Mexico

Abstract

The article argues that the history of Mexican football is contradictory and emphasises the social and cultural environment of the European and American colonies that formed a sport socialité in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Mexican confessional education networks (Jesuits and Marists) of the time had close relations with some European educational centres, and were also very important in the process of sporticisation of Mexican society. In the early twentieth century, the specific characteristics of the Spanish colony in Mexico allowed the transition of socialité football to the domain of the general public, as well as they defined the basic features of the national football rivalries. With the professionalisation of the game in the 1940s, as well as with the diffusion of television in the late 1950s, the rivalries and organisation of Mexican football took a “melodramatised” outlook. The creation of family porras between the 1960s and 1990s exemplify these values. During the late 1990s, new forms of organisation, identities and rivalries between clubs allowed fans to “invent” the barras. With South American influence, young people of the late twentieth century tried to reconfigure the prototypical aficionado (passive and well behaved) by an extremely active and disruptive fandom. Finally, based on the discussion of the organised forms of fandom, a series of reflections on machismo, misogyny and homophobia embedded in Mexican football fans is proposed as a contemporary issue.