Sports and nationalism are two forms of imagining and actively constructing the connections that justify and explain belonging to a community. In fact, sports could be said to be one of the key modern terrains for the habitualization of nationalism. However, as practices involving diverse actors in historically and culturally specific contexts, they are also often occasions for the questioning of hegemonic national narratives and even for the emergence of alternative imaginings of supra or sub-national belonging. This collection interrogates sports in Latin America precisely as a key terrain in which nation is defined and populations are interpellated through emotionally charged practices (state policy, media representations, and sports play itself by professionals, national teams and amateurs) of inclusion and exclusion. The book explores the complexities of these practices across a range of sports (soccer, baseball, cycling, basketball, tennis, boxing, surfing, field hockey, swimming, etc.) and national spaces (Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, Costa Rica, Peru, USA, etc.). Finally, it looks at how factors such as gender, (dis)ability, migration, and globalization complicate notions of nation engendered through sports.

The golden age of Mexican cinema, which spanned the 1930s through to the 1950s, saw Mexico's film industry become one of
the most productive in the world, exercising a decisive influence on national culture and identity.

In the first major study of the global reception and impact of Mexican Golden Age cinema, this book captures the key aspects of its international success, from its role in forming a nostalgic cultural landscape for Mexican emigrants working in the United States, to its economic and cultural influence on Latin America, Spain and Yugoslavia. Challenging existing perceptions, the authors reveal how its film industry helped establish Mexico as a long standing centre of cultural influence for the Spanish-speaking world and beyond.

Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints investigates cultural icons of the late nineteenth century from Mexico's largely unstudied northwest borderlands, present-day Sonora, Baja California, and western Chihuahua. Robert McKee Irwin looks at popular figures such as Joaquín Murrieta, the gold rush social bandit; Lola Casanova, the anti-Malinche, whose marriage to a Seri Indian symbolized a forbidden form of mestizaje; and la Santa de Cabora, a young faith healer who inspired armed insurgencies and was exiled to Arizona.

 

Cultural icons such as Murrieta, Lola Casanova, and la Santa de Cabora are products of intercultural dialogue, Irwin reveals, and their characterizations are unstable. They remain relevant for generations because there is no consensus regarding their meanings, and they are weapons in struggles of representation in the borderlands. The figures studied here are especially malleable, he argues, because they are marginalized from the mainstream of historiography.

 

A timely analysis, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints challenges current paradigms of border studies and presents a rich understanding of the ways in which cultural icons influence people's minds and lives.

 

Robert McKee Irwin is associate professor of Spanish at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Mexican Masculinities (Minnesota, 2003).