Drumond Sport and Society in Postrevolutionary Mexico 1 2009

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Sport and Society in Post-revolutionary

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Journal of the History of Sport, 26:6, 723-747, DOI: 10.1080/09523360902739256
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The International Journal of the History of Sport
Vol. 26, No. 6, May 2009, 723–747
Sport and Society in Post-revolutionary

Mexico [1]
By hosting the Central American Games in 1926, the Mexican government sought to
Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 09:09 02 January 2015
convince international observers that the nation had emerged from the years of bitter
civil war that characterised the Mexican Revolution (1910–17). [2] Yet while the
pomp and ceremony of the games may have provided a temporary sense of well-
being, the occasion could not fully mask the disquiet that lay beneath the veneer of
stability. The wounds of the Mexican Revolution went much deeper: the country’s
economic infrastructure was severely damaged; political authority had devolved to
those semi-autonomous provincial leaders with sufficient military clout to get their
way; and as poorer Mexicans called for social justice, the wealthy demanded social
control. Many refused to accept that the violent conflict had run its course: radicals
pushed for greater political change while reactionaries sought to turn the clock back.
Indeed, in the very year that the Central American Games took place, a rebellion
against constitutional attacks on the Catholic Church caused considerable bloodshed
and division. Clearly, it would take more than a few gold medals to convince
onlookers that Mexico had returned to the order and progress that had characterized
the late nineteenth century.
A crucial element in Mexico’s rehabilitation on the international scene depended
on convincing its people that the survival of the nascent central authority represented
the best hope of meeting their expectations. As such, the governments of Alvaro
Obregón (1920–4) and Plutarco Elı́as Calles (1924–8) developed a series of
compromises in which sporadic grants of land and labour reforms were used to
buy the loyalty of agrarian and industrial worker unions. While their support helped
the government to survive several armed revolts, the assassination of president-elect
Obregón in 1928 underlined that deep divisions remained. With the primary aim of
averting further political instability, Calles formed the Partido Nacional de la
Revolución (National Party of the Revolution – PNR) in 1929. Comprising all
significant sectors of Mexican society, he sought to convince competing forces that all
political contestation should take place within the party’s bureaucratic structure
rather than on the battlefield. Thus the precursor of the single-party state began a
process of patronage that would last for the remainder of the twentieth century. This
is not to say that there were no dissenters, but the successful cooption of leaders and
the use of limited repression kept the lid on the widespread unrest and violence that
was witnessed in many other Latin American countries during the same period.
ISSN 0952-3367 (print)/ISSN 1743-9035 (online) Ó 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09523360902739256
724 K. Brewster and C. Brewster
Yet to portray Mexico’s problems as purely political would be to ignore the deep
social and ethnic tensions that had been exposed by the revolutionary violence. When
peasant troops marched through the streets of Mexico City in 1914, they shocked
urban sensibilities to the core. Their dark skins and rustic ways exposed the huge
chasms within Mexican society, while their undoubted military potential raised
considerable alarm among members of the elite who were more accustomed to
looking upon their countrymen with disdain for their backwardness and insularity.
As far as they were concerned, the raw energy of the countryside had to be channelled
into non-threatening outlets and those on the periphery of mainstream society
needed to be rescued from the clutches of conservatism and persuaded of their rights
and responsibilities within a post-revolutionary order. The project of social

engineering that followed grappled with thorny issues concerning the very fabric of
Mexican identity. As metropolitan Mexico reached out to the provinces, it sought
redeeming features among the mestizo (mixed race) and indigenous peasants to paper
over the cracks of this socially and ethnically diverse nation. One of the principal
ways in which this was attempted was through the development of a cultural project
designed to fashion perceptions through education and propaganda. By inculcating
the rights and responsibilities of citizenship within revolutionary Mexico, rural
schools and cultural brigades sought to unite a divided country within a single
identity: one that took pride in its national flag, embraced national heroes, and
celebrated victorious moments in national history. [3]
The aim of this study is to provide a historical context for the social dynamics
exposed in Mexico City’s hosting of the 1968 Olympics by exploring the nature and
limits of socio-cultural reform in the post-revolutionary period. We suggest that the
unquestionably earnest endeavours of rural teachers to produce a new Mexican
society could never be fully achieved because a significant section of the political and
social elite had no intention of buying into such a vision. Deep-seated prejudices, no
doubt sharpened by derogatory foreign stereotypes, meant that the Mexican elite
viewed their countrymen with condescension and suspicion. From an elite
perspective, the success of the post-revolutionary projects was not measured by
the ability to create a unified nation but more by the imperative to develop an
efficient, obedient workforce. In many respects, therefore, our analysis of this process
differs significantly from that of other studies, which have sought to emphasize the
process of negotiation and compromise within cultural policies. Our argument is that
no matter how effective these policies were in ensuring peace between social and
ethnic groups in Mexico, they could not bridge the chasm that existed between the
elite and their own people.
In order to test this hypothesis, we first identify the nature of the debate that
consumed elite circles, both before and after the Revolution, over how best to present
the nation to all-important foreign opinion. By doing so, the depth of denial
regarding the realities of Mexican life becomes clear, as does the elite’s desire to
measure up to European perceptions of ‘civilization’. We then investigate the ways in
which the promotion of sport and other cultural activities were deployed in an
Sport and Society in Post-revolutionary Mexico 725
attempt to make Mexican society fit these imported values. By comparing such
initiatives with similar processes elsewhere, it will be seen that Mexican attempts to
foster greater respect between different social and ethnic groups were shallow and
masked a determined effort to homogenize Mexican culture into a more acceptable,
urban-based, notion of civilized behaviour. At the very time that Mexicans were
being taught to think of themselves as having a shared history and shared identity, an
elite sense of aloofness remained a constant obstacle to genuine social unity. Indeed,
the knowledge that foreign stereotypes cast all Mexicans in derogatory terms made it
all the more necessary for members of the elite to maintain a distance between
themselves and their countrymen. No matter how successful the social reforms may
have been, they would prove insufficient to compel the elite to practise what they
preached. Regarding Mexico City’s bidding for the Olympic Games and the staging of
them, this fundamental flaw within socio-cultural reforms meant that the elite’s
perceptions of their countrymen remained essentially unchanged throughout the
twentieth century. Beneath their overt display of national confidence lay a persistent
doubt concerning the degree of development that Mexico as a whole had actually
attained. This would largely determine the ways in which they attempted to manage
the games for overseas and domestic consumption.
An Elitist View of Mexico and its People

Long before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Mexican author, Octavio Paz,
published what has become accepted as a classic analysis of the character of the
Mexican nation and its people, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude).
Among Paz’s many observations was that, due to the singular nature of its history
and geopolitics (its Spanish colonial past and its close proximity to the United States)
Mexico had never developed a truly national identity. Bereft of any real sense of its
own origins, Mexico had all too frequently searched abroad for suitable cultural and
societal models. Paz maintained that this lack of identity invaded the psyche of
individuals, draining them of self-respect and self-confidence. As a defence
mechanism Mexicans, like their nation, employed diverse masks to hide their true
emotions. Only rarely, he continued, did these masks slip to reveal the raw emotions
of the Mexican people. At such moments, they got drunk, made love, fought and
killed, all with excessive passion. [4] Yet even as we read these lines, we should not be
fooled into thinking that Paz saw himself in such terms. He belonged to a much
smaller elite group, members of which shared the intellectual background and
broader experiences that enabled them to muse on the nature of national identity –
an elite that lived in constant fear that, as had happened at distinct times during the
Mexican Revolution, the raw emotions of their compatriots might destroy any façade
of civility that nation-builders hoped to sustain.
The detached, neo-anthropological gaze with which Paz described the ‘other’
within his midst was merely the latest in a pattern of elite reflections on a schism
within Mexican society between desirability and reality. A fundamental problem in
trying to resolve the enigma of what it meant to be a Mexican was a colonial legacy
that had marginalized the indigenous communities and had sustained a caste system
in which purity of European blood eased passage into elite society. A century of
independence had sought to denigrate such decadence as a thing of the past. Yet as
Mexico celebrated its centenary of independence from Spain in 1910, most of its
political elite were nonetheless fair-skinned and were seen as the promoters of
modernization, and most of its poorest citizens were dark-skinned and seen as
barriers to progress. Although presidents Benito Juárez (1858–72) and Porfirio Dı́az
(1877–1911) are often cited as national presidents who had risen from indigenous
and mestizo backgrounds respectively, the fact that contemporary and later portrayals
of both men underwent a process of blancamiento (whitening), underlines the degree

of tokenism and discomfort with which the political elite viewed such penetration of
colour barriers.
How then, given the persistence of this colonial legacy, could Mexico portray itself
to the world in the twentieth century? In a strange way, the centennial celebrations of
1910 would serve as a dress-rehearsal for the Olympic Games half a century later; as a
time when a nation, city and people were laid open for foreign scrutiny. As Paz
suggested, the portrayal of the nation could not be separated from foreign
perceptions of societal and cultural norms. There can be no more poignant an
indication of this than when Spanish, rather than Mexican, masterpieces were chosen
to adorn an art exhibition to celebrate Mexico’s 100 years of independence from
Spain. The deferment to ‘advanced’ notions of civilization, culture and taste pervaded
Porfirian society and, perhaps, illustrates the lack of self-confidence to which Paz
would later allude. Indeed, in the early twentieth century foreign opinions of Mexico
were mixed, to say the least. While many foreign entrepreneurs may have voiced
praise for the civilized society of the Mexican elite, there is little doubt that they saw
the majority of Mexicans in a very different light.
An appropriate example of exactly how far Mexicans needed to go in order to be
seen as equals within the international community can be taken from the 1904
Olympic Games in St Louis. Alongside recognized sporting events, the organizers of
the games arranged a series of activities that took place during so-called
‘Anthropological Days’. As John Hoberman notes, mock competitions were staged
in which ethnic minorities such as ‘Blacks, Chinese, Philipinos, Turks, Mexican
mestizos, Eskimos and Indians’ were induced to compete among themselves ‘in track-
and-field events and then in their native sports’. [5] Two distinct reactions to such
spectacles emerged: Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, dismissed
them as a product of ‘American vulgarity’; while Professor McGee, president of the
American Anthropological Association, rationalized that they and other anthro-
pological aspects of the events offered ‘the lesson of experience that personal contact
is the best solvent of enmity and distrust between persons and peoples’. [6] Whether
such initiatives were vulgar or noble depended on one’s perspective and
interpretation. For the US organizers and, no doubt, many of the competing
Western European nations attending the games, Mexican mestizos were viewed as just
one of several groups included in a quaint exhibition of native pastimes – a frivolous

curio before the serious competition began. If this portrayal does not explicitly refer
to the social Darwinism prevalent at that time, the sentiments of two US travellers to
Mexico published one year earlier offer a more extreme portrayal of underlying
perceptions: ‘The mestizos – near half the population – have all the worst features of
their Spanish and Indian parents. Turbulent, born criminals, treacherous, idle,
dissolute, and cruel, they have the Spanish lust and the Indian natural cynicism, the
Spanish luxury of temperament with the Indian improvidence.’ [7]
For a Mexican elite that took their cue from the social and cultural mores of the
Western world, such disparaging views of Spaniards, mestizos, and the indigenous
would have been deeply wounding. In many ways this accounts for the preference of
the Mexican elite for carving a separate space for themselves: one that was divided
from Spanish colonial decadence by the brave fight for independence, and that was
set apart from mestizos and the indigenous by an ostentatious appreciation of
European cultural tastes. Attempts to portray the Mexican identity on the
international stage, therefore, reflected elite perceptions of its own place in society
while nonetheless maintaining a positive image of Mexico as a place where foreign
investors and diplomats would be given a welcoming, civilized reception.
In his study of nationalism, Tom Nairn offers a perspective that is useful in
understanding the dilemma of the Mexican elite. He refers to a Janus-like form of
nationalism that accompanies efforts to appropriate the powers and benefits of
modernity by a so-called ‘backward’ culture and people. Even as they do so, they
reach into their own past for sources of comfort, stability and identity. As such,
a nation looks forward to a bright new future while simultaneously looking back for
reminders of its origins. Nairn develops this theory by suggesting that Janus rarely
reveals just two faces. He offers a tendency towards ‘internationalism’ as an
alternative gaze, and the heterogeneity of ‘national’ history as another; both
conspiring to blur the vision of would-be nation builders. [8] In the case of the
Mexican elite, their perception of the indigenous communities as ‘backward’ was a
contemporary reminder of a past that appeared to threaten Mexico’s future. Yet such
uncomfortable realities could be averted by reaching back to a ‘golden age’ of pre-
Columbian civility, a nobler bedrock upon which to establish Mexican identity.
The elite’s search for a golden age had begun even before Mexico had gained
independence from Spain. In the late eighteenth century, for example, the discovery
of a statue of the pre-Columbian goddess, Coatlicue, caused considerable controversy
when it was displayed in the patio of the university in Mexico City. Margarita Dı́az-
Andreu argues that by placing it alongside sculptures from Ancient Rome and
Greece, elite society was displaying its need to reconstruct history along idealized,
European lines. Not surprisingly, when it was realized that indigenous visitors to the
site saw the statue as a source of cult worship rather than a symbol of nationhood, it
was removed and buried underground. Only in the immediate post-Independence
period (1821–4) was it exhumed and exhibited in the National Museum. Dı́az-
Andreu states that by placing it within this controlled environment, it became easier
to safeguard a dominant class interpretation of the statue as an appropriate cultural
representation of the new Mexican nation. [9]
As the centennial celebrations of Independence imply, an elite bias towards
European high culture continued throughout the nineteenth century. Given the
significant nationalist strain within the Revolution and its aftermath, it might be
expected that such a trend would have been discarded as a relic of a decadent past.
Yet Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo points out that the question of national identity
remained unresolved throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. [10] By
analysing the ways in which Mexican culture was portrayed at international
exhibitions and fairs during the 1920s and 1930s, he argues that the oscillation
between pre-Columbian, Hispanic and modernist representations reflected an

ongoing debate within Mexican intellectual circles concerning the very fabric of
Mexican society. It went without saying, of course, that whichever interpretation of
Mexico was offered to the world, it was a sanitized, idealized Mexico that was au fait
with modern technology and at ease with its ethnic diversity. What was not on show
at these exhibitions was any hint of the discontent within social or ethnic groups, nor
was there a display of the raw emotions to which Octavio Paz would later refer. Just
as Mexico City’s authorities cleared the streets of the indigenous before welcoming
foreign dignitaries to celebrate the centenary of independence, so would later
designers of Mexican images abroad also cover what they viewed as unsightly stains
of Mexican society beneath a pure alabaster finish. [11] Yet the question of
international image, although important to the elite’s sense of self-perception, was
only one factor in the task facing social reformers in the twentieth century. As the
Revolution had all too powerfully underlined, there was a need to attend to the
structure as well as the façade of Mexican society. In seeking to do so, post-
revolutionary governments recognized the central role that culture could play.
Culture and Social Cohesion

An elite’s desire to control the way people think and behave is an eternal element of
social dynamics. It has provoked a range of tactics from brutal enforcement to
gentle persuasion and has been conveyed through a diversity of methods. The
specific role cultural politics can play in this process is that it represents a form
of hegemony by stealth. Operating outside a formal setting of party politics,
there may be a temptation to believe that cultural approaches have a better chance of
catching society with its guard down: a seemingly innocuous pastime might
not attract the same degree of suspicion as more overt political overtures.
Within such an environment, controlling the agenda of cultural politics offers a
crucial tool in managing a society composed of divided and conflicting classes and
groups. [12]
Considerable academic attention has been paid to the nature and limitations of the
state’s ability to manipulate society through cultural projects, latterly termed cultural
hegemony. John Hargreaves highlights the Marxist approach of the French
philosopher Louis Althusser, for whom institutions such as the church, education,
sport, arts and literature formed part of the cultural institution of a repressive state
that functioned ‘to reproduce the relations of economic production, i.e. the
exploitation of labour by capital’. While sympathetic to the overall thesis, Hargreaves
argues that the notion that cultural genres such as sport merely transmit ‘bourgeois
virtues’ is simplistic as it does not allow sufficient room to appreciate the nuances of a
process that is constantly evolving to suit the current stage of development of any
given society. [13] It is these very nuances that persuade cultural historians of the
potential of culture to provide a deeper understanding of social dynamics.
Using British society in the nineteenth century as an example, Ingram and Loy
point out that a rising middle class challenged aristocratic values of title and
connections by emphasizing the importance of desirable qualities such as
temperance, humility, dignity and merit. Rejecting activities such as cock-fighting
and bull-baiting, which were enjoyed by aristocracy and popular classes alike, the
middle classes created a new sporting ethos based on the notion of ‘Muscular
Christianity’. Sport was directed towards virtuous endeavour rather than profit, with
rules, regulations and associations ensuring that such values were protected. As such,
the middle classes created a space for themselves that distinguished them from
aristocratic decadence and from the popular classes for whom amateurism in sport
was beyond their means. In time, however, the middle classes attempted ‘to
incorporate the working class into their hegemonic definition of character’. [14]
What had first begun as a means of challenging one dominant system of social values
was later turned into a tool to maintain another.
Alan Clarke and John Clarke suggest that sport can play a particular role in cultural
hegemonic processes because the values that sport transmits, such as competitiveness
and merit, ‘appear to rest on natural, or extra-social truths, rather than being the
products of human or political construction’. [15] While this may be the case, the
political deployment of sport often seeks to foster initiatives that appear to be less
than natural. James Riordan, for example, shows how officials in Soviet Russia during
the 1920s displayed considerable wariness towards any competitive sport they viewed
to be individualistic and contrary to Socialist ethics. What Soviet society needed,
many then underlined, was to demonstrate the ‘revolutionary innovation of
proletariat physical culture’ in the form of ‘labour gymnastics’, mass displays,
pageants and excursions. [16] Riordan also highlights how India, China and the
Soviet Union have ‘quite deliberately taken western sports from town to country in
order to help integrate diverse peoples into the new nations and to promote a
patriotism that transcends petty nations and ethnic affiliation’. [17] In these
examples, the underlying purpose of sporting events was to aid processes that, if left
to their own devices, would not have occurred. Russian citizens in the immediate
post-revolutionary era did not automatically assume the corporatist mentality, nor
was it easy to convince Kazakhs and Turkmen that they shared a common identity.
As will be seen in the case of Mexico, the potential of subordinate groups and of
popular culture traditions to resist such developments should never be overlooked.
It seems clear from the above examples that the manipulation of culture can play a
vital role in a state’s attempts to influence the way in which populations view
themselves and recognize their place within a broader environment. Building on
ground-breaking work by Ilene O’Malley, later studies have developed our
understanding of how culture was used by the post-revolutionary state in an
attempt to control and unite disparate sectors of Mexican society. [18] Much of the
responsibility for convincing Mexican peasants that they had a vested interest in the
country’s recovery from years of civil war fell upon the newly created SEP (Secretarı́a
de Educación Pública – Ministry of Public Education). Ramón Ruı́z places Secretary
of Education José Vasconcelos, and his successor José Manuel Puig Casauranc, at the
forefront of an elite-led project that assumed the problems of the Mexican

countryside to be due to the character and behaviour of peasants rather than a result
of fundamental flaws in the structure of rural society. As such, they prescribed liberal
doses of urban-based civility to wrest the peasant from his supposed slothful and
degenerate ways. [19] This was nothing new; Justo Sierra had recommended similar
remedies during the Porfiriato. [20] Increasingly, however, teachers came face-to-face
with the structural barriers to rural development, as parish priests and conservative
elements within local elites used their considerable influence to resist such changes.
Poorly paid and often badly trained teachers lived by their wits, adapting SEP
directives to suit local conditions. In trying to gain local allies in the struggle to
deliver meaningful changes, teachers often became more radical than the SEP policy-
makers had intended, a process that Mary Kay Vaughan sees as evidence of grassroots
pressure to refashion the SEP’s centrally-derived project. [21]
Resolving the ‘Indian problem’ was central to the broader agenda of rehabilitating
the Mexican countryside. As Vaughan explains, in the 1920s, federal rural schools
were asked ‘to discipline and channel the energies of the rebellious peasants’. [22]
Harnessing and defusing the unbridled passions of the indigenous informed the
indigenismo element within SEP policies during the 1920s, a component that
Guillermo de la Peña sees as fundamental to SEP ambitions of incorporating
indigenous communities within broader society. [23] Another important aspect of
this was to break down the ignorance that many mestizos shared concerning the lives
of their indigenous countrymen. If all peasants were to share a new national identity,
mainstream society needed to be convinced that the indigenous could be redeemed.
The emphasis on respecting, yet nonetheless developing and perfecting, indigenous
society included persuading mestizos that their indigenous countrymen had
descended from noble pre-Columbian ancestors and that, through education, they
could be rescued from their present lowly condition.
SEP policies underwent a process of gradual transformation that would culminate
in the adoption of socialist educational reforms during the presidency of Lázaro
Cárdenas (1934–40). Under Vasconcelos in the early 1920s, the ministry’s rural
education policies sought to make children literate and numerate, and to introduce
them to basic methods of cultivation ‘to inspire among peasants a love for the land’.
[24] The emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic, and in particular the more
outlandish notion of introducing children to the classics, met with considerable

resistance. Here, the elite-driven values behind such reforms were laid bare to a
ridiculous level. While members of the elite may well have seen the classics as an
essential part of any child’s formation, peasant parents, many of whom spoke little or
no Spanish, could not relate to such classes, and there was a tendency for children to
demonstrate their love for the land by working in the fields instead of attending
school. Even before Puig Casauranc took over in 1924, the SEP had modified its
approach to rural education, reflecting the action pedagogy of the North American
educationalist John Dewey. Under his scheme, rural children would learn by example
and in the process would more fully appreciate the value of their labours within the
broader community. It was believed that lessons in sobriety and personal hygiene
would transform Mexico’s ethnically diverse youth into a united peasantry that
would be fully prepared to assume a productive role within a capitalist rural
economy. Gender roles were reinforced: boys were taught agricultural chores, while
girls were schooled in domestic sciences to help them provide stable and healthy
domestic environments. Although poorly coordinated, other government depart-
ments reinforced these messages: civil engineers, agronomists, agriculturists and
physicians joined teachers in the ambitious task of transforming Mexican peasants
from previous oblivion to assume their responsibilities within the new post-
revolutionary future. [25]
The struggle to win the hearts and minds of peasants during the 1920s and 1930s
has received considerable attention in recent years. The provision of education, roads,
land and irrigation introduced new agents, new concepts and a new vocabulary into
the countryside. Historians such as Marjorie Becker, Adrian Bantjes and Mary Kay
Vaughan have analysed the process of negotiation between different groups at the
local level in the establishment of these initiatives. [26] They show that, particularly
in the Cárdenas presidency, state institutions had matured sufficiently to make their
presence felt within rural communities. Peasants nonetheless sought to stamp their
own cultural identity on local policy implementation; for a variety of reasons some
communities fared better than others. In the 1920s, however, the presence of the state
had been both weaker and less defined and much depended on the courage, skill and
determination of the individuals charged with delivering state reform, whether that
be giving lessons in hygiene or in drawing the lines of future land grants in the dusty
soil. Fortunes varied: some delivered real changes to rural life, while others were
killed in the attempt. Local conditions played a significant role in deciding which of
these fates awaited them.
Given the high risks that were often involved in promulgating state-driven social
reforms within the countryside, it would be natural for those introducing such
changes to improvise and find less conflictive methods of achieving their objectives. If
one accepts Clarke’s and Clarke’s suggestion that the fundamental values of sport
‘rest on natural, or extra-social truths’, [27] then it could be expected to have had an
important role in persuading Mexican peasants of the consensual nature of state
initiatives.
Sport and the Emerging Mexican State

In common with many Latin American countries, the potential of sport to modify
society was realized comparatively late in Mexico. Prior to the Revolution,
enthusiasm for sports had been confined to a small elite and the urban middle
classes. Following trends in the developed world, ballooning, golf, polo, horse-racing,
baseball, cycling and rowing became popular sports for the limited number of
Mexicans who possessed the time and money to pursue such interests. [28] Although
English migrants (predominantly Cornish miners) had brought football to Mexico in
the late nineteenth century, for many years the national championship was contested
by expatriate teams such as the ‘Mexican Country Club’ and the ‘British Club’, names
that graphically portray the expatriate composition of the players. [29] It was not
until the 1920s that football began to attract a wider following, and this coincided
with the Mexican authorities’ slow but steady promotion of imported mass sports,
particularly through the rural schools.
Mexico’s new national curriculum of the 1920s strongly reflected John Dewey’s
philosophy that children should learn from experience. In relation to physical well-
being, this demanded physical education programmes that promoted health, fitness
and wholesome leisure. [30] Following government guidelines, Mexican rural
teachers included gymnastics and movement and dance exercises into the
curriculum. As one rural teacher, Baudelio Candanedo, wrote in his guide to federal
educational programmes in 1928, the government’s campaign to expand physical
exercise was vital in the endeavour
to promote and establish the physical development of our race as the basis of
intellectual and moral education; to create strong, healthy, and vigorous
individuals who can contribute efficiently to the defence of the nation; and to
cultivate truly aesthetic ideals that reflect the beauty and the balance of the human
body.
Acknowledging the largely indigenous composition of his area, Candanedo reminded

his colleagues that ‘the Aztecs had been deeply concerned that their children should
receive education. Therefore, one of our aims must be to enable the Indians to regain
their vigour.’ [31] Even in the early days of the promotion of sport within schools,
elements of physical and intellectual vitality were being linked to a sense of national
duty and ethnic rehabilitation.
Growing official recognition of the symbolic value of sport can be seen by the way
in which displays of physical vigour began to take centre stage on days of public
celebration. During the 1930s, 20 November was established in the national calendar
as the day on which the nation would honour the Revolution (marking the date in
1910 when Francisco Madero had raised the banner of revolution). Reflecting the
state’s efforts to take the gun out of politics, it was decided not to celebrate the
occasion with an overt display of militarism. Instead, athletics competitions
and processions of athletes were preferred to military marches and displays of
weaponry. [32] Calls for an institutional framework to coordinate efforts to promote

sport soon followed. In October 1932, the federal government announced the
establishment of the Confederación Deportiva Nacional (National Sports Confed-
eration), a development that, as one newspaper article put it, ‘would help to
accomplish the highest duty the Constitution asks of our youths; that of receiving a
standard of civic and military training which will enable them to defend the
sovereignty and integrity of our homeland’. [33] In 1935 Senator David Ayala sought
to push the agenda further still. He noted the widespread enthusiasm for sports
among the advanced countries of Europe and drew direct links between sport and
national development. According to Ayala, regular sporting activities created a people
who were strong in body and mind, and who practised habits of punctuality, hygiene,
cooperation, honour and discipline. By creating a centralized department of sport, he
concluded, the government would produce athletes who could bring honour to the
nation, and more importantly, could help to combat the religious fanaticism and
alcoholism that ‘atrophy the peasant’s spirit and poison his body’. [34]
Sport thus became increasingly politicized, and it took little time for the socialist
educational policies of the Cárdenas presidency to provoke a noticeable switch from
individual to group sports. As one newspaper underlined, ‘an emphasis on teamwork
and cooperation replaced a previous obsession with individual achievement and
winning medals’. [35] Competitions were arranged between villages and the newly-
created agrarian communities to foster a sense of peasant class identity. Cárdenas
used the 1937 celebrations of Revolution Day to launch the first national athletics
meeting for agrarian communities. The children of peasants who had been the direct
recipients of agrarian reform competed in an event that acknowledged the
achievements of the Revolution on a national stage. [36] Here one sees the ‘extra-
social truth’ element of sport on which Clarke and Clarke place such importance.
Attracting children towards state-sponsored sports had the dual effect of luring them
away from the conservative, anti-revolutionary clutches of the local priest, while at
the same time inculcating a sense of identification and indebtedness to the
revolutionary regime. Given that more overt challenges to the Catholic Church were
often met with violent resistance, the genre of competitive sport offered a seemingly
innocent attempt to change rural society. Despite a distinctly anti-US element within
post-revolutionary rhetoric, cultural imports such as baseball and basketball were
enlisted in the fight to redeem society. The responsible Revolutionary Mother was
said to have been happier seeing her children outside playing baseball rather than
stuck inside stuffy churches attending mass. An indication of the popularity of such
measures can be gained by the fact that the presidential office was inundated with
requests from rural communities asking for hacienda or church lands to be
requisitioned in order to create sports pitches. [37]
Despite a political drift towards the right in the late 1930s, the symbolism of the
Revolution and the role of sport within the reconstruction of Mexican society
retained its importance. In 1941, the incoming president, Manuel Avila Camacho,
decreed that the Revolution Day celebrations would be preceded by a two-week
sports festival that would help to unite the celebrations of the Revolution in diverse
communities throughout the Republic. Furthermore, he predicted that the games
would provide the masses with ‘a healthy distraction of exemplary discipline and
physical strength; essential qualities in the fight against the old, inherited vices, and to
inculcate within great sectors of the population the routine of a healthy and cultured
life that was shared by all advanced countries’. [38] The vices to which the president
referred were those generally associated with rural fiestas: heavy drinking and
gambling. These were portrayed as the remnants of a decadent colonial past that,
through ignorance and lack of education, had contributed to the very exploitation the
Revolution had sought to eradicate. Centre-stage in the celebrations was a dance
from the ‘Grand Ballet of the Masses’ entitled ‘Surrender’. The choreographed
instructions are worth relating in some detail:
. The dance begins with 50 couples dressed as peasants performing faenas

[voluntary community work] in the fields. They are obviously tired and exhausted.
. They then come across a ‘PULQUERIA’ [a drinking house in which the alcoholic
drink, pulque, is sold].
. The men enter the pulquerı́a and drink vast quantities of pulque, while the
women wander around aimlessly, sad, and without purpose.
. The men get drunk, some draw knives and begin to fight, while others approach
the women and beat them.
. The band plays a slow lament.
. A group of men dressed in white appear [representing sports teachers]. They
surround the men and women and hand out tennis racquets and balls, which the
peasants accept with suspicion.
. The music changes into a more cheerful melody.
. The peasants begin to play tennis in an uncoordinated fashion.
. The band plays more rhythmic tunes and the peasants play in a much more
accomplished manner in time to the music.
[Interval]
. The peasants reappear on stage wearing sports uniforms. They march in good
order and talk enthusiastically about gymnastics.
. Five couples [representing teachers, soldiers, peasants, factory workers and the
commercial sector] form a circle.
. Within the circle the principal couple [representing the peak of physical fitness]
carry the national flag.
. As the band begins to play, the pair is raised aloft, and all sing the ‘Anthem to
Sport’. [39]
What can be taken from this highly symbolic spectacle? Certainly there was great
care to acknowledge the innate qualities of the peasants: the first scene portrays their
capacity for honest hard work and sense of social responsibility in their willingness to
work for the benefit of their community. Yet this scene also recognizes that the
endeavours of the peasants were being undermined by a lack of efficiency, and that
there was a desperate need for outside help to rectify their hitherto uncoordinated
actions. In the absence of more creative outlets, the men had turned to alcohol in
their free time, and their drunkenness threatened to undermine the very fabric of
rural civility. Rural school teachers are introduced as reformers who convey the
message that the regular practice of sport is a healthy activity that will provide the
peasants with a sense of purpose and discipline. Significantly, the peasants are shown
to recognize their responsibilities to the nation and to develop a sense of patriotism
through sport (the five pairs representing important elements of the PNR). As the
title of the ballet implies, only by surrendering to the paternalism of the state would
these peasants be able to achieve their full potential.
This approach to physical education is similar to what James Riordan calls the
‘theatricalization of sport’ in Soviet Russia. More radical Russian political groups,
such as the Proletkultists, viewed any form of individual sports as a bourgeois
remnant of a decadent past and they devised a range of new activities and games for
children such as ‘Helping the Proletariat’, ‘Agitators’ and ‘Rescue from the
Imperialists’. Beyond the distinctly ideological messages purveyed in the activities,
the essential element was mass participation. One event in 1927 to mark the tenth
anniversary of the Russian Revolution involved 7,000 performers, with a strict rule
that no one should simply be a spectator. [40] This emphasis on widespread
contribution was apparent in Mexico, but in different ways. The ‘grand ballet of the
masses’ did not call for mass participation, but its message was clearly intended for
mass consumption. Nonetheless, the Revolution Day marches through the streets of
Mexico City counted on thousands of athletes or, more accurately perhaps, civil
servants dressed as athletes: unity and patriotism through sport was being actively
encouraged.
The changing nature of how the state was trying to use sport as part of its cultural
armoury is also clear. As Ingram and Loy suggest, differing political circumstances
affect the ways in which cultural tools are used. In the 1920s, Mexican governments
had been more concerned about rehabilitating Mexicans and dissuading them from
‘bad habits’, one of which was attending mass. School activities had reinforced gender
roles and competition in sport was seen as preferable to competition through
violence. In the 1930s, however, under the socialist educational policies of Lázaro
Cárdenas, more emphasis was placed on the kinds of initiatives that were then being
developed in Soviet Russia. Individualism was seen as vanity, while sports were
favoured that promoted unity, social cohesion and self-sacrifice for the greater good.
Yet this shift of emphasis should not mask an underlying concern to control all
Mexicans within the smothering embrace of state patronage. The only difference was
a change in the tenor of the rhetoric accompanying these efforts. Nowhere was this
more obvious than in the government’s attempts to incorporate Mexico’s indigenous
population within a common national identity. As this study argues that the Mexico
City Olympics revealed such incorporation to be nothing more than superficial, it is
important to understand the processes that led to such limited success.
A Sporting Solution to the ‘Indian Problem’

The question of ethnic divisions in the post-revolutionary era reinvigorated the much
longer debate concerning what it meant to be Mexican. What the Revolution did
provide, however, was an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and to seek new
solutions to what was often referred to as the ‘Indian problem’. As far as political
rhetoric was concerned, the post-revolutionary state explained previous misunder-
standings between ethnic groups as relics of the discredited colonial period. In the
future, the Mexican race would acknowledge and draw strength from its composite
parts. In many ways this approach addressed Manuel Gamio’s romantic notion as
laid out in his 1917 publication Forjando Patria. Published in the midst of
revolutionary violence, he had called upon the different factions to forge a new patria
‘from Hispanic iron and Indian bronze’. [41]
In 1921 the Department of Education and Culture for the Indigenous Race was
established, and this was followed four years later by the Department of Rural Schools
for the Incorporation of the Indigenous Culture. [42] Rural teachers and cultural
brigades were sent out into the countryside ‘to harness and defuse the unbridled
passions’ of the indigenous and make them worthy of their new-found status. [43]
Within the tight embrace of patriotism, the indigenous were taught to read, speak
and write in Spanish, to respect the flag, to cherish the nation and to wash their hands
and brush their teeth. Urban civility began to penetrate the furthest reaches of the
republic and to erode the insularity that social reformers believed had held back the
development of the semi-autonomous indigenous Mexicans. In 1925, the outgoing
Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos developed his idea of ethnic synchronicity:
‘A mixture of races accomplished according to the laws of social well-being, sympathy
and beauty, will lead to the creation of a type infinitely superior to all that have
previously existed.’ The mestizo would personify the so-called ‘Cosmic Race’ and
would be fortified by the attributes that the indigenous and European cultures could
both supply. [44] Beginning in the late 1920s, such sentiments increasingly influenced
an official Indigenist programme that was characterized by state paternalism: it was
welfare-orientated, and it sought to bring education, health provision and
‘civilization’ to isolated indigenous communities with the ultimate aim of cultural
assimilation. [45] Mexico’s indigenous people ceased to be seen as ‘little Indians’; and
suddenly became ‘compatriots’, ‘brothers’ and ‘the rural proletariat’. [46]
This was a crucial period in ethnic relations in post-revolutionary Mexico: a time
to sweep aside the racism of the past and to provide a new sense of Mexican identity,
one that was based on a mature acceptance of the cultural and ethnic diversity of its
people. Before examining the details of how Mexico progressed in this project, it is
worth stepping beyond Mexican shores to see how others approached similar
problems. A particularly interesting comparison is Ireland, which during the 1920s
was also seeking to break with the past by carving out a distinct cultural profile. Irish
reformers tried to use culture, and specifically sport, to forge a sense of identity that
predated that of the British colonial power. As Mike Cronin reveals, one such
initiative was to reinvent Aonach Tailteann, a Celtic festival of sport and art that
claimed cultural roots stretching back some 3,000 years. It consisted of athletics,
gymnastic and equestrian events and was accompanied by cultural contests based
around poetry, literature, dancing and story-telling. At a time when individuals were
encouraged to embrace Ireland’s long history and tradition of Celtic culture, the idea
of reinventing the Aonach Tailteann was appealing. The first festival was held in
Dublin in 1924, but as Cronin points out, despite the political rhetoric, popular
enthusiasm for the event quickly waned. He argues that the project failed due to lack
of government sponsorship and, equally important, because there was insufficient
interest in Celtic traditional events. What spectators found more appealing, especially
in rural Ireland, were elements of modernity, especially racing cars. [47] The
continued power of the Gaelic Athletic Association and the strong popular following
for Gaelic football and hurling, indigenous sports that to this day distinguish Irish
culture from the broader international scene, suggest that this rush towards
modernity was neither complete nor irreversible. Yet that aside, the rejection of
tradition by Irish country folk in the 1920s exposes an often overlooked aspect of
ethnic identity. As Jeremy MacClancy notes, many studies of ethno-nationalism have
focused their attention on how ethnic minorities have sought to preserve their
traditional cultural traits as a form of resistance to incorporation. This overlooks the
fact that leaders of ethno-nationalist groups have ‘stressed simultaneously both the
distinctively traditional and the distinctively modern aspects of their culture’. [48] As
we move our focus back to Mexico, the differing perceptions regarding what role the
indigenous cultures should assume in modern society reveal the underlying tensions
between the ethnic groups.
As previously discussed, this study argues that the contradictory messages
emanating from the Mexican elite during preparations for the 1968 games were
merely the latest manifestation of a deep-seated confusion regarding nationhood.
When, for example, Senator Ayala had proposed the establishment of a department
of sport in 1935, he advocated adopting the practices present in the United States and
Western Europe in order to improve Mexico’s racial stock. [49] Simultaneously, the
indigenista element within the SEP socialist education programme was given new
emphasis in February 1935 when a ‘nationalist campaign’ was launched ‘to revive
enthusiasm in sports and games that had been practised by indigenous tribes in the
past’ and to use them as basis of a ‘new form of National Physical Education’. [50]
The ministry’s bi-monthly magazine for teachers, El Maestro Rural (The Rural
Teacher), included articles that detailed regional indigenous dances and games with
the hope of spreading them throughout the extensive network of federal rural
schools. At the same time that some within the political elite continued to view
Mexico’s indigenous population with disdain, others were seeking to promote
indigenous cultures as an essential aspect of being Mexican.
Indigenous communities were also recipients of the state’s broader range of
physical education policies that were being promulgated in towns and villages
throughout the republic. Yet the need to remind mainstream society of the
imperative to embrace a common indigenous past had the effect of raising
the indigenous profile in sporting events. At the 1941 Revolution Day games, the
Department of Indigenous Affairs organized a display of sports practised by
indigenous groups from all over the republic: from blow-pipe competitions from the
southern state of Oaxaca, to tampuche, a tennis-like game from northern state of
Nayarit, the nation was seen to celebrate the rich diversity of its cultural heritage
under the auspices of celebrating the Revolution. [51] Most symbolic of all, perhaps,
were the preliminaries to the games. Following Olympic tradition, in early November
two athletes set out from opposite ends of the republic, each bearing a ‘Symbolic
Flame of the Revolution’. The first team of runners to carry the southern torch
comprised 25 Mayans who crossed the south-eastern state of Yucatán before handing
it to their counterparts in Campeche. The northern torch was entrusted to Yaqui
runners who took it through their colonies before passing it to mestizo athletes.
A telegram to the president expressing loyalty and enthusiasm for the Revolution Day
commemorations was sent from each community through which the flames passed
on the way to Mexico City. [52] It was a symbolic, local, reaffirmation of the
Revolution that drew all ethnic groups, classes and regions of Mexico towards a
common national enterprise.
The message of ethnic unity under a national cause remained a prominent feature
in the promotion of sport and it reached new heights following the Second World
War. In 1948, for example, an Aztec warrior was chosen to represent Mexican
nationhood. He held a presidential declaration of support for the Confederación
Deportiva Mexicana (Confederation of Mexican Sports) in which President Miguel
Alemán reminded Mexican youths that sport could provide the necessary sense of
discipline and solidarity to face their future responsibilities (see Figure 1). The
responsibilities to which the president was referring may well have included the
obligation to defend La Patria through national service – conscription had been
introduced during the war. [53] Youths from indigenous communities were again
being asked to offer their fighting spirit in defence of the nation.
The Aztec warrior symbol was also recruited for patriotic duty in 1955 when, to
mark the third year of Adolfo Ruı́z Cortines’s presidency, the National Confederation
of Popular and Revolutionary Youth Organizations organized a marathon through
the streets of Mexico City. The circular emblem of the organization was divided into
two halves: on the left, the red, green and white of the national flag, each colour
bearing a letter of the governing party, the Partido de la Revolucionario Institucional
(Institutional Revolutionary Party – PRI), the successor to the PNR. On the right was
the face of an Aztec warrior. The route of the marathon and the prizes awarded
emphasized the patriotic tenor of the event. Participants ran from the Monument to
the Revolution to the newly built National University campus in the south of the city.
They returned along 20 November Avenue (Revolution Day) and finished in front of
Figure 1 Aztec warrior showing Confederación Deportiva Mexicana declaration.

Source: Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
the National Palace. As well as gold, silver and bronze medals, other awards bore the
names of revolutionary leaders, former presidents or poignant dates in Mexico’s
glorious history. The organizers reminded competitors that ‘it was the highest civic
duty of Mexican youths to participate in this greatly significant event’. [54]
Embodied within this single sporting event were salient features of a cultural project
that had begun many years earlier: ethnic unity, youthful endeavour, education and
patriotism.
Yet inconsistencies within official thinking were never far from the surface. With
the introduction of national service, responsibility for the promotion of physical
education was shared between the SEP and the Ministry of Defence. In a government
poster issued in 1953 (see Figure 2) a schoolteacher and a military officer combine
efforts to produce a Mexican youth that would be able actively to participate in
military service. [55] Interestingly, despite all the rhetoric concerning ethnic unity,
youthful vigour and patriotism, the conscript in this poster is fair-haired and pale-
skinned. Evidently echoes of the sentiments that Senator Ayala had expressed 20 years
earlier still persisted: the ‘discipline, hygiene, cooperation, honour and punctuality’
that distinguished European countries from the underdeveloped world, could serve
Mexico’s national conscripts well. This belied the fact that the majority of Mexicans
recruited for national service came from poor mestizo or indigenous origins. [56]
What should be concluded from the ostentatious presence of indigenous sporting
cultures in national events? Did they represent a sign of willingness to resolve the
previous ethnic tensions in society? While, to a certain extent, we do not doubt this
intention, we question the underlying spirit of the attempt. The most important
motive for resolving the ‘Indian problem’ was arguably to complement state efforts to
convince mainstream mestizo society that the indigenous were worthy of full and
equal citizenship. If notions such as the ‘Cosmic Race’ were to have any validity at all,
mestizo society needed both to acknowledge and to accommodate the riches borne by
indigenous cultures. Where we believe that this post-revolutionary experiment was
disingenuous is that there is little evidence of these compromises actually taking
place. Rural teachers and cultural missionaries certainly did gather together the
surviving remnants of the indigenous civilizations that had fought so valiantly to
defend Mexican soil from the Spanish conquest, and the evidence was placed in glass
cabinets in museums and provided material for history textbooks. Yet such objects of
indigenous cultures were every bit as inanimate as the stone statues or pyramids of
Teotihuacán. What post-revolutionary society portrayed was a vision of the
indigenous culture that called for the minimum of compromise; representations of
a glorious indigenous past that could easily be transplanted into the heart of Mexican
culture without fear of rejection. We believe that this produced a façade of ethnic
tolerance, and that the indigenous contribution to the ‘Cosmic Race’ was relegated to
the historic, folkloric and ceremonial. In this cosmic race, it was the indigenous
people who were forced to do all the running in a headlong dash towards
assimilation.
Partial Victories in a Bigger Contest

While many of the elite’s concerns about society predated the Revolution, the
cessation of hostilities did offer an opportunity to attempt new solutions. There is
clear evidence that, for the first time, mass participation in sport and recreational
Figure 2 Ministry of Defence poster advertising a national athletics competition for

conscripts.
Source: Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
pastimes was promoted to fulfil a variety of objectives. It fell into a broader pattern of
socio-cultural reforms that were designed to instil a sense of unity within a bitterly
fragmented people; to embrace ethnic groups, regions and marginalized communities
within a common Mexican identity that had room for diversity but that was bound
together by patriotism and loyalty to La Patria. As such, Jeremy MacClancey’s
observation regarding the potential of sport is apposite:
Sport may . . . be useful to fulfil a plethora of functions: to define more sharply the
already established boundaries of moral and political communities; to assist in the
creation of new social identities; to give physical expression to certain social values
and to act as a means of reflecting on those values.
With more than a nod of recognition to cultural historians, he also suggests another
function: ‘to serve as potentially contested spaces by opposed groups’. [57]
If we accept MacClancey’s argument, sport indeed has the potential to reflect the
dynamics of a society undergoing renewal. It is certainly the case that a fundamental
priority of the Mexican post-revolutionary state was to establish or, more accurately,
to re-establish the political and moral boundaries of communities that had been
battered by years of war – a war in which able leaders could rise from humble
beginnings to wield considerable military and political power. As the state sought to
demobilize these figures and to centralize political authority, it also recognized the
need to challenge the remaining conservative pillars of pre-revolutionary society,
particularly the Catholic Church. In their place, new social structures built around
such elements as state-controlled unions, rural schools and cultural brigades set
about instilling a secular society that swore allegiance to the Revolution and its
leaders rather than to the Vatican and the Pope. The promotion of sport and
recreation not only reflected these centrally-driven initiatives, but in some respects
were seen as vital ways of delivering them.
Yet as diverse cultural histories of post-revolutionary Mexico make clear, the
recipients of state reforms were often capable of rejecting, stalling or modifying
the nature and pace at which local implementation took place. MacClancey offers the
example of the Pueblo Native Americans of Cochiti, New Mexico, who were
introduced to basketball in order to foster local social harmony. Instead, sporting
rivalry matched familial factionalism; events become more disruptive than beneficial
and the village council eventually had to prohibit the game. South of the border,
there are many examples where local communities sought to impose their own
interpretation on externally-imposed cultural initiatives. Take, for example, the
peasants of Acambay who asked President Lázaro Cárdenas to stop the ‘anti-sporting’
actions of a municipal president who wanted to build a clock tower on an existing
sports ground. [58] Was this simply a desire to practise sport, or was it an attempt to
undermine the authority of a local politician? It certainly fits a familiar pattern in
which Mexicans used contemporary political rhetoric to settle old scores. Tensions
between individuals, factions and communities did not suddenly disappear with the
end of the violent Revolution, but in the decades that followed they took on new
forms, among which was an enthusiasm (real or otherwise) for sport.
While the focus of this study is not primarily concerned with popular cultural
resistance to state initiatives, the fact that such resistance could jeopardize the
accomplishment of its original objectives is pertinent to our thesis concerning the

extent to which socio-political elites accepted the redemption of post-revolutionary
society. If state attempts to establish desirable moral and social values within the
popular classes were seen as having been compromised in order to gain acceptance on
the ground, then the question that the elites might understandably ask themselves
was: to what degree had the masses become ‘civilized’? Of course, this perspective is
only partly the result of obstinacy on the part of the Mexican masses. It was also
highly significant that few within the Mexican elite were truly willing to embrace a
sense of unity.
One of the more facile arguments made for viewing the social and ethnic policies
during the past-revolutionary period as a success is to compare the relative peace in

Mexico to the violence and ethnocide that has blighted other Latin American
countries with large indigenous populations. It is true that Mexico has not witnessed
the levels of state-sponsored violence against peasant and/or indigenous communities
that characterized events in Central America in the 1930s and 1960s, and in Peru
during the fight against the Sendero Luminoso. Yet if one is assessing the success of
efforts to foster social unity, there is little merit in using such extreme examples as
benchmarks. More accurately, for all the reasons stated above, it needs to be
acknowledged that the Mexican state’s attempts to reshape society had only been
partially realized. Surrounding the whole project was a sense of incompleteness – a
degree of progress had been made, but the task of turning the majority of Mexicans
into the race envisaged by the elite still had a long way to go. Furthermore, no matter
how diligent and successful social reformers might have been in their efforts to
‘redeem’ Mexicans, it was highly unlikely that the end-product could ever have
measured up to the idealized vision that the elite was portraying to the outside world.
Just as attempts to teach the classics to peasant children were as ineffective as they
were inappropriate, there was little or no prospect of the post-revolutionary
generation of Mexicans ever obtaining the degree of socio-cultural sophistication
with which the elite could enjoy a comfortable association. Foreign, rather than
Mexican, cultural traits continued to influence elite opinions of their countrymen
and their nation. Many of the post-revolutionary socio-cultural reforms were
developed within an international context of white superiority and, therefore,
Mexican (mestizo) inferiority. So, as far as the Mexican white elite was concerned,
even the most successful programme of redemption could do nothing other than
produce a Mexican race that was, at best, seen as second-rate by foreigners. Thus as
Mexico experienced decades of post-revolutionary ‘unification’, the Achilles heel of
Mexican identity acted in different ways to maintain a separateness within society.
Elites distanced themselves, both geographically and socially, from mainstream
mestizo society; while patriotism provoked an exaggerated form of protectionism, in
which national pride needed to be defended. As Mexico moved from post-
revolutionary reconstruction to a period of mid-century consolidation, these
contradictions would continue to influence the ways in which the elite sought to
modify their country’s international image.
Notes
[1] This study offers a substantial revision and merging of the arguments laid out in Brewster,
‘Patriotic Pastimes’ and Brewster, ‘Redeeming the ‘‘Indian’’’.
[2] For an interesting analysis of Mexico’s participation in the Central American Games, see
McGehee, ‘The Origins of Olympism in Mexico’.
[3] Lorey, ‘The Revolutionary Festival in Mexico’. Similar conclusions are made in Benjamin,
La Revolución.
[4] Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 39–46.
[5] Hoberman, ‘Olympic Universalism and the Apartheid Issue’, 528–30.
[6] Quoted in ibid.
[7] Channing and Tabor Frost, ‘The Rule of Porfirio Diaz’, 526–34.
[8] Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, 71–2.

[9] Dı́az-Andreu, ‘Nacionalismo y arqueologı́a’.
[10] Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World Fairs, 181–240.
[11] Tenorio-Trillo, ‘1910 Mexico City’, 179–80.
[12] Clarke and Clarke, ‘‘‘Highlights and Action Replays’’’, 62.
[13] Hargreaves, ‘Sport, Culture and Ideology’.
[14] Ingram and Hardy, ‘Introduction’, 10.
[16] Riordan, Sport, Politics and Communism, 44–6.
[17] Ibid., 54.
[18] O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution; Benjamin, La Revolución.
[19] Ruı́z, Mexico, 26–7.
[20] French, A Peaceful and Working People. Mary Kay Vaughan also discusses the element of
continuity between the policies of Justo Sierra and Vasconcelos. See Vaughan, Cultural Politics
in Revolution, 23–9.
[21] Vaughan, The State, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 179.
[22] Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 4.
[23] De la Peña, ‘La ciudadanı́a étnica’.
[24] Loyo, ‘Lectura para el pueblo’.
[25] Knight, ‘Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State’, 403–5.
[26] Bantjes, As if Jesus Walked on Earth; Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire; Vaughan, Cultural
Politics in Revolution.
[28] Beezley, Judas and the Jockey Club, 15–52.
[29] Ramı́rez, Cual es la historia, 11; Palma Rubı́n de Celis, El mundo de fútbol, 41.
[30] Pope, Patriotic Games, 128.
[31] Candanedo, Programas Detallados, 29.
[32] Benjamin, La Revolución, 111–12.
[33] ‘Un Organismo Con Autonomı́a’, El Nacional, 9 Oct. 1932, 8. Although the article refers to
this body as the ‘National Athletics Confederation’, it seems clear that the body being formed
was the Confederación Deportiva Mexicana.
[34] Lázaro Cárdenas, 532.2/1, document dated September 1935, Archivo General de la Nación,
Mexico City (hereafter AGN).
[35] ‘Socialización de la Educación Fı́sica,’ El Nacional, 21 Dec. 1935, 8.
[36] Lázaro Cárdenas, 532/14, AGN, provides correspondence relating to attendance at the Games.
See also Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 29–36.
[37] See for example Lázaro Cárdenas, 532.2/35, AGN, letter dated 11 Sept. 1936 from the Comité
Agrario of Atexas, Hidalgo, to the president; Lázaro Cárdenas, 532.2/36, AGN, letter dated 19
Sept. 1936 from the director of the elementary school in Amanalco de Becerra to the
president.
[38] Manuel Avila Camacho, 532/29, AGN, dated 7 July 1941. Benjamin notes that the first such
Games had been launched in 1930, but did not reappear until 1941. See Benjamin,
La Revolución, 112.
[39] Manuel Avila Camacho, 532/29, AGN, 29 June 1941.
[40] Riordan, Sport, Politics and Communism, 46–7.
[41] Brading, ‘Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo’.
[42] Tresierra, ‘Mexico: Indigenous Peoples’, 194.
[43] Ruı́z, Mexico, 26–7.
[44] Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, 31.
[45] Tresierra, ‘Mexico: Indigenous Peoples’, 190.
[46] For examples of such rhetoric, see Brewster, Militarism, Ethnicity and Politics, 157–8.
[47] Cronin, ‘Projecting the Nation through Sport and Culture.
[48] MacClancey, ‘Sport, Identity and Ethnicity’, 9–10.
[49] Lázaro Cárdenas 532.2/1, AGN, document dated Sept. 1935.
[50] Anotador, ‘Deportes y Juegos Indı́genas’, El Nacional, 7 Feb. 1935, 8.
[51] Manuel Avila Camacho, 532/29, AGN, 7 July 1941.
[52] Manuel Avila Camacho, 532/29, AGN, 4 Nov. 1941.
[53] Miguel Aléman, 532/.2/4, AGN, June 1948.
[54] Ruı́z Cortines, 532/58, AGN, see letter dated 4 Dec. 1955.
[55] Ruı́z Cortines, 532/12, AGN, May 1953.
[56] Lozoya, El ejército mexicano.
[57] MacClancey, ‘Sport, Identity and Ethnicity’, 7.
[58] Lázaro Cárdenas, 532.2/47, AGN, see letter dated 15 March 1937.
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Tennessee, Knoxville]

On: 02 January 2015, At: 09:09

The International Journal of the

Sport and Society in Post-revolutionary

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523360902739256

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Sport and Society in Post-revolutionary

ISSN 0952-3367 (print)/ISSN 1743-9035 (online) Ó 2009 Taylor & Francis

and responsibilities within a post-revolutionary order. The project of social

An Elitist View of Mexico and its People

of both men underwent a process of blancamiento (whitening), underlines the degree

one of several groups included in a quaint exhibition of native pastimes – a frivolous

between pre-Columbian, Hispanic and modernist representations reflected an

Culture and Social Cohesion

forefront of an elite-led project that assumed the problems of the Mexican

outlandish notion of introducing children to the classics, met with considerable

Sport and the Emerging Mexican State

Acknowledging the largely indigenous composition of his area, Candanedo reminded

weaponry. [32] Calls for an institutional framework to coordinate efforts to promote

. The dance begins with 50 couples dressed as peasants performing faenas

A Sporting Solution to the ‘Indian Problem’

Figure 1 Aztec warrior showing Confederación Deportiva Mexicana declaration.

Partial Victories in a Bigger Contest

Figure 2 Ministry of Defence poster advertising a national athletics competition for

accomplishment of its original objectives is pertinent to our thesis concerning the

during the past-revolutionary period as a success is to compare the relative peace in

[8] Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, 71–2.

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