mean egotism of their “galactic” posture;
these team colors suggest indigenous contentment as much as they
wave flags of conquest.
Figure
2
Quiet containment, volatile combustibility: such is the paradox
that characterizes not only each side’s stance heading
into this contest, but that informs the essence of competitive
sport as well as a “new” America heralded by this
single game. Both teams expect to win; and, although their meeting
yields a closely fought affair, players from each camp display
behavior that remains within bounds established by an agreed-upon
set of rules. By the same token, a similarly tense, yet seldom
wholly consensual, co-existence has proved to be the distinguishing
feature of the América that this match figures. America,
that is to say, might be transnationally whole in the New Americanist
scheme of things. The América that emerges in the 2005
MLS championship, however, and in the daily transactions that
comprise life in the hemispheric West, involves a constant process
of cross-cultural compromise that makes the oxymoronic reluctant
belligerence of the Revolution and Galaxy seem tame by comparison.
At once disarmingly passive and anxiously unsettled, our athletes,
no less than an América that by nature remains under continual
zonal contestation, enact all the determined pushing, shoving,
and, in this case, kicking that go into any competitive match.
But whereas Major League Soccer on this occasion, and many more
besides, has reproduced a kind of borderline balancing act appropriate
to the “fair play” sanctioned on global sport’s
touchline, it has replicated at the same time the complex socio-cultural
process that is “contact.” The rules of the former
do not apply to the latter, and outcomes in the one are seldom
as predictable as they are in the other. Indeed, since “contact” precludes
closure, América as such may remain in a perpetual
state of becoming.
***
Our team rosters, meanwhile, have achieved
a
multi-ethnicity fitting for a global game, and so underscore
the hemispheric
implications of border crossing (Halpin). The starting squads
for each of the League’s 2005 Cup finalists provide a glimpse
of the eventual “winners” and “losers” in
a fast-diversifying region. Of New England’s starting eleven,
only the name Daniel Hernandez suggests something other than
northeastern Anglo-centrism. Surnames like Parkhurst, Dempsey,
and Twellmann better represent the side that eventually goes
down to defeat. Los Angeles, for its part, and in keeping with
its accepted designation as the “Border City” (Hise
547), by contrast has assembled a team with strong ties to latitudes
south. At the sound of the starting whistle, the Galaxy’s
lineup includes the Brazilian-born Paulo Nagamura, in addition
to U.S.-born players of Latin American descent like Pasadena’s
Peter Vagenas and L.A.’s own star striker Herculez Gomez.
Then there is the substitute’s bench. Coming on as an eleventh-minute
replacement is another native Brazilian, Ednaldo da Conceicao,
while Guatemalan midfielder Guillermo “Pando” Ramirez
makes his fateful entry just past the hour mark. It is Ramirez’s
right-footed shot in the seventeenth-minute of extra time that
breaks a goalless stalemate, clinching the win for Los Angeles.
No “shot heard ‘round the world,” Pando’s
breakthrough did remind ABC Sport’s television audience
of the obvious: despite being based in the United States, Major
League Soccer derives much of its quality, and not a few of its
charms, from a Caribo-American network of players, coaches, and
staff. The fact that the Galaxy did not even field substitutes
Pablo Chinchilla (Costa Rica) and Marcelo Saragosa (Brazil) in
the Cup Final speaks volumes as to the ethnic depth at Los Angeles’ disposal.
That the League claims fully half its fan base as Latino is but
emblematic of the inter-American context within which MLS, like
its American Studies cousin, increasingly functions.
And yet Major League Soccer has instituted such tight controls
over players’ place of origin as to risk opposing contact
in practice. Of the twenty-eight players allowed teams under
MLS regulations for game day selection, only four can be senior
internationals, whom the league classifies as “non-domestic” (The
Official Site). In order to qualify as “domestic,” a
player must be a U.S. citizen, hold a green card as a permanent
resident, or else have been granted refugee or asylum status
by the federal government. Los Angeles’ Galaxy demonstrated
relative restraint when it fielded but three internationals on
the day of its Cup victory. The question is whether the League
will maintain a similar sense of proportion. If stretched to
their conservative limits, current MLS guidelines on player profiles
could result in an excessive ethnic vigilance whereby “Pando” Ramirez’s
match-winning exploits come to mean less than the fine print
on his passport. If casually relaxed, they could replicate on
team rosters a kind of unmonitored migratory traffic. Neither
prospect seems likely, or desirable. More significant is how
one sport’s attempts at measuring “Americanness” alter
the complexion of transnationalism.
Parallel developments across the Atlantic suggest a precedent.
In its 1996 Bosman ruling, the European Court of Justice overturned
a quota system that until then had prevented European clubs from
at once fielding more than three foreign and two foreign “assimilated” players.
Post-Bosman, clubs may field as many foreign players from other
European Union states as they wish, although restrictions on
the number of players from outside the E.U. remain. U.S. support
for comparable restrictions in the States has earned it good
standing with the sport’s Zurich-based world governing
body, the Fédération Internationale de Football
Association, or FIFA. A certain irony attends compliance, however.
Whereas Bosman empowers teams from Europe’s Union to draw
without limit from a pool of continental and British talent,
and thereby capitalize on a nascent European-wide identity, quasi-Bosman
MLS rules ensure that U.S. club teams drink but sparingly from
their own regional wellspring of footballers. América as New Americanists understand the term simply has not been written
into Major League Soccer’s bylaws. The end result is this:
L.A.’s Galaxy, or even an ethnically challenged Revolution,
must bypass players from neighboring nation-states, since they
count locally as “foreign” in a way that unionized
Europeans do not among their member nations. MLS endures despite
thus being penalized. But it seems that insular notions of country
here lag behind progressive conceptions of culture.
Recognizing its dilemma, MLS has discovered a way to turn multicultural
without compromising its policies. Quite simply, Major League
Soccer has crossed the border. Of the two expansion franchises
to appear in the League for the 2005 season, neither Los Angeles’ Club
Deportivo Chivas USA nor Real Salt Lake has enjoyed score-sheet
success. At the same time, Chivas – or “Goats,” as
the name translates from Spanish – typifies the ethnic
direction in which MLS now is headed. With an official logo that
reads “Adiós Soccer. El Fútbol Está Aquí" (“Good-bye
Soccer. Football is Here.”), Chivas has emerged as L.A.’s “other” team
in more ways than one. Although restricted like all MLS sides
to only four internationals, Chivas embraces a Mexican American
identity suitable to its Los Angeles origins (Sánchez
13); likewise, its overt ethnic politics announces the arrival
of an Américan culture in the West whose Latin
influence extends beyond football. If, as filmmaker Tim O’Mahoney
states, the league “wasn’t thinking through the ethnic
question early on” (qtd. in Davis 10), it is now.
Aficionados will recognize the “Goats” as the legendary
Guadalajara side from Mexico’s Primera Liga, or
First Division. Chivas’ being La Liga’s best-supported team stems
in part from its principled policy of fielding only Mexican nationals – a
rarity in an age of global sport, and at a time when domestic
competitors have not hesitated to sign athletes from Central
and South America. Such are Chivas’ native claims that
Mexico City-based sports columnist Ricardo Castillo Mireles deems
them Mexico’s “second national team.” “There
is,” he adds, “nothing more Mexican than Chivas” (Davis
11).
But there is Chivas USA, which has redefined MLS much
as football is realigning the Americas. Owned, like its parent
team, by Mexican
millionaire Jorge Vergara, Chivas USA is no less a cultural
landmark for its being a clever financial venture. Vergara was
well aware
of MLS in 2002, when he assumed control of the Chivas original.
But he thought league efforts to date at generating interest
among Mexican fútbol fans ineffective. More important,
he felt that U.S. soccer as expressed through MLS lacked Latin
American football’s visceral appeal. Invoking Chivas’ famed
red-and-white-striped jerseys – which feature enough blue
trim to symbolically recall Mexico’s official designation,
Estados Unidos Mexicanos, or “United States of Mexico” (see
figure 3) – Vergara states, “They [MLS] needed the
shirt – the
colors, the tradition, the passion” (Davis 11; Stevenson
A11). So for its inaugural campaign of 2005, Chivas USA received
the first of the football assets stipulated by Vergara: the Guadalajara
club donated both its “colors” and team logo to the
cause. Also forthcoming was veteran midfielder Ramón Ramírez,
a former star player at Chivas Guadalajara and a mainstay for
the Mexican national side over the previous decade. In fact,
alongside Ramírez and several other first-choice Mexican
nationals, Chivas USA has assembled a squad whose roster reads
as the ethnic reverse of New England’s, and the epitome
of what the Galaxy’s could become. Hispanic names of California
locals predominate, with even the Anglophonic Martins (Brazil)
and Hendrickson (St. Vincent, Caribbean) lending a promiscuous
subtext. To appreciate Chivas’ feat of expansion is to
comprehend an América “united” not
only through sport with Mexico, but that finds itself leagued
by a global
game whose hemispheric status as a lingua franca revises
the very idea of region.
Figure
3
Chivas USA has its detractors. Vergara’s Mexicans-only
hiring policy across the border – and a mostly Mexican
approach to manning his MLS side – strikes many as an ideological
(and tautological) assertion of Mexico’s independence.
Vergara, for his part, has courted controversy. Indeed, Chivas
USA President Ivas Sisniega proudly announces that his owner’s
overriding concern is to counter the perception up north that
Mexicans are “second-rate citizens” (Davis 11). And
Vergara himself has disrupted league and locals alike by casting
L.A. rivals the Galaxy as the ethnic “whites” they
are not. Vergara describes the situation this way: “It’s
the Latins versus the Gringos. And we’re going to win” (Davis
29). Given the Galaxy’s sizeable Latino contingent, team
general manager Doug Hamilton resents Vergara’s “gringo” charge
(Martinez B13). At the same time, a growing chorus of MLS spectators
has greeted Vergara’s public relations gambit with a reciprocal
charge. Chivas USA’s heavily Mexican roster has prompted
heated online chat room discussion of the “Mexicanization
of MLS” (Connolly).
Students of American popular cultural studies might question
whether Chivas USA’s ethnic exclusiveness is at odds with
the catholicity that is “contact.” Some take the
view that “loyalty
to soccer” in general can be a way for “immigrants” to “resist
assimilation into American culture” (Davis 10). Such an
opinion rests upon a threefold assumption. One is sociological:
that ethnicity is synonymous with difference. The second pertains
to soccer, and inheres in the belief that, as J. MacClancey summarizes,
sports function as “vehicles of identity” which “provide
people with a sense of…classifying themselves, and others,…latitudinally
and hierarchically.” Assumption three returns us to our
starting point, the cultural geography of the Americas. The “American
culture” rejected by both the immigrant resistance theorists
and Vergara’s ethnic rhetoric is no less real for its being
based in a subjective response of opposition. Yet it functions
oppositionally at all – “latitudinally” and “hierarchically,” in
MacClancey’s formulation – because of a lingering
resistance to understanding the Américas on longitudinal
terms. As MacClancey again suggests, ethnicity and sport might
reduce to difference in theory, but they need not work that way
in practice (MacClancey 1-20). What I have styled Fútbol
América is today a testing ground for Americans across
the hemispheric West to engender a shared sense of culture. Under
the right conditions, Chivas could bring Américans together,
rather than keep a minority of MLS supporters apart.
***
Such conditions are in place now, and already
have forged through football an inter-regional identity whose
common denominator
is América. We must look no further than Mexico City for
an illustration of the contemporary western nation-state’s
having succumbed to sport. There, under the auspices of La
Liga’s elite Club América, fútbol has demonstrated such
practical disregard for self-contained statehood as to turn cross-cultural
contact into a rule of the game.
One nominal “Club” has re-discovered, or simply reasserted,
in its Américan modifier the hemispheric sensibility
that underwrites a comparative approach to popular culture. Club
América
is, to begin, cosmopolitan in a way that arch-rival Deportivo
Chivas is not; La Liga’s wealthiest team spurns
the Guadalajarans’ pro-Mexico
policy, spending freely to obtain its allowance of international
standouts. It also plays home matches at a venue conspicuous
and capacious enough for an entire continent, maybe two: resting
at an elevation of 7300-feet above sea level. América’s
Estadio Azteca lends the side a bird’s-eye view of
a holistic West; seating 105,000, Azteca truly suits an unabashedly ambitious
club that plies its trade in the world’s largest city.
But it is the telling iconography of the team’s logo and
mascot that best suggests the ramifications of fútbol
América for New Americanists. The former presents us with
a familiar image of North, South, and Central America, drawn
in a color we might call continental blue. Paneled quadrants,
meanwhile, again in blue, appear against a gold backdrop, reminiscent
at once of the stitching on a football and the contours of a
globe. A capital red “C A,” for Club América,
flanks the territorial center, and announces in the club’s
crest an unmistakably hemispheric agenda. América visually
appears to spread outward in concentric circles from its Mexican
epicenter. The message is simple, if unsettling: Club success
spells inexorable Américanization for all lands within
contiguous footballing distance of the side’s home turf.
All America must and will be one in its Américanness.
No less provocative is the team animal mascot. The imagery for
football’s reworking the meaning of region takes corporeal
form in the cartoonish figure of Las Águilas, or “The
Eagles.” Club América makes non-nationalist use
of a U.S. icon when it invites fans everywhere to join the team’s
climb to heights worthy of Azteca. The club website even grants
its brown-feathered Águilita, or “Little Eagle,” powers
of speech, which he employs with border-collapsing effect: “Escribe
aquí tu correo electrónico,” he says, “y
recibirás información exclusiva de tu equipo favorito.
Sí eres Águila de corazón, intégrate
a la comunidad americanista” (Club América, Sitio
Oficial). Translation: “Enter your email address here and
receive information exclusive to your favorite team. If you are
an eagle at heart, join the Americanist community.” Team “information” might
be “exclusive.” In contradistinction with Chivas
USA, however, Club América has made an inclusiveness exclusive
to the Américas its aim by turning region itself into
an occasion for “community.” Far more bold than bald
is this eagle.
***
Fútbol América entails
more than one club. The list of instances of its inter-hemispheric
impact
is as evocative
as it is long. At the club level, professional leagues in both
Brazil and Colombia feature a club América of their own,
while Mexico’s América is considering an MLS expansion
franchise in Houston similar to Chivas’ in L.A. Consider,
too, that the prestigious Libertadores Cup – an annual
tournament featuring the top professional teams from South America – in
recent years has allowed non-continental Mexican sides to compete.
Libertadores itself, or “Liberators,” refers to the
leaders of Latin American revolutions who secured independence
from Spain. It seems of no little interest, then, that talks
continue over whether to include MLS teams in the tournament
as well: we face the intriguing prospect of watching a side like
New England’s Revolution square off against Latin teams
that precede them in football provenance, follow them (chronologically,
at least) in politics, and share with them a common cultural
geography.
International football at the regional level has followed a like
trajectory. Notwithstanding sport’s potential for sustaining
a belief in fundamental cultural “difference” (Crolley
and Hand 157-58), football as a cultural practice can serve an
alternate purpose. It can build and sustain community where there
was none before, or else strengthen what might have been tenuous
at best (MacClancey 9). To take a timely example, football’s
World Cup competition draws at least as much of its inspiration
from the tangible regional affiliations that qualification entails
as it does from any faith in an Olympic-style human collective.
Case in point: like all would-be participants, the United States
must qualify for the “Final,” global stage of football’s
premier event by first working its way through a round-robin
tournament featuring various regional teams. U.S. competition
includes countries that fall under the umbrella of CONCACAF (Confederation
of North, Central American and Caribbean Football Association).
Accordingly, U.S. players have far more “contact” with
opponents from Trinidad and Tobago, say, or rivals Mexico, Costa
Rica, and Canada, than they do with World Cup regulars like England,
South Korea, or France. Conditioned, then, to prioritize region
over world, western footballers could expect to internalize a
unified view of América instilled in them by their playing
experience.
The semi-hemispheric Copa América promises much the same.
Played every three years, and alternating with World Cup summers,
the so-called Copa has accomplished for the West a regional commonweal
not unlike that sought by its planetary counterpart. Perhaps
inevitably, organizers of the “American Cup” admitted
teams outside South America for the first time in 1999, when
Mexico and Costa Rica participated. The United States has yet
to be invited, but many expect U.S. involvement at the next staging
in 2008. Here sport looks poised to consolidate, not to separate.
It is no more than FIFA could have expected. After the Second
World War, it had responded to the increasing number of nation-states
applying for admittance by urging the regionalization, and thus
de-centralization, of its own administrative functions. That
meant limiting the role of mighty Europe within football’s
power structures; it meant as well, and not without another touch
of irony, frequent European complaints from the 1970s forward
that newly enfranchised Latin American nations were wielding
cabalistic control of the organization. We hear similar complaints
today against emerging football nations (Sugden et al. 11-13),
so it seems only proper that talk of Football Africa and
Asia has become common. If Pacific Rim Football, or Football
Arabia, is on the bill for tomorrow, it is Fútbol América
making headlines today.
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