Race, Fútbol, and the Ecuadorian Nation : the Ideological Biology of (Non-) Citizenship
p. 201-222
Texte intégral
1Participation in international sports competitions often provides “national populations” – and particularly their elites – with occasions to enact the official understanding of “national identity”, or sometimes also to reflect upon and revisit what and who is included in, or excluded from, the “national character”, and why. Such events can also give a special stage to victorious athletes from subaltern groups or excluded peoples. This essay is focused on the comments published in the press and on the internet about the performance of the almost entirely black Ecuadorian national team at the 2006 FIFA World Cup – the biggest global sports arena there is. On June 9, 2006, the Ecuadorian team won 2-0 against Poland in their first match of the tournament in the Gelsenkirchen stadium in Germany. Two Afro-Ecuadorian players, Carlos Tenorio and Agustín (Tín) Delgado, marked the goals. They gave national pride to fans of a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds in Ecuador, and to Ecuadorian migrants in Europe, the United States, and numerous other locations.
2The Ecuadorian black players’ increased and indeed global visibility as a result of their victories in the qualifying rounds for the 2006 Mundial and in their first two games in Germany1 shook, for a little while, the Ecuadorian racial order and the foundation of conventional understandings of national identity and their attendant construction of Ecuadorian blacks as ultimate Others (Rahier 1999b, 1999c, 2003a). It opened up a space in Ecuadorian society – particularly after the second victory, this time against Costa Rica, on June 15, 2006 – to talk about race, anti-black racism, and national identity. Black players were representing a country that elites have usually defined as fundamentally mestizo (mixed with both Spanish or European ancestry and Indian or indigenous ancestry) since the beginning of the 20th century, and that many outside of Ecuador see as one of the Andean countries with the biggest indigenous population. As I, and others, have discussed elsewhere, mestizaje is polysemic, it means different things in different national, and even local, contexts (See Rahier 2003a, Hale 1996, Stutzman 1981). In Ecuador, indigenous peoples are seen by the elites as deserving special communal rights more so than black communities (see Rahier Forthcoming ; see also, for other national contexts, Hooker 2005, Ng’weno 2007, Greene 2007a and 2007b), and the official notion of national identity, which I call “the ideological biology of national identity”, somewhat incorporates indigeneity into mestizaje while keeping blackness at bay : blacks are not part of official mestizaje ! Ted Gordon has made a similar point when writing about Nicaragua (Gordon 1998).
3What precedes points to the Ecuadorian elites’ making or historical imagining of a non-black racialized national body and identity despite the evidence of a black presence in the country since the early colonial period. Black exclusion from the dominant Ecuadorian understanding of the nation is reproduced in today’s official multiculturalism, which appears as a re-inscription of the hegemonic social and racial ordering of people and things that existed before its advent, and which is now formulated in a somewhat different political configuration with the help of a “new” vocabulary. Charles Hale emphasizes the links between neo-liberal economic reforms and multiculturalism in Central America (Hale 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006). His remarks are pertinent for Andean South America, particularly when he writes that neoliberal governance has included a
(...) limited recognition of cultural rights, the strengthening of civil society, and (the) endorsement of the principle of intercultural equality. When combined with neoliberal economic policies, these progressive measures have unexpected effects, including a deepened State capacity to shape and neutralize political opposition, and a remaking of racial hierarchies across the region. (Hale 2005 : 10)
4Most relevant for this essay is the work of Barnor Hesse (1999, 2000) who differentiates between the “multicultural” and “multiculturalism” (see also Hall 2000), where the latter refers to particular discourses and social forms that attempt to incorporate visible cultural differences and distinct ethnicities into one single national formation – in that sense, "multiculturalism can be named, valued, celebrated, and repudiated from many different political perspectives” (Hesse 2000 : 2) – and where the former, the multicultural, is constitutive of that political configuration and is a signifier of the unsettled meanings of cultural differences in relation to multiculturalism. In this conceptual framework, multiculturalism is the attempt to fix the meaning of cultural differences in national imaginaries. The multicultural is therefore always embedded in a context characterized by a dichotomy between the West and the Non-West, the global north and the global south, the “civilized” and the “savage,” which shapes the cross-cultural processes that establish the meanings of the often (if not always) racially marked instances of contested cultural differences. The multicultural is thus central to the transnational processes that diasporic formations constitute and which deeply unsettle the idea of self-contained, culturally independent and self-sufficient nationalist identities. The multicultural always involves processes of cultural entanglements often called creolization (see Rahier 1999a), which question the notion that national forms are coherent and tidy. Thus, the dynamic of the multicultural is to unsettle supposedly well-established modem societies through processes of what Hesse calls “transruption" – and I argue that the performance of the almost entirely black Ecuadorian team at the 2006 Mundial was “transruptive” – which bring multiculturalism into contested political focus.
A multicultural transruption is constituted by the recurrent exposure of discrepancies in the post-colonial settlement. It comprises any series of contestatory cultural and theoretical interventions which, in their impact as cultural differences, unsettle social norms and threaten to dismantle hegemonic concepts and practices. Transruptions transcend or overcome any initiative to dismiss their relevance, and continually slice through, cut across and disarticulate the logic of discourses that seek to repress, trivialize or silence them. In the absence of effective or satisfactory resolutions, multicultural transruptions are simply recurrent. (Hesse 2000 : 17)
5In this essay, my brief analyses of the commentaries about the black players’ performance during Ecuador’s participation at the 2006 Mundial show that in Ecuador black success in sports functions as a “transruption” of racialized national discourse. My analyses point to two major strategies adopted by Ecuadorian white and white-mestizo middle and upper classes to downplay the impact of the black players’ success, with the objective to limit the unsettling of social norms and to counter the threat to hegemonic concepts and practices of “national identity” that this success could lead to. The first strategy consists in silencing the significance of the now global Ecuadorian black visibility by avoiding altogether the mention of blackness when reporting about the Mundial. That silence can be observed at work in numerous articles in the media, in postings on the internet, and in the five volume scholarly collection about Ecuadorian soccer edited by Fernando Carrión shortly after the 2006 Mundial (2006). The latter barely mentions the issue of race and blackness (it does so in its volume five : Fútbol y sociedad), without ever dealing with them frontally.
6The second strategy has consisted in racializing the Ecuadorian black players in order to re-inscribe and re-affirm both the inevitability of racial differences and of black Otherness despite the official multiculturalist line, and the centrality of the white-mestizoness of the nation. Although contradictory at first glance, both strategies combine to reify the ordinary ideological biology of national identity.
7According to the 2001 general census2, only 271,372 people (2.2 %) self-identified as Negros (Afro-Ecuatorianos) (“Blacks [Afro-Ecuadorians]”) and 4.9 % self-identified as either Negros or Mulatos, out of a national population of 12,156,608, and only 830,418 (7 %) as Indígenas. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of the national population (9,411,890 or 77.4 %) is counted as mestizos. Obviously, the numbers for indigenous peoples and Afro-Ecuadorians are underreportings which call for a critical reading (Izquierdo 2007). It is well known, for example, that for well-known political reasons, the Ecuadorian State – controlled by various sectors of the white and white-mestizo national elite – has tended to underreport, or in the past under-estimate, the size of both the Indian and black populations. It is quite edifying to see that this tendency to under-report has continued despite the adoption of multiculturalism in the 1998 Constitution.
Black players, the press, and the “evidence” of racial particularities
8Even though serious scholarship in the humanities, the social sciences, and the genetics of population has understood for quite a long time that the concept of "race” has no scientific value that could justify the division of the human population into distinct and separate categories, and that it is socially and culturally constructed, sports have nonetheless provided popular and privileged stages for the reification of the concept. Both the general public and sports journalists, as well as some poorly conceptualized scientific research that expresses nothing but the general public’s love affair with genetic determinism (see Mirza 2000), have been involved in this process. And, as I show below, ideas about biological races still underpin informal belief Systems on the strengths and limitations of black athletes to the point that "self-evident” truths are the mode in which sporting opinions are lived. These beliefs taken as "truths” still frequently pop up among self-declared “experts”, coaches, media pundits and "knowledgeable” members of the public (See Ismond 2003).
9In the specific case of Ecuador, these common-sensical beliefs about race have the function to re-inscribe and re-affirm the inevitability of racial differences and of black Otherness. The spontaneity with which these views emerge, here and there, in everyday conversations and in the media, is nothing but a confirmation of their widespread nature. As indicated in the epigraph of this essay, racial thinking about sports is based on the illusion or premise that sports provide level playing-fields where only meritocracy (physical ability, hard work, etc.) prevails. This, then, only brings about the necessity to explain why certain sports are dominated by certain “races” with the use of physical, biological, and genetic particularities.
10On June 18, 2006, three days after the second Mundial 2006 Ecuadorian victory, a journalist wrote :
Los jugadores ecuatorianos han podido ganar dos partidos de fútbol por méritos. Estos jugadores si son representantes de los estratos más amplios y desfavorecidos de la sociedad ecuatoriana, responden a una meritocracia de su oficio al contrario de los representantes que se autollaman "auténticos” para tapar la falta de juego limpio en el proceso que los escoge y los consagra en plazos forzosos. Estamos hartos de quienes quieren apoderarse de nuestra representación política por los próximos cuatro años. ¿Se figuran si eligiéramos a los jugadores de la Selección de fútbol para cuatro años ? Cuando hay verdadera meritocracia en el fútbol, cuando mandan los que saben jugar, entonces hay resultados positivas : meritocracia puede ser y es democracia. No integra la selección ni el que recibió tres millones de un banquero corrupto para ganar la presidencia, ni el hijo de papa que le dejó la herencia bananera. Para ser de la Selección (viene de seleccionar) no sirve el parentesco con el interino ni la complicidad con el dueño del país. (Salazar 2006 : 4)
The Ecuadorian players could win two football matches because of their merits. These players are true representatives of the biggest and most humble classes of society. Their performance responds to the meritocracy of their sport on the contrary of the [political] representatives who call themselves “authentic” and who hide the lack of cleanliness of the process by which they are chosen... We are sick and tired of those who want to control our political representation for the next four years. Can you imagine if we had to elect the players of the national team of football for four years ? When there is true meritocracy in the football, when those who know how to play are in control, then there are positive results : meritocracy can be and is democracy. One cannot be a member of the national team even if he has received three millions from a corrupt banker to get the presidency, or if he is a daddy’s boy who inherited a banana fortune. To be a player in the national team, kinship or complicity with the owner of the country does not open doors. (Salazar 2006 : 4)
11Two days later, in an article entitled "The National Team and the Market" (La Tri y el libre mercado), another journalist explains why Ecuador has not been able to replicate the success of the national football team in other areas of society by referring to the laws of the market economy :
En primer lugar se encuentra el premio al mérito. Los seleccionados son escogidos con base en sus capacidades individuales por lo que la discriminación y el “compadrazgo”, prácticas tan extendidas en Ecuador, no tienen cabida y únicamente los mejores jugadores termina » representando al país independientemente de sus relaciones familiares, su estatuto económico o el color de su piel. Imaginemos el deterioro que sufriría nuestro seleccionado si, como sucede en otras instituciones ecuatorianas, se forzara la participación de los hijos de los dirigentes de la Federación de Fútbol o de los amigos del presidente de la república, o si los movimientos sociales exigieran cuotas para mestizos e indígenas argumentando que los jugadores de piel morena tienen una desproporcionada representación en nuestro equipo mundialista. (Hurtado Pérez 2006 : 5)
First of all, we have merit. The members of the national team are chosen on the ground of their individual capabilities, which renders discrimination or kinship, practices that are usually so important in Ecuador, unimportant here, to the point that only the best players end up representing the country independently of their family relationships, their economic status, or their skin color. Imagine the deterioration that our national team would suffer if, just like it happens with other Ecuadorian institutions, people would force into the selection the sons of the leaders of the Ecuadorian Federation of Football, or the sons of the President of the Republic’s friends, or if the social movements would demand quotas for mestizos and Indians arguing that black players have a disproportionate représentation in our Mundialista team. (Hurtado Pérez 2006 : 5)
12Meritocracy is thus a fundamental premise to the racialist thinking about sports, and the racialization of black athletes – and of black people in general – has been the stuff of ordinary commentary in Ecuador. The coverage of national and international sports events in which black athletes won a medal have usually been featuring stereotypical representations of Afro-Ecuadorians. The mention of Afro-Ecuadorian athletes has usually been accompanied by adjectives such as negro, Moreno, or de ébano (“made in ebony”). Most of the rime, the articles made references to their alleged "superior physical disposition” for certain sports and evoked the usual stereotypes about the physicality of black peoples that can be found in many other contexts, globally. When Consulting the sports press, it is rare that the black skin of these athletes has not been emphasized in a way or other. That is how the female sprinter, Liliana Chalá, was often referred to, in the 1980s, as the negra de oro ("the golden black woman,” or the black woman who got gold), or the football player Italo Estupiñan who was often called in the 1970s el negro Italo Estupiñan or sometimes also el gato salvaje ("the savage cat”), in part because he wore an afro hairdo.
13The vocabulary used to qualify Black athletes in the press continues to replicate practices that were quite common before the adoption of multiculturalism by the 1998 Constitution. In an article published in April 2006, a Vistazo journalist focused on Néicer Reasco, an Afro-Esmeraldian who plays defense for the national fútbol team and who was to travel to Germany for the Mundial, a few weeks later. The title that journalist gave to his article evokes the African Savanna when referring to the athlete: La Gacela de la Selección (“The Gazelle of the Selection”) (Paredes 2006), which obviously contributes to his racialization by evoking animal physical abilities for speed.
14The belief of many Ecuadorians that Afro-Ecuadorians and blacks in general are in fact physically superior and well suited to play football came up often in conversations I recently had with Ecuadorians in Ecuador, in the United States, and in Spain, in accordance with the statements made by the journalists I quote above, in which only the best according to the logic of meritocracy are selected independently of any kind of corruption or personal preference, or even of anti-black racism that would leave for black people sports and entertainment as the unique possibilities for upward mobility. In another article entitled “Ebony Podium”, the journalist Aurelio Paredes racialized black athletes in the following way:
Expertos en preparación física han indicado en numerosas ocasiones que la raza negra tiene una ventaja para los deportes gracias a sus condiciones físicas de poder y de fuerza y a sus capacidades aeróbicas y anaeróbicas que les dan más resistencia al esfuerzo físico. (Paredes 2001: 60)
Experts in physical preparation have indicated in numerous occasions that the black race has an advantage for sports thanks to their physical conditions of strength and power and for their aerobic and anaerobic capacity that gives them more resistance to physical efforts. (Paredes 2001: 60)
15He then goes on to list the Afro-Ecuadorian athletes who have brought medals to Ecuador from participation in international sports events in the past few years. A notorious medical doctor, Dr. Rodrigo Fierro Benítez, wrote in his column in El Comercio, the major Quito-based daily, which for the occasion he entitled “Biopatology and the Tri”, that the fact that most black players of the national football team were from El Chota was because there, the black population has never missed access to iodine: Es así como el pueblo de El Chota no sufrió los efectos de la deficiencia de yodo. Los afroecuatorianos de Imbabura mantuvieron los atributos de una raza superlativamente bien dotada para los deportes (“That is how the people of the Chota Valley have not suffered the effects of iodine deficiency. Afro-Ecuadorians front Imbabura Province have kept the attributes of a race superlatively well endowed for sports”) (Fierro Benítez 2006 : 4). He, like many commentators before him, never writes about socio-economic conditions that might have played a role in the “over-representation” of blacks in the national team, when compared to the percentage of blacks in the national population.
16The same medical doctor had reproduced devastating images of Africa in an article entitled “The Africanization of Our Country”, published in the same daily in the year 2000, in which he laments the political instability of the country at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s. His comments make a notable contrast with the Africa that emerges in Juan Ocles Arce’s statement reproduced in the next section of this essay:
La africanización de nuestro país es un asunto de connotaciones extremas.
De unos años a esta parte las realidades que han ido evidenciándose les ha llevado a numerosos comunicadores sociales, nacionales y hasta extranjeros, a interpretarlas como indicadores de que entre nosotros se había iniciado un proceso de retrogradación que nos conduciría a situaciones bastante similares a las que se viven en buen número de países africanos, es decir en el Cuarto Mundo.
En esta columna me he referido al tema cuando he tratado sobre la mortalidad materno-infantil, la malnutrición, la deforestación de la Costa, la inseguridad jurídica y la corrupción de la dirigencia política. Con Haití, en cuando a desarrollo humano nos hallamos a la cola de Latinoamérica, muy próximos a los africanos, es decir a “los condenados de la Tierra”. (Fierro Benitez 2000)
The Africanization of our country is an issue of extreme connotations. For a few years already, numerous national and even foreign social communicators have emphasized the fact that they interpret some of the realities we have been experiencing as indicators that a process of retrogression that would bring us to situations very similar to the experiences of a great many African countries, that is to say the Fourth World (Cuarto Mundo).
In this column, I made reference to all this when I wrote on motherchild mortality, malnutrition, Coastal deforestation, juridical insecurity, corruption of the politicians. With Haiti, when talking about human development, we are at the bottom of Latin America, very close to Africans, that is to say to the “wretched of the earth”... (Fierro Benitez 2000)
17Various social scientists commented upon the sociological phenomenon that the Tri and its victories in the 2006 Mundial represented for the country because it mostly emerged from spaces associated with marginality (de la Torre 2006b, Polo 2006). Felipe Burbano de Lara, a white or white-mestizo professor in the Ecuadorian campus of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), who is also the ex-editor of Íconos, a well-respected Ecuadorian social sciences journal, wrote:
La Selección muestra el drama que persigue a la manera cómo los ecuatorianos nos relacionamos ton nosotros mismos y ton el país. La mejor expresión de ese drama sigue siendo el grito “si se puede”, que condensa tanto la actitud de derrota nacional como la angustia por superarla. La magia del momento actual es que la Selección permite que nos miremos desde una perspectiva distinta: no como los derrotados de siempre, sino como un país capaz de triunfar. El “sí se puede" intenta sepultar esa actitud consagrada en esa otra frase que nos ha marcado desde una cierta impotencia: “Jugamos como nunca y perdimos como siempre”. Dos aspectos resultan muy reveladores, casi paradójicos, de las vivencias de estos días. El primero, que la Selección dejó de ser ese lugar donde se ratificaba nuestro sentimiento de impotencia nacional, nuestra condena a la derrota. La Selección se ha convertido en la contraimagen de un país enredado, fragmentado, maniqueo, desunido. El segundo, que esa otra representación del Ecuador la ofrece un grupo de afrodescendientes dirigidos por un colombiano. Los excluidos de la nación son capaces de producir otra relación de los ecuatorianos consigo mismos y con su propio país. A pesar de todo el racismo y el rechazo a los negros es sorprendente que los ecuatorianos se sientan tan identificados en ellos. El éxito logrado por la Selección se debe a que se aparta de las tendencias dominantes del Ecuador, por eso puede llegar más lejos que el propio país. (mi énfasis, Burbano de Lara 2006)
The Selection shows the drama that follows the way we, Ecuadorians, relate to ourselves and to the country. The best expression of that drama is perhaps the shouted motto: Si se puede, which condensates both the attitude of national defeat and the anxiety to overcome it. The magic of the contemporary moment is that the Selection allows us to look at ourselves from a different perspective : not like the defeated that we’ve always been, but as a country capable of triumph...
Tire Selection stopped being that space where our feeling of national impotence, our condemnation to be beaten was ratified. The selection has become the counter-image of a country entangled, fragmented, not United...[It is amazing that] this representation of Ecuador is offered to us by a group of Afrodescendants... The excluded from the nation are capable of producing another relation of the Ecuadorians with themselves and with their own country. Despite all the racism and the rejections they have suffered, it is surprising that Ecuadorians identify with them. (my emphases; Burbano de Lara 2006)
18Burbano de Lara’s comments validate a decisive opposition between an Ecuadorian nosotros or “we”, which lie understands as fundamentally white-mestizo, and “them”, the black peoples from marginalized spaces within the Ecuadorian nation, with whom the Ecuadorians (read “white-mestizos”) could surprisingly identify following the success of the national team. His comments naturalize Ecuadorian blacks’ outsiderness vis-à-vis Ecuadorian national (white-mestizo) identity instead of attempting to reduce or even eradicate it. They are quite indicative of what happens in many Ecuadorian publications in social sciences and the humanities, which – as the last section of this essay shows – are no different from mainstream Ecuadorian common-sense’s marking of Ecuadorian blacks as “ultimate Others".
19I end this section with comments from Alexandra Ocles, an Afro-Ecuadorian woman, mother, intellectual, and activist. In contrast with Burbano de Lara’s comments, her notion of "Ecuadorianess” does not exclude Afro-descendants:
... la selección ecuatoriana que, conformada en un 90 % por jugadores afrodescendientes, nos ha dado alegrías y gloria a los ecuatorianos y ecuatorianas desde el inicio de la Copia Mundial. ¿Han leido los diarios? Surgen noticias, gritos, comentarios: “Negros de Oro"; "los Negros, lo mejor de la "Tri", "Negros lindos”; y otros de este tipo : “qué fuerza la de los morenos...”. Todo es parte de la euforia del momento. ¿Qué habría pasado si hubiéramos perdido los dos partidos? ¿Acaso el racismo brotaría a flor de piel y volveríamos a decir que necesitamos "blanquear la Selección" como hace algunos años ? Lo que no cambia es la realidad de los afrodescendientes en el Ecuador: para muchos, seguimos siendo los vagos, los ladrones, las prostitutas a las simples empleadas domésticas. Lo que no cambia es el no tener acceso a una educación de calidad y que fortalezca nuestra identidad; lo que no cambia es que mi hija quiera dejar de ser negra, porque eso le causa muchos problemas en la escuela. Lo que no cambia es que cuando salimos a buscar trabajo simplemente la vacante está ya ocupada apenas nos ven. Lo que no cambia es que si estamos reunidos en una esquina 3 ó 4 afros, sin más, policías se acerquen y nos pidan documentas de identificación, y de paso nos maltraten. Estos y otros temas son los que también debemos comentar. (Ocles 2006)
... the Ecuadorian national football team (...), composed by 90 % of Afro-descendant players, has given joys and glory to us, Ecuadorian men and women, from the beginning of the Mundial. Did you read the news-papers? There are news, shouts, commentaries: Negros de Oro ("golden blacks’’) ; los Negros, lo mejor de la Tri (“Blacks are the best of the Tri”) ; Negros lindos (“Beautiful black men”) ; and many of this type : que fuerza la de los morenos... ("how strong the black players are”). Everything is part of the euphoria of the moment. What would have happened if we had lost these two marches? Maybe racism would have emerged again and we could have heard calls for the whitening of the Selection, as was the case a few years ago. What doesn’t change is the reality that Afrodescendants face in Ecuador: for many, we continue to be the thieves, the social predators, the prostitutes, or the simple domestic employees. What doesn’t change is that we don’t have access to an education of quality that reinforces our identity; what doesn’t change is that my daughter doesn’t want to be black anymore because it causes her too many problems in school... What doesn’t change is that if three or four of us are doing nothing more than talking at a Street corner, policemen corne and ask for identifications, while abusing us in passing. These and many other issues are also what we should comment upon. (Ocles 2006)
20Understandably, Alexandra Ocles’ Ecuadorian "we” is the product of a political move aimed at destabilizing Ecuadorian, dominant multiculturalism by proposing another reading of-to borrow Hesse’s vocabulary (2002) – Ecuador’s multicultural situation, grounded on a more inclusive understanding of Ecuadorian citizenship that gives Afro-Ecuadorians a comfortable and respected position within the nation and its narrations.
El mundial 2006 and the common-sensical conceptualization of the ecuadorian nation
21On June 15, 2006, in the FIFA Stadium in Hamburg, Germany, Ecuador beat Costa Rica 3-0, with goals from Carlos Tenorio, Tín Delgado, and Ivan Kaviedes. The first two players are black, while the third is white or white-mestizo. This victory made of Ecuador the "biggest surprise" of the 2006 Mundial. The euphoria shared globally by Ecuadorian fans left traces on the internet. Dozens of june 15 and 16 Internet postings on a blog on Ecuadorian football echoed this enthusiasm3 :
What a beautiful thing! Of course, Ecuador can (Ecuador puede) ! How I would like to be in Ecuador right now, to celebrate this event that fills every Ecuadorian with pride. ¡ARRIBA ECUADOR !!! ¡Q VIVA MI PAIS !!!
I hope that these triumphs in European lands will serve as examples for our country to get ahead, and that we don’t drown under corruption. Let’s go further, Ecuador, yes we can !
Excellent ! Congratulations for the professionalism you have shown on the field, and I hope that your objective is not only to go to the next round. Everything will depend on what you guys set yourselves to do, and I’m not talking here only about physical strength, but also about mental will. Yes, we can. Arriba Ecuador.
22At first, on the blogs I consulted, as illustrated by the preceding comments, there were only few – if any – mentions of the race of the majority of the successful players. This rather spontaneous silencing of an obvious aspect of the reality of Ecuadorian fútbol must be understood in light of the virulence of ordinary Ecuadorian anti-black racism (see de la Torre 2002 ; Rahier 1998, 1999b, 2003b). It must be identified as a strategy that consists in attempting to limit the unsettling of dominant notions of Ecuadorian national identity in terms of official mestizaje brought about by the transruptive global visibility of Ecuadorian blackness, in the very moment when the Ecuadorian nation is publicly and joyfully celebrated.
23The blogs I refer to were, for the most part, created for the occasion of the Ecuadorian participation in the 2006 FIFA World Cup. They were visited and received postings from – almost exclusively – Ecuadorians at home and abroad, with occasional interventions from other Latin Americans who congratulated Ecuadorians for "their success.” They provided a space for textual interfaces where ordinary Ecuadorian racial categories were reified, and where a default “universal” Ecuadorian white-mestizoness was assumed to be the normal and normative identity shared by all users, in a move that reproduced non-white-mestizo marginality/invisibility. This assumption is not surprising and denotes the existence of patterns in the functioning of race in cyberspace, where digital and racial divides that duplicate sociétal hierarchies are simply taken for granted (see Kolko, Nakaruma and Rodman 2000 ; Nakamura 2002).
24Some of the comments posted on the blogs did mention the players’ race. When they did, they usually confirmed – “silently,” as to universalize it as the norm – the white or white-mestizo identity of the speakers, and racialized the black players either by suggesting their potent physicality or by ordinarily infantilizing them. And the mention of the Black players’ “physical power” did nothing other than evoke the surviving strength of stereotypes about black men4.
Arriba mis negros bellos, los amos, se están poniendo interesantes... sigan adelante con esas garras y fuerzas, póngale corazón por su país, estamos orgullosos acá en el ecuador, y desde acá les damos fuerzas que nosotros acá empujamos esos gales.
Fuerza, humildad, perseverancia, tranquilidad, adelante.
Mételo mételo mételo mételo
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLL GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLL
You go my beautiful black guys, I love you5, and you’re becoming interesting. Continue to fight with these clutches and strengths, put your heart into this for your country. Here in Ecuador, we are all proud of you, and from here we send you strength, because it is us who marked the goals Strenght, humility, perseverance, tranquility, go forward.
Put it in, put it in, put it in, put it in
Goaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall Goaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall. (my emphasis ; posted on June 15, 2006)
soy una ecuatoriana q reside en España, y me 100to muy orgullosa de mi país, lamento no estar allí, para celebrarlo como dios manda. Extraño mucho a mi país y esa gente tan linda.!!!!!!!!!!!!!! esos son mis negritos ecuatorianos iiiiiiiiiiii gracias x. Gracias negritos, ojala q sigan asi. Besos desde España. ¡¡¡viva ecuador !!! (escrito el 16 de junio del 2006)
I’m an Ecuadorian woman who resides in Spain, and I feel very proud of my country. l’m sorry that l’m not home now to celebrate the victory the proper way. I miss my country a lot, and its beautiful people. They are my little Ecuadorian blacks !!!!!! Thanks a lot negrito. I hope that you continue as you have begun. Kisses from Spain. ¡¡¡Viva Ecuador !!! (posted on June 16, 2006)6
25The blogs’ nationalist and emotional comments reproduced common stereotypes and contemporary relations of power. They can also be found in a letter to the Quito-based daily El Comercio, obviously written by a white or white-mestizo reader who, unaware but apparently “well intentioned”, continued to see blackness as an outside to Ecuadorianness and assumed the space provided by the written media and by the internet as evidently white or white mestizo, that is to say as non-black, as did the previously quoted commentators:
Ahora bien, nosotros somos racistas y lo hemos sido desde siempre : pero a pesar de esto la mayor parte de los equipos profesionales, y las selecciones últimas, están y han estado constituidas por jugadores negros. ¿No será, me pregunto, el momento de desagraviar a este pueblo, de darle su verdadero valor dentro del contexto social ?... Esta podría ser la ocasión para concederles el mérita que han demostrado, no solamente coma deportistas, sino como protagonistas de historias ejemplares por su fortaleza y tolerancia. (Tarré Andrade 2006)
This is all well, but we are and always have been racists : and this is despite the fact that [most] football players are Black. Wouldn’t this be the time to ease the lives of this people (desagraviar a este pueblo) ? ... Couldn’t this be the occasion to recognize their true value within the social context ?... This could be the occasion to concede to them the merit that they have shown to have, not only as athletes, but as protagonists of exemplary histories thanks to their strength and tolerance. (my emphases, Tarré Andrade 2006)
26On June 16, the comments of an Argentine ex-football player turned amateur sports journalist nicknamed el Loco Gatti published on his blog provoked the passionate reactions of many Ecuadorians, and forced them to deal with race in relation to national identity. The Loco Gatti wrote :
Los ecuatorianos no son sorpresa, al menos para mí. Ya llevan dos Mundiales seguidos, en Suramérica se clasifican sin muchos apuras y relativamente cerca de Argentina y Brasil... Juegan un fútbol de toda la vida, sin misterios ni cosas raras, y encima han juntado una selección casi entera de nigerianos nacionalizados...’Pero los ecuatorianos no eran indios, como yo ? Pues no, ahora son negritos casi todos. ¿De dónde han sacado ese color de piel ? Yo que la FIFA investigaría, porque estas bananeros (así llamamos en Argentina a los ecuatorianos) nos están timando a todos... (Gatti 2006)
Ecuadorians are not a surprise, at least not for me. They were selected twice in a row to play in a Mundial, and in the South American competitions they classify without problem and relatively close to Argentina and Brazil. They play a good football, without mysterious or strange things, and they have put together a team of nationalized Nigérians... But weren’t Ecuadorians Indians like me? Well, not at all, now they are almost all negritos. Where did they get that skin color? If I were working for the FIFA I would investigate this, because these banana producers [bananeros] (that’s how we call Ecuadorians in Argentina), they are cheating... (Gatti 2006)
27Some people defended the Argentine football commentator and explained that he was obviously making a joke, that his writing style in that piece was humoristic, that he had not written anything that was really offensive7. Others – also obviously whites and white-mestizos – were outraged by these statements and reacted by, in a nationalist outburst, not so much including the black players inside Ecuadorianness but rather simply mentioning -with a touch of paternalism – their region of origin (the Province of Esmeraldas and the Chota-Mira Valley) within the national racial-spatial ordering of the nation (see Rahier 1998), ignoring the growing urban black populations in Guayaquil, Quito, and elsewhere (see Redacción Guayaquil 2006a and 2006b) :
Apenas boy me enteré de ESTO Una amiga me lo envió por mail. ¿Qué puedo decir del lamentable ser que suscribe estas líneas y que se aplica a si mismo el calificativo de "loco”. ¿mezquindad de espíritu ? ¿estrechez de mente ? ¿esa cosa babosa, verdosa y apestosa que se llama envidia ? ¡¡Todo eso y más !! a parte, claro esta, de la notoria ignorancia pues éste seudo periodista que seguramente no conoce bien ni las provincias o estados de su propio país, no tiene forma alguna de saber que nosotros tenemos Esmeraldas y el Valle del Chota, que es de donde salen la mayoría de nuestros buenos futbolistas y deportistas en general. ¡No necesitamos ir a hacer fichajes al África ni a ningún sitio !
I only found out today about this. A friend sent it to me by e-mail. What could I say about this lamentable being who wrote these lines and who calls himself Loco ("crazy”) ? Does he have a petty spirit ? Does he have a small mind ? Is he overwhelmed by that sluggish, greenish, and stinking thing called envy ?...[T]he notorious ignorance of this pseudo-journalist who for sure doesn’t even know the provinces or States of his own country, doesn’t know that we have Esmeraldas and the Chota Valley from where corne the majority of our best football players and athletes in general. We do not need to go find them in Africa or anywhere else8.
28Other comments took advantage of the discussion to express reflexive thinking about ordinary white and white-mestizo Ecuadorian anti-black racism, emphasizing the irony of the comments such as the preceding one that suddenly and loudly acknowledge blacks – even if only for a moment – as a separate group “within” the fabric of the Ecuadorian nation:
Un mea culpa necesario: ninguno de nosotros escapa a haber tenido actitudes racistas con los negros así sea que solo hayamos agarrado la cartera más fuerte cuando vimos uno. Pienso que debemos hacer un esfuerzo por abandonar esos prejuicios y reconocerles de una vez el aporte que han hecho al país no solamente en lo deportivo, pero también en lo cultural con todos los intelectuales y artistas que ban dado. Además, que yo recuerde, ninguno de los políticos atrasapueblos que nos tienen tan jodidos, es negro. (Ibid.’)
We must do a mea culpa: no one among us could say that he or she has not had racist attitudes with blacks, even if it was to only hold one’s purse or wallet tighter when seeing a black man. I think that we must make an effort to abandon these prejudices and recognize once and for all what they have brought to the country not only in the field of sports, but also culturally with ail the intellectuals and artists that they have given us. Furthermore, as far as I can remember, none of the corrupt politicians (politicos atrasapueblos) who have us now so messed up is black. (Ibid.)
29Here again, the assumption is that the online community is fundamentally white or white-mestiza.
30That is in this context that an Afro-Ecuadorian intellectual and political activist, Juan Ocles Arce, intervened and had this to say about the Loco Gatti’s comments:
Por primera ves no necesitamos decir que también hay negros, parque las imágenes eran más contundentes que las palabras, a tal punto que el “loco Gatty”, dijo que éramos un equipo de africanos nacionalizados.
Gracias Gatty, por reforzar nuestra propuesta de antaño : las y los afroecuatorianos solicitamos al gobierno ecuatoriano que firme un convenio con la Unión Africana para que se nos reconozca la doble nacionalidad, esta es : la afroecuatorianidad, lo que nos permitiría desplazarnos libremente por los países del África en busca de nuestros antepasados y fortalecer más nuestra identidad con imágenes reales y no sesgadas como las que nos muestra a diario la televisión, intentando generar sentimientos de vergüenza contra el “continente negro”. (Ocles Arce 2006)
For the first time we don’t need to say that there are also black people [in Ecuador], because the images were more forceful than any word could be, to the point that the "Loco Gatti” said that we were a team of nationalized Africans.
Thank you Gatti to recall our old request : Afro-Ecuadorian men and women ask chat the Ecuadorian government sign a treaty with the African Union so chat we can have double nationality, which is to say the true Afro-Ecuadorianness. This would allow us to move around freely in African countries to look for our ancestors and to strengthen our identity with real images and not with these truncated images that the television gives us daily, trying to generate in us a feeling of shame about the "black continent”. (Ocles Arce 2006)
31As I complete the revisions to this essay, an article from the Quito-based daily Ultimas Noticias gets my attention. It is entitled Una sancción en 100 años de racismo (“One sanction in 100 years of racism"). It reports about a football match that took place in Guayaquil between two Ecuadorian teams, Barcelona and Deportivo Quito, during which Barcelona’s fans repeatedly shouted monkey screams every time black players from the Deportivo Quito played the ball. The article’s title comes from the fact that it is the very first time in the history of Ecuadorian football that an arbiter punishes a club for not controlling its fans and for not preventing them to engage in racist insults against black players, despite the arbiter’s several requests to do so. The idea here is not that this is the first time that such insults are made by fans, but that it is the first time that a punishment is applied. Barcelona’s management will have to pay $2,000.00 to the Comisión Disciplinaria of the Ecuafúbol. For Ximena Chalá, a representative of the Centro Cultural Afroecuatoriano who was interviewed by the journalist, what happens in the football stadiums only reflect what happens in the society at large : “People’s mentality hasn’t changed, this has been happening for a long time. To make this monkey Sound every time a black player has the bail is the same thing as if they were screaming ’lazy nigger’ or ’black thieve’”9.
32I have shown that two strategies that appear, at first glance, as diametrically opposed – the silencing of the presence of black bodies in the triumphant national fútbol team’s performances, and the blatant racialization of black players grounded on the belief in the inevitability of racial differences and of black Otherness – do in fact work together to re-affirm the dominant understanding and practices of “national identity”. Such a re-affirmation is aimed at fighting and controlling the effects of the transruptive black players’ success and is a safeguard for the dominant ideological biology that constructs both citizenship in terms of whiteness and white-mestizoness and that imagines blackness as a kind of non-citizenship, an Otherness "within”. As scholars of nationalism have shown, the construction of national identity would not be possible without the attendant construction of Others within and without the national borders.
33If they want to one day have – unambiguously- the comfortable place they deserve within the Ecuadorian nation, Afro-Ecuadorian activists have no other choice but to continue their transruptive noise.
Acknowledgements
34Many thanks to Florida International University’s Latin American and Caribbean Center for providing the necessary support for the most recent research I conducted in the hemeroteca of the Catholic University of Ecuador in Quito (PUCE), and in the archives of the Vistazo magazine in Quito, October 2006. My special thanks go to Patricia Estupiñán de Burbano, General Editor of the Vistazo Magazine, for giving me the authorization to reproduce the images included in this essay. I am grateful to Shane Greene, Felipe Smith, and John Anton Sanchez for reading an earlier version of this essay and for offering critical feedback.
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 See the videos posted on youtube.com, which celebrate the Ecuadorian goals. Among others : http://youtube.com/watch?v=E180v11u3aE, http://youtube.com/watch?v=mCJOnWn5gs&mode=related&search, http://youtube.com/watch?v=XHe7zB3yi_w. In this article, the expression "Tri" is used following its meaning in Ecuador. "Tri" cornes from "tricolor, " for the three colors of the national flag ; it is also used to refer to the national fút bol team and is synonymous of Selección.
2 http://www.inec.gov.ec/cpv_indigenas/cpv_in_t09.htm
3 See http://www.futbol.ec/ecuador/mundial/futbol_mundial_ecuador_1_costa_rica_0_1t.html, which I consulted on April 9th, 2007.
4 I will never forget the comments of the husband of a white-mestiza friend of mine who told me, in the late 1990s, that when he walked in Quito’s streets, he would always change sidewalks if there was a black man Corning towards him. When I asked him why, he responded that he was intimidated by their height and apparent strength : ¡Son tan grandes !...
5 Here, the author of the note is a woman. In the original, she wrote/os amos, which in Spanish was an expression used to refer to slave owners. If she actually meant to place an "s” at the end of "amo,” the use of the expression would suggest that she thinks that as a resuit of the victories, blacks now hâve the power that slave owners once had... I personally think that she meant to say’’ los amo". which would stand for "I love you". The beginning of her statement is : "Arriba mis negros bellos, se estan poniendo interesantes..’.’ In any case, the lapsus is interesting.
6 http://www.futbol.ee/ecuador/mundial/futbol_mundial_ecuador_1_costa_rica_0_1t.html, consulted on April 9th, 2007.
7 https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?bloglD=11802698&postlD=115153349840830674&isPopup=true, consulted on April 10th, 2007.
8 http://memoriasdeuncordel.blogspot.com/2006/06/nigerianos.htm, consulted on April 10th, 2007.
9 http://www.ultirnasnoticias.ec/noticiaUN.asp?id_noticia=9543&id_seccion=8, consulted on April 8, 2008.
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