Sports Diplomacy: A Dominican Adventure
I tried not to have my personal interests in sports and languages collide, but some things just can’t be avoided…
Category: Sports!
Sentimental Soccer
English + Español
Between Wednesday, June 22, and Sunday, June 26, 2011, River Plate, the team I’ve been a fan of my entire life, was relegated to the second division of Argentina’s soccer league. The depth of…
Sports: Editor’s Letter
I hate sports. As a little girl, I was always stuck on the softball outfield—the practical way of including a chubby, clumsy kid in the mandatory physical education class. I’d rather have been inside reading my favorite poet Edna St. Vincent Millay…
Sports and Political Imagination in Colombia
English + Español
A special exhibit entitled “A Country Made of Soccer” at Colombia’s National Museum features press photos, radio narratives, uniforms and other objects associated with the sport. Inaugurated…
Speaking of Baseball
English + Español
Dice un viejo refrán que no hay nada mejor que el béisbol, que no sea hablar de béisbol. Y con ese propósito nos fuimos el joven periodista deportivo Yasel Porto, el veterano investigador…
Soccer Clubs
English + Español
On June 25, 1978, Argentina and Holland were playing the World Cup final. General Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship had spent millions to organize the Cup; the Montanera guerrilla had…
Santo and Lucha Libre
English + Español
First Fall: They will fight two of the three falls without a time limit! One of my earliest childhood memories is of sitting in front of a small black-and-white television…
To Dance or to Box
English + Español
It’s Sunday, the streets are dusty and the only arrivals to San Basilio de Palenque are some motorcycle-taxis and an old bus from the village of La María. Peddlers descend from the taxis…
Bullfights
English + Español
Spain’s history is not written in ink, but in bull’s blood. The shadow of the black beast with sharpened horns has spread over the Iberian peninsula for thousands of years and extended to…
Women’s Soccer in Brazil
“No one knows, no one saw,” reads the headline in an important Brazilian newspaper announcing the conclusion of the main women’s soccer championship on the continent—the Taça…
Women and Sports in Peru
One of the many vivid memories of my first stay in Peru involved listening to a radio commentary of the national women’s volleyball team as they played against the Soviet Union in the final of…
Sports and Recreation
Sports as a social and cultural phenomenon have notably grown worldwide. Latin America is no exception to this expansion. This is in part because of the large industry built around sports…
Soccer and Literature
The woman in the bookstore in Rosario, Argentina, could tell I wasn’t a native. She asked me what I was doing in the city. I told her I was trying my luck as a freelance writer. Writing about what?…
Searching For Burt Reynolds
While traveling from Michigan to Boston in July 2010, my family stopped for the night in Batavia, NY, and discovered a baseball game was about to begin. My 16-year-old daughter Darcy and I…
Religion, Politics and Plenty of Betting
“While the rest of the world was caught up in contests of individual athletic skills such as jousting, footraces, swimming and wrestling, New World cultures were fielding teams of…
Preparing Rio
What have we Brazilians been doing to break the on-going cycle of violence plaguing the country over the past three decades? Can we offer a safe environment to foreign visitors before…
Preparing for the Olympics
Favelas—“informal settlements” to the academic, “illegal slums” to the antipathetic—are spontaneous, grassroots communities found throughout Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, host to the…
Debating U.S.-Cuban Relations: Shall We Play Ball
Here we go again—yet another moment in history when the U.S.-Cuban relationship, frozen (more or less) since early 1961, could be lurching toward sanity. What makes this moment…
My Goalsetters
As I stood in an unkempt Brazilian park, seemingly landscaped as an afterthought, trucks and buses careened left and right on the thoroughfare behind me. Their cacophony was…
Asociación Civil Lapacho
I spent a summer volunteering at a Grameen microcredit bank in Resistencia, Chaco, Argentina, called Asociación Civil Lapacho, thanks to the student organization A Drop in the…
