Soccer Players in the Re-Creation of Colombian History.

• In Event: Land, Memory and Justice in Colombia Part I: Regional Perspectives

Abstract

By tracing the biographies and sporting trajectories of professional soccer players, different histories of Colombian popular sectors, their regional and social heterogeneity, expressive struggles, and particular achievements appear. In this presentation, I describe the histories of specific players from Antioquia at three different moments (late 50s, late 60s, and mid-70s). I show that the role of soccer players changed during those years. Although some players continued to be accused of vagrancy, some of them became referents of cultural change. Through their sporting practice, soccer players contested and reconstituted the contents and values of their regional identity. I conclude by insisting on how the history of Colombian athletes can help us to understand facets of Colombian history usually ignored: histories of popular enjoyment and self-assertion, of class-racial alliance, of regional solidarity, of creative entanglement between cities and countryside (several players came from peasant families).

Author

• Ingrid Johanna Bolívar, University of Wisconsin