I recently went on a cinematic journey that took me from women’s soccer in Zanzibar to a failed stadium-and-entertainment complex in Buenos Aires.
My travel agency, so to speak, was the Football Scholars Forum. On February 23 it held an online discussion of two low-budget, high-return documentary films. (A recording of the event can be found here. Audio quality improves significantly around the 20 minute mark.)
“New Generation Queens” by Megan Shutzer tells the story of a Zanzibari women’s team. The documentary follows the compelling lives of younger and older women to cast light on the culture of the women’s game on the East African island, which is 99% Muslim. The 50-minute film alternates interviews with passionate players and determined organizers with footage of training sessions on rudimentary pitches. As an historian, I especially liked the remarkable 1988 footage of a Swedish team playing against a local team: the first official women’s game in Zanzibar! After the set up, the film’s main story line becomes the New Generation Queens’ journey to mainland Tanzania for a major tournament. Only the younger players participate in the Under-15 event, an important recruiting venue for the Tanzanian national side. Shaba “Messi” has a lot riding on this competition.
“Ciudad Deportiva—El Documental,” co-produced by Alex Galarza and four Argentine journalists, tells the story of Boca Juniors’ failed attempt in the 1960s and early 1970s to build a 150,000-seat stadium and recreational complex. The 45-minute documentary combines rich archival footage with still photography and interviews, to reconstruct the history of a monumental sports and urban development project. Focusing on Boca Juniors, one of the most popular clubs in the fútbol-mad city (cf. River Plate, Velez, San Lorenzo, among others), and their influential, albeit dodgy president, Alberto Armando, “Ciudad Deportiva” uncovers multiple and complex links between soccer, politics, and urban history in the mega-city of Buenos Aires.
The two enterprising film makers bring impressive academic credentials to their projects. Galarza has a PhD in Latin American History from Michigan State (where I had the distinct pleasure of serving on his doctoral committee), and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Haverford College. Shutzer has a BA from Harvard, did graduate work at Stanford, is fluent in kiSwahili and works in development.
At the Football Scholars Forum, the pair explained the genealogy of their (first) films, narrative choices and production techniques, as well as approaches to film distribution. Notably, Galarza and Shutzer emphasized their commitment to collaborating closely with local people in the filmmaking process. Both spent years doing fieldwork in Buenos Aires and Zanzibar: nurturing relationships, listening to their interlocutors, building trust, and, of course, playing soccer.
The numerous differences between the films make them intriguingly complementary. “Ciudad” is a historical tale told in Spanish by men (though a female narrator) linked to one of the world’s most famous football clubs. “New Generation Queens” is a contemporary story that centers Swahili women’s voices and experiences located at the distant periphery of the global game.
I highly recommend both films. In a glut of English-language soccer media content, these documentaries stand out for their originality and production value. I also intend to use them in my classroom to challenge stereotypes about Muslim African women and to raise questions about the politics of stadium development, past and present.
Tag: Buenos Aires
Image: Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.
Cross-posted from The Allrounder
[First published on November 13, 2014]
We don’t just watch sports – we speak and hear sports. To find out how language shapes our lives as fans, we asked some of our writers to tell us about the ways that people talk sports in English and their native languages. Kay Schiller hails from Munich, fellow historian Peter Alegi grew up in Rome, media scholar Markus Stauff lives in the Netherlands, and sociologist Pablo Alabarces teaches at the University of Buenos Aires. Together, they offer a Rosetta Stone of sports talk.
You’ve all lived for a time in English-speaking countries. Did anything in particular strike you – say, the first times you went to a stadium or watched a match on television – about the ways that native speakers of English talk about their sports?
Kay Schiller: I have lived in the UK since 1997. One of the things that struck me as a non-native speaker when going to see Chelsea, Spurs, Liverpool, ManU, or, more recently, Blackburn Rovers was that I had a tremendously hard time understanding the terrace chants, despite being quite fluent in English. I suppose that this is similar to what English fans experience when they attend a Bundesliga match.
Thankfully, there are now websites that explain what you hear in the stadium. You can learn that Blackburn Rovers fans at Ewood Park have several profane chants for Burnley, such as “Burnley are s**t s**t s**t , they always gonna be s**t.” One major difference with Germany is that while this kind of folklore can be found in the supporters’ curves of stadia, you wouldn’t hear otherwise respectable-looking people participating in chants like these – or middle-aged ladies calling the referee a c***.
I’m not sure what this suggests about the different football cultures of England and Germany, or culture more generally, but I find it worthy of note. Perhaps it’s reassuring that even with all-seater stadia and the continuous jacking-up of gate prices in English football, some things do not change.
Peter Alegi: At venerable Fenway Park in Boston, sitting in the bleachers with my dad (obstinately wearing a Yankees cap), the usual chant we heard was: “Yankees suck!” At New Haven Coliseum, where my older brother and I followed minor league ice hockey, it was: “Shoot the puck!” At basketball and American football games, giant electronic scoreboards demanded chants of “Deeeeee-fe-nse!”
This was a world away from the Italian football stadiums and basketball arenas I grew up with.
What first struck me in the U.S. was a lack of spontaneity in the language of fans at the grounds. The PA announcer, the scoreboard, and recorded music directed the orality of the crowd. Maybe this was because of the corporate nature of American sports, with its top-down manufactured stadium experience that transforms fans into consumers. It’s also hard to chant and sing when spending so much time, money, and energy eating and drinking during games. In any case, the second thing that hit me about the U.S. context was the lack of creativity in the language. Much of the spoken word among fans, chants and commentary alike, seemed very direct and not terribly imaginative, a bit like the English language!
In Italy, our oral culture at the stadium was far more creative. I remember sitting in the stands listening to self-appointed bards who would rise to recite absorbing monologues in the vernacular (dialects are hugely important and richly diverse in Italy). These men (rarely were they women) explained the causes of our striker’s inexplicable impotence or the reasons for the referee’s situational ethics. The language was often metaphorical, indirect. The best insults were the ones delivered with a perfect balance of grit, humor, and linguistic dexterity. Even my intellectual Roman mother, with a PhD in Italian literature, relished such vulgar poetic performances (“vulgus” in Latin means ordinary people, after all). This creative genius came through in the songs we sang. Fans developed an art of crafting lyrics and combining them with a dizzying range of musical sources: classical (Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” was a favorite); operatic (Verdi, of course); patriotic compositions (“La Marseillaise”); marches (John Philip Sousa!); folk/traditional (“La Società dei Magnaccioni,” “O Sole Mio,” and “Auld Lang Syne”); partisan resistance (“Bella Ciao”), and loads of pop (from “Yellow Submarine” to Antonello Venditti’s “Roma, Roma, Roma”).
Eventually, I came to appreciate the comfort and safety of U.S. stadiums and arenas. But to this day, their canned and often lifeless aural culture makes me nostalgic of home.
Click here to read on.
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Dreaming of a Sports City
The Football Scholars Forum, the online think tank based at Michigan State University, recently explored fascinating aspects of the long and complex relationship between fútbol and politics in the history of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In its second session of the 2015-16 season, FSF co-founder Alex Galarza, PhD candidate in History at Michigan State, shared a chapter from his dissertation: “Dreaming of Sports City: Consumption, Urban Transformation, and Soccer Clubs in Buenos Aires.” Galarza’s doctoral research has been funded by prestigious national and international grants, including the coveted Fulbright and FIFA Havelange scholarships.
The potential impact of Galarza’s dissertation work beyond the ivory tower of academia can be gleaned from his involvement in an ongoing documentary film project. Working with four young Argentine journalists, Galarza aims to use the format of filmmaking to reveal the “hidden” history of Boca Juniors’ Ciudad Deportiva—a (failed) urban renaissance construction project that sheds new light on the role of professional soccer clubs in city planning and everyday life. (Watch the trailer here.)
The Forum encouraged Galarza to explain how this history of Buenos Aires compares with the experiences of other Latin American cities, and broader processes of modernization and state formation. The author and participants also discussed constructions of race, whiteness, and gender through fútbol, the politics of club governance, and the ideological projects behind stadium construction.
Listen to or download the audio recording here.
In this video, Alex Galarza and I discuss digital fútbol scholarship at Michigan State University. The conversation ranges from Galarza’s doctoral dissertation entitled “Between Civic Association and Mass Consumption: The Soccer Clubs of Buenos Aires,” to the Football Scholars Forum, the online football think tank.
For more information about Galarza’s research click here.
Alex Galarza, a PhD student in history at Michigan State University and co-founder of the Football Scholars Forum, has been awarded the João Havelange Research Scholarship. This prestigious award is administered jointly by FIFA and CIES (Centre International d’Etude du Sport), an independent research center created in 1995 by the governing body in collaboration with the University of Neuchâtel, and the City and State of Neuchatel, Switzerland.
Galarza’s project is titled “Between Civic Association and Mass Consumption: The Soccer Clubs of Buenos Aires.” It explores how clubs developed as both centers of mass spectacle and sites of everyday urban sociability. Club members and officials used political connections to secure city space and public subsidies for stadiums and the overall success of their professional teams. While clubs became centers of patronage and spectacle, they were also non-profit civic associations central to social and cultural activities in the city. Clubs provided educational facilities, libraries, leisure space, and political forums for their members.
Galarza’s research examines the tensions within football clubs during the mid-twentieth century, an era when Argentine society entered a period of deep economic and political changes following the ouster of Juan Domingo Perón in 1955. Perón’s project aimed at developing a new kind of citizen and civic culture in which the popular classes would have a greater political voice and heightened access to new forms of mass consumption. Mass political participation and consumption remained critical and unresolved tensions during the democratic and military governments that followed. One powerful example of how soccer clubs gave shape and meaning to civic engagement, popular spectacle, and mass consumption is Boca Juniors’ Ciudad Deportiva (in photo above). This failed project was a mix between a stadium complex and amusement park, built over seven artificial islands on sixty hectares of land filled in the Rio de la Plata.
Click here to read a digital version of Galarza’s preliminary work on the fascinating history of the Ciudad Deportiva.
Check back with us for an interview with Galarza in the coming days.