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Masculinities
Global Issues

General Editors: Bruce Kapferer, Professor of Anthropology,

James Cook University and john Gledhill, Professor of
Anthropology, Manchester University.

This series addresses vital social, political and cultural issues

confronting human populations throughout the world. The
ultimate aim is to enhance understanding - and, it is hoped,
thereby dismantle - hegemonic structures which perpetuate
prejudice, violence, racism, religious persecution, sexual
discrimination and domination, poverty and many other social
ills.

ISSN: 1354-3644

Previously published books in the series:

Michael Herzfeld
The Social Production ofIndifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of
Western Bureaucracy

Peter Rigby
African Images: Racism and the End ofAnthropology

Judith Kapferer
Being All Equal: Difference and Australian Cultural Practice

Eduardo P. Archetti
Guinea-pigs: Food, Symbol and Conflict of Knowledge in Ecuador

Denis Duclos
The Werewolf Complex: Americas Fascination with Violence

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Common Denominators: Ethnicity, Nation-Building and Compromise
in Mauritius
 Masculinities

Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina

Eduardo P. Archetti

I~ ~~o~;!~n~~:up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1999 by Berg Publishers
Published 2020 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Eduardo P. Archetti 1999

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of

Congress.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN13: 978-1-8597-3261-8 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-1-8597-3266-3 (pbk)
Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants.
For Kristi Anne
Contents

Acknowledgements 1X

Prologue xi

Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives 1

PART I Hybridization 21

CHAPTER ONE 23

Situating Hybridity and Hybrids

CHAPTER TWO 46

Male Hybrids in the World of Football

CHAPTER THREE 77
Hybridization and Male Hybrids in the World of Polo

PART II Masculine Moralities 111

CHAPTER FOUR 113

Locating Masculinities and Moralities

CHAPTER FIVE 128

Masculinities and Morality in the Poetics of the Argentinian

Tango

vii
viii Contents

CHAPTER SIX 161

Masculine National Virtues and Moralities in Football

CHAPTER SEVEN 180

The Masculine Imagery of Freedom: the World of Pibes and

Maradona

Epilogue 190

Bibliography 194

Index 208
Acknowledgements

This book is the product of many years of fieldwork, heterogeneous

reading, exploration in archives, dialogues and discussions, confer-
ences and seminars. Grants from the National Research Councils
of Norway and Argentina made possible several months of fieldwork
in the period 1988 to 1994. I want to thank colleagues at the Depart-
ment of Social Anthropology in Oslo for suggestive reflections and
critical comments: Marit Melhuus, Signe Howell and Thomas
Hylland Eriksen; the late Ladislav Holy, who gave me inspiration
through long winter talks during his stay in Oslo in 1995; Gary
Armstrong, Richard Giulianotti, Pierre Lanfranchi, Christian Brom-
berger, Sergio Leite Lopes, Jeffrey Tobin, Roberto DaMatta, John
MacAloon and Patrick Mignon, members of the global minority
of social scientists concerned with the complicated relations between
modernity, sport and bodily practices; Rosana Guber and Sergio
Visacovski, anthropologists from Buenos Aires who, like myself,
are striving to understand the puzzling cultural clues of la patria;
Beatriz Sarlo, who, at an early stage and perhaps without knowing,
convinced me of the relevance of my concerns, and the same must
be said of other porteno intellectuals and social scientists: Adrian
Gorelik, Juan Carlos Torre, Enrique Oteiza, Carlos Altamirano,
Donna Guy, Hugo Vezzetti, Laura Golberg, ElisabethJelin, Hector
Palomino, Ariel Scher, Dora Barrancos, Miguel Murmis, Rosalia
Cortes, Leopoldo Bartolome, Nestor Lavergne, Pablo Alabarces,
Julio Frydenberg, Marcelo Masssarino, Roberto Di Giono and Oscar
Teran. I am grateful to many Masters and PhD students from the
Department of Anthropology of the University of Oslo, some of
whom are now my colleagues, for their good and open-minded
ideas. I remember especially the comments of Kjcrsti Larsen, Sidsel
Roaldkvam, Marianne Lien, Hans Christian Hognestad, Anne
Lescth, Roger Magazine and Sverre Bjerkeset.
Many friends have been important during this longjourney. For
almost thirty years, the love, knowledge and wide understanding
of football by Luis Boada, my old friend from Paris 1968, economist
and ecologist, critical supporter of Barcelona and Flamengo, not
ix
x Acknowledgements

only kept me informed about the global developments of the

'universal sport' but revealed to me the existence of a 'deep poetics'
in sport and football. Jorge Jasminoy, my best porteiio friend since
the 1960s, has offered me his generosity, his intelligence, his many
passions, and his home - la guardilla - during my research stays
in Buenos Aires. Amilcar Romero, an outstanding representative
of critical sport journalism in Argentina, always supported my
work, offered me his archive, corrected my errors, introduced me
to new informants and taught me many secrets of Argentinian
football. Finally, my Norwegian friends - comrades of Kultur-
stiftelsen Blindern - with whom the sharing of passion and practice
of football has helped me so much in surpassing the cold and dark
winters of the North.
Friends and colleagues from all over the world, in St Andrews,
Barcelona, Oslo, Paris, Florence, Vienna, London, Buenos Aires,
Uppsala, Amsterdam, Misiones, Bergen, Lund, Rio de Janeiro and
Guadalajara, have read and commented on parts of this book; my
thanks to all of them. Taller Escuela Agenda (TEA) and Editorial
Atlantida in Buenos Aires allowed me to work during several months
in their archives. Two anonymous referees, engaged by Berg, made
strong critiques and generous suggestions that helped me to improve
the final version. John Gledhill and Kathryn Earle, from Berg,
believed in this project and I hope that I have not disappointed
them. My English was considerably improved and transformed by
the critical readings of Nancy Frank and Gary Armstrong.
I would like to express my profound gratitude to all my inform-
ants: friends from my time as student at the University of Buenos
Aires, from the Canadian Bar, from the cafe of Lavalle street and
from Almagro. You must know that without you this book would
have never been written. Moira McKinnan introduced me to her
mother Nora and her aunt Veronica, and through them the saga
of the Traills was disclosed.
Finally, the most precious and constant intellectual, emotional
and moral support was the long-term relationship with Kristi Anne
St0len, University of Oslo, with whom I share the interest in Argen-
tina and an exciting and rich daily family life, and to whom this
book is dedicated. Our adventure and cooperation began in Recon-
quista and Santa Cecilia, province of Santa Fe, in Argentina, more
than twenty years ago. In this first fieldwork, among cotton farmers,
originally from Friuli in northern Italy, we worked together and Kristi
Anne taught me - with her clever queries and doubts, her enthusi-
asm and sensibility - how to become an 'observer' in my country.
Prologue

This book is the result of many years of research on the meanings

of football, polo and the tango in Argentinian society. Parts of
chapters 2, 5, 6 and 7 have been published earlier (see Archetti
1994, 1996, 1997a,b). The choice of sport and dance was the result
of a research strategy that attempted to combine images of men
and masculinities with concrete historical contexts, nationalist
ideology and modernization of the city of Buenos Aires, and with
recent anthropological debates on hybridity and morality. A pio-
neer book on football in Brazil with the programmatic introduction
written by DaMatta (1982), a prestigious Brazilian anthropologist
trained in the study of 'primitive' Amazonian people, opened the
door to the study of sport and its relation to the 'national' in Latin
America and in anthropology in general. Inspired by structuralism
as the search for decisive cognitive maps, and by ritual theory as
the importance of public dramatic performances in complex socie-
ties, DaMatta in an earlier book (1978) problematized the 'national'
through the analysis of carnival - and samba - and the construction
of popular heroes. The connection between football and dance as
an anthropological field of empirical research in Latin American
studies thus became evident. I shall first present some of the
methodological orientations - the mixing of the oral and the
written, the use oflimited historical construction and the limitations
of auto-anthropology - and, briefly afterwards, the theoretical
concerns that have guided my research and that, in many ways,
depart from the original preoccupations of DaMatta. The theo-
retical stances will be developed successively throughout the book.

xi
xii Prologue

Methodological Points of Entry

A prologue is needed for placing my research and my findings in

a proper anthropological context. To write on masculinities through
football, the tango and polo in order to grasp Argentinian identity
is not very usual. The book you will read is not a traditional mono-
graph resting upon the long-term presence of the ethnographer
in the field. The practice of anthropology in the contexts of 'little
traditions' implied an emphasis on the study of oral practices:
speaking, singing and orating. The anthropological written texts
originate, in principle, from oral transmissions - and, of course,
behavioural observation. Orality was thus transformed by the writing
of the anthropologist. However, in contexts of 'great traditions',
social discourses were and are also embedded in, or expressed
through, writing. Anthropologists working in complex societies
with ample literary traditions are confronted with a variety of texts.
These different texts have been produced nationally, even locally,
in the community studied, or elsewhere, by the informants them-
selves or by 'others' in general: writers, journalists, scientists, poli-
ticians, bureaucrats or teachers. Confronted with this dense jungle
of texts, research strategies can vary: the emphasis on the consump-
tion of texts concentrates on the impact of reading, while the
emphasis on the production of texts permits a discussion on the
implications of writing in the shaping of cultural forms. Any
cultural theory thus needs to reflect on the multiplicity of writings
because identities, or the interface between the self and the social,
are also created and re-created through writing and reading. So
how heterogeneous literary works may affect the anthropological
understanding of a given sociocultural setting is a relevant question
to ask.
My book combines traditional fieldwork and orality - stories
and histories told by the informants - with textual analysis - historical
essays, ideological writings of the nationalist authors, journals,
magazines and tango lyrics. A central concern is the process by
which meaning is produced in various texts - including the narratives
produced by my informants - rather than the simple representation
of a cultural reality. I try to combine what my informants said or
commented on, read in magazines or journals, and watched on
television or saw in films, with what I read or saw. The traditional
anthropologist will perhaps find my analysis more textualist than
ethnographic, and the cultural studies scholar will find my textual
Prologue xiii

analysis unsophisticated. However, I hope to have reached a balance

between the written and the spoken in the presentation of some
of the 'myths' of football, constructed historically in written texts
and reproduced today in the figures of some outstanding players
like Maradona. This, due to lack of research, is less developed in
the cases of the tango and polo. This imbalance does not invalidate
my key methodological device: the exploration of meanings in
written texts as a way of understanding that which is derived from
or transformed into orality, which I consider central to anthropo-
logical analysis in complex literate societies. I have, in other words,
emphasized 'emphatic listening' more than the traditional device
of unidirectional observing (Fabian 1983: 151-2).
My fieldwork and archival exploration in Buenos Aires were
carried out in different periods from 1984 to 1994, a total of twenty
months and almost fifty football matches watched. More details
will be presented in the introduction. The reader will easily discover
that my work attempts to integrate a more distant past with a near
present without seeking to give a detailed historical analysis. There
is a 'here and now' and, at the same time, a 'there and then'
fashioned by the process of modernization of Buenos Aires - and
Argentina - that, initiated at the end of the past century, was
consolidated in the first three decades of this century. Sarlo has
defined this process as modernidad periferica (peripheral modernity),
in which European modernity and local differences, acceleration
and anguish, traditionalism and change, criollismo and literary
avant-garde are coalesced (1988: 15). Buenos Aires was thus in this
period 'the great Latin American setting of a culture of mixture
(cultura de mezcla)' (1988: 15). Buenos Aires was also a cosmopolitan
city - with almost 3 million inhabitants in 1930 - in which 75% of
the growth from 1900 is a result of European immigration. The
histories of football, the tango and polo are related to this concrete
period. My main hypothesis is that key stereotypes of masculinities
were created through this modernization as part of a general quest
for identities, imageries and symbols, making the abstract more
concrete. There is, therefore, a historical gap in the book, and the
reader must accept this limitation. I am particularly interested in
the use of history in the cultural construction of identities in
Argentina, and during my enquiry I became interested in the
inverse process, the cultural construction of the past from the
perspective of my informants. As will become clear later, I extended
my focus of research, which initially was on football, to include
xiv Prologue

the tango and polo as a way of achieving an intracultural compara-

tive perspective following the recommendations of some of my
informants.
As an Argentinian and, at the same time, an 'outsider anthrop-
ologist' - trained and working in Europe - I was on a kind of
familiar terrain because, in principle, I had fewer linguistic, social
and cultural obstacles than a non-Argentinian anthropologist.
Moreover, I have 'always' been interested in football, and the
majority of my informants during the first period of my research
belonged to my own 'social group' in terms of class, age and
education. I was a kind of 'anthropologist at home', like many
anthropologists of Brazil, Malaysia, North America or India in the
past, and now many more in Europe (see Jackson 1987), and my
anthropological research a kind of 'auto-anthropology'. Strathern
has defined 'auto-anthropology' as 'anthropology carried out in
the social context which produced it' (1987: 17). At the same time,
my training as a professional anthropologist, a point also empha-
sized by Strathern, implies that I am part of an 'anthropological
culture' and academic community, from which my informants are
excluded. This constitutes a dilemma, which Hastrup commented
on in the following way: 'while fieldwork among your own people
may provide you with an initially different "context of situation",
this context itself will eventually become textualized within the
general context of anthropology' (1987: 105). This implies that the
'insider' perspective in auto-anthropology is not necessarily that
of the 'natives'. Strathern has strongly argued that the personal
credentials of the anthropologists - being a male Argentinian in
my case - are less important for what, at the end, the written
product does: 'whether there is cultural continuity between the
product of his/her labours and what people in the society being
studied produce by way of accounts of themselves' (1987: 17).
In other words, being at home implies that my way of organizing
my enquiry, what Strathern calls 'techniques of organizing knowl-
edge', coincides with the way the people studied organize knowledge
about themselves. I shall argue that, in spite of my theoretical
concerns, not necessarily shared by my informants, and in this sense
accepting the difference presented by Hastrup, the high degree of
auto-anthropology lies not only on the fact that my informants
agreed on - and directed - my objects of study but also on the
existence of Argentinian key cultural and social dimensions that,
to a large extent, I share with them. The reader will find in some
Prologue xv

parts of the book a way of writing that has been called 'auto-
biographical ethnography', in the sense that some of my personal
experiences, in the context of fieldwork or in the realm of the
lived, are transformed into ethnographic writing. Some of my
informants also advised me on key aspects of my enquiry and
scrutiny and became temporarily 'native anthropologists' (see
Reed-Danahay 1997). I try to reproduce this process in the general
introduction of the book, and the different chapters explore various
interconnections, mixtures of genres and voices, in order to better
shape the complexity between historical reconstruction, fieldwork
and autobiography.

Masculinities: the World of Hybrids and

Gendered Morality

Garcia Canclini, in his influential book on hybrid cultures in Latin

America, has postulated that the 'uncertainty about the meaning
and value of modernity derives not only from what separates
nations, ethnic groups, and classes, but also from the sociocultural
hybrids in which the traditional and the modern are mixed' (1995:
2). He asked:

How can we understand the presence of indigenous crafts and vanguard

art catalogs on the same coffee table? What are painters looking for
when, in the same painting, they cite pre-Columbian and colonial images
along with those of the culture industry, and then reelaborate them
using computers and lasers? The electronic media, which seemed to
be dedicated to replacing high art and folklore, now are broadcasting
them on a massive scale. Rock and 'erudite' music are renewing them-
selves, even in metropolitan cities, with popular Asian and African
American melodies. (1995: 2)

Latin American countries are in historical terms the result of the

'sedimentation, juxtaposition, and interweaving of indigenous
traditions, of Catholic colonial hispanism, and of modern political,
educational and communicational action' (1995: 46). The mixing
of tradition and modernity designates processes of hybridization.
He prefers, like myself, this term to 'syncretism' or 'mestizaje'
because it 'includes diverse intercultural mixtures, not only the
racial ones to which mestizaje tends to be limited, and because it
permits the inclusion of modern forms of hybridization better than
xvi Prologue

does "syncretism", a term that almost always refers to religious

fusions or traditional symbolic movements' (1995: 11). His empi-
rical, historical and sociological analysis is focused on expressive
cultural forms: art, handicrafts, literature, film, comic strips and
graffiti. Garcia Canclini, however, has not developed a theory of
hybridity based on the existence of different models permitting a
comparative analysis. It will be clear later in this book that working
with the models proposed by Young (1995) and Strathern (1992)
is more fruitful.
Garcia Canclini also postulates that hybridization can be better
understood through a transdisciplinary framework which blends
art history and literature, folklore and anthropology, and sociology
and mass communication (1995: 3). My transdisciplinarity is also
limited, as I have pointed out above, and my empirical arenas are
football, polo and the tango, typical modern bodily practices; in a
world of increasing competition and transnational exchanges, these
are powerful expressions of national capabilities and potentialities
- as powerful as.art and literature. Football and polo are originally
British codifications exported to Argentina and the rest of the
humanity, while the tango is a genuine Argentinian cultural product
exported to the world. Hybridization is thus related not only to
the expansion of genres but also to the deterritorialization of social
and symbolic processes - key processes for explaining hybridization,
according to Garcia Canclini (1995: 207). I think that, in addition,
the emphasis on sport and dance makes possible an analysis of
hybridization in which the various ways of classifying men and
women, and the relations between men and women, and placing
these classifications in the 'national' and international cultural
global landscape, provide an innovative way to look at hybrid
circuits. I shall try to demonstrate that 'male hybrids' - football
and polo players - have a transgressive power, subverting cate-
gorical oppositions and creating conditions for cultural reflexivity
and change (see Werbner 1997). Hybrids have unique, special or
exceptional qualities, and can be seen as ideological constructions
of social order - and in this way also producers of tradition. The
'ideal' Argentinian football or polo player is a hybrid who becomes
a symbol of tradition and continuity. The paradox of hybrids lies
in the possibility of investigating change - and modernity - and
tradition as being both transgressive and normal. To insist only
on the subversive sides of hybridity, as the post-modern oracles
Hall, Gilroy and Bhabha have done, is partial and in some ways
Prologue xvii

misleading, because empirical research has been replaced by ideo-

logical visions of the future of modern societies. My research is
not grounded on a political standpoint that claims to fight against
conservative forces in Argentinian society (see Hall 1990). Neither
is my book an intellectual product of the radical post-modern
political imaginary.
In the introductory chapter I shall show that Argentinian modern-
ization has been shaped by a massive process of European migration,
and, because of this, hybridization and hybrids are less conditioned
by colonial situations than has been the case in other Latin American
countries with important indigenous and black populations. In this
respect, the analyses of Mosse (1985, 1996) of the modern Euro-
. pean construction of a masculine stereotype related to nationalism,
as well as the recent anthropological contributions to the study of
masculinities (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994), have been import-
ant in inspiring my work. Mosse has emphasized that 'masculinity
was in fact dependent upon a certain moral imperative, upon
certain normative standards of appearance, behaviour, and comport·
ment' ( 1996: 8). He has also insisted on the fact that manly beauty
and a physically fit body were important for the construction of
modern masculinity because they reflected the 'linkage of body
and soul, of morality and bodily structure' (1996: 26). Moral worth
and moral health became central concerns of modernity. Because
'the male body assumed ever-more importance as symbolic of true
masculinity, greater attention had to be paid to its development,
as well as to setting a specific standard of masculine beauty' ( 1996:
28). He argues that 'the male body, beauty, and morals are linked'
and that together 'they symbolize "manly courage" and a "manly
spirit"' ( 1996: 41 ). In nineteenth-century Germany and other Euro-
pean countries, gymnastic exercises became the main means for
achieving both beauty and moral strength. Mosse correctly points
out that England was the exception; there team sport was regarded
as education in manliness (1996: 46). Football and polo, British
sports exported to Argentina, are, therefore, privileged contexts
within which to reflect on Mossc's hypothesis on the interconnec-
tion between male beauty and morality in the image of modern
man. My empirical analysis, in the second part of the book, will
prove that in the Argentinian situation morality is more pertinent
than beauty. I will also explore the field of morality as an anthropo-
logical theoretical domain.
Masculinity without femininity, men without women, is perhaps
xviii Prologue

unthinkable. A man needs a woman to reaffirm his own

masculinity, but the woman who fulfils this function does not always
need to be the same. The lyrics of the tango, a dance made for a
man and a woman, will permit me to discuss the tension existing
between a conventional morality that defines woman as passive
and chaste - the mother and the disciplined spouse - and a
romantic drive in which man is fascinated by the seductive power
of the femme fatale. Mosse has emphasized the fact that in the
construction of modern masculinity woman was subordinated to
man; at the same time, the demands she made upon him were
thought to strengthen his masculinity (1996: 76). The coexistence
in the tango of different moral codes provides, in many ways,
alternative definitions of manhood.
Also masculinities in my book are seen in relation to nationalism,
to the way national imageries function as models and mirrors for
Argentinians. The model of hybrids, as well as reflections on
morality, is central in the way football, polo and the tango are
perceived as social and symbolic fields which place Argentina and
Argentinians in a global scene. During this century a peripheral
modern society has been exporting performing bodies to the world:
male players in football and polo, and, in the tango, male and
female dancers. This process has created native interpretations,
both cultivated and popular, as well as external images:
Argentinians are supposed to do well in all of these activities. In
the last chapter on the meaning of Maradona, a football player
defined as the best in the world in the 1980s and a national icon, I
synthesize the way the local is mixed with the global and historical
continuity is defined. I also try to understand how this is reflected
in the consciousness of my informants.
Introduction: Frameworks and
Perspectives

Buenos Aires and the Nation

The Argentina of today is a complex industrialized and highly

urbanized society that is still, to some extent, dependent on the
economic performance of its agrarian sector. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the powerful imagery of rural Argentina, the pampas
and the gauchos, still coexists with the overwhelming dominance
oflarge cities, particularly Buenos Aires, the city capital, a metropolis
with 13 million inhabitants. In the canonical historical interpreta-
tion of the past it is accepted that from the 1860s, after the end of
the period of civil wars, and until the economic crisis of the 1930s
Argentina was made a modern country through variously: massive
European immigration; British investments in industry and infra-
structure; and a successful integration in the international economy
through massive exports of cereals, wool and beef. Between 1870
and 1914 around 6 million Europeans arrived in Argentina, almost
3.3 million settling permanently. In 1914 one-third of the Argen-
tinian population was foreign-born, the majority being Italians
(39.4%) and Spaniards (35. 2%) (Solberg 1970: 38). By 1900 hundreds
of thousands of northern Italians had become rural workers and
tenant farmers in the provinces of the pampa area (Buenos Aires,
Cordoba and Santa Fe). Italians also settled in the city of Buenos
Aires, built the wine industry in Mendoza and provided the bulk
of manpower to develop the British-Argentinian railways. Most of
the Spaniards came from Galicia and at least one-third of them
settled in Buenos Aires, where they worked in the most unskilled
occupations. Russian immigrants, primarily Jews escaping from
political and ethnic persecution in the Russian Empire, formed

1
2 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

the third largest group (4.1%) and settled in agricultural colonias

and in Buenos Aires. Syrians and Lebanese (2.7%) arrived after
leaving another oppressive empire, the Ottoman. Few were Muslims
and, avoiding agriculture, they became businessmen. Immigrants
also arrived from France, Germany, Denmark and Austria-Hungary
(mostly Serbo-Croatians and Friulans). An important and powerful
minority were the British. They were in 1914 1.1% of the total
foreign population (almost 30,000), working in British firms and
living in the rich suburbs of Buenos Aires or on the estates they
owned. They had their prestigious boarding-schools and their social
clubs, maintaining segregated cultural boundaries. They brought
in the Scottish and English bovine and ovine breeds that trans-
formed livestock production, introduced modern finance systems,
transformed transport and commerce, and, above all, introduced
new sporting practices such as football, tennis, polo, rugby and
cricket. Among the British the English, much more than the Irish
living in the rural areas of the pampas or the Welsh farmers striving
for survival in Patagonia, were able to establish social standards
much admired by the Argentinian upper class. These standards
were in many ways related to the powerful imagery of the British
aristocratic way oflife with its concomitant influence on equestrian
sports competitions. However, the ascendancy of the British was
much larger and more persuasive via the rapid expansion of the
practice of football.
Argentina received, between 1869 and 1930, more immigrants
in relation to its native population than any other modern country.
A mirror of this historical pattern exists in the growth and develop-
ment of the capital city of Buenos Aires. The city grew rapidly
from 180,000 inhabitants in 1869 to 1,576,000 in 1914. By 1930
the city had almost 3 million inhabitants, one-third of whom
were European immigrants (Ferrer 1972: 146). The proportion of
foreigners was 13.8% in 1869, 24% in 1895 and 42.7% in 1914
(Vazquez Rial 1996: 24). A gender imbalance in the arrival of
female immigrants primarily among the younger population meant
that for long periods in Buenos Aires history there was an
over-abundance of males. It is possible thus to imagine Buenos
Aires as a kind of cultural Babel, wherein English was the language
of commerce and industry, French was the language of culture,
and the tongues of daily life were a mixture of Spanish (and
Galician}, Italian (various dialects) and a mixture of Western and
Eastern European languages. Buenos Aires in the 1920s, like New
Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives 3

York, represented, before the recent discovery by anthropology of

the impact of global culture, diasporas and multicultural encounters,
in effect a 'truly global space of cultural connections and dissolu-
tions' (Clifford 1988: 4). Urban life was rapidly transformed during
the first decades of the twentieth century. Luxury hotels, restau-
rants, bistros, hundreds of cafes, a world-famous opera-house and
theatres were built by European architects. This prompted changes
in the use of leisure time and created a new environment beyond
the walls of privacy and home. The Argentinian economic boom
permitted this type of conspicuous consumption. During the first
three decades of the twentieth century Argentina was among the
ten richest countries in the world. This period is also characterized
by the rapid expansion of sporting arenas and social clubs and the
construction of the majestic hippodrome in the suburb of Palermo.
With the building of stadiums and the creation of a national
championship, football developed, so that by the end of the 1920s
Argentina was a world leader in the game.
The appearance of public arenas created new conditions for
public participation. Three institutions, in particular, provided the
public with new excitements and opportunities for the deployment
of sexual fantasies: the modern legal brothels with thousands of
imported European prostitutes, the 'dancing academies' (academias
de baile) or 'cafes with waitresses' (cafe de camareras), and the cabaret.
These arenas were not only appropriated by men but also provided
a space for women, albeit of a special kind. The potent image of
a metropolis like Buenos Aires was dependent on a social and
cultural complexity that transcended the limited and close world
of provincial towns. In this representation the possibilities arising
from the uses ofleisure time and the consolidation of institutional
frameworks for individual creativity and mobility were also import-
ant. In the Argentine of that time, success for a singer, a dancer, a
musician or a football player was related to performances and
recognition by the porteiio (Buenos Aires) audiences and experts.
Buenos Aires had, from the point of view of its inhabitants and
the Argentinians visiting from the provincial and rural interior
and even from larger cities like Rosario or Cordoba, everything:
cafes, theatres, opera, cabaret, luxury brothels, football clubs,
sophisticated restaurants, opulent hotels and equestrian sports
including, from 1928, the Open Polo Championship on the fields
of Palermo.
The Argentinian elite imagined that Paris was the only city
4 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

comparable to Buenos Aires. Paris had achieved, at the end of

nineteenth century, the title of the world's capital of elegance,
sophistication and pleasure. But Paris was more: it was a scientific
centre, a place for technical innovations, an international milieu
where ideological debates flourished and artistic fashions were
shaped. Paris was perceived as the core of modernity. It was also
the city where the hitherto most successful World Exhibition was
held in 1900, attracting more than 50 million visitors. But above
all Paris promised entertainment and enjoyment, with its cafes and
restaurants, its theatres, vaudevilles and cabarets, its department
stores and colourful local fairs and markets. Paris functioned, in
what was the world of travellers at that time, as a fabric of fantasies
and illusions. Buenos Aires operated in the same way in Argentina
and later, once its prestige was consolidated, in South America.
For the South Americans fun and elegance were not enough: the
fact that Buenos Aires was seen as a typical European (and white)
city was crucial in their positive image.
Buenos Aires was inhabited by Europeans but in its origins was
not a typical European city. Buenos Aires was never a medieval
labyrinth like many European cities, including Paris before the
Haussmannian transformation provoked by the upheavals of the
Commune of 1871. Buenos Aires had always had a square-grid
design and by the end of the nineteenth century was a flat and
extended city. From the 1900s the rapid expansion of electricity
not only replaced gas as the main source of energy but made
possible the construction of high buildings with lifts. In 1905 the
city had 126 buildings with more than three floors and a lift. The
number of such buildings had increased threefold by 1909 (Liernur
1993: 66). By 1930 Buenos Aires was 'finished' and looked like a
large European city with great boulevards, big buildings, huge
palaces in the northern quarter, parks and monuments; it had a
modern system of transport, with the electric tramway inaugurated
in 1897 and the subway and the railway connecting the centre with
the suburbs in 1913, and a centre (el centro) where bureaucracy,
business, department stores and entertainment venues coexisted.
But Buenos Aires was more; it was a city with an extended and
busy port, unlike Paris, and contained many residential suburbs
(Silvestri 1993).
The continuous and accelerated expansion of the city created
new residential areas. In the northern part, towards the central
railway station of Retiro and the cemetery of Recoleta, the fashion-
Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives 5

able Santa Fe Avenue become the heart of a very bourgeois and

even aristocratic barrio (neighbourhood). This barrio was adjoined
through the parks of Palermo with Belgrano and other localities
in the north that later become expensive neighbourhoods. Towards
the west, along the Rivadavia Avenue, new middle-class barrios were
consolidated: Congreso, Once, Almagro, Caballito and F1ores. The
barrio of Once, with the construction of the western railway station,
generated an important commercial and residential area where
Jewish, Armenian, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants settled. In this
quarter the colossal food market of Abasto, a kind of Parisian
Marche des Halles, was located. Towards the south the city become
more industrial, and around the factories were found the immigrant
working class dwelling in the barrios of Boca and Barracas. If the
city could expand unhindered towards the west and the north, the
natural frontier in the south was the River Riachuelo, although
the city grew beyond its natural limits when new industries settled
in Avellaneda, Quilmes and Lanus. To the east the obstacle presented
by the River Plate was beyond the limits of technical possibilities.
All these new quarters were rapidly integrated into the life of
Buenos Aires through an expansion of the transport system, pri-
marily the railways and late in the 1920s via expansion of the small
buses (colectivos). The growth of the city in all these directions
created the arrabal, areas that were at the edge of the pampa and
marked the transition from the urban to the rural (Gorelik 1996).
The city of Buenos Aires is thus historically produced through the
juxtaposition of three landscapes: the centre (el centro), a general
space open to all inhabitants, visitors and tourists; the barrio, a
locality, a particular 'closed' space populated in some cases by
different social classes and ethnic groups; and the arrabal, a danger-
ous and liminal area occupied by a marginal population. The
importance of these divisions in the imagery of the city will be
explored later.
Gorelik ( 1996 ), an original historian of the city of Buenos Aires,
has shown that the barrios appeared in the 191Os, not only as a
more or less automatic consequence of the urban expansion but
mainly as political and cultural creations. He argues that the barrio
was, above all, a well-defined public space that was preceded by
more or less socially articulated neighbourhoods ( 1996: 218). In
the barrio the local civil organizations, launching all kinds of initia-
tives for providing the barrio with different services and arenas of
sociability - cooperatives, public libraries and clubs - and the
6 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

common, park and plazas, would define the boundaries and the
identity of the vicinity (see also Armus 1996). In this new space,
Gorelik maintains, the barrio became a quiet, domesticated and
pleasant space conquered and dominated by the urban walkers
(paseantes). The family house would ideally be built not far from a
green space (a park or a plaza). This residential pattern was central
in the aspirations of middle and working classes of European origin
(1996: 220-33). In the neighbourhood the street was the common
public space, while in the barrio the parks and plazas created an
encompassing communal membership. The culture of the barrios
was, in the 1920s, strengthened by the consolidation of organized
football, the dubs representing different barrios, and by the dancing
of the tango in clubs, dancing halls and bars (confiterias danzantes).
To these institutions it is important to add the local public primary
schools, which also defined an area of local participation. Through
public education the Argentinian state aimed to develop a sense
of nationality among the sons and daughters of immigrants. Civic
commitments in local institutions, school and work - when industries
were located in the barrio - coexisted with leisure-time possibilities
afforded by green spaces, clubs and bars. The role of the bars in
daily life was to provide a privileged arena for friendship, gossip
and socializing. Gorelik writes:

For different reasons, then, these institutions are moulded by an import-

ant urban component, in the sense that they constitute societies defined
locally in relation to a concrete territory that is in and against a major
city; producing a localized public space, a space ploughed by formalized
social and cultural relations, and transforming the small universe of
streets and buildings of the barrio into a historical space. This historical
space will not be defined either by a tradition, like the quarter of the
traditional European city, or by a destiny, like the vicinity of a process
of urban modernization without sense, but by a project. (Author's
emphasis; own translation Gorelik 1996: 236-7).

By the 1920s the social and economic transformation of Argen-

tina had been achieved and an incipient democracy consolidated.
The country had 'resisted' the 'invasion' of millions of immigrants
and the 'cataclysms' provoked by new technologies, global connec-
tions, immersion in the world market and massive urbanization
(by 1914, 53% of the population of Argentina was urban). The
country and the city of Buenos Aires were not only heterogeneous
in the objective sense of being the product of ethnic and cultural
Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives 7

mixings, they were also imagined as such by intellectuals, writers,

politicians and, of course, by the population in general (see Halperin
Donghi 1987; Sarlo 1996; Bernand 1997). To imagine a homoge-
neous 'imagined national community' in this historical setting was
not, and is still not, easy. Much more imagination is required than
is necessary when imagining the national in more ethnically homo-
geneous societies with fewer dramatic demographic changes. The
analysis of the Argentinian national male imagery is, thus, an
important arena for dealing with and perhaps challenging the
assumptions and working methods of the anthropological approa-
ches which emphasize the fact that identities are constructed and
nations are products of modernity (Eriksen 1993: 99-102). The
Argentinian situation, like the American or the Canadian situation,
obliges the researcher to think about the 'national', taking into
account, as the primary and overwhelming social factor, immigra-
tion, and, consequently, asking questions about how this process
conditioned and still conditions imageries, identities (both personal
and collective), symbols, meanings, and models of social and
cultural transformation, in particular that from foreigner into
'national'. Moreover, the pursuit of the 'national', if possible,
requires a less dogmatic and standard anthropological methodology
where data are necessarily generated through participant observa-
tion and discussions with selected informants.

Locating the Field and the lnfonnants

I realized very early in the research process that it was important

to reflect critically on my relative distance to the 'national' in
Argentina. It was necessary to find a perspective, a specific point
of view in the process of understanding and selecting things and
events which should be shown in their connections to one another
and should enact a field of study. In my case the process of thinking
and pursuing the national was even more intricate because I am
an Argentinian citizen, born in Santiago del Estero, a provincial
and old city of the north west, who then spent seven years in Buenos
Aires as a university student and left the country in 1968. I returned
from Paris at the end of 1972 and did two years of fieldwork in
the northern part of the province of Santa Fe, among rural cotton
producers, descendants of immigrants from the region of Friuli
in northern Italy. I left Argentina again at the end of I974, worked
8 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

as an anthropologist in Zambia, Norway and Ecuador, and settled

permanently in Norway. I returned to Argentina in 1982 and I was
surprised to discover while attending a football match in Buenos
Aires that I experienced it more as an anthropologist than as a
supporter. For the first time in my life as a football enthusiast I
saw something that I could call 'culture' in the behaviour of the
crowd and in the bodily performances of the players. During two
hours in the stadium I experienced the collective flow of move-
ments, ideas, concepts and emotions. I perceived differences and
similarities, noises and smells, brutality and fair play, the past and
the present, and I realized that I was comparing what I saw with
other distant places and stadiums. My anthropological under-
standing at that very moment was the result of explicit and implicit
cross-cultural comparison (Holy 1987: 19-21). In 1984 I decided
to initiate a study on the cultural and social meaning of football in
Buenos Aires.
I am also a typical mixed or hybrid ethnic Argentinian. My
mother is a descendant of an 'old' Santiagueito family, which origin-
ated in the 1820s by the marriage of a French adventurer, military
man, journalist and natural scientist with a woman of the local
aristocracy. From my father's side I am a more 'standard' con-
temporary Argentinian. My grandfather, born in Lombardy, Italy,
immigrated at the end of the nineteenth century, worked with the
British on the construction of the northern and central railways
and settled in an inhospitable town in the province of Santiago
del Estero. This decision was and still is a mystery in the family.
He married an Argentinian creole woman, born in the neighbour-
ing province of Tucuman, and never returned to Italy. My father
went to the university in Buenos Aires, studied medicine and, on
his return to the province, became a relatively active and engaged
local politician. His marriage was, from the point of view of local
social history, an upward move, an allegory of the fate of many
sons of immigrants who got an education or made money. The
social and ethnic heterogeneity of Argentina had (and still has)
the quality of transforming differences in something visible because
social and cultural mobilities were possible. The history of my
ancestors clearly illustrates how the concrete social trajectories and
the symbolic capital accumulated by individuals in a time of global
connections conditions the mixings - marriages and settlements
- and the real possibilities of successful upward mobility or, as in
many other cases, direct social catastrophe.
Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives 9

When I began my work on football I discovered that the historical

and personal narratives on the origins and style of Argentinian
football were placed in a centre - Buenos Aires. This explicitly
excluded the peripheries, and with it hundreds of provincial and
local histories. The history of Argentinian football was the history
of Buenos Aires football, presented through the glory of prestigious
clubs founded at the end of the nineteenth century and the first
decade of the twentieth century. I thus realized the meaning of
madly supporting River Plate, one of the celebrated clubs of Buenos
Aires, since I was four years old. I was socialized as a provinciano, a
santiagueiio, learning that in the building of the modern Argen-
tinian nation Buenos Aires dominated and exploited the provinces,
but I was, paradoxically enough, supporting, suffering and enjoying,
and psychologically dependent on the fate of a club from the city
of Buenos Aires. I also became aware of the importance of having
santiagueiio players, not only in River Plate but also in the other
first-division clubs of Buenos Aires. The national was conflated
because Buenos Aires football was almost by definition national
football - with the exception of two clubs from the city of Rosario
and two clubs from the city of La Plata, capital of the province of
Buenos Aires, which were incorporated early into the creation of
the professional league in the 1930s. I was suddenly conscious of
something different, of a particular history not found in other
places. An Englishman, I thought, born in London is not supposed
to support a club from Manchester, and vice versa. Suddenly, my
personal identification with a particular club was part of a national
identification, and I felt that a part of myself was shared with
millions of others supporting one of the most popular clubs of
Argentina. My research on football was then open to more general
questions and enquiries.
I found an undeniable centre, Buenos Aires, and a physical
activity, football: bodies, rituals, male performances, masculinity,
international connections, world competition, an international
market for players, a popular and national passion including the
elite, a kind of contemporary social madness in the confluence of
capitalism, media and politics, and a long history initiated in 1867,
when the first football match was played by English immigrants in
the fields of the Buenos Aires Cricket Club. I also realized that a
British sport brought by the British immigrants and transformed
into a national obsession should be a privileged arena for studying
ideologies around ideas of a 'melting-pot'. I began my fieldwork
 10 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

in 1984 by attending football matches. I collected a considerable

amount of data on what I call the folklore of supporters and the
ritual performances in the stadiums. In six months, I attended
twenty first-division football matches and, based on supporter's
chants, published on masculinity and the meaning of ritual violence
in Argentinian football (Archetti 1985, 1992).
In 1988 I started a much more systematic work with selected
informants. In a city like Buenos Aires working on football and
male national identity, the door-to-door method seemed to me
unsuitable. I felt obliged to fall back on intermediaries in the form
of friends or old professional colleagues. Given my middle-class
background, it was normal to begin with persons I had had a lot
to do with in the past: old friends and companions of university
football. They were middle-class professionals,journalists, business-
men and public servants. They introduced me to other informants
and helped me to broaden my original sample. During eight months
I worked with fifteen informants, my original nine friends and the
six introduced to me, supporting different clubs of the Argentinian
professional league - first division. I had supporters of the most
important teams, such as Boca Juniors, River Plate, San Lorenzo
de Almagro, Racing and Independiente, but also ofless important
ones, such as Velez Sarsfield, Estudiantes de la Plata, Rosario
Central, Quilmes and Huracan. My informants knew that I was
interested in the national dimension of football and not in the
parochial - but important - aspect of club identity. Therefore, in
the majority of the interviews they were arbitrarily placed in the
position of reflecting more on Argentinian football than on the
history and meaning of their own teams. This situation was for
some of my informants rather unusual. They reacted in different
ways: they attempted to enhance my knowledge of Argentinian
football history by providing more information and suggesting
sources, they looked for clues that would indicate my football
preferences - players and teams - and biases, they asked me a lot
of questions about anthropology and the objectives of my research,
and they employed a lot of humour and familiarity to show that
they were confident of the importance of my study. But, above all,
they sought to limit the 'disorder' occasioned by an abnormal
situation. I found that the interviews functioned much better after
attending a football match together or sitting in a cafe, and I tried
to gather information on such occasions.
Our conversations were on football and only on football. We
Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives 11

were together in a kind of adventure that excluded topics related

to family, profession, work or politics. The passion of football
excluded other narratives, and I imagine that what we talked about
was uninteresting to others not sharing the language we used. The
language of football, as any specific language, creates important
barriers for those who are not interested (see Auge 1998: 58-9).
Therefore, to talk about the family, or any other topic unrelated to
football, was inappropriate. The reader will not find in this book
a description of the total social and cultural life of my informants,
or even their lives and destinies as football supporters of given
teams. This is another story.
During the year of 1988 I lived in the barrio (neighbourhood) of
Boedo while working as visiting researcher in a research centre
located in the centre of Buenos Aires. The barrio of Boedo is, in
many ways, mythological due to the fact that San Lorenzo de
Almagro, one of the great dubs of Argentina, was located here,
and the tango is associated with the social life of the neighbour-
hood. In order to expand my sample I decided to find a place
where I could meet other kinds of supporters, and not only my
middle-class informants. I selected a bar located in the barrio, the
Canadian Bar, where from 1988 onwards I met new informants.
This group of ten constituted what I called 'the third age' group
of informants. All of them aged more than 60, they were retired
lower-middle-class labourers: one butcher, one electrician, two
account clerks, one foreman labourer, two taxi-drivers and three
small shop owners. Five of them were supporters of San Lorenzo
de Almagro, three of Boca Juniors, one of Huracan and one of
River Plate. With very few exceptions, all the interviews were done
in the cafe. I developed a routine, if possible arriving once a week
in the afternoon and joining the table where members of the group
were seated that day. Most of the interviews were organized through
group discussions, supplemented by individual interviews. During
this period my focus of research expanded to the world of the
tango.
Later, in two stays in Buenos Aires, two months in 1993 and
four months in 1994, I expanded my circle of informants, working
with supporters of San Lorenzo de Almagro, the majority of them
working-class or unemployed students. They belonged to my group
of 'teenagers', aged from 19 to 25. My intention was to begin a
systematic research focused on the culture of young male fans of
San Lorenzo de Almagro. The supporters of this club are known
12 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

for being more creative in inventing chants and among the less
violent of first- division football in Argentina. For different reasons,
my research on the creation of team identity was interrupted.
However, we saw six matches of San Lorenzo de Almagro together
and two of the Argentinian national team. Our discussions on
'national style' convinced me of the changes that had occurred in
Argentina in the epic period from 1980 to 1994, when Maradona
was the dominant player of the national team. During these two
stays I decided to work on the social and symbolic meaning of
Maradona, the most famous and controversial Argentinian football
player of this century, and an icon in contemporary Argentina. I
also carried out systematic work in the archives of Editorial Atlcintida,
reading the leading Argentinian weekly sports magazine El Grafico,
founded in 1919, and in the archives of the National Library.

The Role of Narratives

I shall focus my analysis on narratives - textual strategies, meta-

phoric constructions and displacements, metonymic structures and
figurative devices - and their own history. A narrative is a way of
telling temporal events so that meaningful sequences are portrayed
(Kerby 1991). I worked with three generations of Argentinians,
and, in a way, I was able to trace a kind of genealogical memory
based on lived experiences. The anthropologist gathers a discourse
- narratives and opinions - he is responsible for stimulating and
provoking. For a certain number of hours over different days -
and in different years, as was my case - the informants will put
together an account of Argentinian football or the tango, and the
meaning of such practices in the construction of male national
identities. The existence of an archaeology of memory, being differ-
ent in terms of generations, as much as the actual variations in
representing relations between individuals and society, past and
present, convinced me of the importance of a historical analysis.
In a single society, such as Argentina, people do not remember in
the same way and, moreover, are not obliged to remember (see
Auge 1998). The diversity in remembering is related, among other
things, to two factors: the scope and precision of a genealogical
viewpoint, and the narrative method use to recount (see Le Wita
1994: 118-21). I shall give two examples. Hector, belonging to my
original group of informants, was socialized in football, like many
Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives 13

Argentinians, through a very close relationship with his father, a

committed supporter oflndependiente. His father, dead at the time
of my research, was a fantastic narrator of football stories, and
Hector also had this quality: his memory was prodigious and his
ability to relate a natural gift. In his tales, the football of the 1920s
and 1930s lived by his father was joined to his experience in the
1950s and 1960s. Hector's stories are central in the second part of
the book. They were always poetic and embedded in moral reason-
ing. Tomas, one of my key informants in the chapter on Maradona
and a member of the 'third age' group of Boedo, remembered
fewer historical facts and football stories, but was profoundly reflec-
tive on what he called 'the essence of Argentinian football' (las
esencias del futbol argentino). He gave me many clues to the under-
standing of conceptual continuity in Argentinian football. Every
memory is thus a translation, a way of connecting individual
experiences with social and cultural processes. I therefore confine
my attention to small stories, to discussions in a group when I
introduced a topic, a finding or a doubt, and to anecdotes.
I also found it important to confront my informants with histo·
rical events because these arrangements eventually create their
owns paths in memory, those evocations that nothing, it seems,
can stop. Thus, particular experiences and moments are put together
in such a way that what arises from memory's stream is continuously
filtered and reordered (Cohen and Rapport 1995: 8). Crites (1971)
calls this process the narrative quality of experience. Narrating -
and remembering, as Connerton (1989) reminds us - is by defini-
tion an embodied event. As I pointed out above, we can agree upon
the fact that all memory proceeds via genealogy, and in this sense
the past is always seen from the present. It is what Foucault called
history as genealogy (see Borneman 1996). The present is therefore
the decisive and multiple moment in the process of narrating,
because it conflates the present lived by the informants and the
present of an observer - myself - reading and interpreting words,
behaviour and written texts. In this process there is a kind of double
reciprocity because I - the observer - am an Argentinian (that
which I have in common with my informants) and an anthropologist
(that which constitutes me as an 'other') at the same time. This,
in theory, makes possible awareness of the problem of cultural
construction and construction of categories in the social order
(Fernandez 1995). Thus, and perhaps paradoxically, I needed to
construct my informants as 'others'. In this sense anthropologists
14 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

are never completely 'at home', in spite of what many believe,

because we are obliged to ask unexpected questions, to question
what is commonsensically expressed and accepted by the inform-
ants, to interrogate our own identities as members of a collective
or to examine critically the meaning of given narratives.
Narrations enter into discourses, constituting a corpus of multiple
and heterogeneous 'texts'. I shall place special attention on spoken,
written, iconic, musical - although only partially - and kinetic forms
produced in different contexts. I consider that Holy has expressed
with great clarity the main difference between discourse and culture
when he defines discourse as:

a socially constituted communication which leads to the production of

a set of'texts'. These need not be written or oral but may be constituted
through other modes of expression, for example, through the repres-
entational or performative arts. Even in the written or spoken form
they need not be restricted to a single genre. 'Culture' I take as a system
of notions, ideas, and premises which is not exclusive to any particular
discourse but underlines a multiplicity of them. (1996: 4)

My analysis is not only confined to particular narratives and

discourses. In several parts of the book I use the words 'imagery'
or 'imageries' purposefully because the narratives I collect or read
have the quality of being very visual due to the fact that the empi-
rical focus of my research is intrinsically made up of performances.
The importance of performances for individuals in their produc-
tion of images of themselves, other than the world's image of them,
is undeniable. Actors imagine and reproduce verbally their own
performances as well as performances of others in the production
of narratives. In this process, when they observe or recall perform-
ances and objective constructions the experience is mediated
through a complex mental imagery (see Palmer and Jankowiak
1996). Melhuus and St0len have pointed out that the notion of
imagery can be seen to balance precariously between the imaginary
and the essentialization of the meanings of the imagined ( 1996:
1). They have strongly argued that it is the fixation of an image as
natural which explains its power. They postulate that narratives
and discourses - as well as discursive practices - are all significant
loci for the production of imageries in general. I maintain that, in
addition to this aspect, the term 'imagery' refers to particular scenes
that are activated through cognitive models (analogical representa-
Introduction : Frameworks and Perspectives 15

tions, metaphors or metonymies ). I will attempt to depict the

different cognitive models at work.

Masculinit ies at Work: Football, Polo and the Tango

As I mentioned earlier, football, without a doubt, is the 'national'

sport of Argentina. Football is an activity and a passion that cut
across class, ethnic status or regional origin. Through football
Argentina became an important actor in the modern world history
of sports. Thus, football is a powerful masculine expression of
national capabilities and potentialities. Argentinian football has
constituted a symbolic and practical male arena for national pride
and disappointments, happiness and sorrow. The nationalist dis-
courses on sport, in addition to the discovery of the foundation of
a 'national style of playing', can then be seen as an influential
mechanism through which male cultural power is established.
Then, was it only football?
One of my informants, in a passionate exchange of views on
Argentinian male performances in the cafe of Boedo, pointed out
that the country had been exporting to the world not only football
players:

we exported, as you know, beef and cereals, and we were known due to
these merchandises, but we have been exporting men and women all
the time during this century. We exported football players by their
hundreds, to Europe, to South America and to Mexico, but also we
have been exporting music, the tango, our national music, since 1900,
and of course musicians, singers and dancers. We are seen, and we
think of ourselves, as a country exporting beef, cereals and human
performers of all kind.

I argued back that we were also exporting highly qualified reseai·-

chers in fields as different as mathematics, physics and semiology,
and artists. I suggested famous Argentinian ballet dancers, likeJulio
Bocca, Maximiliano Guerra or Paloma Herrera, and classical music
pianists, like Daniel Barenboim, Bruno Gelber or Martha Argerich.
He accepted that perhaps 'we' (Argentinians) were known because
'they' (the Argentinians artists) were known and appreciated by
a sophisticated audience, but he was not totally convinced. He
argued that 'there is something universal in these important people,
16 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

researchers or artists' and pointed out that, after all, there are
thousands and thousands of good mathematicians or pianists that
are not Argentinians. I refused to accept this argument and I told
him that Brazil, Uruguay and the former Yugoslavia have also
exported hundreds and hundreds of football players and that
football was a 'universal game' as much as mathematics or a
symphony of Beethoven. He then replied:

Yes, I know this very well, but there is something special with football
because in this game the individuals will represent the nation, a way
of performing, competing and doing things differently from others.
Martha Argerich playing the piano is just herself, a unique being, and
nobody will deduce from her way of playing that there is an Argentinian
way of playing, let me say, Beethoven. If you insisted on comparing
football with music you must find a music that expresses us in a different
way. This music is the tango. With the tango, and I hope you will accept
that I am right, there is something special, because the tango is our
music, our gift to the world. And, moreover, the tango has become
almost universal, it is liked in the most remote corners of the world.

He convinced me that I should expand my research and include

the tango. And, following his advice, I did so but not in a conven-
tional anthropological way. He insisted on the importance of the
poetics of the tango in forming an 'emotional map of Argentinian
identity'. I was easily persuaded that the complexity of the tango
was such - it is dance, music, lyrics and show - that in working
with the texts, with the meaning of the poetics of the tango, I had,
in the Andersonian sense, 'printed capitalism' in the lyrics of the
tango. The work with hundreds and hundreds of tango texts helped
me discover that tango was an important field of creativity that
included many 'cultivated' Argentinian writers - and not only the
'popular' ones. Authors with great international success were on
the list: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Ernesto Sabata and
Manuel Puig. I discovered a strong area of cultural commonality
that, unlike the different expressions of Argentinian folklore music,
was also international. I had two embodied products that had
travelled well in the world: the tango and football. The difference
with regard to their historical origins was also relevant for compari-
son: football was an English creation while the tango was typically
Argentinian.
In the tango Argentinians created a 'modern' cultural commodity
that has been travelling for almost a century and, paradoxically,
Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives 17

changing while remaining the same. The tango travels and trans-
forms in Paris and Birmingham, Barcelona and Berlin, Cracow and
Tokyo, Colombia and Mexico, Finland and Germany, Russia and
the USA, and Egypt and Turkey. The history of this nomadism is
waiting to be narrated. We can agree that the very existence of
human society is bound to human creative capacity. It is a rare
achievement of a different kind to generate 'exportable' and 'perma-
nent' artefacts and cultural practices that can travel for a long
period of time beyond the cultural and political boundaries of
Buenos Aires, the city of the tango. Argentinians can proudly state
that they participated in this rarity through the expansion, trans-
formation and permanence of the tango as music and as a dance.
A product of Buenos Aires became a symbol and an expression of
a nation. In a modest way, compared with the massive English
export of sport activities, Argentinians were exporting, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, a music and a bodily cultural
performance that became widely accepted.
In the nationalist narrative the construction of the 'relevant
other' appears once closure has been achieved, once what is 'national'
with its clear borders has been defined and ritualized. The nation-
alist Argentinian discourse cannot travel, and Brazil or Chile will
not import nationalists and Argentinian symbols. In a world of
nations, similarity (all are nations) is accompanied by exclusion
(there is just one Argentinian nation). The study of travelling
'national products' and bodies offers a different perspective
because, in a world of interconnections and global networks,
Argentinian identity is placed in the wide context. Identity is not
closed; it is open in the sense that 'reflectivity' is not reduced to
the way Argentinians 'see' and 'define' the world. Football and
the tango are mirrors and masks at the same time. Identity is
connected, globally connected, because it reflects a long historical
process. Strauss has written:

Identity is connected with the fateful appraisals made of oneself - by

oneself and by others. Everyone presents himself to the others and to
himself, and sees himself in the mirror of their judgments. The masks
he then and thereafter presents to the world and its citizens are
fashioned upon his anticipations of their judgments. The others present
themselves too: they wear their own brand of masks and they get
appraised in turn. (1977: 9)
18 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

Argentinians can see themselves in football and the tango, and in

these activities the 'others' can similarly see them. A complex
interplay of mirrors and masks is thus created and re-created over
time.
The tango and football as arenas for 'national male' identities
reveal the complexity of these kinds of 'free' zones in relation to
'otherness'. The ordering tendencies of society are related to public
arenas like school, military service, work, public ceremonies and
rituals of nationhood. 'Free' zones, like the anti-structural proper-
ties of liminality and hybrid sacra in the work of Turner ( 1967),
permit the articulation of languages and practices that can chall-
enge an official and puritanical public domain. 'Free' zones are
also spaces for mixing, for the appearance of hybrids, for sexuality
and for the exaltation of bodily performances. In modern societies
sport, games and dance are privileged loci for the analysis of
'freedom' and cultural creativity. The tango and football can thus
be conceptualized as a threat to official ideologies. Therefore, an
accomplished analysis of national male imageries will attempt to
integrate the various aspects of 'otherness' because it needs all
the fragments, and all the dislocated and mismatched identities,
and it relies on the changing character of Argentinian society and
Argentinian men and women.
Lugones, Rojas and Galvez, the Argentinian nationalist writers
o{ the 191 Os, attempted to recreate the 'national', the essence of
the 'nation' and of argentinidad, in the figure of the gaucho, a
romantic male free rider and heroic figure of the Argentina of the
wars of independence, at a time when he was in actuality losing
his freedom and becoming a rural proletarian (see Slatta 1985;
Delaney 1996; Miller 1997). The authors were reacting and pioneer-
ing in resisting immigration and the cultural effects of Argentinian
modernization. They were responding like many other intellectuals
in situations when a rural traditional society confronts rapid indus-
trialization and urbanization (see Gellner 1983: 57-61; Hutchinson
1992). I shall, in the next chapter, return to some of their ideas.
However, a study of Argentinian national male images needs to
problematize the continuity of the rural and the contemporary
exaltation of the pampas and the gauchos. I decided on an indirect
strategy: to find the powerful rural imagery in other activities and
not in the pampas. While I was searching for men, horses and riding
in contemporary Argentina, one of my informants put me on the
right track. Amilcar, a clever and perceptive journalist, commented
Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives 19

to me that in only one sport is Argentina insuperable: polo - an

equestrian game associated with British aristocrats and Texas
millionaires. As I mentioned before, the British introduced polo,
with great success, in Argentina. I thought that this expansion
should permit me to make some fruitful comparisons between
football and polo, the popular and the aristocratic, the urban and
the rural. I decided, as late as 1994, to introduce polo as one of
the 'free' zones of my study, and I interviewed retired polo players
and personnel of the Argentinian Polo Association. I also worked
on the history of this sport in Argentina. In 1997 I was fortunate
enough to get acquainted with the descendants of the Traill's, the
English family who founded modern polo in Argentina. They
opened up a new perspective for me and gave me some important
information.
I now had three fragmented, dislocated and mismatched ventures
where I could search for, and perhaps find, Argentinian male masks
and mirrors: football, the tango and polo. At the same time these
activities more or less represented the stratification of Argentinian
society in terms of its practioners: polo was the aristocratic
landed-class sport, football was popular, and tango poetics were a
product of the middle classes. Moreover, I had three sets of relevant
relations: men-men in football, men-women in the tango and
men-horses in polo.
My data are heterogeneous and generated from participant
observations, discussions, various archives, as well as from news-
papers, magazines and films. This writing combines oral and
written traditions, draws on the past and the present, on ideas
and visions, on concepts and moralities, and, above all, on topics
that are central to many Argentinians. This book illustrates some
of the problems associated with ideas of the nationhood and mascu-
linities by focusing the research strategy on marginal or liminal
topics. Significantly such a strategy of 'capture' does not exclude
other alternatives.
My research is not on the official ideology of national male
identities and nation state but on the margins of the national, the
fields where the national can be perceived and related to specific
individual features, cultural creativity and public performances.
In the nationalist discourse and the ideology of the state individuals
are defined as passive selves, as objects of socialization and indoc-
trination. Cohen has argued the importance of studying the 'thinking
self in relation to nationalism, the individuals as creative and
20 Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives

producers of meanings. He writes: 'religious, nationalist or political

doctrine may give people ways to think about themselves, forms
within which to locate themselves. But there is a vital distinction
to be made between these forms of thought and expression, and
their content' (1994: 146). I would like to add that 'indoctrination'
regulates arenas defined as vital by the nation state, like the school
system or the military barracks, leaving 'free' zones of creativity.
To define a project around these 'free' zones implies a change of
perspectives in the research on nationalism and masculinities.
My empirical findings will be presented along the two axes
presented in the prologue, which, I think, are central for the
production of national male imageries in general: hybridization -
or its contrary purity - and male hybrids, and gendered masculin-
ities - comprising same-sex and cross-sex relations. I shall, in the
following chapters, elaborate on these dimensions. However, other
relevant issues are also revealed in the analysis of discourses of
hybridization and masculinities. One of the central themes has to
do with the importance of moralities in the production of hybridity
and gendered identity. We shall see that in many cases narratives
and discourses are pervaded by moral reflections. Therefore, it is
highly plausible that hybridity and gender may be the vehicles
through which morality is socially articulated.
PART ONE

Hybridization
 CHAPTER ONE

Situating Hybridity and Hybrids

It has been stated that the existence of two or three different racial
groups inhabiting the same geographical space as early as the
sixteenth or seventeenth century is a unique characteristic of the
American experience. Consequently, 'more than living side by side,
members of different races came to know each other in the most
intimate sense. The result was interracial progeny' (Socolow 1996:
3). Schwartz (1996) has called this process of interracial sexual
relations 'ethnogenesis'. Latin American societies were, then and
now, populated by 'hybrids', by people of mixed blood - mestizos,
mulattos, mamelucos and pardos - and Argentina was no exception
as we have seen in the previous chapter. The category of mestizo -
Spanish and Indian mixed - indicated both a biological and cultural
hybrid (Bouysse-Cassagne and Saignes 1996). The fact that this
term is twofold, biological and cultural, suggests that the awareness
of miscegenation and biology tends to predominate. Moreover, the
existence of the concepts of mestizo and mestizaje as emic con-
ceptualization implied that, in the long run, these terms could
include any kind of racial or ethnic mixture. The same can be
postulated in relation to folk categories like creole and creolization.
In this chapter I shall show the power and limitations of these
conceptual models in Argentina.
As we saw in the prologue, Garcia Canclini prefers to use hybridi-
zation instead of syncretism and mestizaje because it includes
'diverse intercultural mixtures' and 'permits the inclusion of the
modern forms of hybridization' (1995: 11 ). His approach is based
on the idea that, in contemporary Latin America, modern culture
is heterogeneous as a 'consequence of a history in which moderni-
zation rarely operated through the substitution of the traditional
and the ancient' (1995: 47). Garcia Canclini put special emphasis
on cultural processes in general without, in a systematic way, relating

23
24 Hybridization

hybridization to hybrids - concrete actors - and without problem-

atizing the existence of different models of hybridization. A more
complete analysis calls for a conceptualization of the 'hybrids', and
in my case male hybrids, and 'hybrid moments', spaces or objects
through which rituals are elaborated and 'free zones' separated
from other domains of society.

Models of Hybridization and the

Creation of Hybrids

General

Papastergiadis has convincingly argued that the history of the

hybrid must be as old as the narratives of origin and encounter
(1995: 9, 1997: 257). It is obvious that the existence of a clear
boundary between 'us' and 'them' calls for the hybrid, the mixed,
the less pure, which is created by the transgression or the possibility
of transgression of this boundary. In a negative sense, the hybrid
can be seen or defined as a representation of danger, chaos, loss
and degeneration. However, if the mixing is perceived positively
the hybrid can represent creativity, complexity, amalgamation,
vitality and strength. Given these situations the hybrid is always
thought of in relation to purity and along the axes of inclusion
and exclusion. Therefore, the model ofhybridity- and the codifica-
tion of the hybrids - can only emerge from circumstances in which
discontinuities have been produced and policies of purification
enacted. Hybridization, as Latour (1993) has reminded us so many
times, was a response to practices of purification. There are no
hybrids without natural and pure categories.
Young (1995: 25) has summarized the debate on hybridization
in the nineteenth century in three dominant models:

1. Hybrid as a category is conceptualized as mixed but as creating

a 'pure' form that reproduces itself, repeating its own cultural
origins.
2. Hybridization as creolization involves fusion: the creation of a
new form, which is set against the old form of which it is partly
made up.
3. Hybridization as a chaotic process in which no stable new form,
but rather something closer to a radical heterogeneity, discon-
tinuity, a kind of permanent revolution of forms, is produced.
Situating Hybridity and Hybrids 25

It is clear that hybridity makes difference into sameness, and same-

ness into difference, but 'in a way that makes the same no longer
the same, the different no longer simply different' (Young 1995: 26).
The concepts of hybridity and hybrids were developed in the
natural sciences and in the practice of biology in the nineteenth
century. A hybrid was an animal or a plant produced from the mix-
ture of two species. Hybridity implies the creation of a pseudo-species
as a result of the combination of two discrete species. However, in
Darwin's perspective, the emphasis was put on degrees ofhybridity
because the species could no longer be seen as absolutely distinct.
Central to Darwin's hypothesis is the idea that there is no essential
distinction between species and varieties.
By 1861 hybridity was used to denote the crossing of people of
different races (Young 1995: 6). This use implied the acceptance
that the different races mixing were of different species. For reasons
closely associated with the question of racism, and especially because
the 'human hybrids' produced were successful in terms of fertility,
this was taken to prove that humans were all one species. Therefore,
from the end of the nineteenth century until today 'hybridity' and
'hybrid' have moved from the field of biology into key concepts
for cultural criticism and political debate. In this respect, Young
has stressed the significance of Bakhtin's theory ofhybridity (Young
1995: 20-2). Bakhtin's emphasis on the mixture oflanguages within
a text, which defies authority, evidences a new way of relating the
concept of hybridity to politics. The language of hybridity trans-
forms and disrupts the singular order of a dominant code. Bakhtin
writes:

Unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important

modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages. We may
even say that language changes historically primarily by hybridization,
by means of mixing of various 'languages' co-existing within the bound-
aries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a
single group of different branches, in the historical as well as palae-
ontological past oflanguages. (1981: 358-9)

Bakhtin distinguishes 'organic hybrid' from 'intentional hybridity'

as historical, unconscious products. Organic hybridity will tend
over time towards fusion while intentional hybridity will almost by
definition be a contestatory activity, a clear affirmation of cultural
and linguistic differences (1981: 361). Hybridity is thus associated
with resistance and cultural creativity; it is made contestatory in,
26 Hybridization

for example, the case of carnival (Papastergiadis 1995: 13; Young

1995: 21 ). Moreover, hybridity can be defined as a kind of perma-
nent condition of all human cultures, one which contains no zones
of purity. Instead of hybridity versus purity, as in the biological
use, Bakhtin's view suggests that hybridity is one of the conditions
of human creativity.
Bhabha (1985, 1994) has politicized the concept of hybridity,
using it as a critique of the colonial situation and the hegemony
of the national discourse based on cultural homogeneity. Hybridity
appears as a discourse exposing the conflicts in colonial discourse
and the various ways of living with difference. Hybridity includes
explicit forms of counter-authority, moments of political change
as well the importance of transgressing fixed borders. Against the
concept of a homogeneous nation Bhabha stresses the importance
of the migrants and the diasporic communities. Hybridity itself
becomes a form of cultural difference, challenging dominant cultural
values and creating liminal spaces (a 'third space'). In this way, it
is a mode for dealing with the juxtapositions of space and the
combination of 'time lag', out of which a sense of identity that is
always liminal is constructed. Friedman has correctly observed that:
'the language of in-betweenness, even of liminality, dominates and
would even seem to organize Bahbha's call to hybridity. Words
such as displacement, disjuncture, tran-sition, tran-scendence are
rife in the texts, where the enemy is that which is generally bounded
and thus, for him, essentialised, (1997: 78).
The main limitations of Bakhtin's semiotic approach and Bhabha's
literary analysis from an anthropological point of view is the dist-
ance from the commonsensical uses (the way actors themselves
perceive mixing and create local categories) and, above all, the fact
that they are definitions from the outside and, in this sense, power-
ful normative frameworks. However, I believe that we still need
a view from outside that helps us to get a better understanding
of the processes of self-definition and self-identification. I find
Strathern's use of the concepts, partially following Latour, most
fruitful. According to Strathern hybrids as entities are products
of relations. The English conceptualize themselves as hybrids in
terms of their origins; 'an astonishing mixed blend', this 'glorious
amalgam', which is seen as the natural generator of manifold talent
(1992: 30). Strathcrn emphasizes the fact that in the representation
of English history there are always additions to an already infinite
social and cultural complexity, sustaining the imagery of 'constant
Situating Hybridity and Hybrids 27

infusions of new blood'. The country's institutions were invigorated

by cross-fertilization. However, in this mixing each individual - a
hybrid him/herself in the sense that he/she is the product of
different beings - 'contributed his/her unique portion without
losing the transcendent characteristic of individuality that was
preserved in the singularity of "the English" themselves' (1992:
36, 83). It is central, therefore, to ask for the native conceptual-
ization of the relationships between the particular and the general,
the unique and the representative. The English have two models.
On the one hand, they aggregate in the sense that individuals carry
out the resonance of a tradition or a community, and in this sense
their attributes contribute to its aggregate character. The individual
attributes contribute to the collective. On the other hand, they
imagine a transcendent and organic order (the national or the
collective) that allows for degrees of relatedness or solidarity or
liberty; it is like an organism that functions as a whole entity to
determine the character of its parts. 'The English' can similarly
appear as both aggregate and organism ( 1992: 29). Strathern
writes: 'the aggregating concept stressed the "melting pot" symbol-
ism of heterogeneity, the organic concept that of a redoubtable
character that was only to be exemplified idiosyncratica~ly in each
individual English(man). The English were thus self-defined in an
overlapping way as at once a people and a set of cultural character-
istics' (1992: 30).
In a more recent article Strathern (1996) has related hybridity
to the concept of network as used by Latour. Hybrid, she proposes,
is a concept used in social sciences to refer to something that is of
mixed origin. It is a critique of separations and of categorical
divisions. Therefore, in analysis of ethnicity, identity and popular
culture, for example, it is positively related to creativity, cultural
strength and political vigour. Hybridity is invoked in many analyses
as a positive force in the world. If hybridity invokes openness the
concept of network is needed because it: 'summons the tracery of
heterogenous elements that constitute such an object or event, or
string of circumstances, held together by social interactions: it is,
in short, a hybrid imagined in a socially extended state' (1996: 521).
This analysis must be properly contextualized. Strathern's method-
ology is based on the powerful idea of 'cutting networks'. In this
direction, Strathern proposes that if we take given networks as
socially expanded hybrids then we must take hybrids as condensed
networks. 'The Euro-American hybrid, as an image of dissolved
 28 Hybridization

boundaries, indeed displaces the image of boundary when it takes

boundary's place' (1996: 523).
The most important lesson that we can draw from Strathern's
framework is the insistence on the analysis of native models of
hybridity, based on the way the complex relations between diversity
and generalization are defined. A model of hybridity calls for
diversity and pluralism, while the existence of society - and the
national state - and culture calls for generalization. My main aim
is to study how in Argentina diversity and generalization are con-
ceived by the intellectual elite as well as my informants in concrete
processes of hybridization. This is even more indisputable because,
as in the case of England, Argentinians have explicit and implicit
models of hybridization based on powerful concepts like creoli-
zation (criollizaci6n) and mixing (mestizaje). In this context according
to Strathern: 'we are dealing with people who themselves make
generalisations, who imagine that they are part of larger collect-
ivities, who act with reference to what they assume to be widespread
norms and such like, and who are consequently preoccupied with
what they take to be a relationship between the particular and the
general' (1992: 28).
I shall try to demonstrate that the intellectual debates of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in
Argentina defined a probtematique, a semantic field and a dominant
discursive arena. I shall not attempt to bring about a historical
synthesis of the controversies and I shall not present them in a
lineal way. In this chapter I shall move from lbarguren, a nationalist
of the 1920s, to Alberdi and Sarmiento, the founders of the modern
nation state in the second part of the nineteenth century, and to
Lugones, Rojas and Galvez, the modern nationalists of the begin-
ning of the twentieth century. This perspective implies that the
historical complexities of these debates will not fully be discussed. 1
My main attempt is to delineate a field of ideas in the area of
political ideologies and to explore its manifestation in other arenas.
Sports can be seen as constituting 'patriotic games' in the era of
national states and internationalism, as social practices that can
eventually re-create dominant ideas related to nationalism (see
Jarvie and Walker 1994; Mangan 1996; Pope 1997). Once these
practices are established, they will provide a kind of historical
framework within which the new generations will interpret the
practice in their own way. The semantic field constituted at the
beginning of the twentieth century will partly condition new ideo-
logical developments defining topics and probtematiques.
Situating Hybridity and Hybrids 29

Local
As I pointed out before the colonial period in Latin America and
in Argentina is marked by the mixing of populations, particularly
the mixing of native Indians and Europeans, known by the Spanish
term mestizaje. Creole cultures constituted national identities and
imageries long before anthropologists discovered that the modern
world we live in today is hybrid. Carlos Fuentes, the prolific Mexican
writer, celebrated the quincentennial discovery of America in 1992
as the consecration of the racial mix of Spanish America, writing:
'We are Indian, black, European, but above all mixed, mestizo. We
are Iberian and Greek, Roman and Jewish, Arab, Gothic, and Gypsy.
Spain and the New World are centres where multiple cultures meet
- centres of incorporation, not of exclusion' (1992: 348). The
ideology of mestizaje is still today the dominant ideology of national
identity in Latin America. Therefore, the groups that did not mix
or are perceived as lacking the will to mix with others are con-
sidered a potential threat to this ideology. In the colonial as well
as in the post-colonial periods the category mestizo was identified
with the mixture of Spanish and natives and, in this sense, pre-
supposed the existence and the reproduction of the pure Indian
or other pure racialized classifications (Momer 1971; Basave Benitez
1992; Harris 1995; Ochoa 1995; Schwartz 1996; Bouysse-Cassagne
and Saignes 1996; Radcliffe 1997). This process is extreme in the
case of the Dominican Republican, in which the category Indian
(indios) as pure Dominican is used in order to exclude the black
population, or in many countries, Brazil being a typical case, in
which some mixtures are defined as better than others (Freire 1946;
Krohn-Hansen 1997).
In the immigrant Argentina of the end of nineteenth century
and early twentieth century, the native Indian population had been
almost eliminated through the expansion of the frontier of the
national state and the consequent War of the Desert in 1879. The
remaining native population was portrayed as an immobile, doomed
race, unable to accept mixing (mestizaje), education and modern-
ization, stuck in the compulsion to repeat the same ineffective
campaigns of resistance until, at last, they perished along with their
names and their stories. For different reasons, among them wars,
diseases and the massive immigration of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, the black population, which constituted 25%
of Argentinians in 1838, numbered less than 2% by 1900 (Reid
1980). Therefore, when the massive flux of immigrants disembarked
 30 Hybridization

in Buenos Aires, immigration was perceived by the nationalist

writers of the beginning of the twentieth century as the real threat
to the original mestizaje, to the original creole population, to the
old inhabitants of the country.
Rojas, one of the most important nationalist writers, conceived
the massive immigration and the lack of a clear educational policy
orientated towards the integration of foreigners as a menace to
cultural reproduction (1909: 89-90). Images of 'invasion', language
'corruption', moral and sexual 'chaos' are present in Rojas and
other writers like Lugones, Gcilvez, Bunge and lbarguren. Even in
1926, a modernist writer like Borges, who imagined the city of
Buenos Aires as a cosmopolitan fusion, contrasted the margins of
Buenos Aires, populated by a creole population, to the centre of
the city where 'the babelic, the picturesque, the tearing off from
the four points of the world, the Moor and the Jewish' dominated,
(1993: 24).
By 1914, when the first waves of the vast immigration stopped
as a consequence of the First World War, the positive image that
European immigration had enjoyed among the Argentinian intellec-
. tual elite was tarnished. Foreign-born businessmen and foreign
enterprises controlled a large share of the national economy. Urban
foreign workers, especially in Buenos Aires, organized trade unions,
were continually striking and became very militant. Moreover, from
1904, the Socialist Party became one of the dominant political
forces in Buenos Aires, where anarchists were also very active.
Liberal values and cosmopolitanism had guided the generous
immigration policies since the 1850s. The modern Argentina was
imagined as the result of massive European immigration: a rapid
integration in the world market through foreign capital investment,
technological change, increasing local production and the expansion
of consumption of foreign industrial goods; a prompt urbanization
as a way of changing rural traditional attitudes, caudillismo and
political clientelism; and, as a main consequence of the changes,
an increasing economic and social mobility of larger groups of
the society. Ibarguren, criticizing Alberdi, one of the fathers of
the nineteenth-century modernist Argentinian project, wrote:

The doctrine of Alberdi, opposed to the national idea founded in the

heroic meaning of life and patriotism which created our first pages
of history, is based on the materialist and bourgeois concept of the
economic well-being as the supreme objective of a nation formed by
Situating Hybridity and Hybrids 31

cosmopolitans. Our fertile territory was, and still is, a great world
producer of cereals and beef. Such a policy, carried out with the best
intentions of creating progress and producing indeed great wealth,
joined by the massive avalanche of immigrants that has transformed
Buenos Aires and the great Litoral into a polyglot and heterogeneous
region, a real chaotic ethnic Babel, has not promoted the formation of
a spiritual unity, a proper Argentinian soul. This soul will emerge and
will be powerful only when nationalism creates the moral and organic
unity of all the social forces amalgamated in one only spirit. (Own
translation; lbarguren 1934: 154)2

Ibarguren did not conceptualize the nation as a necessary mixture,

as a hybrid based on miscegenation. The idea of amalgamation so
explicitly presented, and so crucial in any model of hybridization,
is a kind of Renanian conception of the spirit of the nation as an
expression of a collective psychology. In this sense the nation (and
the nationality) is reduced to a psychological phenomenon, to a
collective consciousness that must be created. The question of racial
mixing is thus avoided.
The liberals primarily conceived of Argentina as constituted by
the citizens of a modern state. The accent was put on the freedom
and the autonomy of the individual as representing the limits of
the sovereignty of the nation state. According to Alberdi (1915)
the individual and his liberty were above the authority of the
fatherland. His vision concerning the impact of immigration was
cosmopolitan: the new Argentina should be the product of the
socio-economic and cultural impact of the immigrants. In this sense
he rejected the idea that Argentinian culture was something fixed,
a stock of irreplaceable meanings, symbols and practices. Argen-
tinian society and culture were conceived of as something to be
produced and changed through immigration and modernization.
Regarding the status of the immigrants, Alberdi thought that
Argentina should only guarantee citizenship and political rights.
This image was consistent with the way of life of Argentinian
cosmopolitans like himself. They were not bound by local habits
(which many of them considered to be traditionalist and backward),
they spoke foreign languages and lived long periods of their lives
in exile or as travellers in Europe and/or the United States. Their
life experiences, sensibilities and ideology made it possible for them
to perceive, in many ways, the immigrants as similar to themselves.
The European immigrants to Argentina had left their villages and
cities, customs, food habits and local rituals, manifesting a great
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
on the scene. Nicodemus had failed to assist in hiving
that swarm. Worse than that, he had butted the
unfortunate parson into three beehives and released
three other swarms upon him.

On his second escape, Nicodemus had boldly entered [44]

the log school house while school was in session. The
teacher had climbed on top of the table. Since there
were only holes where windows should have been, the
children swarmed through the window holes leaving
Nicodemus with the situation well in hand. Since it was
a warm day and Nicodemus was tired, he had fallen
asleep beneath the table. Needless to say there had
been no more school that day.

Johnny laughed aloud as he recalled these stories of the

Colonel’s prize ram. But now his eyes were glued upon
the high walled pen in which Nicodemus was confined.
Some living creature beside Nicodemus had entered
that pen. He and Nicodemus were having it out. Was
Nicodemus chasing the intruder about or was the wary
old ram at last on the run?

“Might be that bear we saw yesterday,” Johnny told

himself. “I—I’ve just got to see.”

Johnny knew the Colonel and liked him. A big, bluff, [45]
red-cheeked, jovial southern gentleman, he was the idol
of every boy who came to know him. Nicodemus,
despite all his reputation for breaking up beehives and
dismissing schools, was a valuable ram. If anything
seriously threatened his safety, the Colonel should know
of it. Besides, there was a chance, a bare chance, that
Johnny, through this little adventure, might become
better acquainted with the Colonel’s daughter, Jensie.
Soon enough Johnny discovered that Nicodemus was
not in the slightest bit of danger, unless, like many an
aged and crusty human being, he was in danger of
bursting a blood vessel because of unsatisfied rage.

As Johnny climbed the high board fence, to peer with

some misgiving into Nicodemus’ pen, he barely held
back a gasp.

“Of all things!” he muttered. Then, having lifted himself

to a secure position atop a post, he sat there, mouth
open, eyes staring, witnessing a strange performance.

There were indeed two living creatures in that pen. One

was the invincible Nicodemus. The other, instead of
being a bear, was a boy, the fleetest footed boy Johnny
had ever seen.

Johnny wanted to laugh. He longed to shout. He did

neither, for this would have broken up the show. “And
that,” he told himself, “would be a burning shame.”

And so it would. The boy and the ram were playing a [46]
game of artful dodging. And the boy, apparently, was a
match for the ram. Hugging some roundish, brown
object under one arm, he dashed squarely at the ram.
Leaning always toward the ram, he came within three
paces of him when, like a flash, he bent to the right
and, with the speed of a snapping jack-knife, swerved
slightly to one side and passed the charging beast like a
breath of air.

Voicing his disappointment in a low “Ma—maa,”

Nicodemus shook his head until it seemed his massive
horns would drop off, then prepared to charge once
again.
This time, as the ram came bursting down the field, the
boy stood stock still. With arms outstretched, he
appeared to offer his brown, oblong burden to the ram.

“Now! Now he’ll get him!” Johnny breathed.

But no. As the ram appeared about to strike the boy

amidship, with lightning-like speed, he withdrew his
offering, pivoted sharply to the right to go dashing
away, just in time to avoid the terrific impact.

“That,” Johnny mumbled, “that sure is something!”

Then, like the whizbang of a fire cracker, a thought [47]

struck him. Yes, this WAS something! Something real
indeed. Like a flash it had come to him that the thing
this strange boy carried was a football, that this boy was
a marvel, that here was the answer to his prayer, the
fulfillment of his promises and his dreams. Here was the
much needed half-back. He wanted to climb on top of
the board fence and let out one wild shout of joy.

But wait. Who was this boy? A mountain boy to be sure.

Was he through high school? Probably not. Few
mountain boys are. His hopes dropped.

“But who is he?” he asked himself. “Who can he be?”

To this question, for the time, he found no answer. The

boy wore a long vizored cap, pulled low. The shadows
hid his face. Yet there was, Johnny assured himself,
something familiar about that slender form, those
drooping shoulders.

For a full quarter of an hour, awed, inspired, entranced, [48]

Johnny witnessed this moonlight duel between a boy
and the champion of all butting rams. Then, with a
suddenness that was startling, the affair came to an
end. The boy tried a new feature of the game. A dozen
swift steps backward spelled disaster. He tripped over
something behind him, recovered, then straightened up
just in time to receive the full impact of the irate ram’s
headlong plunge.

The boy shot backward like an empty sack. At the same

time there was an explosion like the bang of a shotgun.

“Good grief!” Johnny exclaimed, starting to the rescue.

But there was no need. The boy, still able to travel

under his own steam, made his way across the field, to
climb atop the fence and to cling there panting.

He was now not twenty feet from Johnny. But as yet he

appeared unconscious of Johnny’s presence. In the final
scrimmage, his cap had been knocked from his head.
Johnny recognized him on the instant. It was Ballard
Ball, the boy from the mystery mill.

“Well,” Johnny spoke before he thought, “he got you.

But—”

He broke off as he caught the gleam of the other boy’s

deep-set, dark eyes.

“I—I’m sorry,” Johnny apologized instantly. “I didn’t [49]

mean to spy on you. I saw you and Nicodemus, thought
you might be that bear.”

“That bear,” Ballard laughed—his good humor having

suddenly returned. “No bear’d ever have a chance with
old Nicodemus. He’d be knocked out cold in the first
round.”
“I believe it,” Johnny began sliding along the fence. “But
say!” he exclaimed. “Where did you play football?”

“I never did, not very much, you see,” Ballard laughed.

“We tried it over at the Gap. It went fine until Squirrel-
Head Blevins called Blackie Madden a name he didn’t
like. Blackie went home and got a gun. If the teacher
hadn’t caught Blackie with it, Squirrel-Head wouldn’t be
living now. So that’s all the football there was.”

“At the Gap?” Johnny breathed a prayer. “Did you go to

high school there?”

“Yes, I—I sort of graduated there last June,” Ballard

admitted modestly.

“Thank God,” Johnny breathed. Then—

“Ballard, you’re going to college. You’re going to play

real, big-time football.”

“Oh no! I—I can’t,” Ballard was all but speechless. “I— [50]
I’ve got less than fifty dollars. You—you can’t go to
college on that.”

“Sure you can!” Johnny’s tone was one of finality. “My

granddad’s one of the trustees of Hillcrest College. He
endowed a scholarship. It’s open. That will pay your
tuition. You can work for your room and board. More
than half the boys do that. Yes, you’re going to college.
And will the coach be pleased! Ballard, old boy, you’re
the answer to my prayer.”

“But Johnny,” the mountain boy’s voice hit a flat note, “I

read somewhere that college freshmen are not eligible
to play football.”
“That’s only in the big colleges and universities,” Johnny
explained. “You’ll be eligible in Hillcrest all right.”

“And now,” Johnny said more quietly after a moment.

“Now I can go fishing with a good conscience.”

“What’s college got to do with fishing?” Ballard asked in

surprise.

Johnny told him.

“I must go to college so you can go fishing,” Ballard [51]

laughed. “Well, one excuse is better than none. Wait till
I get my ball and I’ll go up the creek with you. He
busted my ball, the old rascal! But then maybe that sort
of saved my ribs. I’ll not try the back-step after this.
Wait!” He sprang into the pen, and before Nicodemus
could arrive, was back on the fence with the deflated
ball. And that was how Johnny made his first move
toward fulfilling his promise to Coach Dizney of old
Hillcrest. He had done it with the aid of Nicodemus.
There was more to come, very much more.

[52]
 CHAPTER IV
THE HAUNTED POOL

Next day Johnny disappeared among the

rhododendrons and mountain ivy that grow along the
right bank of Pounding Mill Creek. His step was light, his
heart was gay. And why not? Had he not fulfilled his
mission? Had he not discovered the much needed half-
back for the Hillcrest coach? And did he not carry in his
hands, beside a short split bamboo rod, a can of “soft
craws”? And were not soft craws the bait of baits for
this season of the year? He looked with pride and joy
upon the half dozen crawfish, that, having recently shed
their shells, held up soft and harmless claws for his
inspection.

“I’ll get that old sport, the king of all black bass, today,”
he assured himself. “I’ll have him in less than an hour.”

He might have fulfilled this promise had it not been for

a lurking shadow that, passing silently on before him,
came to rest at last on a rocky ledge, above the second
deep pool in Pounding Mill Creek.

Johnny had little interest in that second pool for the [53]
present. In fact that particular pool had a peculiar sort
of horror for Johnny. A man had been drowned in that
pool. He recalled the story with a chill. A group of
foreign laborers, so the story went, had driven up the
creek from the Gap. They had meant to dynamite this
pool and get a mess of fish. Since this was against the
law and since they found Zeb Page, a deputy sheriff,
sitting on a near-by boulder, they had decided to take a
swim. The pool was deep, all of twenty feet. Four of the
foreigners could swim. The water was fine. They
enjoyed it immensely.

They had all crawled out on the bank to sun themselves

when one of their number, who had never known the
delights of swimming, said, “That’s nothing. I can do
that.” He dove in, clothes and all. He disappeared
beneath the placid surface of the pool. Ten seconds
elapsed, twenty, forty, a full moment, and he did not
reappear.

Alarmed, his comrades dove for him. Ten minutes later

they brought him to the top, dead. In each of his two
coat pockets, they found a heavy revolver.

“I always said,” old Uncle Joe Creech always exclaimed [54]

after telling this story, “that totin’ pistol guns would
keep a good man down. And that to my notion mighty
nigh proves hit plumb fer sarton.”

“And folks do say,” he would add with a lowered voice

and shifting eyes, “that this here foreigner can be heard
on a still night in the dark of the moon, a shootin’ off of
them there pistol guns. But then shucks!” he would
squirt tobacco juice at a crack in the floor. “Shucks! How
could he an’ him drowned and dead?”

Sure enough, how could he? All the same, Johnny never
dropped his bait in that deep pool. He always had a
shivery feeling that it might catch on something soft and
that if he hauled in hard enough, he’d bring a dead
body to the top. Pure fancy, he knew this to be, but
anyway there were enough other pools to be fished in.
Why not pass this one up? He meant to pass it up on
this day, as on all others, but fate had decreed
otherwise.

Quite forgetting the deep pool that lay just beyond the [55]
last clump of mountain laurel, Johnny happily dropped
his first wriggling soft craw into the shadowy waters of
the pool next to that one where, more than once, a
grand and glorious old black bass had eluded him.

“I’ll get him,” he whispered. “Get him for sure.”

But would he? He waited. Lurking in the shadows, he

watched the dry line sink down, inch by inch. Then, with
a soundless parting of the lips, he saw the line begin
shooting away.

“Bass,” he whispered. “Big old black bass.”

The bass he knew, would run a yard, two, three yards,

then pause. Should he give the line a quick jerk then,
setting the hook? Or, as many wise anglers advised,
should he wait for the second run?

The line ceased playing out. Old bass had paused.

“Now,” Johnny whispered. “Now? Or—” He gave a quick
jerk. He had him. His heart leaped. He began reeling in.

Then his hopes fell, only a little fellow. It must be. No [56]
real pull at all. Nor was he mistaken. Close to the
surface there appeared a beautiful young bass, perhaps
nine inches long, the kind those mountain natives call
“green pearch.” With a deft snap of his line, Johnny
switched him off, then watched him as, for a moment,
stunned by the suddenness of it all, he stood quite still
in the water. Johnny’s thoughts were all admiration.
How beautiful he was, like the things a Chinaman does
in green lacquer.

But the big old black fellow, still lurking down there
somewhere in the shadows? What of him? At once
Johnny was alert. Drawing in his line, he offered up one
more precious soft craw on the altar of a fisherman’s
hope.

Down, down went the craw-dad. Down, down sunk the

line. But what was this? Of a sudden the line shot away.
Startled, eyes bulging, Johnny watched his line play out,
a yard, two, three, four, five, all but the length of the
pool.

Then, “Now!” he breathed once again. And—what? Was

he snagged on a rock? It seemed so. But who could be
sure? He strained at his line cautiously. It did not budge.

“Fellow’d think it was an alligator,” he whispered. He put

a little more strain upon his line. It gave to his touch.
Then, of a sudden it went slack.

“Dumb! Got off! He—” [57]

At that instant the pole was all but jerked from his hand
and at precisely the same instant, the most magnificent
fish he had ever seen leaped clear of the water. He
leaped again and yet again. Johnny’s heart stood still.
Then as he saw the fish vanish, felt the tug and knew
he still had him, his heart went racing.

It was at this precise second in the long history of the

world that Johnny’s ears were smitten by an unearthly
scream. It came from the direction of that other pool,
the foreigner’s death pool, the haunted pool. The
scream was repeated not once but twice. It was
followed by a loud splash.

There could be but one conclusion. Someone had been

about to fall into the pool. That someone could not
swim. Someone HAD fallen into the deep pool.

Johnny dropped his pole, heaved a sudden sigh of [58]

regret and at the same time dashed through the
bushes. Arriving breathless at the edge of that other
pool, he saw a head rise partially above the water. A
mass of crinkly brown hair floated on the surface.
Without further thought, Johnny plunged, clothes and
all, into the pool, to begin an Australian crawl toward
the spot where the head had been. But where was it?
For a space of ten seconds, he could not locate it. When
at last his racing gaze came to rest, it was upon a spot
close to the opposite bank. The head was there, also a
pair of fair, round shoulders.

Johnny paused in his swimming to see a girl, of some

sixteen summers, emerge, fully clothed and dripping,
from the pool.

Just then she turned about to look at him and say, as a

rare smile played about her lips, “Oh! You in swimming
too?”

To measure Johnny’s emotions at that moment would

be impossible. The girl was beautiful. But the witch?
Why had she screamed? Had she meant to deceive him?
And his fish? Gone of course. Even a Tennessee shad
could loose himself from a drifting pole like that.
“No,” he said, speaking slowly. “I’m not in swimming. I
fell in, same as you did.”

“But I didn’t fall in,” the girl shook the water from her
hair. “I jumped in.”

“And do you always scream like that when you dive?”

Johnny was puzzled and angry.

“Nearly always.” The girl sat down upon a rock in the [59]
bright sunshine. “There’s some sort of bird that screams
before he dives. I like it.”

“And I suppose,” Johnny said mockingly, “that you

always go in clothes and all?”

“Always,” she said soberly. “It wouldn’t be quite decent

not to unless you have a bathing suit. And I haven’t
one. I’ve asked Dad to buy me one many times but he
always forgets.”

“Who’s Dad?” Johnny asked quickly.

“Dad is Colonel Crider. I’m Jensie Crider. Now please,”

there was a friendly note in her voice, “stop being ugly.
Come on out in the sun. We’ll be all dry in a half hour. I
want you to tell me about a lot of things.”

Jensie Crider, Johnny was thinking to himself. The very

girl I’ve wanted to know. And such a meeting as this!

“You made me lose a black bass, a—a whopper,” he

grinned in spite of himself.

“Oh! I’m sorry!” she was all sympathy. “But I’ll find you
another, a bigger one. You wait and see!” She stood up
to shake herself until her damp garments spun about
her. “Now please do come up and get all dried out.”

Who could but obey this order from so beautiful a siren? [60]

“Now tell me,” she said when Johnny had settled himself
upon the rock, “what do you do besides catch fish?”

“Sometimes I go scouting for football players.”

“Do you find them?”

“Found one last night.”

“Down here in the mountains?” she voiced her surprise.

“It’s Ballard Ball. You’d be astonished. He’s an artful

dodger. I—” he was about to tell her how he had found
him but changed his mind. “I—I’m going to take him
with me to college.”

“Oh, college.” The girl’s voice dropped. “Father wants

me to go to college. I’m not going.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I?”

Johnny told her why. He spoke in such glowing terms of

big football games, wild rallies, of bonfires, and sings
around great open fireplaces, the joyous friendships of
youth and the satisfaction to be had from learning
something new every day that at last quoting from last
Sabbath’s Sunday School lesson, she murmured:

“‘Almost thou persuadest me.’” [61]

“But see!” she sprang to her feet. “Now we are all dry.
And I shall keep my promise. Now for that big, black
bass!”

[62]
 CHAPTER V
THE CRIMSON FLOOD

Several days later, Johnny Thompson found himself

crouching on the western sidelines of the football field
at old Hillcrest. He had been there a half hour. During
that time a variety of interests had vied for the attention
of his active brain.

For a time he had thought of the mill down there at the

foot of Stone Mountain in the Cumberlands. All that
seemed quite far away now. Yet the strangeness and
mystery of it lingered. He had not forgotten his resolve
to solve that mystery. In his mind’s vision now he saw it
all. Now the ancient mill, its secret trap door and the
serious minded Donald Day presiding over it all. Johnny
had hoped that Donald would tell him the secret of
those strange recesses at the bottom of the old mill. He
had pictured himself saying, “Donald, old son, how can
you take an empty, double walled jug down there and
bring it back full of something quite valuable when there
is nothing down there but air and water?” He had never
asked the question, had never quite dared. So the
mystery of the mill remained a mystery still.

The old master of the mill, Malcomb MacQueen, was still [63]
in the hospital. Apparently his fall, when the bridge
came down, had resulted in very serious injuries. No
one seemed to know when he might be about again.
One thing was sure, everyone would be glad when that
day came. “How those mountain people do love him!”
Johnny whispered as he crouched on the sidelines
waiting for action.

And Ballard? Ah, that was the question uppermost in

Johnny’s mind at this moment. As he crouched there
waiting for the kick off of that first of the season’s
games, he asked himself over and over, “What about
Ballard?”

When he told the coach that he had found a star half-

back for him, a sure winner who in all his life had played
but three games of football and had been given no
opportunity to shine in these, the coach had indulged in
that quaint but classic expression: “Oh yeah?”

But Johnny had remained undismayed. “You wait and [64]

see!” had been his only reply. He had not told of the late
night tryst with the champion butter of all rams, old
Nicodemus. It seemed a little strange to him as he
thought of it now. “Wait and see,” he had repeated.
That was all. Now they were waiting. They were to see.
The zero hour was approaching. Cedarville, the visiting
team, would kick off to Hillcrest. An important game? All
games of a series are important. Seven games were to
be played for the championship of the Little Seven
League.

No one wanted Hillcrest to win as Johnny did. He

wanted his find, Ballard Ball, to turn out to be a star of
the first magnitude. He wanted the Hillcrest boys to win
because he knew and loved them. More than that,
Hillcrest had been his father’s school. Johnny’s father
had died while he was still young, not, however, until he
had fired Johnny’s boyish mind with tales of football
battles of good, old, half forgotten days.

“They used to win,” Johnny had said to Ballard that very

morning. “Win and win and win! Last year Hillcrest lost
and lost and lost. Hillcrest has not carried off the
pennant for six years.”

To this Ballard had made no reply. Johnny thought he [65]

saw the lines tighten about his thin, serious face. He
was sure he caught a gleam from those dark, deep-set
eyes. That was all. It was enough. “He’ll do,” had been
his mental comment. Now the eternal question came
back to him, “Will he do?”

“Here they come!” a high-pitched voice cried. The

speaker was close beside Johnny. “Here they come! The
Crimson Tide!”

It was Jensie Crider who, wakening Johnny from his

reverie, brought him to his feet with a snap. Yes, Jensie,
the same Jensie, who had screamed three times then
leaped, full dressed, into that mountain pool was here.
And, miracle of miracles, wild and free as she had been
down in the hills, today she was garbed in a sober
costume and going to college, Johnny’s college, old
Hillcrest. Something to marvel at here.

No time for that now though, for indeed, here they

came, the Hillcrest team, the Crimson Flood as Jensie
had named them.

The ball had been kicked off. A long, high, rocketing

kick, it had been gathered in by Punch Dickman, the
Hillcrest full-back, and now here they came.
To Johnny at that moment, they seemed a crimson tide [66]
indeed. Their red jersies flaming in the sun, they were
like the onrush of a flaming prairie fire. Johnny’s own
heart flamed at sight of them.

Among them all, one figure stood out boldly. A large,

heavy boned boy, he moved with the determined gallop
of a stubborn two year old colt. He ran just ahead of the
ball carrier. When a boy in orange and blue leaped
toward the carrier, he was met not by the big full-back
but by this other boy. Hillcrest’s left end whose name
was Dave Powers. Dave spilled him as easily as he
might have a tea-wagon laden with dishes. Two others
of the orange and blue went down before him.

“Look at ’em!” Johnny thrilled to the core of his being.

“Thirty yard line, forty, forty-five, fifty. Over the center,
forty-five! Forty! There! There he’s down on the
Cedarville thirty-seven yard line. Yow-ee! What a run-
back. It’s a good sign, Jensie! A very good sign!” He
slapped his companion on the back as if she were a boy.
And she came back with a feigned punch to the jaw.

“But Ballard?” Johnny’s thoughts sobered. Ballard, the [67]

slim dark-eyed mountain boy was in there at right half.
The coach was giving him his chance.

“Good old Dizney!” Johnny muttered. “Here’s hoping!”

“He’ll make good,” Jensie exclaimed. “Ballard will make

good. I’m sure of it.”

“That’s a pal,” Johnny’s heart warmed toward the girl.

Once down there in the Cumberlands he had fairly
hated her for making him lose a fine black bass. He was
all for her now.
Hillcrest had the ball. The run-back had been wonderful,
but, after that for a time, things were not so good.
Johnny saw at a glance that the Hillcrest team was
outweighed fifteen pounds to the man. And, in the
beginning games at least, weight does count.

Hillcrest tried a smash through right tackle. No good.

They attempted an end run with Ballard carrying the
ball. Johnny caught his breath as he saw the mountain
boy tuck the ball under his arm. “First blood,” he
muttered. Two enemies broke through the line. Ballard
dodged one, appeared to offer the ball to the second,
then pivoted and faded out to the right.

“Great stuff!” Johnny murmured. [68]

In the end, however, the mountain boy was thrown for

a loss of two yards. One more down, then came the
punt.

A Cedarville man carried the ball to his own forty yard

line. Then followed a terrific pounding of the Hillcrest
line that resulted in four first downs, a thirty yard run
through the line and at last a touchdown by the
invaders.

“Oh!” Jensie sighed, it was the first real game she had
ever witnessed. “How can we win when they ram the
line like a flock of goats?”

“Or rams?” Johnny chuckled in spite of himself. “But

wait,” he consoled her, “our team will take to the air.
Then you’ll see.”

“Take to the air?” Jensie was puzzled.

“We’ll have to beat them with passes,” Johnny
explained.

He looked at the girl beside him and marvelled. From

his strange introduction—or lack of introduction—back
there in the mountain pool, he had suspected her of
being a trifle crude. To his vast surprise, he had found
her very much of a lady.

As he thought of it now, while Cedarville took time out [69]

before a try at the goal, as he recalled the few happy
days spent with her there in the mountains, he found
himself thinking of her as he might have thought of the
fine type of English girl, who rides after the hounds,
plays golf, cricket, and tennis, and is a fine-spoken,
properly dressed young person for all that.

Ride after the hounds? Well, they had not quite done
that. They had followed the Colonel’s favorite hounds
over the ridges, hunting squirrels. They had risen two
hours before dawn to walk through the dewy moonlight
to a cornfield. There they had treed two fat, marauding
old coons and had, as Jensie put it, “Shot them at
sunrise.” They had—

But there was the kick for the extra point. No good, off
to the right. Johnny cheered with the rest but his gaze
was wandering from the coach to Ballard, then from
Ballard to the coach again. What was the coach thinking
of Ballard? Probably nothing. He hadn’t been given a
chance. He—

“There! There they go!” Jensie cried.

At once Johnny’s eyes were on the ball. Cedarville had [70]

kicked off to Hillcrest. By some strange chance, it was
Ballard who caught the ball. It was no mere chance that
Dave Powers, the left end, was at Ballard’s side—he had
a way of being near the runner. Together they sprinted
down the line, but not for long. Ballard’s course was too
much of a snake-dance for Dave. He dodged there,
pivoted here, leaped straight at a would-be tackler, then
shot to the right. Eluding all would-be tacklers, leaving
his team mates far behind, the slim Kentucky boy set
the bleachers howling with delight. Had it not been for
the lone safety man who rushed him and downed him
at the fifteen yard line, it must surely have been a
touchdown from a run-back—a marvelous feat. As it
was Hillcrest went wild with the yell:

“Yea Ballard! Yea Ballard! Ballard! Ballard! Touchdown!

Touchdown!”

A touchdown it was, and that on the very next play.

Little Artie Stark, Hillcrest’s midget quarter-back, took
the ball, lateralled a slow pass to Dave Powers at end,
and Dave, plunging like a bucking bronco, shot through
the line.

“Yea! Yea! Yea!” even Jensie, who until now had [71]
watched the game in passive silence, joined in the
cheering.

The kick was good. The score stood 7-6 in favor of

Hillcrest.

There followed moments of tense struggle. Hillcrest won

the ball and lost it. Cedarville battled their way to the
ten yard line only to lose the ball on a fumble. Hillcrest
took to the air but with little success. Pass after pass
dropped to earth incomplete.

At last there was but seven minutes left to play. The day
was warm for autumn. Both teams showed the strain.
Hillcrest tried one more forward pass only to meet with
disaster. It was intercepted by the opponent’s right end.
He went romping down the field for a second
touchdown. The kick was good. Score 13 to 7 against
Hillcrest.

“Cheer up, boys,” Johnny shouted as, having taken time

out, the Hillcrest boys lay sprawled out before him.
“You’ll win. There’s six minutes yet to play.”

“Than-thanks Johnny. Thanks for them few kind words,”

came from a member of the team. Ballard did not so
much as look up.

“He’s dead on his feet,” Johnny whispered to Jensie. [72]

“The coach should take him out, but he’s afraid he’ll
break him if he does.”

“Poor Ballard,” Jensie whispered back. “I wish he’d have

some luck.”

Jensie was deeply interested in Ballard. They had gone

to school together, she and Ballard, for years. It had
mattered little that her home was large, her father rich;
his home small, his family poor. They were friends.

When grade school was over Jensie had been sent away
to a high class private boarding school for girls. This had
lasted exactly three weeks. Jensie had pined away for
her beloved mountains, her childhood comrades, and
the glorious freedom of public schools. She ran away
from Madame Farar’s select finishing school. She came
home to the mountains. Her father had chuckled over
her rebellion and had sent her, with Ballard and all her
other childhood pals to the high school at the Gap.
She had not wanted to go away to college. The [73]
appearance of Johnny Thompson on the scene had
changed all that. Johnny had painted glowing pictures
of college, of basket ball, football, pep-meetings,
evenings about the open fire in the big “dorm” and all
else that goes to make college glorious. Johnny himself
was a rather glamorous figure. And Ballard was going.
That was enough. So, here she was. And here was
Ballard of her own Pounding Mill Creek, on a football
team that apparently could not win.

“They MUST win!” She set her teeth hard.

“They shall win!” Johnny exclaimed.

Would they? It did not seem so, for once again, as play
was resumed, the opponents began battering their
shattered line, marching down the field toward one
more touchdown.

But not so fast! The Hillcrest line stiffened. Three downs

and no gain. Cedarville was forced to kick. The ball shot
skyward like a rocket to drop right into Artie Stark’s
waiting arms. Artie raced forward for a gain of twenty
yards. With a tackler at his heels he hurled a forward
pass to Dave Powers. Dave sprang into the Cedarville
mob. He dodged here, pivoted there, was about to be
tackled, then lateralled back to Artie Stark half way
across the field and all alone.

By this time the Hillcrest bleachers had gone mad. Even

the Cedarville rooters were screaming at the tops of
their voices.

“Touchdown! Touchdown!” yelled the excited mob. [74]

Johnny looked at his watch. “One minute to play, one
minute for a touchdown. Regular Jack Armstrong
football,” he murmured.

Almost, but not quite. Finding himself in the open and in

full possession of the treasured pigskin, Artie Stark once
again shot forward toward the goal line. An enemy
appeared on the right. He dodged him. One on the left,
another on the right, a third directly before him. No
chance. His eyes roved the field. “Than—thanks, good
fortune,” he murmured as he sent the ball on a long,
looping curve toward Ballard Ball, the slim Kentucky boy,
who stood waiting all alone on the enemy’s five yard
line. It was a perfect pass. Ballard was not obliged to
move a foot. The ball dropped squarely in his arms. Yet
—Johnny could not believe his eyes—the ball went
bouncing in air to at last strike the earth and roll away.

“Incomplete pass,” Johnny groaned. “One, two, three [75]

passes, all incomplete. The ball goes back miles and
miles. And with only a half minute left to play.” He
groaned again and all Hillcrest groaned with him. And
well they might for, scarcely had the teams lined up for
play when the whistle blew. The game was over.
Hillcrest had lost 13 to 7.

When Johnny and Jensie went in search of Ballard they

did not find him on the field. He had vanished.

“Johnny, we must find him,” Jensie exclaimed. “We

really must! I know Ballard. I’ve known him a long, long
time. He’s too good to be true. He’ll blame himself for
the loss of that game. He—why he may start for home
tonight. You never can tell.”

[76]
 CHAPTER VI
OLD KENTUCKY

After a futile search for Ballard, Johnny wandered back

to the Blue Moon. The Blue Moon was Johnny’s latest
financial venture in a strange and troubled world. It
promised to be a grand flop and Johnny was duly
unhappy about it.

The establishing of the Blue Moon had been a

suggestion of Johnny’s grandfather. The old man was
seldom wrong. This time, however, it did seem that he
had erred.

It had started with Johnny’s determination to find his

young Kentucky friend a job, anything at all that would
enable him to earn money for food and lodging. At first
it had seemed simple enough. In the end it proved
impossible. Everything was taken.

“Way to get a job these days,” Johnny’s grandfather had

said, “is to make one for yourself.”

“Sure,” Johnny grinned, “but how?”

“Not so hard as it might seem,” the old man rumbled. [77]

“I’ve been thinking about it for quite a spell. You know
college boys like a place to gather and talk things over,
have a cup of coffee or hot malted, sort of a gathering
place of the clan.”

“I know,” Johnny agreed.

“I’ve been watching them. They wander down town, go

in here, go in there, gather in places, not so bad, not so
good either, little gambling, slot machines and all that,
little bad language from rough town folks, all that sort
of thing. If I had a boy away from home, I’d like him in
a better place. So why not, Johnny?” The old man
leaned forward eagerly.

“Why not what?” Johnny asked.

“Why not turn that abandoned bowling alley building

just off the campus into a sort of student’s retreat, place
where they can buy little things they need, sit down for
a hot drink, gather around for a bit of conversation, all
that.

“I’ve got the fixtures for you, took them on a bad debt.
They’re in storage. I’ll finance it for you. Make a job for
both you and Ballard. What do you say?”

“Grand!” Johnny had all but hugged the old man.

They had worked hard to make the place attractive, [78]

Johnny and Ballard had. Jensie had added a feminine
touch, with a picture or two and colored curtains. She
had imported for them a southern negro cook who
could make famous little meat pies and apple turn
overs, the sort that melt in your mouth.

The place was, Johnny decided, to have very few rules,

one was that this was a place for men only. Perhaps this
rule was a mistake. One thing was sure, the student
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