National Identity in the Sports Pages: Football and the Mass Media in 1920s Buenos Aires

The 1920s saw the emergence of a distinctive, new urban culture in the city of Buenos Aires. ¹ Although this culture did not extend to the borders of the nation, it was a national culture in the sense that it continually manufactured and reproduced images of Argentine national identity. Research conducted over the last two decades has greatly improved our understanding of this new culture. We know that it was, to a great extent, forged in the city's new, outlyingbarrios where manual workers lived side by side with skilled workers and members of the middle class. The relatively strong performance of the Argentine economy during these years made social mobility a more realistic aspiration for more people than it had ever been before. Partly as a result of this economic reality, the new barrio culture revealed a less militant attitude on the part of porteño workers, a trend visible as well in the significant decline in membership and effectiveness experienced by labor unions. ² But the new cultural milieu reflected more than just economic prosperity; it was intimately tied to the birth of a mass culture disseminated by radio, cinema, and tabloid. In particular, the 1920s witnessed the commodification and massification of tango and football, two popular cultural practices that were now transformed into quintessential representations of Argentinidad.

The consolidation of a distinctive, porteñoculture during this period is, in part, a story of immigrant assimilation. The first two decades of the twentieth century had seen the formation of a foreign-born working class whose alienation from electoral politics and from mainstream Argentine society facilitated the rise of a fiercely combative labor movement. In this context, Argentine elites, politicians, and intellectuals worried about the lack of a cohesive national identity. A strongly nationalist curriculum in the public schools was one solution to this problem; a legal and military crackdown on anarchist labor organizers was another. The issue took on even greater urgency after 1912, when the Ley Sáenz Peña inaugurated Argentina's first experiment with an open, competitive electoral system based on universal male suffrage. Itself a response to the crisis in national identity, the electoral reform necessitated the transformation of the children of immigrants into loyal, patriotic Argentine citizens. But what education, repression, and politics could achieve only in part, the mass culture of the 1920s seemed to accomplish far more thoroughly. By that time, a new generation of native-born children of immigrants had emerged, ready to embrace Argentine national identity, the dream of upward mobility, and the new mass cultural commodities.

Nevertheless, assimilation does not necessarily entail the construction of homogeneity or the erasure of social conflict. The children of immigrants became assimilated Argentines, but the nation they joined was hardly a harmonious community of equals. The mass culture embraced by this new generation produced versions of Argentine national identity that subordinated ethnic differences to national unity but often foregrounded divisions based on class. The capitalist logic of mass cultural production led to the commercialization of class solidarities, as producers sought to develop commodities that would appeal to masses of lower-class consumers. Yet elite and middle-class Argentines were often scandalized by the result. This article will explore these processes by examining the national images produced by media coverage of international football matches during the late 1920s. Although it is not surprising that Argentine football teams in international competition were often described as the representatives of national identity, these descriptions produced complicated and contradictory effects.

Scholarship on sports, and particularly football, in Latin America has often stressed its socially integrative function. In her classic study of Brazilian football, Janet Lever argues that the sport's "paradoxical ability to reinforce societal cleavages while transcending them makes [it] the perfect means of achieving a more perfect union between multiple groups." ³ According to Lever...