‘Changing the cultural landscape’: English engineers, American missionaries, and the YMCA bring sports to Brazil – the 1870s to the 1930s

Abstract

On 2 October 2009 the New York Times announced that the IOC had selected Rio de Janeiro as the site of the 2016 Olympic Games – the first to take place in South America. If it had not been for English and Scottish engineers, who had brought futebol (soccer) to Brazil in the late 1800s, and other sports that American missionaries and the YMCA introduced this might never had occurred. Following the Civil War (1861–65) American interest in spreading the Christian gospel abroad grew considerably. In 1871 Presbyterian minister George Whitehall Chamberlain and his wife founded at São Paulo, Brazil ‘the American School’ (today known as Mackenzie College). Games like basketball as well as a more liberal system of education for girls (formerly largely excluded from schools) as well as for boys soon would be introduced. The noted Brazilian educator Fernando de Azevedo has written positively about these developments. Also interested in spreading its influence, in 1891 the International Committee of the YMCA of North America sent Myron Augustus Clark to São Paulo, where he set about training many native-born Brazilians. The Playground Association of America (established in 1906) sought to do likewise. Henry J. Sims, one of several other YMCA leaders who arrived from the United States, and Fred C. Brown, who was recruited to be Executive Secretary of Rio de Janeiro’s exclusive Fluminese Football Club, helped lay the foundations for the Latin American Games that were first held at Rio de Janeiro in 1922. This article examines how developments such as these did much to ‘change the cultural landscape’ in Brazil.