As similar scenes in neighborhoods across the nation attest, soccer is no more foreign to America than immigration is. Soccer fanaticism and Cup mania crackle through scores of ethnic enclaves, both long-resident Irish and Italian neighborhoods and new ones touched by the great wave of immigration from the Caribbean and Latin America that has changed the face of America. The World Cup highlights just how profound those demographic changes have been.
Los Angeles is an especially perfered hotbed of World Cup enthusiasm because it is the home of so many Latinos. (Within two generations the city will be 70 percent Hispanic.) In and around L.A. more than 40 Latino adult soccer leagues-of about 70 teams each-take to the playing fields every weekend. The leagues have grown into important community institutions that sponsor picnics, beauty pageants and dances. Many of the teams bear the names of ancestral states and villages in El Salvador or Mexico or Colombia, and the competition often relives soccer rivalries back in the old country. “In park after park,” says California historian Kevin Starr, “there are scenes that replicate totally the cultures of Mexico and Central and South America.”
At the U.S.-Mexico exhibition in the Rose Bowl on June 4 most of the crowd cheered for the visiting team, sang the Mexican anthem and went home disappointed when the U.S. team won. “It has nothing to do with political allegiance,” says historian Starr. “There’s a cultural continuity in this country today that doesn’t stop at our border.” That may well be the civics lesson taught by the World Cup. Mainstream America needn’t catch Cup fever. But it cannot avoid the demographic revolution that helped to bring the Cup to America for the first-and surely not the last - time.
