La cancha peronista

Despite the importance of football in Argentine culture, until the last few years the writing of its history has been done by journalists and popular writers. More recently a wave of scholars, sociologists, historians, and others have written serious studies of football that have tied the game to larger issues in society: images of masculinity, nationalism, sense of neighborhood, and politics, among others. Many have been very good and have helped us understand the impact of football on Argentine society. The book under review is a collective work that was produced by some of the pioneer authors in this literature. The work is a product of the authors' realization in 2012 that despite the progress made in the study of football, little serious work had been done on the impact of the first Perón era (1946–1955), when football had already become by far Argentina's most important sport, and on football's sponsoring clubs, which played crucial roles in society. Argentine football teams are a product of clubs that are civic associations, and by 1945 many clubs had thousands of members, to whom they offered opportunities for participation in sports and social and educational activities.This work takes an important first step in examining the Peronist regime's impact on football clubs and the game itself. The mythological version of the regime had it having an increased interest in sports in general, especially football, and favoring certain teams and punishing those that were not particularly supportive of the government. Not surprisingly, the studies in this book have taken this vision and made it much more complex and nuanced. It becomes clear that, as shown in recent studies of other sectors of Peronist society, such as labor unions, the government took existing tendencies and pushed them further than before. Juan Perón and some of his ministers seemed genuinely interested in sports and well aware of their cultural and political importance. Loans were made to a number of different clubs, but that had begun in the 1930s, and while clubs frequently glorified members of the regime, again this was something that had begun on a much smaller scale earlier. It is not at all clear that clubs were rewarded or punished based on support for the regime, and the entities did retain some autonomy.The book is divided into an introduction and two sections. The first deals with sports in general and football during the first Peronist government. There are chapters on the regime's attitudes toward sports, on a Peronist sports magazine, on the famous football players' strike of 1948 and the government's role therein, and on the growth of membership in football clubs. The second part looks at nine clubs in Greater Buenos Aires and La Plata, and there is an additional chapter on football in Córdoba. Like all collective works, some chapters are better than others. A few are limited by relying on scarce sourcing, whether due to inability to locate materials or perhaps for other reasons. The better articles put the Perón era in the perspective of the previous decade, in which there was growing government interest in the clubs.The chapters puncture a number of key stereotypes. Although explicitly the comparison is not made between Boca Juniors and River Plate, the chapters on these, the two most important clubs, make clear that, regardless of the stereotype that fans of the former come from the lower socioeconomic sectors and fans of the latter from those that are better off, there was little difference between the clubs in their relationship with the regime. Both received aid from the government (as they had during the 1930s), and both responded to or encouraged this aid by embracing the regime. Also it is clear from two other chapters that the belief that the regime especially favored some clubs and punished others is more legend than truth. The club that was supposedly the most favored—Racing, based in the industrial suburb of Avellaneda—was treated not that differently from most of the other big clubs. Racing had long had special relations with politicians. The small club Talleres, in neighboring Remedios de Escalada, was supposedly punished for being a bastion of socialism. However, after an examination of its internal politics, its problems, although very serious, seem to have had more to do with its own failings.This book is an important first step in examining the Perón regime's impact on a key aspect of the society. What its authors have done quite successfully is look at both the larger picture and the club level. It is only at the level of the club that one can judge how much changed and in what manner. A great deal of work remains to be done, but we now have moved well beyond mythology toward a clearer vision of what changed during the Perón regime

Football · Government (linguistics) · Masculinity · Media studies · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Product (mathematics) · Public relations · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Physical Education and Sports Studies · Sports and Physical Education Studies

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