Sports Culture in Latin American History ed. by David M.K. Sheinin (review)

Scholars of Latin America have increasingly turned their attention to sports over the last two decades. Despite the recent proliferation of scholarship on this topic, edited collections have been few and uneven at best. Sports Culture in Latin American History is a welcome addition to Latin American cultural studies and the subfield of sports history. Edited by David Sheinin, this collection showcases an impressive array of scholarship that employs new and traditional sources to highlight the importance of athletes, who often found themselves at the intersection of discussions about race, gender, nation, civic identity, and public space.

In the first chapters, contributions from Michael Donoghue and Ken Lehman highlight the role of combat sports in the articulation of an “authentic” national culture. Donoghue examines the life of Panamanian boxing legend Roberto Durán, whose working-class brand of machismo and defiant attitude towards American imperialism, suited the nationalist project of the military government of Omar Torrijos in the 1970s. Durán’s turbulent life and career arc provide Donoghue with the opportunity to add a new wrinkle to literature on “muscular” politics and national identity, which he describes as “redemptive machismo.” Unfortunately, Donoghue spends so much time linking Durán to Torrijos’ anti-American populism that he ultimately devalues the redemptive second chapter of Durán’s boxing career and his significance during the dictatorship of Manuel Noriega in the 1980s. Lehman’s chapter alludes to the connection between athletes and muscular populism in Evo Morales’ Bolivia, but it does so without limiting athletes to their roles as symbols of state power and discourse. Instead, he situates cholo (predominantly indigenous or mestizo) culture and practices by examining the stories of female wrestlers. These transgressive luchadoras were at the center of contested notions of gender, ethnicity, national identity, and modernity. Their desire to fight in public spectacles upended family dynamics, redefined ideas about femininity, and provided a more positive—even celebratory—image of the cholo/chola. In highlighting the agency of these wrestlers in polleras (knee-length skirts), this chapter offers readers a nuanced and complex analysis of the ways in which athletes redefined bolivianidad.

Carolyne Ryan Larson’s impressive chapter on indigenous physicality in late nineteenth-century Argentina shifts the focus to the human body. Her research includes a variety of materials rarely seen in sports scholarship, including travel accounts, artistic representations, and anthropological studies from Argentine scholars and foreign adventurers. In these sources, bodies of indigenous peoples like the Tehuelche and Ranquel not only served as objects of scientific observation, but they also became symbols of an authentic Argentine physicality, particularly for their mastery of horse riding in the rugged southern regions of Argentina. By paying attention to the ways in which scholars and foreigners inject cultural and symbolic meanings to indigenous groups, Larson ably demonstrates how the human body serves as contested terrain for debates concerning modernity and tradition, civility and barbarism, and difference and exclusion.

The middle portion of the book examines civic life and public space. Joshua Hotaka Roth and Raanan Rein focus on the disparate ways that sports facilitated social integration among Japanese and Jewish immigrants in São Paolo and Buenos Aires, respectively. Whereas Japanese paulistas imported into Brazil the game of gateball as a cultural link to their homeland, Jewish porteños participated in soccer and other local sports as a means toward social assimilation and acceptance. Despite these differences, both sports provided immigrant groups with the opportunity to dispel their stereotyped reputation as meek, frail, and erudite—more interested in academics than athletic competition. These chapters reveal the ways that immigrants’ pursuit of respectability and acceptance reshaped their host cities. Ageeth Sluis’ exploration of the female form during the Art Deco period of the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico City is a fascinating, yet odd, contribution to this section on civic life. Similar to the transgressive Bolivian luchadoras, the Art Deco movement inspired Mexican women to experiment with androgynous...