Footballers, ‘Public Figures’, and Cultural Struggles in Colombia in the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

This article has two interrelated objectives. The first is to show how Colombian footballers in the 1960s and 1970s created different understandings of their trade. These understandings challenged prevailing narratives about players’ regional belongings and were imbued with the values and memories that the players’ communities assigned to being a man; to participate in public life, and to perform collective practices, whether productive, recreational or entertaining. The second aim is to demonstrate that the practice of oral histories with footballers allows us to detect and analyze the specificity of these values and memories, and to discover the cultural struggles that players incited by articulating their sports trajectories with the history of their communities and regions. While those cultural struggles left traces in the sporting journals, their true meaning and political potential emerge only through the practice of oral history, this is when players have the opportunity to reflect systematically on their experiences with an ‘other’ who is different but interested. The article focuses on the trajectories of three Colombian players but builds on extensive research with 52 footballers.