“IF THEY CAN DIE FOR ITALY, THEY CAN PLAY FOR ITALY!”:
IMMIGRATION, ITALO-ARGENTINE IDENTITY, AND
THE 1934 ITALIAN WORLD CUP TEAM
by
ZACHARY R. BIGALKE
A THESIS
Presented to the Department of History
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts
June 2017
THESIS APPROVAL PAGE
Student: Zachary R. Bigalke
Title: “If They Can Die for Italy, They Can Play for Italy!”: Immigration, Italo-Argentine
Identity, and the 1934 Italian World Cup Team
This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the Master of Arts degree in the Department of History by:
Carlos Aguirre
Robert Haskett
John McCole
Chairperson
Member
Member
and
Scott L. Pratt
Dean of the Graduate School
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School.
Degree awarded June 2017
ii
© 2017 Zachary R. Bigalke
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
iii
THESIS ABSTRACT
Zachary R. Bigalke
Master of Arts
Department of History
June 2017
Title: “If They Can Die for Italy, They Can Play for Italy!”: Immigration, Italo-Argentine
Identity, and the 1934 Italian World Cup Team
In 1934, four Argentine-born soccer players participated for the Italian team that
won the FIFA World Cup on home soil. As children born to parents who participated in a
wave of Italian immigrants that helped reshape Argentine society in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, these four players were part of a larger trend where over one
hundred Argentine soccer players of Italian descent were signed by Italian clubs in the late
1920s and through the 1930s.
This thesis examines the liminal space between Italian and Argentine identity
within the broader context of diaspora formation in Argentina through a look at these four
exemplars of the transatlantic talent shift. Utilizing sources that include Italian and
Argentinian newspapers and magazines, national federation documents, and census and
parish records, the thesis reveals the fluidity and temporality of national identity among
Italo-Argentine immigrant offspring during the early twentieth century.
iv
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Zachary R. Bigalke
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon
DEGREES AWARDED:
Master of Arts, History, 2017, University of Oregon
Bachelor of Arts, History, 2015, University of Oregon
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Latin American History
Sport History
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Independent Researcher, 2016
Publishing Consultant, Clark Honors College, 2015-2016
Graduate Employee, UO Department of History, 2015-2017
Research Assistant, UO Special Collections and University Archives, 2014-2017
GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS:
Roberta Park Award, North American Society for Sport History, 2016-2017
Summa cum laude, University of Oregon, 2015
Undergraduate honors with distinction, UO Department of History, 2015
Graduation Speaker, UO Department of History, 2015
Undergraduate Research Award, UO Library, 2015
v
Paul Dull Scholarship, UO Department of History, 2014
Dean’s List, University of Oregon, 2013-2015
Dean’s List, Portland State University, 2012-2013
PUBLICATIONS:
Bigalke, Zachary R. “George J. Cameron and the Rise of Oregon Soccer.” In
Mapping U.S. Soccerscapes, 1863–1913: Immigrants, Industries, and
Individuals, edited by Chris Bolsmann and George Kioussis, Chapter 11.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. (Final chapter draft due October
31, 2017.)
Bigalke, Zachary R. Review of Flamenco and Bullfighting: Movement, Passion
and Risk in Two Spanish Traditions, by Adair Landborn. Sport in
American History. Published March 26, 2017.
https://ussporthistory.com/2017/03/26/review-of-flamenco-andbullfighting/.
Bigalke, Zachary R. “Early Afro-Brazilian Soccer Stars and the Myth of Racial
Democracy.” Sport in American History. Published March 23, 2017.
https://ussporthistory.com/2017/03/23/early-afro-brazilian-soccer-starsand-the-myth-of-racial-democracy/.
Bigalke, Zachary R. “Collaboration versus Confrontation: Comparing the
Successes and Failures of Major League Soccer and the American Soccer
League.” Sport in American History. Published March 9, 2017.
https://ussporthistory.com/2017/03/09/collaboration-versus-confrontationcomparing-the-successes-and-failures-of-major-league-soccer-and-theamerican-soccer-league/.
Bigalke, Zachary R. “Karl Onthank (1890-1967).” Oregon Encyclopedia.
Published January 5, 2017.
https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/onthank_karl/.
Bigalke, Zachary R. “Anything but Ringers: Early American Soccer Hotbeds and
the 1930 U.S. World Cup Team.” Soccer & Society (December 2016): 121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2016.1267636.
Bigalke, Zachary R. Review of Association Football: A Study in Figurational
Sociology, by Graham Curry and Eric Dunning. Sport in American
History. Published November 27, 2016.
vi
https://ussporthistory.com/2016/11/27/review-of-association-football-astudy-in-figurational-sociology/.
Bigalke, Zachary R. Review of The World Through Soccer: The Cultural Impact
of a Global Sport, by Tamir Bar-On. Sport in American History. Published
October 22, 2016. https://ussporthistory.com/2016/10/22/9959/.
Bigalke, Zachary R. Review of The Shared Origins of Football, Rugby, and
Soccer, by Christopher Rowley. Sport in American History. Published
October 2, 2016. https://ussporthistory.com/2016/10/02/review-of-theshared-origins-of-football-rugby-and-soccer/.
Bigalke, Zachary R. Review of Distant Corners: American Soccer’s History of
Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes, by David Wangerin. Sport in
American History. Published September 17, 2016.
https://ussporthistory.com/2016/09/17/review-of-distant-corners/.
Bigalke, Zachary R. Review of Californio Portraits: Baja California’s Vanishing
Culture, by Harry W. Crosby. Southern California Quarterly 98, no. 2
(summer 2016): 232-234.
Bigalke, Zachary R. “From Foreign Curiosity to National Obsession: Soccer,
Immigration, and Politics in Argentina from Mitre to Yrigoyen.”
Undergraduate honors thesis, University of Oregon, 2015.
CONFERENCE PAPERS:
Bigalke, Zachary R. “Home on the Other Side: Investigating Early National
Identity Formation in Italy’s Argentine Diaspora in the Context of the
1934 World Cup Team.” Panel presentation with Sam Schelfhout,
Olga Ruzhelnyk, and Chris Henderson, presented at the 45th annual
NASSH Convention, May 26-29, 2017, Fullerton, California.
Bigalke, Zachary R. “Anything but Ringers: Historical Sketches of the Soccer
Hotbeds That Produced the 1930 U.S. World Cup Team.” Panel
presentation with Ian Plenderlieth, Chris Henderson, and Patrick Salkeld,
presented at the 44th annual NASSH Convention, May 27-30, 2016,
Atlanta, Georgia.
Bigalke, Zachary R. “From Foreign Curiosity to National Obsession: Soccer,
Immigration, and Politics in Argentina from Mitre to Yrigoyen.” Panel
presentation with Iñaki Gonzalo and Erin Gallo, presented at the 1st
annual LALISA Congress, April 9, 2016, Portland, Oregon.
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This M.A. thesis builds upon previous research conducted as both an undergraduate
and a graduate student at the University of Oregon. My gratitude, first and foremost, goes
out to Professor Carlos Aguirre for his continued support of my investigations into the
broader history of soccer in Argentina. His depth of understanding about both the history
of soccer throughout Latin America as well as the broader cultural forces at play helped
maintain my own enthusiasm throughout the project. I also wish to thank Professors Robert
Haskett and John McCole for their support of this project throughout my time in Eugene,
as well as Professor Daniel Pope for his counsel at the earliest stages of the thesis research.
I also wish to thank several other individuals who offered advice throughout the
course of this undertaking. Lucas Burke, Josh Fitzgerald, Nichelle Frank, Breann
Goosmann, Lacey Guest, Hillary Maxson, Miles Reding, and Haley Williamson all
provided instrumental advice throughout the course of beginning the writing of this thesis
in History 607 during the Winter 2017 term. Alberto Lioy in the Department of Political
Science provided a sounding board as well as critical assistance with reviewing my
translations of Italian-language source materials. Lauren Goss of UO Special Collections
and University Archives and Patrick Salkeld at the University of Central Oklahoma also
offered suggestions at several stages of the draft process.
viii
Dedicated to my wife Melanie, for encouraging me to return to school
and for supporting me at every stop along the journey.
ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter
Page
!
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 1!
HISTORIOGRAPHIC REVIEW ................................................................................................... 10
1. OPENING ARGENTINA’S DOORS: IMMIGRATION DEMOGRAPHICS AND
RAIMUNDO ORSI ....................................................................................................................... 17!
The Motivations of Argentine Government Immigration Policy .............................................. 24!
Argentine Leaders and Desired Immigrant Nationalities .......................................................... 27!
The Demographic Impact of Immigration Policy ..................................................................... 31!
Marriage Dynamics and the Italian Diaspora ............................................................................ 35!
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 38
2. LIVING IN TWO WORLDS: ITALIAN DIASPORIC IDENTITY AND LUIS MONTI ....... 41!
Forming Italian Identity and Institutions Abroad ...................................................................... 47!
Economic Patterns Between Italy and Argentina ...................................................................... 51!
Immigrants, Pastimes, and La Raza Argentina ......................................................................... 56!
The Growing Italo-Argentine Impact on Soccer ....................................................................... 59!
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 62
3. TENUOUS BUT LASTING BONDS: ARGENTINE LINKS WITH ITALY AND ATILIO
DEMARIA ..................................................................................................................................... 64!
Political Pandering and the Italian Diaspora ............................................................................. 72!
Transnational Connections through Soccer ............................................................................... 76!
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 81!
x
4. PROPAGANDA AND PATRIOTISM: THE FASCIST SPORTS PROJECT AND ENRIQUE
GUAITA ........................................................................................................................................ 84!
Legislating Oriundi Inclusion in Italian Soccer ........................................................................ 89!
The Demographics of the Transatlantic Talent Shift ................................................................ 93!
The Media’s Role in Selling the Italian Traits of Oriundi ........................................................ 98!
Successes and Failures of 1934 World Cup Propaganda Efforts ............................................ 102!
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 106
5. CONCLUSION: THE LIMITS OF ITALIANITÀ IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE 1934
WORLD CUP .............................................................................................................................. 109
APPENDICES ............................................................................................................................. 120!
Appendix A: Italo-Argentine Players in Italy Before World War II ....................................... 121!
Appendix B: Foreign-Born World Cup Representatives......................................................... 123!
Appendix C: Baptismal Record of Raimundo Orsi ................................................................. 136!
Appendix D: Baptismal Record of Luis Monti ....................................................................... 137!
Appendix E: Baptismal Record of Atilio Demaria.................................................................. 138!
Appendix F: Baptismal Record of Enrique Guaita.................................................................. 139
NOTES ON PRIMARY SOURCES ............................................................................................ 140
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 144!
Primary Sources ...................................................................................................................... 144!
Secondary Sources .................................................................................................................. 148!
xi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
Page
Figure 1. 1934 Italian World Cup Team Photo................................................................................ 2!
Figure 2. Photo of Raimundo Orsi ................................................................................................. 17!
Figure 3. Map of Southern Argentina from 1851 Atlas ................................................................. 19!
Figure 4. View of Avellaneda from 1892 Map of Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area .................... 22!
Figure 5. Rates of Homogamy in Buenos Aires, 1882-1923 ......................................................... 37!
Figure 6. Photo of Luis Monti ....................................................................................................... 41!
Figure 7. View of La Boca from 1892 Map of Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area ......................... 42!
Figure 8. Photo of Atilio Demaria ................................................................................................. 64!
Figure 9. 1892 View of Area between Recoleta and Villa Alvear ................................................ 66!
Figure 10. 1928 Argentina Olympic squad .................................................................................... 68!
Figure 11. Photo of Enrique Guaita ............................................................................................... 84!
Figure 12. 1888 Map of Entre Ríos Province ................................................................................ 86!
Figure 13. South American Players in Serie A, 1910-1941 ........................................................... 95!
Figure 14. Photo of Omar Sívori.................................................................................................. 114!
Figure 15. Photo of Mauro Camoranesi ....................................................................................... 116!
!
xii
LIST OF TABLES
Table
Page
Table 1. Immigrants by Country of Origin, 1870-1910 ................................................................. 32!
Table 2. Population Growth in La Boca, 1869-1914 ..................................................................... 44!
xiii
INTRODUCTION
With less than twenty minutes remaining in the second half of the 1934 FIFA World
Cup final, a partisan crowd of between 55,000 and 60,000 mostly local supporters was
silenced at the Stadio Nazionale del Partito Nazionale Fascista in Rome. Antonin Puc beat
veteran Italian goalkeeper and team captain Giampiero Combi from a tight angle to put
Czechoslovakia 1-0 ahead of the hosts. Down by a goal in the final ten minutes of the
second half, Italy scored late to force extra time and then found the decisive goal in the
first overtime period to claim its first world soccer championship. When Combi hoisted the
Jules Rimet Trophy after two full hours of play, Fascist Italy reaped a major reward from
its investment in sport as a vehicle for promoting the regime.
Yet Italy’s success throughout the tournament was due in large part to the
contributions of several key individuals who were born not in Italy but in Argentina. In the
final, it was Raimundo Orsi—who had been born just south of Buenos Aires in
Avellaneda—who scored the late equalizer that sent Italy and Czechoslovakia to overtime.
Five minutes into the first overtime session another Argentine native, Enrique Guaita of
Buenos Aires, slotted a pass through the Czechoslovak defense to Italian teammate Angelo
Schiavio for the winning goal.1 The starting eleven for Italy in the finals also included Luis
This paper includes primary source materials in both Spanish and Italian. All translations are my
own unless otherwise noted.
1
See “I calciatori italiani alla presenza del Duce conquistano il campionato del mondo,” La
Stampa (Torino), June 11, 1934, for the initial response to the victory in Italy the day after the
championship victory. Statistical information and rosters for the 1934 World Cup final was also
1
Figure 1. 1934 Italian World Cup Team Photo
Luis Monti is standing in back row, second from the right. Raimundo Orsi is the second player
from the left crouching in the front row. Enrique Guaita is at the right end of the front row.
Source: Bob Thomas, “The Italian team is pictured with their coach Vittorio Pozzo before the
1934 FIFA World Cup semi-final against Austria,” Getty Images, June 3, 1934, via “World
Cup 1934 Photos,” FIFA.com, posted January 26, 2015, accessed January 27, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/italy1934/photos/index.html.
Monti, the formidable Buenos Aires-born midfielder who patrolled the center of the pitch
and became the only player to participate in two World Cup finals for two different teams
after captaining the losing side when Argentina lost against Uruguay in 1930.
These talented men were the beneficiaries of the immense pressure on Italian
manager Vittorio Pozzo to lead the host nation to victory and validate Fascist efforts to
promote sports. Calling upon the best players in Italy’s national league meant integrating
consulted at “1934 FIFA World Cup Italy: Matches,” FIFA.com, accessed February 11, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/italy1934/matches/index.html.
2
oriundi (the term given to foreign-born individuals of Italian descent) into the starting
lineup for every World Cup match. In addition to mainstays Orsi, Guaita, and Monti, Pozzo
gave a start to another Buenos Aires native, Atilio Demaria, as well as Brazilian-born
Anfilogino Guarisi during the earlier rounds of the tournament. Of these players, whose
status as naturalized Italians made them eligible for military conscription, Pozzo
challenged any claims on the legitimacy of including them in his roster. His common
refrain was that “If they can die for Italy, they can play for Italy!”2 In this way ItaloArgentine players (individuals born in Argentina to Italian immigrant parents) were
incorporated into Fascist definitions of nationalism.
Photos such as the one on the preceding page, taken prior to the semifinal match
against Austria, offer a window into the demeanor of the foreign-born individuals relative
to their Italian-born teammates. All three Argentine-born individuals who took the field in
Florence that day appear almost disinterested in the pregame revelry and displays of
nationalism that were already commonplace at that early stage of international competition.
Monti, standing in the back, seems far less at ease than his teammates, while Orsi and
Guaita are both fidgeting with their hands in the front row. In total, the trio’s body language
seems to indicate a desire to get to the business of playing the match.
Each of these men previously suited up for their natal lands in international
competition before representing the azzurri (the nickname of the Italian national team due
to their distinctive blue jerseys) in the 1934 World Cup. Orsi and Monti each won a silver
2
Attributed to Pozzo in Brian Glanville, “Luck or judgment? Managerial choices at Euro 2004
raise eyebrows,” Sports Illustrated, posted July 5, 2004, accessed via Internet Archive February 2,
2017,
http://web.archive.org/web/20110604050359/http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2004/soccer/07/05/g
lanville.ws/index.html.
3
medal with Argentina at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam. Monti was joined by
Demaria on Argentina’s roster for the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay. Guaita was young
enough to earn playing time for Argentina both before and after his sojourn in Italy. Even
Anfilogino Guarisi, the lone Brazilian in the bunch, won the 1925 Copa América with the
team of his birthplace.
Fielding foreign-born players did not in itself make Italy unique among soccerplaying nations. The United States, Italy’s opening-round opponent, fielded players who
had emigrated from England, Scotland, and Norway.3 The Netherlands turned to Beb
Bakhuys, born in the Dutch East Indies, for much of its offensive firepower. France looked
to its own overseas territories and included two Algerian-born players on its 1934 roster.4
In this period the prevalence of shifting national boundaries meant that representing
multiple national teams was not an aberration but a reality of the contemporary geopolitical
dynamics at play. Today, while dual representation has been banned by FIFA, players still
represent nations as immigrants, and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and Soviet
Union also resulted in athletes representing multiple national teams.
For those who follow international soccer, then, the sport has long required a
suspension of belief regarding nationality. Events such as the World Cup serve as the stages
for proxy battles between nation-states. In this context, athletes participating in those
3
The demographics of the 1930 U.S. World Cup team are something which I covered at greater
length in a previous paper. You can access that article at Zachary R. Bigalke, “Anything but
ringers: early American soccer hotbeds and the 1930 US World Cup team,” Soccer & Society
(2016): 1-21. At present this article can only be accessed online, as it is pending print publication.
Access to this article is available at
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14660970.2016.1267.
4
In order to provide context about the prevalence of foreign-born players representing World Cup
teams over time, a detailed chart is included in Appendix B, “Foreign-Born World Cup
Representatives.”
4
events take a “single combat warrior” role much like the astronauts about which Tom
Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff. Even before the World Cup began in 1930, the Olympics
and other competitions provided the chance for rivalries between proximate states to be
expressed without recourse to warfare. Yet the suspension of belief comes not only in terms
of imbuing athletic competition with the semiotic significance to stand in for military
maneuvers, but also in terms of what defines citizenship and inclusion within the nation.
This is a question that has vexed not only soccer but all sports since the evolution of modern
sports and sporting events.
What was unique in the Italian case are the mechanisms by which over one hundred
oriundi entered the employ of Italian clubs, beginning with the mid-1920s reforms that
swept through Italian soccer and continuing through the end of the Fascist era. Italy’s turn
toward foreign-born talent was the result of a conscious government-driven reimagining of
nationality under Mussolini that will be detailed in the fourth chapter. Much has already
been written about the Fascist sport project, especially the emphasis the Italian regime
placed on sports facility development in the interwar period.5 A series of legalistic
manipulations helped foster the conditions by which Italy centralized control over soccer
on a national level, formed a professional national league, and closed off its borders to
foreign talent while expanding the concept of what constituted domestic status.
5
See for example: Robert S.C. Gordon and John London, “Italy 1934: Fascism and Football,” in
National Identity and Global Sports Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics and
the Football World Cup, ed. Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2006), 41-63; Simon Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game
Under Mussolini (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004); and In Corpore: Bodies in Post-Unification
Italy, ed. Loredana Polezzi and Charlotte Ross (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press, 2007).
5
As such, the four Italo-Argentine players representing Italy in 1934 were among
the beneficiaries of structural changes within the sport that permitted oriundi to naturalize
and play for Italian clubs. The passage of the Carta di Viareggio (Viareggio Charter), so
named because it was drafted and constituted in the seaside city in Tuscany in August 1926,
brought major changes to Italian soccer. The charter paved the way for a fully national
league comprised of professional clubs, which began play in 1929-1930. It also sought to
reduce the influence of foreigners in the game by restricting the use of foreign-born players.
Yet embedded within the Carta di Viareggio was the loophole that helped facilitate
the movement of South Americans into the Italian game, as the Fascist interpretation of
Italian identity deemphasized birthplace in favor of lineage to allow foreigners with Italian
ancestry to play in the Italian league as “repatriated” Italians. Though they were Argentine
citizens by birth, the Fascist government operated under a broad definition of citizenship
that extended dual citizenship to individuals whose parents had immigrated from Italy.
Oriundi thus lived as individuals who identified in a space of multiple nationalities, and it
is the interplay between Italian and Argentine identity that drives this project.
This thesis advances the line of scholarship about the 1934 World Cup by
evaluating the story of the oriundi through both the pull factors that drew athletes to play
for clubs in Fascist Italy as well as the push factors that made overseas employment more
attractive. This story also requires a look at the broader sociocultural factors that were a
critical part of Argentina’s demographic growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, as Italian immigrants helped create the modern Argentine state. Both aspects are
critical for beginning to understand why players chose to navigate the liminal space
between Italian and Argentine identity.
6
Identifying as Italian was not a foreign concept to the South American players who
journeyed to play in Serie A, as decades of transatlantic migrations primarily related to
employment had already opened the Atlantic as a point of exchange between motherland
and diaspora. The decades-long period where immigration irreversibly impacted the
demographic composition of the Argentine populace helps explain more generally the state
of dual nationality among Italians and their Argentine-born offspring. Like their parents
(and in some cases grandparents) who had immigrated to Argentina, the dozens of soccer
players who plied their trade in Italy followed in this tradition of economic opportunism.
But while economics might offer a simple explanation as to why oriundi soccer
players took advantage of professional opportunities in Italy, why were the best among the
repatriated players willing to adopt a fluid conception of national identity and represent
both their Italian and Argentine nationalities based on temporal and situational
circumstances? This research extends an understanding of the broader linkages that might
have inspired Argentine-born athletes to assist in the Italian nation-building project by
participating in high-profile, high-stakes international soccer competition—as well as the
ephemerality of those linkages.
Once the Carta di Viareggio provided the loophole that allowed Italian soccer clubs
to turn to South American players of Italian ancestry as a ready supply of talent, players of
Italian descent had economic incentive to play up already extant notions of Italian identity.
While this rationale might be sufficient to explain participation with professional clubs,
though, it does not entirely explain why players represented the national team. To
understand why Argentine-born soccer players were willing to represent Italy in
7
international play at the 1934 FIFA World Cup, we must first come to understand the
dynamics by which Italians were at the forefront of a demographic boom in Argentina.
What I am undertaking with this thesis is to foreground my primary research on
these four players with the extant secondary scholarship on Italian diasporas and Argentine
immigration in a way that helps frame the shifting nature of national identity. While the
thesis introduces new biographical information about these athletes, it is not primarily a
biography in nature. Rather, in working to amalgamate these disparate threads of research,
the intent is to investigate more broadly a century of diasporic Italian national identity
formation in Argentina and the ways in which Italian culture both shaped and separated
immigrants and their children from broader Argentine society.
In doing so, the goal is to move beyond purely economic explanations to better
understand why Italo-Argentine soccer players treated national identity as a malleable
construct. Each of the four individuals detailed in this thesis emphasized their multiple
nationalities at various points in time by choosing to alternate between representing their
personal homeland and the native land of their parents. By connecting these storylines, this
thesis answers both the structural and individual factors that helped steer men like Orsi,
Monti, Guaita, and Demaria to depart from Argentina and represent a nation which only
one had previously visited and to which each had varying degrees of familial ties. At once
it brings into question both how these four men self-identified in terms of their nationalities,
as well as how the general public collectively forms a common national identity.
Because of its sociocultural as well as geopolitical relevance both historically and
presently, soccer has long offered a chance to become a representative of the nation on an
international stage. The four Argentine-born players who helped Italy win its first World
8
Cup, and who had previously represented Argentina, demonstrate the multiplicity of
national identities that can exist within an individual. Through soccer, then, we can see
how the progeny of Italian immigrants in Argentina more broadly incorporated their
parents’ conception of identity and the societal factors that were developing around them
and adapted these traits to take advantage of circumstances.
The four Italo-Argentine stars who represented Italy in the 1934 World Cup
demonstrate the fluidity of national identity that persists to the present. Much like the
offspring of other diaspora communities, the oriundi players who suited up for Italy
navigated an intersection between the past national identities of their parents and the
nationality they personally developed growing up as youth in a rapidly evolving Argentine
culture. In this way, we should be able to learn something about their experiences by
understanding the society in which they were raised. The four oriundi of 1934 demonstrate
the duality of national identity for Italo-Argentine individuals, as they existed in a liminal
space between italianità and argentinidad where they were at once of both nationalities
and neither nationality.6
6
Italianità is the term describing Italian national character. Likewise, argentinidad is the term
used to express Argentinian national character. These terms, along with criollo (native-born
Argentinians of Hispanic descent), oriundi (a term describing a foreign-born individual of Italian
ancestry), Italo-Argentine (Argentine-born individuals of Italian descent), mediterraneità (a term
attributed to a Mediterranean character), albiceleste (the nickname for the Argentine national
team due to the color of their jerseys) and azzurri (the nickname for the Italian national team due
to the color of their jerseys) will be used throughout the paper. Other terms will be defined as
necessary throughout the paper.
9
HISTORIOGRAPHIC REVIEW
The seeds of this thesis were first planted soon after completing my undergraduate
thesis work on the politics of soccer’s early development in Argentina. To stimulate my
general interest in soccer history, I picked up a copy of John Foot’s Winning at All Costs:
A Scandalous History of Italian Soccer to read over summer break. In Foot’s work, I heard
about the Carta di Viareggio for the first time. Two weeks removed from graduation, my
first emotion in coming across this new piece of information was disappointment that I had
not made this connection prior to completing my undergraduate work. Given its outsized
influence on the flow of talent out of Argentina at the end of the country’s amateur era,
though, I was also surprised that no prior scholarship on soccer in Argentina had referenced
this key document. I filed away this nugget of information and turned toward other projects
in the interim.
In returning to the subject over the past year, I began to read more about Italian
soccer during the Fascist era. Overall, I was disappointed by the superficial treatment
afforded to oriundi players within the broader story of soccer’s development under the rule
of Mussolini. In focusing on the national aspects of the history, scholars of Italian soccer
were inclined to gloss over the structural factors that drove players to move away from
Argentina. Much like ships passing one another on the transatlantic voyage between Genoa
and Buenos Aires, scholars dealing with these two regions knew the other group existed
yet never seemed to connect in any meaningful way.
10
In a 2015 article commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the International
Review for the Sociology of Sport, Alain Bairner made an argument for greater
intersectionality in studying the impact of sport on nationalism. As an example of what this
new approach might look like, Bairner suggests that “instead of focusing primarily on how
female athletes are represented in their national media, it would be interesting to learn how
these women see themselves in relation to the national project.”1 This short thought piece
by Bairner helped inform the way in which I framed the scope of my research this term.
The hybridity of this project aligns with the call to diversify beyond the “imagined
communities” narrative issued by Bairner that is as relevant to sport historians as it is to
the sport sociologists to whom he was originally speaking.
Like my previous research on U.S. soccer, this current project is in many ways a
work of migration history in which national identity is questioned through participation in
representing the nation-state in athletic competition. Because it touches upon so many
different aspects of historical inquiry, my research is inevitably dependent on the work of
past historians as well as scholars in other disciplines. My work engages with scholarship
on the immigrant experience in Argentina and the formation of Italian diasporas as much
as it does with sport itself. As such, it bears looking a bit further into the key developments
within these two fields of research and how evolving understandings of nationality and
immigration in the context of Argentina and Italy will influence the final form of my project
this term.
In terms of immigration to Argentina, there is a long historiography in the subject.
Much of this research is in Spanish, dating back as early as Enrique de Gandía’s 1932
1
Alan Bairner, “Assessing the sociology of sport: On national identity and nationalism,”
International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50, no. 4-5 (2015): 378.
11
ethnographic study of early Italians in Buenos Aires and Jorge F. Sergi’s 1940 history of
Italian immigration to Argentina.2 Given the legacy of Italian immigration both in Buenos
Aires and throughout Argentina, the continued interest in the subject is reflected into the
present. Much of the discussion has remained rooted in a materialist dialectic that
emphasizes the labor aspects of immigrants, especially the research conducted through the
end of the twentieth century. Some, such as Eduardo P. Archetti, have engaged in study of
the immigrant origins of Argentine cultural forms, though the primary focus of most studies
centers on urbanization, export agriculture, and the economic factors that guided Argentine
immigration policy.
Samuel L. Baily, professor emeritus in the Department of History at Rutgers
University, is probably the most prolific scholar to publish about Italians in Argentina
during past half-century. Baily began to publish on current developments in Argentina in
1965, and his work was at the forefront of this labor-focused research into Italians in the
country. In addition to labor history, Baily has also focused on Italian-language media
development and the impact of marriage patterns on assimilation as his research interests
have evolved, and his 1999 book Immigrants in the Lands of Promise ties together four
decades of research in one monograph. He situates himself in opposition to the
assimilationist model of migration history that was the dominant discourse within the field
during the first two decades after World War II, contextualizing rather than glossing over
2
Enrique de Gandía, Los Primeros Italianos en el Río de la Plata y Otros Estudios Históricos
(Buenos Aires: A. García Santos, 1932); Jorge F. Sergi, Historia de los Italianos en la Argentina
(Buenos Aires: Editora Italo Argentina S.A., 1940).
12
the structural factors that aided in both assimilation and in the retention of Italian
identities.3
More recent articles by María Cruset and Lucy Taylor both help deconstruct the
discourse around citizenship in Argentina.4 Both published within the past four years, these
two articles further demonstrate the limits inherent within immigrant status. Cruset’s work
focuses on the legal frameworks assembled to maintain the foreignness of Italian
populations in Argentina, demonstrating the variable status of Italians in Argentina and the
dialectic of assimilation and control at the heart of these laws. Taylor steers her research
toward the ways in which immigration confronted the Spanish colonial dichotomies of
indigenous versus citizen populations, providing a new theoretical framework that opens
the door toward a better understanding of the relationship of Italians to Argentina as
political beings.
Further, books such as Federico Finchelstein’s 2010 monograph Transatlantic
Fascism have worked to connect the immigrant discourse into a broader transnational
narrative dissecting political developments among homeland and diaspora alike during the
early twentieth century. In working to “denaturalize standard notions of what is Latin
American and what is European,” Finchelstein engages in employing a transnational and
comparative dimension to his scholarship which has helped to inform the direction of my
current project.5 A desire to demonstrate both linkages and points of opposition between
3
Samuel L Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York
City, 1870-1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 10.
4
María Cruset, “From ‘Melting Pot’ to Nation-State: The Argentinian Case,” New Balkan
Politics 14 (2013), online; Lucy Taylor, “Decolonizing Citizenship: Reflections on the
Coloniality of Power in Argentina,” Citizenship Studies 17, no. 5 (2013): 596-610.
5
Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina
and Italy, 1919-1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9.
13
Argentina and Italy during the Fascist period are at the heart of this research and also play
a role in the direction of the research pertaining to the next facet of my inquiry.
The historiography related to Italian diasporas is also diverse, and there is far more
that has been written about the subject in English. Much like other fields, the history of
Italian diasporas began with a focus on labor and economic history. Scholars such as the
late Italian economic historian Luigi De Rosa extended this argument with a voluminous
array of research on the subject from the 1970s onward. An economic focus remained
prevalent in the scholarship through the early 1990s, when Dino Cinel published The
National Integration of Italian Return Migration.6 This book provided a more nuanced
image of regional variability in the impact of emigration and repatriation on Italian
communities than anything that had previously been published, though Cinel’s analysis
remains firmly rooted in materialist analysis of the lived experiences of Italian diasporas
and their financial connections to Italian regional life.
More recently, several monographs released over the past decade have offered new
ways of looking at this diaspora beyond a source of remittances to supply needed capital
to Italian projects. Aliza S. Wong has picked up the discourse of race that had long been
set aside by earlier generations of scholars studying Italian national identity, a critical factor
in understanding the variegated nature of Italian society.7 Mark Choate goes a step further,
articulating diaspora formation as a form of “emigrant colonialism” given the lasting ties
6
Dino Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870-1929 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
7
Aliza S. Wong, Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861-1911: Meridionalism, Empire, and
Diaspora (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
14
between Italy and its expatriate communities in Argentina and elsewhere throughout the
Americas.8
On a more conceptual level, it has also been valuable to look at several studies
related to dual nationality. Liza Mügge’s 2012 paper on dual nationality and transnational
politics, specifically as it relates to Surinamese and Turkish populations in the Netherlands,
helps provide a more detached case study outside of the scope of the thesis. Mügge’s
research affords an opportunity to test the dynamics that play on immigrants’ sociopolitical
identities, including the push and pull of state actors in both the country of origin and the
country of settlement.9 Other studies have focused in more acutely on dual nationality
among Latinos, both in terms its impact on naturalization in countries of settlement and on
political connectedness in both host and origin countries.10 Since oriundi players who
signed contracts with Italian clubs in the 1920s and 1930s took on dual nationality, the
broader significance of dual nationality both within Latin America and more globally plays
another role within the thesis.
In addition to this work on dual nationality, it has also been valuable to look at
modern sociological developments regarding assimilation theory, especially as it pertains
to the children of immigrants. In challenging traditional models of assimilation theory that
8
Mark I. Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008).
9
Liza Mügge, “Dual Nationality and Transnational Politics,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies 38, no. 1 (2012): 1-19.
10
Michael Jones-Correa, “Under Two Flags: Dual Nationality in Latin America and Its
Consequences for Naturalization in the United States,” International Migration Review 35, no. 4
(2001): 997-1029; Jeffrey K. Staton, Robert A. Jackson, and Damarys Canache, “Dual
Nationality Among Latinos: What Are the Implications for Political Connectedness?” Journal of
Politics 69, no. 2 (2007): 470-482; Sarah Allen Gershon and Adrian D. Pantoja, “Pessimists,
Optimists, and Skeptics: The Consequences of Transnational Ties for Latino Immigrant
Naturalization,” Social Science Quarterly 95, no. 2 (2014): 328-342.
15
articulated a straightforward and linear process of incorporation, sociologists have helped
form a more complex understanding of assimilative processes among immigrants and their
offspring. Demonstrating the variability in adopting the native language of parents, trends
in identifying with parents’ national origins, and other factors that play into the pace of
assimilation, this vein of research has helped better understand the fluidity of national
identity for children navigating spaces between host and diaspora cultures.11
This thesis presents the case studies of the four oriundi players who represented
Italy in the 1934 World Cup and builds upon these various facets of research. The empirical
work on Italian diasporic relations, Argentine immigration policy and demographics, and
Fascist sport development all inform the thesis, as does the theory underpinning the lived
experiences of immigrant offspring and dual-nationality individuals. Integrating these
outside influences on sociocultural development helps to place the respective
historiographies of Argentine and Italian soccer history into clearer conversation with one
another and illuminate how soccer in both countries provided the space in which oriundi
athletes could express the multiple facets of malleable national identities.
11
Several recent monographs focusing on new models of assimilation theory include Susan
Wierzbicki, Beyond the Immigrant Enclave: Network Change and Assimilation (New York: LFB
Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2004) and Caroline L. Faulkner, Economic Mobility and Cultural
Assimilation among Children of Immigrants (El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC,
2011). See also Barry R. Chiswick, Yew Liang Lee, and Paul W. Miller, “A Longitudinal
Analysis of Immigrant Occupational Mobility: A Test of the Immigrant Assimilation
Hypothesis,” International Migration Review 39, no. 2 (2005): 332-353;
16
1. OPENING ARGENTINA’S DOORS: IMMIGRATION
DEMOGRAPHICS AND RAIMUNDO ORSI
Raimundo Orsi was the first of the
Figure 2. Photo of Raimundo Orsi
1934 Italo-Argentine quartet to make the
transatlantic voyage to play professionally
in Italy. He arrived in October 1928,
having signed a contract with Juventus of
Turin after starring in the 1928 Amsterdam
Olympics for silver medalist Argentina.
The contract between Orsi and the club
included payments of 8,000 lire a month, a
signing bonus of 100,000 lire, and a Fiat
509.1
The salary and added bonuses
presented the most obvious pull factor
drawing Orsi to leave his hometown club
Source: “Raimundo Orsi at Independiente ca.
1920s,” Wikimedia Commons, updated August
6, 2012, accessed April 22, 2017,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Raimundo_Orsi_Independiente.jpg.
Independiente of Avellaneda to play for a
foreign team nearly 7,500 nautical miles away. But Orsi has been sold, both at the time of
his arrival and decades after the fact, as a quintessential representation of an Italian citizen
1
“Raimondo Orsi sbarcato a Genova,” Il Littoriale (Bologna), October 4, 1928, 1; Tony Mason,
Passion of the People? Soccer in Latin America (New York: Verso, 1995), 48.
17
born abroad. Soon after he arrived in Italy, articles as far south as Naples were asserting
that Orsi was an Italian son of Italian immigrants who just happened to be born in
Argentina, and that “he has always lived there as an Italian.”2
Italian media, under the aegis of the Fascist government, had a clear incentive to
upsell the italianità of Argentine-born players when trying to introduce them as legitimate
Italians to the public. Yet Raimundo Orsi’s genealogy does not easily conform to the
narrative of Italian identity. Delving into his family tree offers an instructive look at the
complicated dynamics that were taking place in Argentina as immigrants helped reshape
the nation’s ethnic demographics at the turn of the twentieth century. Orsi’s lineage reveals
the interactions between the two largest immigrant groups as well as the native-born
Argentine population during this period of demographic overhaul. We can see this most
clearly in the story of Orsi’s parents.
We know neither when Raimundo’s father, Lorenzo Orsi, arrived in Argentina, nor
which ship carried him across the Atlantic Ocean from his native Genoa. His name is
nowhere to be found after searching through several databases of ship passenger records.
Similarly, the 1895 census records provide no information about how long Orsi had lived
in Argentina at the time he gave his information to the census. What we do know is that
Orsi was living in Argentina by 1895, having disembarked from one of the ships that
traveled back and forth between the ports of Genoa and Buenos Aires, teeming with Italian
immigrants seeking new lives in Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. Lorenzo was yet another among the hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants
2
“Raimondo Orsi in Italia,” Tutti gli sports (Napoli), October 14-21, 1928, 4.
18
Figure 3. Map of Southern Argentina from 1851 Atlas
Buenos Aires is starred; Chascomús is circled directly south of Buenos Aires; and Carmen de
Patagones is circled at the far south of the border.
Source: J. Rapkin, “Chili and La Plata,” in The Illustrated Atlas, and Modern History of the
World Geographical, Political, Commercial & Statistical, ed. R. Montgomery Martin, Esq.
(London: J. & F. Tallis, 1851), via David Rumsey Map Collection, accessed March 20, 2017,
http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~296057~90067579.
living in Buenos Aires and the port cities south of the federal district the first time he is
identified as an Argentine resident.
According to the local records from the 1895 national census, Orsi was an
unmarried 23-year-old living and working in the industrial city of Barracas al Sud,
separated by the Riachuelo waterway from the La Boca district in Buenos Aires. Barracas
al Sud was still nearly a decade away from being rechristened as Avellaneda (in honor of
former Argentine president Nicolás Avellaneda) in 1904. Lorenzo could read and write,
according to the census, though it is not clear from the scant details on the census records
19
whether that was in Spanish or only in Italian. Orsi did not own any real estate in Argentina,
but he was employed as a mechanic in the city.3
Within six years he met and married Gregoria Donata Yturriaga, the last of four
children born to a Spanish immigrant father and an Argentine mother. As with Lorenzo
Orsi, there is no clear evidence to indicate precisely when Gregoria’s father, Juan
Yturriaga, embarked on the transatlantic voyage from his native Spain and arrived in
Argentina. But, based on his long residence in the country, we can ascertain that he was
among the first waves of immigrants to arrive in the country after the passage of the 1853
Constitution liberalized Argentine immigration policy. According to the 1869 national
census, Yturriaga was an illiterate 24-year-old immigrant living and working as a carpenter
in Chascomús, about one hundred kilometers south of Buenos Aires.4
Given his bachelor status in the 1869 census, Juan Yturriaga likely had not yet met
his future wife, Raymunda Martínez. Raymunda was born in the town on the banks of the
Río Negro in Carmen de Patagones in September 1851 into a family that lived on what was
then the frontier of European settlement in Argentina,.5 At the time, the Río Negro served
as the border between independent Argentine territory and the unincorporated areas of
Patagonia.6 The couple was married sometime around 1871, though it is unclear whether
3
“Argentina, 1895 censo nacional: Barracas al Sud (Avellaneda), Cuartel 01,” Archivo General
de la Nación (Buenos Aires), 188 of 230, via FamilySearch, digitized April 9, 2016, accessed
March 9, 2017, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-6SZQ-D2P?i=187&cc=1410078.
4
“Argentina, 1869 censo nacional: Chascomús,” Archivo General de la Nación (Buenos Aires),
7 of 779, via FamilySearch, digitized April 13, 2016, accessed March 8, 2017,
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-XCZ9-WW4?mode=g&i=6&cc=1462401.
5
“Bautismos 1804-1860,” Parroquia Nuestra Señora del Carmen (Carmen de Patagones), 381 of
504, via FamilySearch, digitized May 26, 2016, accessed March 9, 2017,
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939D-K39Z-XY?mode=g&i=380&cc=1972912.
6
See Figure 2 on previous page for a visual representation of Argentina’s southern border during
this period.
20
the wedding took place in Carmen de Patagones, Chascomús, or elsewhere. Either soon
before or soon after the wedding, Martínez moved in permanently with Yturriaga in
Chascomús. Martínez left her hometown at the height of a four-year Argentine military
operation to dispossess Araucanian, Ranquel, and Pampas populations of their territory and
extend the southern border.7
Raymunda gave birth to the couple’s youngest of four children, Gregoria Donata
Yturriaga, in Chascomús on December 12, 1880, and the infant was baptized in the parish
church nine days later.8 Still settled in the city after several decades together, Yturriaga and
Martínez approached their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary at the time of the 1895 census.
After spending the greater part of his life on Argentine soil, Yturriaga had learned how to
read and write and had already seen three of his four children with Raymunda reach
adulthood.9 Gregoria, who grew up with her elder siblings during a period of rapid
modernization for Argentina, would soon leave home as well. The advent of railroads was
shrinking the space between locales, and Gregoria moved north toward Buenos Aires at
some point in the waning years of the nineteenth century.
After marrying Lorenzo Orsi, Gregoria became pregnant as winter gave way to
spring in March 1901. The couple lived on Calle Lavalle 176, a few blocks from the main
cathedral in Barracas al Sud. The site has since been rebuilt in the processes of
7
Kristine L. Jones, “Civilization and Barbarism and Sarmiento’s Indian Policy,” in Sarmiento
and His Argentina, ed. Joseph T. Criscenti (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), 3839.
8
“Bautismos 1878-1881,” Parroquia Nuestra Señora de La Merced (General Lavalle), 597 of
623, via FamilySearch, digitized May 26, 2016, accessed March 9, 2017,
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-61TS-G6T?mode=g&i=596&cc=1972912.
9
“Argentina, 1895 censo nacional: Chascomús, Cuartel 02 (Población urbana),” Archivo General
de la Nación (Buenos Aires), 70 of 199, via FamilySearch, digitized April 9, 2016, accessed
March 8, 2017, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-6919-9H4?mode=g&i=69.
21
Figure 4. View of Avellaneda from 1892 Map of Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area
The starred location at bottom center represents the first residence where Raimundo Orsi lived
in Avellaneda, which was then known as Barracas al Sud. Located just off the map to the lower
left is the present-day location of Estadio Presidente Juan Domingo Perón, home of Racing Club,
and Estadio Libertadores de América, home of Orsi’s first club Independiente.
Source: Pablo Ludwig, Ciudad de Buenos Aires y Distrito Federal (Buenos Aires: Gunche,
Wiebeck y Turtl, 1892), via David Rumsey Map Collection, accessed April 23, 2017,
http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3702~340019.
urbanization, but the address now sits nearly equidistant between the old Catholic parish
seat and the new secular cathedrals of the modern era, the side-by-side stadiums of soccer
clubs Independiente and Racing Club. Neither club yet existed as Gregoria went into labor
and gave birth to a son, Raimundo, on December 2, 1901.10
10
“Bautismos 1901-1902,” Parroquia Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (Avellaneda), 550 of 815,
via FamilySearch, digitized June 4, 2014, accessed March 9, 2017,
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939D-G6DP-D?mode=g&i=549. See also Figure 4.
22
On a fundamental level, the same conditions that allowed Juan Yturriaga to arrive
in Argentina at some point in the 1860s also made it possible for nearly two million
Italians—including his future son-in-law—to also immigrate and lay down roots over the
second half of the nineteenth century. The demographic upturn caused by what was largely
a matter of Italian and Spanish immigration was the result of favorable immigration policy
implemented by the Argentine government. This policy also opened the door for English
immigrants to arrive on Argentine shores, where they transplanted a pastime that eventually
blossomed into a national obsession. As urbanization shifted Argentina away from more
traditional cultural pastimes, soccer proliferated among both native-born and immigrant
populations as a cheap and entertaining diversion adaptable to the cityscape.
To understand why soccer made its way to Argentina in the first place and why
Argentine-born soccer players were willing to represent Italy in international play at the
1934 FIFA World Cup, we must first come to understand the Argentine legal structures
and social dynamics that made the country an attractive destination for immigrants in the
latter half of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. Between 1869 and 1914
the country more than quadrupled in size, from under two million to nearly eight million
people. This could not occur without a series of policy decisions by the independent
Argentine state that positioned immigrants as a necessary component to realize the
country’s goals of building an economic base and a steady pool of reliable labor.
This chapter investigates the mechanisms that helped bring Yturriaga, Orsi, and the
parents of the other three Argentine-born Italian World Cup stars to Argentina prior to
World War I. Argentina’s leaders actively sought to increase their European population
base, to the extent that they inserted pro-immigration language when framing the national
23
constitution in 1853. But the political leaders of the young nation also operated from
hierarchical ideas about Europeans that shaded the public reception of this legislation in a
stratified and racialized context. By creating advantageous situations for immigrants, these
policies helped accomplish Argentina’s socioeconomic goals and built a Eurocentric
population base in the country while also revolutionizing Argentine society in ways its
intellectuals and leaders had not anticipated.
The Motivations of Argentine Government Immigration Policy
After its initial independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, Argentina
aimed to define its nation in political rather than ethnic discourse. The goal of early
Argentine leaders was to frame a republican system that would stress equality, liberty, and
popular sovereignty rather than an ethnocultural definition of the nation.11 This was not an
implicit rejection of ethnicity within the discourse of the nation, but rather a de-emphasis
of ethnic identity from a position of primacy in the discourse. The desire to construct a
nation defined by its political rather than its cultural traits would serve as a foundational
premise for Argentina’s early immigration policy.
This can be seen in the discourse around immigration that marks the earliest stage
of independence. As early as 1812, Bernardino Rivadavia advocated for the government to
offer “its immediate protection to individuals of all nations and to their families who want
to establish their domicile in the territory of the State” as a means of promoting an
11
Jeane Delaney, “Imagining la raza argentina,” in Nationalism in the New World, ed. Don H.
Doyle and Marco Antonio Pamplona (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 144.
24
independent modernization project.12 Always one of the least populous of the Spanish
colonies in the Americas, the early independence leaders recognized that they would never
be able to fully realize the economic potential embedded within the vast geopolitical spaces
unless they managed to acquire the population to convert their modernization goals into
reality.
While there were certainly small concentrations of Italians and other immigrant
populations in Argentina during the first decades of independence in the early nineteenth
century, the foundations which led to wider growth of the Italian diaspora were laid with
the drafting of the 1853 Constitution. The document that was eventually signed on 1 May
1853 explicitly incorporated immigration as a fundamental point of emphasis. This
document created the formal structures of an open-door policy that stimulated the
transatlantic flow of immigrants from Europe, a process which was critical in the building
of the modern Argentine state. Building on the sentiments of earlier independence leaders
such as Rivadavia, the language in the 1853 Constitution went even further in protecting
the rights of foreigners on Argentine soil. The document unambiguously states that the
“federal government will encourage European immigration” to boost agriculture, industry,
and intellectual life in Argentina.13
12
“... siendo la población el principio de la industria y el fundamento de la felicidad de los
Estados y conviniendo promoverla en estos países por todos los medios posibles, el gobierno
ofrece su inmediata protección a los individuos de todas las naciones y a sus familias que
quieran fijar su domicilio en el territorio del Estado, asegurándoles en pleno goce del hombre en
sociedad, con tal de que no perturben la tranquilidad pública y respeten las leyes del país.”
(Translated section in italics.) Quoted in Miguel Alberto Caramuti, La Política Migratoria
Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Depalma, 1975), 21.
13
Translated from Article 25 of “Constitución de la Confederación Argentina (1 de Mayo 1853),”
World Intellectual Property Organization, accessed January 17, 2017, PDF, 271,
http://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/es/ar/ar147es.pdf. A digital copy of the original
handwritten text can also be viewed at “Constitucion de la Confederacion Argentina, 1853,”
Biblioteca del Congreso de la Nación, accessed January 19, 2017, PDF,
http://www.bcnbib.gov.ar/uploads/constituciondelaconfederacionargentina1853.pdf.
25
Article 20 of the 1853 Constitution further provided foreigners with civil
protections equivalent to those of Argentine citizens. Immigrants needed to reside for just
two years in Argentina to request and gain citizenship, and could even request citizenship
after a shorter term of residency by “claiming and proving services to the Republic.”14 But
the extension of civil liberties to foreigners living in Argentina meant that there were no
restrictions on immigrants’ freedom of movement, employment opportunities, religious
freedoms, or additional tax impositions. These protections, when combined with latent
prejudices against Mediterranean populations, meant that there was little incentive for
Italians in Argentina to naturalize. While Article 20 eliminated any legal incentive to take
on Argentine citizenship, however, Italians were still selectively adopting cultural norms
that were becoming more widespread across ethnicities and integrating into the nation
through sport and other social organizations.
Whereas Rivadavia had made no overt mention about Eurocentric immigration
policy, the motivations had already begun to drift subtly toward racialized conceptions of
whitening the population by midcentury. The Constitution made no explicit distinction
between European countries in its pro-immigrant policy, though the leaders who signed the
document were influenced by political theories that delineated not only between European
and non-European immigrants but which also differentiated qualitatively between different
European nationalities. The next two sections of this chapter examine the immigrants that
Argentine political leaders hoped to court and the real impacts of immigration on national
demographics.
14
Translated from Article 20 of “Constitución de la Confederación Argentina (1 de Mayo 1853),”
World Intellectual Property Organization, accessed January 17, 2017, PDF, 270,
http://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/es/ar/ar147es.pdf.
26
Argentine Leaders and Desired Immigrant Nationalities
This focus on building the Argentine population via Europe was rooted in the
racialized theories of early independence intellectuals such as Juan Bautista Alberdi.
Despite living most of his life in exile outside Argentina, Alberdi’s political theories had
an outsized impact on the men who came together to frame the 1853 Constitution. His 1852
tract, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina,
was utilized in many ways as a blueprint for framing the Constitution. In this text, he argues
that immigration will bring the “revitalizing spirit of European civilization to our soil”
through the habits brought across the Atlantic by European immigrants.15 As the
independent state matured, ethnicity took on a greater significance in political
determinations.
Alberdi reasserted two decades after the Constitution’s signing that only European
immigration could lead to civilization. Unsurprisingly aligned with prevalent racial
theories of his time, Alberdi contended that populating a country with Asians or Africans
would “brutalize” the nation. But he also argued that there was a specific form of European
that should be courted across the Atlantic, and that “the garbage of backward or less-refined
Europe” would “poison a country” should it be allowed to overwhelm the immigration
policy.16
What for Argentinians constituted “refined” Europe? Neither Spanish immigrants
like Juan Yturriaga nor the millions of Italians like Lorenzo Orsi fit within the demographic
15
Juan B. Alberdi, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República
Argentina, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: La Cultura Argentina, 1915), 88-89.
16
Juan B. Alberdi, “Gobernar es Poblar” (Paris: 1873), in Bases y puntos de partida para la
organización política de la República Argentina, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: La Cultura Argentina,
1915), 17-18.
27
of refined nations. For Alberdi, “the most capable immigrants” were to be found “in
England, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium and Germany.”17 Northern Europeans, rather than
those immigrants from southern Europe, were perceived to be the more desirable ethnicities
for fortifying the Argentine population. This attitude was not directly codified within the
1853 Constitution, but it was far from a hidden perception. The relevant sections of the
Constitution that frame immigration as European immigration are rooted in this context of
a racial discourse in which Italians—along with Spaniards and eastern European
immigrants—were perceived to be second-class Europeans, almost of another continent.
As Argentina began to push its borders outward and began to evolve as an
independent entity, vibrant communities were forming among many of the immigrant
groups in the country. The British, for instance, developed a small but influential
community that served as a critical source of both technical expertise and foreign capital
as Argentina developed railroads, port facilities, and export-based industrial infrastructure
over the latter half of the nineteenth century. But they also introduced their own cultural
forms, among which was soccer.
June 20, 1867 is one of those mythic dates that looms large over the history of
soccer in Argentina. On that day, a group of young men congregated at the Buenos Ayres
Cricket Club in the Palermo district to stage the city’s first official soccer match.18 After
dividing into two teams and donning colored caps to signify the sides, the group of
expatriates took to the field and played two 50-minute halves. When playing time
17
Juan B. Alberdi, quoted in Documentos de historia argentina 1870-1955, ed. Liliana Caraballo,
Noemí Charlier, and Liliana Garulli (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1998), 15.
18
Through much of the nineteenth century, many English-language maps and English-speaking
institutions used this Anglicized spelling of the city name. Interestingly, it was also still used in
some Italian-language literature that will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 4. This spelling
will be used only when applicable in terms of describing specific institutions and references.
28
concluded, the team in white caps had won 4-0.19 That landmark encounter is often
positioned as the official beginning of organized soccer in the country.
We know now that the match held on that Thursday afternoon was not the first time
that soccer had been played in Argentina. For that matter, the local English-language media
in the city were reporting on matches organized and held at the cricket club itself at least
as early as 1863.20 The 1867 narrative retains its power as an origin story for Argentine
soccer, however, not necessarily because it was a “first” event but because it frames an
early example of how liberalized immigration introduced the cultural forms that evolved
into an integral part of Argentine national identity.
It also demonstrates another key facet of immigration that Argentina’s elite
leadership could not control. Even nationalities such as the British, who Argentine leaders
hoped would assimilate most readily into Argentine culture, were inclined to introduce
their own cultural forms into the mix. Though the British provided the bulk of the foreign
capital and industrial knowledge that helped build up Argentina’s export economy, they
were no different than other immigrants in the ways they helped steer the direction of
modern Argentine culture.
Subsequent generations of leaders were not immune to this hierarchical attitude
toward European immigrants. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the Argentine president from
1868 to 1874, did not hide his preference for German immigrants over other European
nationalities. More importantly in terms of shaping nationalist discourse, his vehemence
19
“Football Match,” The Standard (Buenos Aires), June 23, 1867, 2. Secondary reports of this
match can also be found in Osvaldo Bayer, Fútbol Argentino: Pasión y Gloria de nuestro deporte
más popular (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1990), 18, and Eduardo P. Archetti,
Masculinities: Soccer, Polo and the Tango in Argentina (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 48.
20
“Buenos Ayres Cricket Club,” The Standard (Buenos Aires), June 26, 1863, 3.
29
against Italian immigrants increased especially in the decades after concluding his six-year
term as president.21
What makes this especially interesting is that Sarmiento, even as he harbored these
sentiments toward Italians in Argentina, was nevertheless a longtime admirer of Italian arts
and architecture after first immersing himself on a visit to Europe in 1847. Sarmiento was
among the group of oligarchic Argentine elites who saw no contradiction in drawing upon
Italian influences to leave behind the Spanish colonial past and articulate a new national
form of civil identity even as they disparaged the perpetuation of Italian identity among
immigrant populations. As Buenos Aires emulated European cities in reconfiguring its
urban footprint in the late nineteenth century, it also drew upon a skilled Italian labor force
that could help realize the vision that mirrored the shifting demographics of the Argentine
population.22 The evolution of this cultural connection will be examined further in chapter
three.
Italians were hardly the only immigrant demographic to draw skepticism about the
sincerity of their loyalties within Argentine society. But, as they were the immigrant
nationality that rapidly became the predominant diaspora within Argentina in the late
nineteenth century, it was Italians who drew the largest level of scrutiny. The perpetuation
of such prejudices among the most influential Argentine leaders would have grave
consequences given the demographic realities of the growing immigrant populations in
Argentina.
21
Samuel L. Baily, “Sarmiento and Immigration: Changing Views on the Role of Immigration in
the Development of Argentina,” in Sarmiento and His Argentina, ed. Joseph T. Criscenti
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers,1993), 138.
22
George Epolito, “Golondrinas: Passages of Influence: The Construction of National/Cultural
Identities in Italy and the Río de la Plata Basin of South America,” National Identities 14, no. 3
(2012): 230.
30
The Demographic Impact of Immigration Policy
Though the rest of the players were undeniably British at that landmark 1867 game
on the grounds of the Buenos Ayres Cricket Club, one man’s lineage has been harder to
pinpoint. Among the players in Palermo that late June day was William Boschetti, whose
nativity has been traced to the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia but who has also been
described as Italian by ethnicity.23 Boschetti’s participation in this landmark event
foreshadows the future influence of Italians and their descendants on the development of
soccer both in Argentina and, later, as repatriated members of the Italian national team.
While Argentine leaders hoped to court immigrants from northern European
nations, these countries contributed little to the demographic growth of the Argentine
population through immigration. The British community may have been influential both in
providing the capital and skill for early infrastructural development as well as in
introducing soccer to the society, but the number of immigrants from the United Kingdom
totaled just under 43,000 over the four-decade period between 1870 and 1910 when
immigration had the largest effect on the formation of a demographically diverse Argentine
populace. The Germans sought by Sarmiento and others constituted a slightly larger
23
Boschetti was listed as one of the participants in “Football Match,” The Standard (Buenos
Aires), June 23, 1867, 2. The argument for Saint Lucia as Boschetti’s birthplace was forwarded in
Jonathan Wilson, Angels with Dirty Faces: How Argentinian Soccer Defined a Nation and
Changed the Game Forever (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 3. Depictions of Boschetti as
likely being Italian by ancestry have been popularized by Eduardo Archetti, most recently in
English in the article “Male Hybrids in the World of Soccer,” in The Latin American Cultural
Studies Reader, ed. Ana del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, Abril Trigo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), 407.
31
Table 1. Immigrants by Country of Origin, 1870-1910
18701879
18801889
18901899
19001910
TOTAL
PCT
Belgium
628
15,096
2,654
2,391
20,769
0.6%
Denmark
303
1,128
1,282
3,437
6,150
0.2%
France
32,938
79,422
41,048
37,340
190,748
6.0%
Germany
3,522
12,958
9,204
20,064
45,748
1.4%
156,716
472,179
411,764
848,533
1,889,192
59.0%
111
4,315
675
1,622
6,723
0.2%
44,802
148,394
114,731
672,941
980,868
30.7%
186
632
490
592
1,900
0.1%
9,265
15,692
4,691
13,186
42,834
1.3%
656
1,852
1,612
10,481
14,601
0.5%
PERIOD TOTAL
249,127
751,668
588,151
1,610,587
3,199,533
ANNUAL AVG.
24,913
75,167
58,815
146,417
Italy
Netherlands
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
Portugal
Source: Data from J. Ulyses Balderas and Michael J. Greenwood, “From Europe to the
Americas: A Comparative Panel-Data Analysis of Migration to Argentina, Brazil, and the
United States, 1870-1910” (pre-publication draft, November 2006), 23.
population, but the numbers of immigrants from Germany was also below 50,000 over this
period.24
The demographic breakdown of the points of origin of the immigrants of this
period illuminates the disproportionate impact of British capital and cultural diffusion on
economic and social growth in the country. When the first tentative inflow of British capital
entered Argentina in the 1860s and 1870s, emigrants from the United Kingdom accounted
for four percent of the total number of immigrants entering Argentina. But from this point,
24
J. Ulyses Balderas and Michael J. Greenwood, “From Europe to the Americas: A Comparative
Panel-Data Analysis of Migration to Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, 1870-1910” (prepublication draft, November 2006), 23. See also “Table 1: Immigrants by Country of Origin,
1870-1910” on this page for data by decade for the point of origin of European immigrants.
32
the proportion of British immigrants in Argentina would continue to decline in relation to
other immigrant groups.
The decade of the 1870s set the precedent of Italian predominance in immigration
patterns that continued throughout the rest of the century and into the 1900s. Three out of
every five people to disembark in Buenos Aires to start a new life hailed from the Apennine
Peninsula, which had been experiencing its own conflicts revolving around political
consolidation during the same span that Argentina went through the growing pains of early
independence. The 156,000 Italians who disembarked on Argentine soil were joined by
another 44,000 of Yturriaga’s Spanish compatriots.
The quantity of immigrants arriving from Italy more than tripled in the 1880s. As
Argentina’s Italian population grew to more than a half million in size, this decade also
marked a larger general boom in immigration. A threefold increase in Spanish emigrants
cemented their position as the second-largest group of immigrants coming into Argentina.
By the point of the 1914 census, nearly ninety percent of the immigrants that had arrived
in Argentina over the preceding four decades were of either Italian or Spanish origin.
The forty years between 1870 and 1910 that mark the most intense period of
migration from Europe to Argentina rendered an Italian diaspora that comprised nearly one
quarter of the 7.9 million people living in Argentina and a Spanish diaspora that constituted
another twelve percent of the population.25 That so many of the more than three million
immigrants hailed from Italy and Spain cannot solely be attributed to legal factors. In
25
At the time of writing, there is no digitized copy of the 1914 census records available to
researchers. In addition to the data found in “Table 1: Immigrants by Country of Origin, 18701910” on page 19, information for the total 1914 population was drawn from Michael Soltys,
“1914, the year a nation counted its living,” Buenos Aires Herald, October 3, 2014, accessed
March 11, 2017, http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/169759/1914-the-year-a-nationcounted-its-living.
33
addition, the economic incentives for coming to Argentina can be viewed in context of the
wage disparities between points of origin and the destination country.
An Italian immigrant arriving in Argentina between 1890 and 1900 could expect to
earn on average 150 to 200 percent more than they would be able to earn working in
comparable fields of labor back in Italy. For a Spanish immigrant during the same period,
Argentina offered the opportunity to at least double his or her earnings relative to wage
scales in Spain. Even as these numbers fell in the early twentieth century both prior to and
during World War I, immigrants still earned higher wages in Argentina relative to their
points of embarkation into the 1920s and 1930s.26
What makes this especially interesting is the fact that this wage gap comes in the
aftermath of the Baring Brothers crisis that revealed an overdependence on foreign capital
and reduced global confidence in the country’s economic future. 27 A lack of data prior to
that collapse makes it difficult to know what the situation looked like for earlier immigrants
such as Yturriaga, but it seems likely that the trend held firm in the decade prior to 1890.
Once the economic bubble that had built up during the 1880s finally burst, overall
European immigration fell by 160,000 during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The
two groups whose numbers dropped by the lowest ratios were emigrants from Italy and
Spain. The decision of men like Juan Yturriaga and Lorenzo Orsi to take advantage of
economic opportunities in a liberal environment for immigrants, and to forge permanent
roots in the country regardless of whether they ever attained citizen status, is critical to
26
Alan M. Taylor, “External Dependence, Demographic Burdens, and Argentine Economic
Decline After the Belle Époque,” The Journal of Economic History 52, no. 4 (1992): 914-915.
27
David Rock, Argentina 1516-1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987), 158-159, 166.
34
keep in mind when considering the first- and second-generation offspring of Italian- and
Spanish-immigrant parents.
Marriage Dynamics and the Italian Diaspora
The marriages of both Yturriaga and Orsi also help reveal that frustrations with the
predominance of Italians and Spaniards among the immigrants flowing into Argentina were
hardly universal among the native-born population. The extent to which biases against
Spanish and Italian immigrants were confined to the elite factions of Argentine society
bears out in the fact that marriages between Argentine citizens and immigrants, and
between immigrants of different ethnic backgrounds, were becoming a more regular
occurrence by the early twentieth century.
Within this liberal environment, Italian homogamy rates were already in decline by
the last decade of the nineteenth century, dropping by more than six percent from 1892 to
the period between 1899 and 1901 when the couple married. In the case of Orsi’s parents
as well as his grandparents, a combination of the demographic influx of immigrants and a
gender imbalance among criollo individuals precluded high rates of homogamy and
explains why both Raymunda Martínez and Gregoria Yturriaga married immigrants.
A deeper look at homogamy rates provides further context for understanding the
real level of integration of the Italian diaspora into Argentine society. Among Argentineborn males, rates of intra-group marriage remained steady around 75 to 80 percent between
1882 and 1923. For Argentine-born women, rates of homogamy increased in the twentieth
century. The trend for Spanish-born women mirrors that of Argentine men, while male
35
Spanish immigrants saw their rates of homogamy rise steadily much like Argentine
women.
Italians, by and large, do not fit into this same picture of increased homogamy.
Instead, rates of exogamous marriage increased at a regular clip among both Italian men
and women over this four-decade sample of data. Lorenzo Orsi was thus part of a broader
process by which Italians were intermarrying with other communities in Argentina.28
While Italian immigrants retained a patriotic affinity for their homeland, their children
navigated in a space where multiple influences helped shape their own conceptions of
national identity.
By the 1920s, also, these immigrant distinctions would have been less significant
as more first-generation Argentine citizens married. When Raimundo Orsi married Estela
Montes de Oca on March 6, 1926, for instance, it would have registered as a homogamous
marriage between two Argentine individuals.29 What is lost in this picture is whether there
were high rates of homogamy within the Italo-Argentine population. In Orsi’s case, at least,
he followed in his father’s footsteps in marrying someone from a multigenerational
Argentine family.
While Orsi is joined by Enrique Guaita as an oriundi star whose Italian ancestry
only extended along one side of his family tree, the other two Argentine-born players who
represented Italy in 1934 fall on the other side of the demographic divide. Though it would
be foolish to infer too much from such a small sample size, the split between the two players
28
See Figure 5, “Rates of Homogamy in Buenos Aires, 1882-1923,” on the following page. For
further context on the information visualized within the chart, see Samuel L. Baily, “Marriage
Patterns and Immigrant Assimilation in Buenos Aires, 1882-1923,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 60, no. 1 (1980): 40-41.
29
“Bautismos 1901-1902,” Parroquia Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (Avellaneda), 550 of 815.
36
Figure 5. Rates of Homogamy in Buenos Aires, 1882-1923
Source: Data from Samuel L. Baily, “Marriage Patterns and Immigrant Assimilation in Buenos
Aires, 1882-1923,” Hispanic American Historical Review 60, no. 1 (1980): 41.
from Buenos Aires and the other two from outside the federal district is notable insomuch
as it provides a few interesting contexts about both the prevalence of and limits to
homogamy throughout Argentine marriages. In the case of the four soccer stars who shifted
their allegiances from the albiceleste to the azzurri, Italian lineage was hardly absolute. A
deeper look at the demographics of their peers within the players’ respective parishes
would help better understand whether this is mere coincidence or indicative of a broader
trend.
What the individual cases of the four players reveal anecdotally is that
homogamous marriage seems to have been more common within the urban core of Buenos
Aires than in other areas of the country. Luis Monti and Atilio Demaria, born in Buenos
Aires to parents who were both Italian immigrants, fit a more traditional picture of
37
diasporic insularity. On the other hand, Raimundo Orsi (born nearby in Avellaneda) and
Enrique Guaita (from Entre Ríos province) can claim Italian heritage only on their paternal
side, demonstrating that homogamy was hardly an absolute during this period. This also
furthers the argument presented by Samuel Baily that reveals a more complicated picture
of heterogamous marriage patterns that break along gender lines.30
Conclusions
Spanning the decades both before and after the drafting of the 1853 Constitution,
Italians in Argentina remained stigmatized in one form or another. The racial discourses of
Alberdi and other influential Argentine political theorists positioned Italians as less
civilized than other immigrant ethnicities from northern Europe, and a subsequent lack of
assimilation among these groups further increased the antagonism. But those prejudices
were not pronounced enough to prevent the framers of the Constitution from more tightly
restricting the scope of immigration to specific European countries, nor did it eliminate the
economic incentives that made Argentina particularly attractive as a destination for Italian
and Spanish emigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Those prejudices also did not necessarily extend beyond the elite classes,
considering the increased prevalence of heterogamous marriage between Italian and
Spanish immigrants and the criollo population. The increasing number of children who,
like Raimundo Orsi, were the product of heterogamous marriages led to the creation of a
new generation of Argentine citizens. What, then, would lead a child such as Orsi to grow
30
Samuel L. Baily, “Marriage Patterns and Immigrant Assimilation in Buenos Aires, 1882-1923,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 60, no. 1 (1980): 40-41.
38
up and move away from his mother’s native land not just to seek out a professional
opportunity but also to represent his father’s nation in international competition?
Once Italian immigrants began to form a significant demographic presence in
Argentina, and began to marry both other Italian immigrants as well as locals and other
immigrant nationalities, it was inevitable that this process would help shape the local
culture while at the same time retaining connections to their native lands. The next chapter
delves into how the nineteenth-century demographic shift in Argentina resulted in
twentieth-century processes not only of contestation between immigrants and the extant
populations but also of congregation and collaboration. Immigrant labor, along with
foreign capital, was an essential component of Argentina’s development into a modern
independent state. But immigrants also had an important role to play in terms of helping in
determining the course of modern Argentine national identity.
While institutional and unofficial prejudices played a part in the formation of Italian
enclaves that conflicted with official Argentine goals for an assimilated society, Italians in
Argentina did not remain fully insular or entirely endogamous in nature. Their affinity for
natal lands was not static, but like other ethnicities with Argentina they coopted and
adapted cultural forms from other groups and in turn contributed elements of their own
culture to the emerging nationalist discourse. As such, the cultural influences that helped
shape the early lives of Italo-Argentine individuals like Raimundo Orsi were not
exclusively Italian, but also included influences from non-Italian immigrants like his
grandfather Juan Yturriaga and native-born Argentine individuals such as his mother
Gregoria Yturriaga. A multiplicity of cultural influences assisted more broadly in shaping
a new, aggregate Argentine identity, but it also helped to influence the fluidity with which
39
Argentine-born individuals with Italian lineage interacted with both their Italian and their
Argentine identities.
40
2. LIVING IN TWO WORLDS: ITALIAN DIASPORIC
IDENTITY AND LUIS MONTI
Among the four players from
Figure 6. Photo of Luis Monti
Argentina who represented Italy in 1934,
Luis Monti is the most elusive and the
most enigmatic of the group. He was most
likely born to Italian immigrants Antonio
Monti and Maria Buono in the heavily
Italian barrio of La Boca at some point in
either March or May 1901.1 Monti and
Buono
were
among
that
flow
of
immigrants, arriving in Argentina at some
point in the late nineteenth century from
the northeastern Italian region of Romagna
Source: “Luis Monti cover photo,” El Gráfico,
October 31, 1925.
located south of Venice along the Adriatic
1
Monti has been the hardest player for whom to pin down his backstory. After searching through
two years of records for each of the eighteen parishes within Buenos Aires at the time of his birth,
there was no child by that name recorded as being born on May 15, 1901—the date commonly
cited as his birthdate. The only person of this name listed within the records for this general
period is listed as being born on March 16, 1901. Given the errors of transcription that inevitably
occurred during a period where recordkeeping was all done by hand, coupled with the fact that
baptisms regularly took place months after birth, I contend with high confidence that the Luis
Monti who went on to play for Argentina in the 1930 World Cup final and Italy in the 1934 final
is the same as the Luis Monti listed in the baptismal record at: “Bautismos 1901-1902,”
Parroquia San Juan Evangelista (Buenos Aires), 257 of 1012, via FamilySearch, digitized May
14, 2016, accessed April 16, 2017, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939D-GZTZH?i=256&wc=MDBG-8NL%3A311514201%2C321662601%2C314274101&cc=1974184.
41
Figure 7. View of La Boca from 1892 Map of Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area
The starred location at left most likely represents the first residence where Luis Monti lived in
La Boca. Located just off the map to the lower left is the present-day location of Estadio Alberto
J. Armando, the home of Boca Juniors commonly known as La Bombonera. Note as well the
railroads along both sides of the Riachuelo.
Source: Pablo Ludwig, Ciudad de Buenos Aires y Distrito Federal (Buenos Aires: Gunche,
Wiebeck y Turtl, 1892), via David Rumsey Map Collection, accessed April 23, 2017,
http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3702~340019.
coast.2 After marriage, the couple settled at Palos 215 in the heart of La Boca. Monti and
Buono became members of the parish of San Juan Evangelista, and they began to create a
life together within the community.
La Boca, situated at the southeastern corner of the Buenos Aires federal district,
juts out into the mouth of the Riachuelo (Río de la Matanza) from which it derives its name.
Dividing Buenos Aires from the unincorporated municipalities on the south side of the
waterway, the Riachuelo cuts inland past Avellaneda and other industrial districts and
2
Gino Cervi, “Azzurro oriundo, ma serve in un Mondiale?,” GQ Italia, published June 9, 2014,
accessed April 22, 2017, https://www.gqitalia.it/sport/calcio/mondiali-calcio/2014/06/09/azzurrooriundo-mumo-orsi-paletta-i-mondiali-dei-naturalizzati/.
42
meanders southwest out of the metropolitan area. By the time Monti was born, railroads
cut into the city from the countryside right up to the docks, with lines running along both
sides of the Riachuelo to economize the movement of cattle, wheat, and other agricultural
commodities to the docks for export.
Amid all this economic transformation, La Boca remained one of the main points
where immigrants disembarked from their transatlantic voyages. As a result, the area
remained a center of heavy immigrant concentration through the first decades of the
twentieth century.3 During the two decades between the 1895 and 1914 national census,
immigrants continued to account for more than forty percent of the total population within
the district.4 Because of the high concentration of immigrants, this was also geospatially
one of the main places where identifying as Italian—or even identifying with one’s specific
region from Italy—was most prevalent.
It was in this environment that Luis Monti was born in the spring of 1901. He grew
up at a time when soccer was gaining a lasting foothold among the various ethnic
communities represented among both immigrant and native-born groups. The sport was
taking root throughout the city, as groups of young men came together to form teams in
neighborhoods both within Buenos Aires and in urban areas throughout the country. During
Monti’s childhood, the two largest clubs in Argentina both came into existence mere blocks
from his first home. Within a few years of his birth, both River Plate and Boca Juniors had
been formed within the barrio.
River Plate was founded shortly after Monti’s birth. Congregating near the docks,
a multiethnic group that included immigrants and native-born players of British, Spanish,
3
4
Rosatti, Cien años de multitud: Historia de Boca Juniors, 59.
Sargent, The Spatial Evolution of Greater Buenos Aires, 148.
43
Table 2. Population Growth in La Boca, 1869-1914
1869
1887
1895
1904
1909
1914
La Boca population
6,200
24,500
38,164
60,878
65,370
76,024
City population
171,200
404,100
655,500
944,800
1,222,600
1,561,100
3.6%
6.1%
5.8%
6.4%
5.3%
4.9%
---
---
20,442
30,210
30,206
36,185
---
---
53.6%
49.6%
46.2%
47.6%
La Boca - % of city
population
La Boca immigrant
population
La Boca - % immigrant
population
SOURCE: Data from Horacio D. Rosatti, Cien años de multitud: Historia de Boca Juniors, una
pasión argentina [Vol. 1: El período amateur (1905-1930)] (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2008), 28;
Charles S. Sargent, The Spatial Evolution of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1870-1930
(Tempe: Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies, 1974), 148.
and Jewish origin as well as Italian ethnicity founded the club on May 25, 1901.5 The club
struggled to obtain enough space to build facilities and a stadium within La Boca, moving
in and out of the barrio on several occasions in search of land. The team tried moving
across the Riachuelo into Sarandí during its first decade. The experiment lasted two years
before the club returned to La Boca in 1907, though the club remained nomadic before
finally leaving La Boca permanently after completing construction of its current stadium
in Belgrano.6 Ultimately, River Plate was less dependent on maintaining direct contact with
a specific enclave than its modern rival.
That is because Boca Juniors emerged from origins that were more solidly anchored
in ethnically rooted beginnings. Among a population that numbered around 60,000 people,
5
“Club Atlético River Plate,” La Nación, May 22, 1904; Francis Korn and Silvia Sigal, Buenos
Aires antes del Centenario: 1904-1909 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2010), XXVIII;
Raanan Rein, Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina, trans. Martha Grenzeback (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2015), 57.
6
Joel Horowitz, “Football Clubs and Neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires before 1943: The Role of
Political Linkages and Personal Influence,” Journal of Latin American Studies 46, no. 3 (2014):
581; Gabriela Miño, “River, sus comienzos y sus estadios,” La Nación, July 7, 2011,
http://blogs.lanacion.com.ar/archivoscopio/uncategorized/river-sus-comienzos-y-sus-estadios/.
44
nearly half were immigrants. Two-thirds of those immigrants were born in Italy, and
subsequently two-thirds of the native-born population in La Boca was Italo-Argentine by
ethnicity.7 Less than fifteen minutes from Monti’s childhood home, a quintet of Genoese
friends met in the Plaza Solís on April 3, 1905. There, the group hammered out the details
that led to the mythic foundation of Boca Juniors on a park bench.8
Like River Plate, Boca Juniors was forced to bounce around from site to site
searching for a permanent place to call home. The club’s only effort to anchor somewhere
outside La Boca, however, nearly caused the club to fold after its membership declined by
eighty percent following a 1912 move to Wilde.9 Whereas expansion outside of La Boca
was feasible for a River Plate club that had successfully transcended identification with a
specific ethnicity, Boca Juniors was an institution inexorably interlinked with its Italian
heritage that could only survive by also remaining geospatially connected to that
community.
At the time when Monti started his playing career in 1921, River Plate was playing
its final years in La Boca and Boca Juniors had already become a local institution. Yet the
local talent never played for either club, as Monti got his start at Huracán in 1921. Monti
signed a contract with Boca Juniors the following year, but left to join San Lorenzo before
playing a game representing the local club of his childhood community. It was in Almagro
that he became a star, and from there where he eventually made his way to play alongside
Orsi at Juventus after the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay.
7
Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York
City, 1870-1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 276, n. 53; see also Table 2,
“Pupulation Growth in La Boca, 1869-1914” on this page.
8
“Historia,” Club Atlético Boca Juniors, accessed February 20, 2015,
http://www.bocajuniors.com.ar/el-club/historia.
9
Rosatti, Cien años de multitud: Historia de Boca Juniors, 72.
45
Without individuals like Monti and Buono leaving their native Italy to lay down
roots and form new families overseas in Argentina during the last decades of the nineteenth
century, the Italian national team would have had no nationalist rationale for depending so
heavily on the four Argentine-born players who helped win the 1934 World Cup title. But
this rationale also depended on the development of an Argentine society that had been
irreversibly shaped by Italian immigrant culture and which provided the space for Italians
and their offspring to continue identifying as Italian.
The previous chapter demonstrated some of the lingering racially-charged rhetoric
and the shifting attitudes toward Italian immigrants that marked late-nineteenth century
Argentina. Because the legalistic frameworks that made Argentina a desirable destination
for immigrants did not always mesh with social and political attitudes toward certain
immigrant groups, hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants like Monti and Buono came
together to form a strong diasporic Italo-Argentine identity in their new homeland. Italian
identity transmitted from immigrants through their progeny, and in turn also helped reshape
Argentine national identity on a broader level.
To better understand how players might have perceived their own identity as
Italians and Argentinians in the 1920s and 1930s, it is critical to first gain a better
understanding of how Italian identity formed among the Argentine diaspora over the first
century of immigration. In considering this subject, we must look not only at Italian
immigrant couples such as Monti and Buono but also at those immigrants who, like
Lorenzo Orsi, married outside of the Italian diaspora.
As this chapter reveals, Italians who immigrated to Argentina were situated in a
space where there was little incentive to assimilate and in which they often outnumbered
46
extant populations, leading to the formation of a strong diasporic identity. But at the same
time the limits to endogamy discussed in the previous chapter help explain how Italians
became interwoven into broader Argentine society through familial as well as professional
links and helped shape the direction of modern Argentine national identity.
Forming Italian Identity and Institutions Abroad
Despite the wishes of Alberdi and other Argentine leaders, the bulk of immigrants
that came to Argentina in the late nineteenth century were not from northern Europe.
Instead, Italy and Spain accounted for nearly ninety percent of the transatlantic immigration
to Argentina from 1870 through 1910.10 Concentrations of Italian immigrants to Argentina
were primarily from two key regions. The first were the northwestern regions of Lombardy,
Liguria, and Piedmont. The latter was the province of Chieti, situated in the Abruzzo region
along the Adriatic coastline.11 Just as southern Italy produced a disproportionate number
of Italy’s immigrants to the United States, these two geographic areas along the peninsula
had an outsized influence on Argentine population development.
For many lower-class individuals that made the transatlantic voyage from the
Apennine Peninsula and its surrounding islands, Argentina presented a chance to shed their
regional pasts and form a collective diasporic national identity in a way that had not been
accessible in their homeland. As early as the 1820s, immigrants in Argentina and elsewhere
in the Americas were beginning to identify themselves as Italian rather than by their regions
10
J. Ulyses Balderas and Michael J. Greenwood, “From Europe to the Americas: A Comparative
Panel-Data Analysis of Migration to Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, 1870-1910” (prepublication draft, November 2006), 23.
11
Dino Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870-1929 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 109.
47
of origin.12 Those successive waves of immigrants arrived in a world with institutions that
helped ease the transition to Argentine society and reinforced Italian identity.
The first Italian mutual aid society, Unione e Benevolenza, was established in
Buenos Aires in 1858—four years before the full geopolitical consolidation of Argentina
into its present configuration. Two years after its formation the society’s membership
numbered in the thousands, and within less than a decade two separate political rifts
resulted in the splintering of the organization into three separate mutual aid societies. Each
catered to Italians who maintained differing ideological hopes for the future course of
governance back in Italy.13 These groups split along political rather than geographic lines,
highlighting the early coalescence of Italian identity among large numbers of ItaloArgentine immigrants.
Not every Italian immigrant remained in urban areas, migrating inland toward other
cities and rural communities throughout the main agricultural regions along the Río de la
Plata and Río Paraná in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fé, and Entre Ríos. There,
Italian immigrant labor constituted more than half of the working population on the
farmlands of the two provinces as both tenant farmers, sharecroppers, hired labor, and
independent landholders.14 Here groups of immigrants often retained their regional
identities, as the nascent transportation networks prevented broader cultural exchange
beyond one’s local community. They were also one of the populations most prone to
12
Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000),
45.
13
Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise, 174.
14
Eugenia Scarzanella, “’Corn Fever’: Italian Tenant Farming Families in Argentina (18951912),” Bulletin of Latin American Research 3, no. 1 (1984): 4-5.
48
transnational migrations, working the temporally-alternated harvest seasons in both
hemispheres.
Links to Italy were also reinforced through the Italian-language press that began to
develop in Argentina by the 1860s. The largest newspaper, La Patria degli Italiani, had a
regular circulation of 11,000 by 1887 and an estimated 40,000 regular readers by 1904.
This and other newspapers championed Italian language and culture and reinforced already
strong links with the burgeoning European republic.15 By the early twentieth century, this
Italian nationalism had flourished to the point where in some ways it was as if Italy had set
up satellite colonies within another country.
In May 1913, La Patria degli Italiani saw fit to publish a “New Ten
Commandments of Italian Immigrants” to codify for its readers the terms of what it meant
to be an Italian abroad. The commandments insisted not only upon maintaining trade links
and patriotic fervor for the homeland but also passing these sentiments along to successive
generations of foreign-born Italo-Argentine children.16 Given that he was literate, it is
entirely possible that Lorenzo Orsi read this article and took heart to inform and instill a
sense of Italian identity to young Raimundo, who was at the time the “New Ten
Commandments” were published. Though he continued to grow up much like any other
Argentine boy, we will see that Raimundo readily championed his links to Italy later in
life.
It was this lingering maintenance of Italian identity on Argentine soil that sparked
the greatest backlash against the Italian diaspora. French and English populations also
15
Samuel L. Baily, “The Role of Two Newspapers in the Assimilation of Italians in Buenos Aires
and São Paulo, 1893-1913,” The International Migration Review 12, no. 3 (1978): 327-328.
16
Mark I. Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008), 73.
49
suffered questions about loyalty as their children received citizenship from their parents’
home countries.17 In this regard, the issue was less with a maintenance of cultural identities
than it was a question of patriotism. But it must be noted that, whether born to two Italian
immigrant parents like Monti or a heterogamous couple like Orsi, Italo-Argentine citizens
did not remain wholly Italian. Successive waves of immigrants and their native-born
progeny helped to shape Argentine identity. They were also transformed by the rapidly
urbanizing society as they interacted with extant Argentine populations and other
immigrants from throughout Europe.
While populations retained their own languages upon arriving in the Spanishspeaking country, recognizing one another as compatriots through these linguistics, they
eventually came to learn Spanish. This was usually the case even when immigrants did
make efforts to learn Spanish prior to emigrating from Italy, as there was rarely any
reference to the linguistic idiosyncrasies of Argentine Spanish in dictionaries, instruction
manuals, and other educational materials on Spanish-language instruction in Italy in the
decades leading up to World War I.18
As they adopted the local Spanish dialect as their own, immigrants incorporated
certain idioms into the larger amalgamated local language. Cocoliche, a nineteenth-century
pidgin language merging Italian and Spanish forms that evolved into lunfardo, another
linguistic form that disseminated popularly as the language of tango music. Ultimately this
amalgamated into the castellano rioplatense that became the lingua franca of a
17
Baily, “Sarmiento and Immigration,” 137-139.
María Martínez-Atienza and María Luisa Calero Vaquera, “Gramáticas de español para
italianos (1873–1915): la emigración como motivo para el aprendizaje de lenguas,” Iberoromania
80 (2014): 261-275.
18
50
cosmopolitan nation.19 One can also see the Italian influence in such areas as Argentine
cuisine, which incorporates many elements of regional Italian culinary traditions that were
first introduced by immigrants in the nineteenth century.
Like other Italian diasporas throughout South America as well as the United States,
the growing Italian communities of Argentina operated in a liminal space where they were
geographically of the Americas while remaining culturally and patriotically Italian. The
Italian community in Buenos Aires and elsewhere was simultaneously shaping Argentine
society while remaining tied culturally to Italy. Patriotic links to the old country remained
firmly in place as generations of agricultural laborers continued the seasonal migrations
back and forth across the Atlantic and permanent expatriates passed on Italian identities to
their children. As the next section details, this was but one of several economic links
between Italy to Argentina.
Economic Patterns Between Italy and Argentina
Even though Italian communities settled in Buenos Aires and other urban areas of
the Río de la Plata and the Argentine interior, they retained links to their ancestral lands
and many became locked in cycles of migration. The pattern of remittances and return
migration that marked the lived experience for many Italians living abroad, both in
Argentina and elsewhere, effectively positioned the Atlantic as an aquatic borderland.
Human capital became one of Italy’s largest exports, with foreign currency flowing back
19
Donald S. Castro, The Argentine Tango as Social History, 1880-1955 (San Francisco: Mellen
Research University Press, 1990), 17-19; Ana Cara-Walker, “Cocoliche: The Art of Assimilation
and Dissimulation among Italians and Argentines,” Latin American Research Review 22, no. 3
(1987): 39-40.
51
across the ocean at regular intervals to help finance the slow growth of the burgeoning
nation-state.
For decades, Italians living in Argentina had limited options to protect the wages
and capital they acquired working abroad. In 1872, the Banco de Italia y Río de la Plata
was established in Buenos Aires and recognized by the Argentine government, providing
access to banking services for the first time. The bank opened branch offices in La Plata
and Rosario by 1887, and soon other Italian banks began to form and service other
communities in the interior such as Santa Fe and Chivilcoy.20 These banks, however, were
not situated as spaces for the transfer of money back to Italy.
Instead, much like Italian emigrants living in the United States and throughout
Europe, Italo-Argentine populations availed themselves of various means of remitting
money across the Atlantic both official and clandestine.21 While official channels such as
international money orders were readily available at Argentine post offices, the slow
process of money transfer led many to either risk sending currency or gold coins via
registered mail or turning toward often usurious private bankers that served as forwarding
agents. Through these various channels, immigrants living in Argentina forward between
ten and forty million lire annually back to Italy throughout the second half of the nineteenth
century and into the early 1900s.22
The ability to send remittances in one form or another back to Italy was in large
part the result of wage imbalances that were discussed in the previous chapter, as increased
20
Luigi De Rosa, “Italian Emigration to Argentina and Immigrant Remittances (1850-1908),”
Journal of European Economic History 36, no. 2-3 (2007): 383-384.
21
For information on European and U.S. remittances, see Cinel, The National Integration of
Italian Return Migration, 141-149.
22
De Rosa, “Italian Emigration to Argentina and Immigrant Remittances (1850-1908),” 388-389.
52
earning power abroad allowed Italians in Argentina to make more money than they could
back home. So far, no correspondence between Argentina and Italy has been found from
any of the 1934 World Cup players or their parents, but a look at one representative family
can help us better understand the dynamics that linked diaspora to native land economically
during the same period when Antonio Monti and Maria Buono were starting their family
in a new homeland.
A cache of correspondence from a pair of Italian brothers who emigrated
permanently from Italy to Argentina in the first decade of the twentieth century provide a
lens into at least the world of literate Italian immigrants which included Orsi. The Sola
brothers, Oreste and Abele, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1901 and 1912 respectively from
Biella, a town located in the far northwestern corner of Italy. A collection of more than two
hundred letters between the brothers and their relatives back in Biella offers a glimpse into
the patterns of remittance that continued throughout the brothers’ lives in Argentina.23
Five years after Oreste first arrived in Argentina, he had established himself to the
point where he sent his first documented remittance of 300 lire back to Italy in June 1906.24
He sent another 200 lire in September 1907, and by early 1908 his correspondence stated
that “I’ll still send you the same amount as I do now.”25 A regular pattern was established
in which money was regularly sent back across the Atlantic in letters, helping subsidize the
family’s pastoral lifestyle back in Biella. Even when Argentina suffered through an
economic downturn in the period leading up to and the beginning stages of World War I,
23
One Family, Two Worlds: An Italian Family’s Correspondence Across the Atlantic, 1901-1922,
ed. Samuel L. Baily and Franco Ramella, trans. John Lenaghan (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1988.
24
Oreste Sola, Letter 26 (Buenos Aires, June 12, 1906), in One Family, Two Worlds, 67.
25
Oreste Sola, Letter 29 (Buenos Aires, September 4, 1907), in One Family, Two Worlds, 70;
Oreste Sola, Letter 31 (Buenos Aires, February 19, 1908), in One Family, Two Worlds, 73-74.
53
Oreste and Abele still managed to send 500-lire remittances back across the Atlantic in
regular intervals.26 These remittances continue up until the death of the Sola brothers’
parents.
We have no way of knowing whether Antonio Monti or Maria Buono ever sent
money back to family in Romagna, but even Italian mechanics could make far better money
in South America than a comparable position would provide in wages back home. Though
perhaps not as fastidious in maintaining correspondence as the Sola family, it is not
inconceivable that Monti and Buono would have maintained regular contact with family
back in Romagna. And, like so many other Italians who migrated to the Americas during
the period, this correspondence would have potentially included the occasional remittance.
While the Sola brothers present a representative picture of the individual workings
of sending money back to family overseas from Argentina, they also offer an idealized
picture of marriage. Not only did Oreste marry a fellow Italian immigrant but, like Monti
and Buono, he wed a woman who emigrated from a community near his own Italian
hometown. The homogamy patterns among the Italian community in Buenos Aires,
discussed in the previous chapter in the context of the Orsi family, indicate the likelihood
of a far greater demographic variegation among subsequent generations who identified as
Italo-Argentine than one might expect from a community that retained strong diasporic
links to families that remained across the Atlantic.
When men like Monti or Sola married a fellow Italian, they not only sought
someone else from Italy but someone who emigrated more specifically from the same
26
Explcit references to remittances occur at seven points during the period from August 1913 to
February 1915. See letters 102, 106, 107, 111, 114, 116, and 118 in One Family, Two Worlds,
142-143, 145-146, 147-148, 150-151, 153, 154-155, 156-157.
54
region. At times the Italian diaspora’s links to their home communities transcended the
development of a new national identity, and this is what primarily engendered an
ideological backlash against immigrants who chose not to participate in the formation of
new Argentine conceptions of their national identity.
Yet we know from the work of Baily and Ramella that the Sola brothers remained
in Argentina, despite the frequent discourse throughout their letters talking about a return
to Biella. There is also no indication that either Antonio Monti or Maria Buono returned to
their homeland at any point before, during, or after the period when their son played for
Juventus and the azzurri. The formation of diasporic connections maintained links to the
homeland, but it also created new geospatial connections within Argentina that proved
lasting.
In this way, even the most ardently patriotic Italian immigrants helped shape the
direction of Argentine national identity in the twentieth century. The shifting and
multidimensional sociocultural landscape in which their children grew up helps explain
why oriundi players such as Monti felt comfortable shifting identifying with multiple
nationalities over the course of their careers. As the next section demonstrates, the
intellectual shifts in Argentine public discourse regarding immigration also helped to shape
this environment in which Italo-Argentine individuals were raised. Italians received the
heaviest scrutiny for what was perceived as an unwillingness to assimilate into broader
Argentine society, but there was also no clear consensus as to how Italian culture might fit
into Argentine society.
55
Immigrants, Pastimes, and La Raza Argentina
The elite class in Argentina had been all too happy to support the initial proimmigration policies instituted when Sarmiento was in power, but as they found themselves
subordinated into a ruling minority in their own country a series of increasingly
conservative administrations watched the new century approach with apprehension about
the irreversible processes they had set in motion. In an ironic twist that will be highlighted
further in the next chapter, native elites turned toward the same social structures that
fostered ethnic integration of immigrants in hopes of promoting and preserving perceived
Argentine traditions.27 The critical point for now is that the stipulations of the 1853
Constitution providing immigrants with rights equivalent to citizens without requiring
eventual naturalization came under greater scrutiny from the very individuals who had
initially supported Article 20.
As the twentieth century dawned, this retention of diasporic Italian identity proved
contentious as a new generation of Argentine intellectuals sought to more clearly define an
ethnic basis for national identity. Having built a solidly European demographic base within
Argentina, the goal of this generation was to turn those foreign elements into citizens.
Popular culture depicted immigrants as the source of criminality in urban spaces, which
helped to inspire the passage of laws restricting immigration in 1902 and 1910.28
Growth had come with both opportunities and costs. Reliance on foreign capital
had created boom and bust cycles within the Argentine economy. Increased urbanization,
27
Julio Frydenberg, Historia Social del Fútbol: Del Amateurismo a la Profesionalización
(Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2011), 30.
28
Aline Helg, “Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies, and Popular
Reaction,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1990), 45-46.
56
industrialization, and the transformation of pastoral operations in rural areas played as big
a role in pushing traditional Argentine gaucho culture closer to obsolescence as
immigration did in this shift. Yet the blame for this cultural shift was placed mostly on
immigrants. Italians and Spaniards alike came under heat from influential Argentine
politicians such as Sarmiento for their unwillingness to assimilate, similarly to the smaller
French and English communities.
But given this criollo cultural backlash against immigrants’ unwillingness to
assimilate, why then did soccer and not another sport find purchase in Argentina? Cricket
may have predated soccer’s presence in Argentina, and it was cricket clubs that provided
the social structures from which the first matches and clubs were organized. Cricket, along
with rugby and other British sports, remained niche pastimes confined to pockets of the
British diaspora in Argentina. The criollo elite of Argentine society turned toward polo as
a way of mimicking and mythologizing the significance of gaucho equestrian traditions in
a rapidly modernizing society. 29 But for most of Argentina’s population, whether nativeborn or immigrant, polo was a cost-prohibitive pastime inaccessible on any level.
Instead, soccer proved most resilient in terms of accessibility and adaptability to
the range of urban spaces available. As the sport gained popularity somewhat among
Spanish and Italian immigrants but especially among their native-born children, the new
participants took advantage of whatever open space was available within the urban
environment to develop an adaptive potrero culture in which “the importance of freshness,
spontaneity and freedom” were of paramount importance.30 As opposed to the monotony
29
Archetti, Masculinities, 102.
Eduardo Archetti, “’And Give Joy to my Heart’: Ideology and Emotions in the Argentine Cult
of Maradona,” in Entering the Field: New Perspectives on World Soccer, eds. Gary Armstrong
30
57
that was perceived within the British system, Argentine soccer “made use of dribbling, and
brave individual effort, in defence as well as attack, which resulted in a style of football
that was more agile and attractive.”31 This evolution of a particular local style of play
served as one of the points of congregation between immigrant groups, both in terms of
contact within teams as well as between teams.
This transition was all taking place during a period marked by attempts to construct
the notion of la raza argentina, which Eduardo Magione framed in 1909 as “the need to
give a soul to the variegated grouping of men and tendencies that is in the process of
forming the Argentine race.”32 Recognizing the diversity of European groups living within
Argentina, this conception of Argentine nationality was inclusive of groups such as the
Italians. Magione’s view indicates that not everyone was willing to discount the
contributions which immigrants had to offer toward forming a modern national identity.
Like other efforts, however, this was predicated in forming a singular identity out of this
diverse pool of communities coexisting in the country.
Consensus, however, was rare regarding what cultural traits should take
preeminence in defining Argentina’s unique national identity. Various individuals
privileged ethnicity and language, specifically Spanish, in defining this identity. Others
espoused religion, especially Catholicism, as the common denominator that underpinned
Argentine identity. Some also turned toward personality traits and common interests in
and Richard Guilianotti (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 35; Gaffney, “Stadiums and Society in TwentyFirst Century Buenos Aires,” 163.
31
Rory Miller, “Introduction: Studying Soccer in the Americas,” in Soccer in the Americas:
Fútbol, Futebol, Soccer, eds. Rory Miller and Liz Crolley (London: Institute for the Study of the
Americas, 2007), 8.
32
Delaney, “Imagining la raza argentina,” 152.
58
helping formulate this definition.33 The key was in finding those sociocultural traits that
translated across ethnic boundaries.
In that regard, soccer—originally introduced and popularized among the British
expatriate community in the mid-1800s—was already positioned as one of the few cultural
forms that transcended ethnicity among the agglomerated European populations in
Argentina. By the first decade of the 1900s, soccer had expanded beyond Buenos Aires
and was gaining popularity in urban centers throughout the country. As such, it provided a
formative space for interactions between groups that helped construct this national identity.
The Growing Italo-Argentine Impact on Soccer
In addition to Boca Juniors and River Plate, the first decade of the twentieth century
saw the formation of the other three “Big Five” clubs of Argentine soccer—San Lorenzo,
Racing Club, and Independiente. Each of their formative stories reveal the influence of
Italians at this point of early development. These are the clubs that gained prominence as
youngsters like Orsi and Monti grew up, and by the time the two sons of immigrants began
their careers in Argentina these five clubs had firmly established their preeminent position
thanks to the contributions of Italo-Argentine stars.
San Lorenzo, the third of the five clubs based in Buenos Aires and the team for
which Luis Monti became an international sensation, was formed in January 1907. That
year, a group of youths led by Federico Monti (no known relation to Luis) and Antonio
Scaramusso established the informal club structure that evolved into San Lorenzo de
33
Delaney, “Imagining la raza argentina,” 150.
59
Almagro over the next year.34 The group spent the next year playing in the streets of the
expanding barrio, at the corner of México and 33 Orientales Streets near the Oratorio San
Antonio. The location was less than ideal for the young athletes, as neighbors frequently
complained until police arrived to scatter the assembled teams.35
Almagro and its adjacent neighborhoods had become another nodal point for
immigrant communities in Buenos Aires as well as less-wealthy criollo families; the young
men who gathered to form El Club Forzoso de Almagro were the sons of this diverse
community, and the streets would become the focal point of community life for these
adolescents.36 Playing in the streets of an urban environment experiencing exponential
growth was also fraught with danger; when one of the young men was nearly hit by a
passing tramcar, Father Lorenzo Massa witnessed the spectacle and offered the grounds
outside the Oratorio San Antonio as a playing field in exchange for church attendance from
the boys.37 Thus the club also became linked with the church, helping spread its influence
further within a predominantly Catholic society.
This same period also saw the rise of clubs outside Buenos Aires. By 1913, Racing
Club from nearby Avellaneda became the first non-British club to win a league title.
Formed a decade earlier on March 25, 1903 by 21 young men of various ethnicities between
the ages of 15 and 24, Racing Club had rooted itself in the growing district of Avellaneda
34
“Historia,” Club Atlético San Lorenzo de Almagro, accessed March 8, 2015,
http://www.sanlorenzo.com.ar/institucional.php?codigo=1.
35
Carlos Carullo, “106 años llenos de Gloria,” Museo Jacobo Urso, accessed March 8, 2015,
http://www.museodesanlorenzo.com.ar/contenido/MUSEO1/museoJ1345.htm.
36
“Classic Club: Centurions dream of Copa glory,” FIFA, accessed March 8, 2015,
http://www.fifa.com/classicfootball/clubs/club=2147481868/.
37
“Classic Club: Centurions dream of Copa glory,” FIFA.
60
after affiliating with the Argentine Football Association two years after its formation.38
Only two players on the 1913 championship roster were of British descent, and every
player on the team had been born in Argentina.39 Racing Club became the first dominant
institution after the sport transcended its English roots, which only served to intensify
competition across the board. It is at Racing Club where Luis Monti, the only player to take
the field in World Cup finals for two different teams, spent eight years of his career before
migrating to Italy.
Racing Club’s rival in Avellaneda provided the formative space where Monti’s
future teammate on both the 1928 Argentine Olympic team and the 1934 Italian World Cup
team, Raimundo Orsi first developed his talents. Independiente was first conceived in
August 1904 when employees of a local department store who were prevented from playing
for the company team gathered and formed their own club. The club officially formed and
drafted its constitution on New Year’s Day 1905, and soon settled permanently to play in
Avellaneda.40 There Independiente soon became a rival to Racing Club, a situation that is
even more pronounced given that the two teams’ stadiums are presently situated side by
side down the road from where Orsi spent his childhood.
Until soccer garnered enough interest to attract club development among a wider
range of immigrants beyond the British diaspora, it could not develop solidly as an
Argentine cultural form. Among the most iconic clubs that remain relevant to this day in
Argentina, Italian immigrants and their offspring had a varying degree of influence in the
38
“La Historia del Primer Grande,” Racing Club AC, accessed via Internet Archive on March 15,
2015, http://web.archive.org/web/20160307190222/http://www.racingclub.com.ar/historia/.
39
Bayer, Fútbol Argentino, 21.
40
“Historia,” Club Atlético Independiente, accessed March 22, 2017,
http://clubaindependiente.com/es/institucion/historia.
61
formation and rise of these institutions. This socialization process further indicates that
insularity within the Italian diaspora only went so far in Argentina, and that this large pool
of immigrants and their Italo-Argentine families readily contributed to the rise of this
popular pastime much as they helped influence the linguistic and culinary developments
discussed earlier in this chapter.
Conclusions
The pace of demographic change during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries put immigrants, especially Italians, in position to help shape the future course of
Argentina’s sociocultural development as an independent nation. At the same time, the
Italian diaspora retained strong links with its mother country that continued to grow over
time even when families formed and stayed in Argentina. Italians living in Argentina thus
maintained strong links between both the mother country and with their new communities
outside the diaspora.
In this way, the Atlantic Ocean remained a space of economic, cultural, and
political exchange between the two coalescing nation-states. Much of this exchange
remained rooted in transatlantic migrations. Forty percent of Italian emigrants that
disembarked in Argentina eventually made their way back to Italy during the first decade
of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, one-third of Argentine immigrants from Italy
returned to their homelands.41 This continued two-way flow was integral in reinforcing
Italian identity even for those that chose not to make the return migration and settled
permanently in South America. Not everyone settled like Orsi and Guaita had, and those
41
Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 106.
62
patterns of travel between the two countries remained another critical part of both
countries’ continued development.
This continued exchange, coupled with the demographic shifts in the populace,
meant that Argentine politicians were increasingly looking toward Italy as a cultural
reference point. Less conflicted than Sarmiento, who admired Italy’s art and architecture
even as he reviled the perpetuation of Italian patriotism among immigrants, Argentine
leaders in the early 1900s began to forge stronger cultural bonds with the country that had
provided so much of its population base over the latter half of the previous century. As
much as their paternal links helped Italo-Argentine soccer players identify with the country
of their fathers, so too did the shift toward a country that increasingly allowed itself to
absorb and adapt Italian culture as its own.
In the next chapter, these bonds will be examined in greater detail. Even before
Fascist Italy turned toward Argentina as a source of talent to stock its soccer league and its
national team, Argentina increasingly embraced its links to Italy as it was demographically
changed by Italian immigrants. Italian cultural forms were gradually incorporated into this
concept of la raza argentina as a means of expressing this link. Even as they continued to
maintain their Italian identities, immigrants and their progeny were living in an evolving
Argentine society that was increasingly beginning to resemble their own diasporic images
of italianità.
63
3. TENUOUS BUT LASTING BONDS: ARGENTINE LINKS
WITH ITALY AND ATILIO DEMARIA
Like Luis Monti, Atilio José
Figure 8. Photo of Atilio Demaria
Demaria was the son of two Italian
immigrants. His father, Antonio Demaria,
was born in the town of Crescentino in the
Piedmont region of Italy.1 The elder
Demaria had already emigrated by 1895,
when as an 18-year-old he was living with
family and working as a laborer in Lomas
de Zamora.2 His wife, Albina Meola, was
still an 11-year-old in Italy at the time of
the 1895 census. Though we do not know
how they met or where they were married,
we do know that the couple were married
and living at Castillo 333 in the Villa
Source: “ATILIO DEMARIA, hombre
récord,” El Gráfico, published May 30, 2014,
accessed April 23, 2017,
http://www.elgrafico.com.ar/2014/05/30/C5306-95-historias-de-la-seleccion-en-losmundiales.php.
1
“Il Campione della Settimana: Attilio Demaria,” La Domenica Sportiva, December 11, 1933,
13.
2
“Argentina, 1895 censo nacional: Buenos Aires, Lomas de Zamora, Cuartel 05 (Población
rural),” Archivo General de la Nación (Buenos Aires), 10 of 77, via FamilySearch, digitized
April 9, 2016, accessed April 19, 2017, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-635W4SN.
64
Alvear barrio west of Recoleta and northwest of Almagro at the time Albina gave birth to
Atilio on March 19, 1909.3
A look at the map on the following page demonstrates just how quickly the city
was growing outward. Seventeen years before Demaria was born, the area between Villa
Alvear and Chacarita was on the urban fringes. By 1909, the area was filling in as the urban
space extended along rail lines westward from the Río de la Plata. Just as the urban space
was expanding, Demaria grew up at a time when soccer was expanding in popularity, yet
the fact that he was nearly a decade younger than Orsi and Monti also meant that he reached
maturity at a time when the Argentine league was in drastically different shape than it had
been at the beginning of the 1920s. Through the amateur era, three different schisms led to
the formation of dissident leagues. Power struggles over institutional control of the sport
had led to the increase in opportunities for new clubs to form, as clubs affiliated and
disaffiliated over arguments that centered in one form or another over questions about
money. The fractious nature of this period for Argentine soccer simultaneously facilitated
irruptions in club development and participation but which also diluted the competition
level for all parties concerned.
The first rupture in the early iteration of the Argentine league came in July 1912,
just a few months after the Demaria family had grown with the arrival of Atilio’s younger
brother Felix on April 27, 1912.4 By that point the family had moved westward to Haedo
3
“Bautismos 1909-1910,” Parroquia de San Bernardo (Buenos Aires), 286 of 800, via
FamilySearch, digitized May 19, 2014, accessed April 19, 2017,
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939D-G6X6-3?mode=g&i=285&wc=MDBLZM3%3A311514201%2C319904101%2C312964801&cc=1974184. I have chosen to use the
spelling of Demaria, without an accent, as this is how it appears on the baptismal record and the
census records.
4
“Felix Demaria II,” FC Internazionale Milano, accessed April 23, 2017,
http://www.inter.it/it/archivio_giocatore/G0205.
65
Figure 9. 1892 View of Area between Recoleta and Villa Alvear
The starred location at left represents the first residence where Atilio Demaria lived in Villa
Alvear.
Source: Pablo Ludwig, Ciudad de Buenos Aires y Distrito Federal (Buenos Aires: Gunche,
Wiebeck y Turtl, 1892), via David Rumsey Map Collection, accessed April 23, 2017,
http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3702~340019.
on the metropolitan outskirts, the town that Demaria would call home both early in life and
in his final years. The issues that were beginning to come to a head when the Demaria
brothers were in their youth would have a lasting impact that steered the course of their
careers overseas.
This initial institutional feud began over a dispute regarding gate receipts after the
stadium of Gimnasia y Esgrima de Buenos Aires (GEBA) had been appropriated by the
Asociación Argentina de Football for a match against an all-star side from Rosario. The
club argued that the Asociación’s terms presented “an imposition that, despite being
sanctioned by an article of the rules of procedure of the Association, is not consonant with
66
the autonomy of affiliated clubs.”5 Other clubs joined GEBA in disaffiliating from the
Asociación, and the dissident group formed its own league that operated for the next two
seasons.
After the relationship between the two leagues was mended in 1914, soccer
operated in an uneasy holding pattern through World War I. But by 1919 the Asociación
and several of its most influential clubs were once again at a standoff. Ignored by the
Asociación’s executive council, which was unwilling to cede governing power to club
delegates, and twelve dissident clubs—including Estudiantil Porteño and Gimnasia y
Esgrima de La Plata (Gimnasia La Plata), the two clubs at which Demaria started his career
in Argentina—disaffiliated from the league.6 Once again rival leagues operated alongside
one another, crowding the metropolitan space of Buenos Aires and the surrounding
communities with a glut of soccer.
Because of this second divide in the administration of the game, Argentina was
forced to watch from home as South American rival Uruguay brought the Olympic gold
medal home to the Río de la Plata from the 1924 Paris Summer Games. Feuding between
rival Olympic federations and rival national soccer federations caused Argentina to miss
the April deadline for registering a team, preventing them from competing against the
world in France. Two years later, only the intervention of Argentine president Marcelo
Torcuato de Alvear could bring a tenuous end the infighting and reunite the various factions
5
“Un Conflicto Deportivo,” La Prensa (Buenos Aires), June 10, 1912, 12.
Memoria de la Asociación Amateurs de Football (Buenos Aires: Talleres Ferlini & Segade,
1920), 10-11.
6
67
Figure 10. 1928 Argentina Olympic squad
Luis Monti is standing in back row, fifth from the left. Raimundo Orsi is crouching at the right
end of the front row. Domingo Tarasconi, top scorer of the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic soccer
tournament, is crouched second from the left in the front row.
Source: “La squadra dell'Argentina, seconda classificata nel torneo,” from Vittorio Pozzo, “Il
torneo di calcio ad Amsterdam,” Lo Sport Fascista (Milan), July 1928, 15,
http://dlib.coninet.it/bookreader.php?&c=1&f=5177&p=18#page/2/mode/2up.
administering the sport long enough for the team to coalesce in time to play at the 1928
Olympics in Amsterdam.7
The team that Argentina sent across the Atlantic to compete in the Netherlands was
heralded by Italian sports outlets as a favorite to reach the final. On its way to playing rival
Uruguay for the gold medal, Argentina ran rampant over their competition, outscoring the
United States, Belgium, and Egypt by a combined 23-5 score to set up the South American
7
For more details on the schism within the Olympic committee and within Argentine soccer as it
pertains to the 1924 Olympics see Cesar R. Torres, “’If We Had Had Our Argentine Team Here!’:
Football and the 1924 Argentine Olympic Team,” Journal of Sport History 30, no. 1 (2003): 124.
68
final. The team was heavily dependent on the firepower of Italo-Argentine stars such as
Domingo Tarasconi, a forward for Boca Juniors who scored eleven goals in Amsterdam
and finished the tournament as the top scorer. Uruguay successfully defended its 1924
Olympic title with a 2-1 replay victory after the teams tied 1-1 in their first attempt to settle
the championship.8 In its post-Olympics coverage, the recently inaugurated magazine Lo
Sport Fascista spared no praise for the two finalists:
È una classe a sé quella dei giocatori del Rio de la Plata. Freschezza di
movenze, spontaneità di comportamento, varietà di giuoco, praticità di
atteggiamenti. Una classe di fronte alla quale occorre inchinarsi.9
The players of the Río de la Plata are in a class of their own. Freshness of
movement, spontaneous behavior, variety of playing, practical attitudes. A
class in the face of which we must bow down.
That sentiment proved prescient, as soccer clubs in Italy’s restructured national league
began to bow before the rich talent pool of Argentina (and to a lesser extent Uruguay) and
started to sign oriundi to professional contracts soon after the Olympics ended in
Amsterdam.
It was the 1928 Argentine team, as much as the Uruguayans who won the title, that
inspired Fascist sports leaders in Italy to manipulate citizenship laws to justify utilizing
foreign-born talent in international competition. The Italo-Argentine stars who played a
critical role in the silver-medal performance offered a diasporic talent pool which helped
lead Italy to World Cup glory but also brought into question what it meant to be Italian.
8
Statistical information regarding the 1928 Olympic tournament from Karel Stokkermans, “IX.
Olympiad Amsterdam 1928 Football Tournament,” Rec.Sports.Soccer Statistics Foundation,
updated July 21, 2016, accessed February 24, 2017, http://www.rsssf.com/tableso/ol1928fdet.html.
9
Vittorio Pozzo, “Il torneo di calcio ad Amsterdam,” Lo Sport Fascista (Milan), July 1928, 17,
http://dlib.coninet.it/bookreader.php?&c=1&f=5177&p=18#page/2/mode/2up.
69
Orsi was the first Italo-Argentine star to capitalize on this new opportunity, but it might
have been Demaria who benefitted most from the advent of Italian professionalism.
Still seventeen years old at the time that Orsi, Monti, and the rest of Argentina’s
Olympic team return from Amsterdam, Demaria was beginning his career with Estudiantil
Porteño at the time that the final rupture in Argentine soccer irrevocably set the sport on
its path toward full professionalization. By the time the Asociación first openly discussed
the need to accept the professional future of the game in October 1930, Orsi and Monti
were already suiting up for Juventus. Dr. Juan Pignier, the president of the Asociación,
argued to the board, “the implantation of professionalism should be addressed, if you want
to govern by the reality of the facts.”10 Nothing came of the motion immediately, leading
most of the top clubs—including every Big Five club—to disaffiliate from the Asociación
and form the Liga Argentina de Football. Twelve members initiated the move on May 9,
1931; by May 31, a new 18-team league had formed in which players were openly paid for
the first time in Argentina.11 The move to professionalism, in the eyes of the clubs
endorsing the concept, “will have also contributed to [soccer’s] moral greatness and to that
of its institutions.”12
Demaria’s club, Estudiantil Porteño, sided with the Asociación and remained
amateur. Having been part of Argentina’s roster at the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay,
Demaria was loaned to Gimnasia La Plata for a tour of Brazil and Europe. That tour, part
10
Asociación Argentina de Football, Memoria y Balance General de 1931 (Buenos Aires: 1932),
11-12.
11
Iwanczuk, Historia del Futbol Amateur en la Argentina, 224-225; Vic Duke and Liz Crolley,
“Fútbol, Politicians and the People: Populism and Politics in Argentina,” in Sport in Latin
American Society: Past and Present, eds. J.A. Mangan and LaMartine P. DaCosta (London: F.
Cass, 2002), 100.
12
Liga Argentina de Football, Memoria y Balance General de 1932 (Buenos Aires: Imp. Araujo
Hnos., 1933), 14.
70
of a broader process of transnational soccer exchanges that will be discussed later in this
chapter, took eighteen players and a small staff on a whirlwind transatlantic voyage that
lasted five months and included visits to eight countries on two continents. Demaria played
in all 27 matches as a representative of Gimnasia La Plata, and once he returned with the
traveling party he played one professional match with the club in the Liga Argentina before
signing with Milanese club Ambrosiana-Inter for the 1931-1932 season.13
Like Orsi and Monti before him, Demaria had opened the eyes of Italian clubs with
his performances on European soil. Demaria was still a relatively young player when he
relocated overseas, however, and his storyline shows the longest period spent playing and
coaching in Italy. Before going into the specifics of how Fascism coopted soccer as a way
of symbolically linking motherland with its diasporas in the next chapter, it is worth
looking at the ways in which connections to Italy and Italian culture were beginning to
influence Argentina in the early twentieth century.
Successive generations of Italo-Argentine children had been born as Argentine
citizens even as older immigrant generations often chose to eschew naturalization. As
Italian ethnicity became demographically dominant within Argentine culture, politicians
in turn increasingly expressed their affinity for Italy. This chapter examines the various
ways in which Argentina continued to be shaped by Italian society even after the period
when immigration had a less pronounced impact on sociocultural development.
13
Pablo Ciullini, “Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata Trip to Brazil and Europe 1930/31,”
Rec.Sports.Soccer Statistics Foundation, updated December 8, 2016, accessed April 23, 2017,
http://www.rsssf.com/tablesg/gimnasialp-trip31.html; “Attilio Demaria I,” FC Internazionale
Milano, accessed April 22, 2017, http://www.inter.it/it/archivio_giocatore/G0204; Angelo Clerici,
“Demaría, Atilio José,” Diccionario Futbolística, accessed April 22, 2017,
http://www.gelp.org/displaydictionaryselection.php?id=340.
71
Political Pandering and the Italian Diaspora
Electoral reforms, championed by President Roque Sáenz Peña and passed in 1912,
introduced secret balloting and compulsory voting for every adult male citizen in
Argentina, bringing the full machinery of the democratic process to the general populace
for the first time. “To fear the legality of secret voting is to show oneself intimidated by
democracy,” Sáenz Peña articulated against the voices of detractors, “thus ascribing to the
present generation a civic cowardice which is not present in the souls of the constituents or
in the creative concept of a nationality, the fruit of courage and wisdom.”14 This afforded
an opportunity for Italo-Argentine individuals, and immigrants who had taken on
citizenship under the liberal naturalization provisions that remained from the 1853
Constitution, to exercise real power in the political process for the first time.
Despite his rhetoric, Sáenz Peña did not anticipate what would transpire, assuming
that the various factions among the oligarchy that had dominated Argentine politics for five
decades would maintain popular support among the restricted class of people considered
citizens for the purposes of voting.15 Instead, nearly two decades of popularly elected
governments followed in the wake of these reforms, with the governments of Hipólito
Irigoyen and Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear guiding the nation through World War I and the
1920s.
During the Radical era, politicians were quick to recognize the impact of ItaloArgentine contributions to Argentine national identity. In a June 1926 interview, Marcelo
Torcuato de Alvear told the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, “I would not be an
14
Quoted in Ricardo Levene, A History of Argentina, trans. William Spence Robertson (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), 504.
15
Rock, Argentina 1516-1987, 190.
72
Argentine if I didn’t love Italy. My love for Italy is second only to my love for my own
fatherland.”16 What makes this especially interesting is the fact that Alvear had no personal
connection whatsoever to Italy; he was born into the Argentine elite in 1868, with his father
serving as the first mayor of Buenos Aires. His grandfather was also born in South America
prior to independence, making his connection to Italy as tenuous as Raimundo Orsi’s
maternal side of the family tree.17
Positioning in solidarity with Italy was not a political stance exclusive to
Argentina’s Radical government. After Yrigoyen was deposed in 1930, new leader José
Félix Uriburu continued this political shift toward acknowledging the lasting impact of
Italy on Argentina. Echoing Alvear’s comments four years earlier, Uriburu said in a 1930
interview with Corriere della Sera that “indestructible links unite Argentina to Italy.”18
The similarity of Uriburu’s sentiments when compared to Alvear demonstrates that playing
up Italy’s influence on Argentina’s development was a political tactic that transcended
party, ideology, and electoral legitimacy. And fostering stronger ties to Italy proved
tempting for politicians on all levels.
This attitude extended beyond the federal government to include provincial leaders,
and lasted even after players like Orsi began returning to Argentina from their years playing
in Italy. The governor of Buenos Aires province, Manuel Fresco, met personally with
Mussolini and maintained contact with Fascist officials between 1936 and 1940. Fresco
went so far as to commission buildings that resembled the palazzi comunali in the new
16
Quoted in Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in
Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 51.
17
Félix Luna, Alvear (Buenos Aires: Libros Argentinos, 1958), 15-16.
18
Quoted in Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism, 52.
73
cities of the Agro Pontino.19 In this way new Italian architectural forms became yet another
cultural form that, like linguistic and culinary developments, helped shape Argentine
national identity.
The passage of the Ley Sáenz Peña also helped to facilitate the development of
soccer in Argentina into a political instrument, as large numbers of men who were about
to vote for the first time in 1912 turned toward clubs to guide their decision-making process
at the polls. Individual local politicians such as Pedro Bidegain, Jorge Newbery, José P.
Tamborini, Eliseo Cantón, and Alberto Barceló exercised real power during the Radical
period by developing clientelist networks as key administrators at local soccer clubs. Media
sympathetic to the causes of the Radical government, such as Boca Juniors supporter
Reinaldo Elena, used their support of major clubs to influence public opinion.20 In the case
of both politicians and the media members who covered them, all parties were operating in
wards where they too inevitably had to cater to the desires of Italo-Argentine clients,
constituents, and customers.
The demographic shifts within the Argentine population, both through immigration
and through marriage and birth, helped create a populace that was increasingly Italian in
its characteristics. Politicians without any ancestral connection to Italy felt the need to play
up the essential elements of Italian contributions to modern Argentine society. But this also
ignores the reality that Italian identity was neither uniform nor static, and there were many
conceptions of what it meant to identify as Italian thousands of miles away from Italy. The
19
Epolito, “Golondrinas,” 236. For a deeper understanding of the planned cities of the Agro
Pontino and their impact on Fascist architecture more broadly, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three
New Deals (New York: Picador, 2006).
20
Horowitz, “Football Clubs and Neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires before 1943,” 567-570, 574576.
74
next section examines those variegations in Italian identity that sprang up in ItaloArgentine political discourse, and how Argentine politicians were often pandering to
Italian-identifying voters in ways that courted some and alienated others.
The previous chapter went briefly into the formation of mutual aid societies
beginning in the 1850s, and the ways in which politics led to the proliferation of social
organizations that espoused divergent ideological beliefs both about Italy and about how
Italians should function within Argentina. Those mutual-aid societies demonstrate that,
even at an early period before widespread immigration had irreversibly altered the
demographics of the Argentine population, there was a spectrum of political ideology
within the Italian diaspora that was proliferating in Argentina. As the number of Italians
living in Argentina increased through the nineteenth century and into the 1900s, it only
increased the number of opinions toward how to relate politically to their birthplaces.
Connections to Italian politics did not necessarily translate to widespread support
for Fascism, either among the Argentine government or the Italian diaspora in Argentina.
The formation of a middle class that was more broadly integrated into the Argentine
economy and society, coupled with the broad incorporation of Italo-Argentine offspring
into electoral politics by the Ley Sáenz Peña and the Radical period, meant that there was
less incentive to identify with Mussolini’s nationalist rhetoric. As opposed to other Italian
diasporas, especially those in Brazilian cities, there was a greater tendency toward
antifascist political leaning among the Italian community in Argentina.21 Even as Italian
21
João Fábio Bertonha, “Fascismo, antifascismo y las comunidades italianas en Brasil, Argentina
y Uruguay: una perspectiva comparada,” Estiudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos 14, no. 42
(1999): 117, 120-121.
75
identity was recognized by all parties as a critical component of the modern Argentine
nation, that did not mean adopting wholesale every innovation to develop in Italy.
In aggregate, though, Italians in Argentina were inclined to show sympathy to the
government in Rome during Mussolini’s reign. As the Radical period ended in a coup d’état
and a succession of military leaders and fraudulently elected governments ruled Argentina
during the 1930s, the general political trend was far more sympathetic to authoritarian
governments.22
On that same note, it is hard to imagine that players all had a singular rationale for
signing contracts with Italian clubs. For individuals like Orsi or Monti, Italy offered the
chance to extend careers and earn more solid paychecks doing so. For a player like
Demaria, the opportunity to travel to Italy and play in the stadium of his future club prior
to signing likely had a major impact on his decision to return to Milan to play for
Ambrosiana-Inter. The next section turns toward the discussion of overseas tours by both
Italian clubs in South American and Argentine clubs in Europe, focusing on how these
exhibitions provided limited but impactful transnational connections between the two
countries.
Transnational Connections through Soccer
Despite their positions as two of world’s historic powerhouse national teams and
the deep connections between the two countries, Argentina and Italy did not play one
another in international competition until 1974. Further, there were only limited and
22
Eugenia Scarzanella, Ni gringos ni indios: Inmigración, criminalidad y racism en la Argentina,
1890-1940 (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes Editorial, 2003), 125.
76
sporadic interactions between club or select sides from the two countries, mainly in the
form of Italian teams visiting Argentina on larger tours of South America. The introduction
to this chapter illustrated one of the rare instances where Italian and Argentinian touring
teams crossed the Atlantic in either direction.
Even when teams did visit, the itinerary often precluded anything more than a rapid
series of barnstorming exhibitions before the ship once again left port to return home. In
the case of the Gimnasia La Plata tour of 1930-1931, only two of the twenty-two matches
of the European leg of the tour were held in Italy. The first was a 3-3 draw in Milan against
Ambrosiana-Inter on March 15, 1931, allowing Demaria to showcase his skills against the
club which eventually signed him to come to Italy five months later.23 But even with two
Italian immigrant parents, it is telling that the Italian newspapers saw fit to note that neither
he nor Uruguayan legend and fellow Ambrosiana-Inter signing Héctor Scarone were well
versed in the Italian language.24
This dearth of contact between the two countries on the soccer field prevented any
long-standing sporting animosities from developing between the two countries in the sport,
and is another possible reason why Italo-Argentine players placed a circumstantial
emphasis on their various national identities as the situation warranted. At the same time,
though, it is also worth considering whether more players might have taken advantage of
Italian playing opportunities had there been increased exposure between clubs from the
two countries. This will be discussed in greater detail in the fourth chapter, but is worth
23
Ciullini, “Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata Trip to Brazil and Europe 1930/31,”
http://www.rsssf.com/tablesg/gimnasialp-trip31.html.
24
“L’arrivo a Milano di Scarone e De Maria,” Il Littoriale (Roma), August 7, 1931, 6.
77
considering as a possible factor that prevented an even larger talent drain from South
America.
Because the sport started as a British enterprise, it was inevitable that the first teams
from Europe to tour Argentina were British club sides. The first non-British club from
Europe to play exhibition contests in Argentina was Torino, who visited South America in
1914. Initially invited by the local league in São Paulo to cross the Atlantic, Torino made
its way south from Brazil to play three games in Buenos Aires in late August and early
September before returning home. The Italians lost two of the three matches, falling 2-1 to
the Argentine national team and 1-0 to defending league champion Racing Club before
defeating a league selection in the final match.25
Nine years passed until another Italian team made the voyage to Buenos Aires. In
1923, Genoa followed in Torino’s footsteps. The club from Lorenzo Orsi’s hometown
arrived in August, and played four matches during their short visit to the Río de la Plata.
Genoa lost its first match 2-1 against a selection of stars from the northern clubs in Buenos
Aires on August 19, but managed to pull out a victory against a select eleven from southern
clubs in the metropolitan area on September 2. A quick sojourn to Montevideo resulted in
a 2-1 victory by the Uruguayan national team, and Genoa concluded its tour with a 1-1
draw against the Argentine national team. Domingo Tarasconi, the top scorer five years
later at the Olympics, put Argentina ahead with a goal in the opening minute of play, but
Genoa’s Aristodemo Santamaria scored the equalizer eight minutes later and neither side
25
Luciano Pasqualini and Marcelo Leme de Arruda, “South American Trip of Torino and Pro
Vercelli in 1914,” Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation, updated March 10, 2016, accessed
March 23, 2017, http://www.rsssf.com/tablest/torino-vercelli-braztrip14.html.
78
managed another goal.26 Once the Italians embarked for their return voyage home, another
six years passed before Italian and Argentine teams played one another again.
These limited athletic interactions between Italian clubs and their Argentine
counterparts, however, only took place in one direction. This is in part because, until the
mid-1920s, Argentine clubs did not make European tours in the same manner that saw
clubs from Europe travel overseas. This changed when Boca Juniors became the first
Argentine club to visit Europe when they played a series of nineteen exhibitions across the
continent between March and June 1925. What is interesting about this trip is the fact that
a club thoroughly identified with the Genoese diaspora in La Boca played zero contests in
Italy.
After failing to organize in time to send a team to the 1924 Olympic Games,
Argentina hoped to send its national team abroad to play a series of contests in Europe.
When that plan fell through, Boca Juniors volunteered to make the trip as the country’s
representative. The club incorporated several players from other Argentine clubs to bolster
the side, but it played in the blue and yellow of Boca Juniors. The trip, promoted and
organized by the owner of the newspaper Crítica, Natalio Bonata, was mainly financed by
Bonata and two Spanish businessmen.27 This trip saw Boca Juniors evolve into a national
phenomenon in Argentina, transformed from an ethnic neighborhood institution into an
avatar representing a uniquely Argentinian style of play.
26
Pablo Ciullini, “Río de la Plata Trip of Genoa CFC 1923,” Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics
Foundation, updated June 16, 2016, accessed March 23, 2017,
http://www.rsssf.com/tablesg/genoa-satrip23.html.
27
Waldermar Iglesias, “Cuando Boca se hizo Boca,” Clarín, published April 3, 2013, accessed
March 23, 2017, http://www.clarin.com/deportes/boca-hizo_0_rJ9f1cKiP7e.html.
79
Because of the nationality of those underwriting the trip, it is not surprising that
thirteen of the clubs’ nineteen matches took place against Spanish clubs and regional
selections from Spain. From there, Boca Juniors then traveled to Germany and France for
six more matches before making the return voyage back to Argentina.28 There is no
evidence to suggest that the club deliberately avoided contact with Italian soccer, but it is
telling that the club eschewed the opportunity to connect with teams from the country
whose descendants had founded the club. That this occurred at the point when Boca Juniors
was shifting from a neighborhood institution to develop a nationwide following across
Argentina indicates a desire to diversify the club narrative. This is almost a reversal of the
actions of Argentine politicians; while criollo leaders were appropriating an affinity for
Italy and Italian culture in their own rhetoric, Italian-identified institutions were adopting
a less ethnically rooted public face.
Had Italy managed to defeat Uruguay in the semifinals of the 1928 Olympics in
Amsterdam, the two countries would have faced one another in the gold-medal match.
Adolfo Baloncieri gave the Italians the lead in the ninth minute, but three Uruguayan goals
in the first half put the underdogs in a two-goal deficit at the half against the defending
champions from 1924. Virginio Levratto pulled the azzurri to 3-2 an hour into the match,
but Uruguay held on to face their South American rivals in the championship.29 The Fascist
press was quick to note that Italy had been the only European team to reach the semifinals.
28
Pablo Ciullini, “European Trip of CA Boca Juniors 1925,” Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics
Foundation, updated April 14, 2016, accessed March 23, 2017,
http://www.rsssf.com/tablesb/boca-trip25.html.
29
“Olympic Football Tournament Amsterdam 1928: Italy-Uruguay,” FIFA.com, accessed March
23, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/tournaments/archive/mensolympic/amsterdam1928/matches/round=197035/
match=32332/index.html.
80
“Of the European teams present,” Vittorio Pozzo wrote in his capacity for Lo Sport
Fascista, Italy “was the best in every aspect.”30 Even so, the azzurri fell short against
Uruguay and would have to wait another half-century before finally facing Argentina in
international play at the 1974 World Cup.
Italian clubs finally returned to Argentina in 1929, when Torino and Bologna made
concurrent South American tours that saw the two clubs play a combined fifteen games
against Argentine sides. Demonstrating the gap in talent that still existed between Italian
and Argentine clubs in the late 1920s, Bologna managed only one win out of eight during
the Argentine part of their tour, defeating Argentina del Sud 2-1 on August 25. Torino
knocked off Independiente, which had just lost star left wing Raimundo Orsi to Torino’s
rival Juventus, along with a combined selection in Rosario to take two victories from their
seven exhibitions in Argentina.31 It would be the last tour by an Italian club during the
Fascist era. Instead, as Demaria and the other Italo-Argentine players signed by Italian
clubs demonstrate, these teams were becoming more interested in hiring Argentine players
than playing matches against their Argentine counterparts.
Conclusions
The desire to play up the Italian roots of Argentina by politicians doubtless had an
impact on the next generation of Italo-Argentine youth growing up during the post-World
War I era. Italian migrants in Argentina were living in a country that was increasingly
30
Pozzo, “Il torneo di calcio ad Amsterdam,” 17.
Hans Schöggl, “South American Trip of Bologna FC and Torino FC 1929,” Rec.Sport.Soccer
Statistics Foundation, updated March 10, 2016, accessed March 23, 2017,
http://www.rsssf.com/tablesb/bolotoro-zam29.html.
31
81
recognizing their impact on Argentine national identity. Politicians at all levels in
Argentina, whether out of genuine affection or only as a means of pandering for votes,
recognized the expediency of incorporating rhetoric extolling Italians as an indelible part
of the nation.
While soccer players in Buenos Aires and elsewhere were dealing with the
incessant schisms that wracked the sport at its institutional levels, they would have been
exposed to rhetoric that played up the importance of Italy to Argentinians just like any
other segment of the population. Raised by parents who were sent their own signals through
Italian-language media to remain patriotic to their native land, and to pass those virtues on
to their own Argentine-born children, this next generation that included Demaria and his
fellow oriundi on the 1934 Italian team grew up in a society that harbored far different
opinions of this demographic than it had only a few decades before.
But by 1931, the window was already closing for Italy to capitalize on the pipeline
of players from Italy. The day after announcing the arrival of Demaria and Scarone in
Milan, Il Littoriale published a more sobering article that spoke to the impact of recent
developments in Argentine soccer, reporting on the effect that the spread of
professionalism through Argentine clubs would have on the Italian game. Arguing that
“professionalism will henceforth prevent the exodus of the best players,” the reporter notes
that inside-left forward Vicente del Giudice elected to end negotiations with Italian clubs
and stay in Argentina after being offered 30,000 pesos (200,000 lire) to remain with Racing
Club in Avellaneda.32 That one of the official sports publications of the Fascist party
32
“Il professionismo impedirà d’ora innanzi l’esodo dei migliori calciatori,” Il Littoriale (Roma),
August 8, 1931, 3.
82
printed such an article reflects an intimate understanding by the Italian public as to how its
clubs were exploiting a market advantage by hiring Italo-Argentine players.
In the final chapter, the story shifts from the dynamics that helped push players out
of Argentina and toward the pull factors that were initiated by the Fascist government to
take advantage of this small but significant window of time. Delving into the structural
factors that opened the door for Italo-Argentine players to flock to the Italian league during
the late 1920s and into the 1930s, we can begin to deconstruct the draw of Italy even after
Argentina’s league turned toward professionalism. In doing so we will turn toward the
story of the fourth Italo-Argentine player who suited up for Italy in 1934, evaluating
Enrique Guaita’s story in relation to his three oriundi compatriots and juxtaposing their
experiences against the broader sociopolitical forces at play during this period.
83
4. PROPAGANDA AND PATRIOTISM: THE FASCIST
SPORTS PROJECT AND ENRIQUE GUAITA
Like the other immigrants that
Figure 11. Photo of Enrique Guaita
have been introduced in earlier chapters,
there is no information as to when either of
Enrique Guaita’s parents arrived in
Argentina. The census records indicate
that Arturo Guaita and Eloisa Ormashea
married at some point around 1892, when
Guaita was thirty-seven years old and
Ormashea had just turned twenty-one.
In the last decade of the nineteenth
century, the couple settled in Entre Ríos
province and opened their own bakery in
Source: “Enrique Guaita cover photo,” La
Gazzetta dello Sport, August 15, 1935.
Lucas González. By the 1895 census, the
couple had been married three years and Eloisa had already given birth to their first three
children.1 The family continued to grow over the next decade, but without being able to
consult the 1914 national census records it is hard to determine exactly how many children
1
“Argentina, 1895 censo nacional: Entre Ríos, Nogoyá, Sauce (Población rural),” Archivo
General de la Nación (Buenos Aires), 48 of 246, via FamilySearch, digitized April 9, 2016,
accessed April 19, 2017, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-6Q9SMY9?mode=g&i=47&cc=1410078.
84
Guaita and Ormashea raised in Entre Ríos while also running their bakery. We do know
that the family was still growing fifteen years later, when at thirty-nine years old Eloisa
gave birth to the couple’s seventh son on July 15, 1910.2 Less than two months later,
Enrique Guaita was baptized in the parish of San Lucas Evangelista at Lucas González.3
As a result, he was the only one of the four Argentine-born oriundi on the 1934 Italian
team who grew up outside the expanding metropolitan footprint of Buenos Aires and its
surrounding cities.
While soccer had begun to expand into the interior of the country, the sport had not
yet become as popular in Entre Ríos as it was in other parts of Argentina at the time of
Guaita’s birth. Introduced to the sport as an adolescent, Guaita began kicking the ball when
he turned fourteen. Soon thereafter, he moved two hundred miles away from home to enroll
in the medical school at the university in La Plata. At seventeen, he earned his first
appearance with Estudiantes de La Plata, and by the end of the season he was already being
heralded as one of the top players in the country.
As Guaita developed as a forward, cutting in from the left on the vaunted front line
for Estudiantes, it looked as though he also might provide an effective replacement to help
the national team recover from the loss of Orsi. Less theatrical with the ball than his
predecessor for Argentina, Guaita was nevertheless an effective and efficient striker who
2
Though the article states that the family’s seven children were all male, census records dispute
this fact. More likely is that, of the Guaita children, seven were male. See Vittorio Finizio, “Viale
del Tramonto: Enrico Guaita,” Corriere dello Sport (Roma), July 3, 1953, 3.
3
FIFA and other records indicate that Guaita was born on July 15, 1910, whereas the baptismal
record lists August 15, 1910 as the birthdate. As was the case with Luis Monti, I imagine this was
a clerical error during a period of exclusively handwritten recordkeeping. See “Bautismos 19091911,” Parroquia de San Lucas Evangelista (Lucas González), 105 of 158, via FamilySearch,
digitized March 28, 2017, accessed April 11, 2017, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939DG6X6-3?mode=g&i=285&wc=MDBLZM3%3A311514201%2C319904101%2C312964801&cc=1974184.
85
Figure 12. 1888 Map of Entre Ríos Province
The starred location at top center of map represents the location of Lucas González, birthplace
of Enrique Guaita.
Source: Mariano Felipe Paz Soldan, Provincia de Entre Rios (Buenos Aires: Felix Lajouane,
1888), via David Rumsey Map Collection, accessed April 29, 2017,
http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~20641~570018.
had already gained a reputation as a gentleman on the soccer pitch despite his youth.4
Between his role as a student in La Plata and his growing career as a key member of the
Argentine national team, there was little reason to expect that Guaita would follow his
compatriots overseas.
Like so many other Italo-Argentine stars, though, Guaita was eventually convinced
to try his luck in Serie A. He signed with Roma in the spring of 1933, as the club courted
three Argentine players to its roster. Guaita arrived in Italy alongside fellow Estudiantes
teammate Alejandro Scopelli and former Racing Club and Atlanta defender Andrés
4
“I Nuovi Giallo Rossi: Enrico Guàita,” Il Littoriale (Roma), June 8, 1933, 3; Vittorio Finizio,
“Viale del Tramonto: Enrico Guaita,” Corriere dello Sport (Roma), July 3, 1953, 3.
86
Stagnaro.5 Scopelli initially looked as though he would be the star signing of the trio,
scoring the opening goal in a 4-3 friendly win over Bayern Munich in May 1933 that
marked the first appearance of the three Argentine-born stars for Roma.6 Scopelli and
Guaita tied for the club lead in goals during the 1933-1934 season, with each scoring
fourteen times over the course of the campaign.7
Then Guaita broke out as one of the stars of the 1934 World Cup, scoring the pivotal
goal in the semifinals and helping his adopted country win its first international title. Once
the new campaign began in the fall, the momentum Guaita had built up over the summer
continued to elevate his play into the league year. Scopelli continued to play respectably
and finished with eleven goals for the 1934-1935 season. But Guaita eclipsed his
compatriot, nearly doubling his output in his second year in Italy. His twenty-seven goals
for Roma led Serie A, as Guaita finished six goals ahead of runner-up Silvio Piola of Lazio
in the scoring race.8
Enrique Guaita’s story presents the most puzzling case in terms of why he chose to
represent Italy. As noted at the end of the previous chapter, the economic incentive to play
overseas had already begun to dissipate thanks to the formation of a professional league in
Argentina. Guaita shared another trait with Orsi, in that his Italian heritage can only be
traced through one side of his family tree. While his father was indisputably Italian, both
census and baptismal records reveal that Eloisa Ormashea was a Spanish immigrant. As
5
“Scopelli, Stagnaro e Guaita, assi del calcio argentino giungeranno alla Capitale ai primi del
mese di maggio,” Il Littoriale (Roma), April 14, 1933, 6.
6
“La Roma edizione 1934 gioca un match amichevole colla squadra Bayern di Monaco,”
Domenica Sportiva (Milano), June 25, 1933, 5.
7
Maurizio Mariani, “Italy 1933/34,” Rec.Sports.Soccer Statistics Foundation, updated October
23, 2002, accessed May 2, 2017, http://www.rsssf.com/tablesi/ital34.html.
8
Maurizio Mariani, “Italy 1934/35,” Rec.Sports.Soccer Statistics Foundation, updated October
23, 2002, accessed May 2, 2017, http://www.rsssf.com/tablesi/ital35.html.
87
we also saw in Orsi’s case, all discussion of this fact was judiciously avoided by both the
Fascist-operated and independent sports media outlets during his playing career in Italy.
Even further, though, later accounts in the Italian press about Guaita’s career also
uniformly avoided discussion about the contentious circumstances of his departure from
Italy in 1935.
Both Fascist-created media outlets and independent press were inclined to support
Fascist interpretations of national identity forwarded by the government.9 Without fail,
these stories downplayed foreign origins and positioned oriundi such as Guaita as
quintessentially representative of Italy. In this regard, it is internalized propaganda directed
at convincing the local population of players’ identity more than it is an attempt to
legitimize the talent in the eyes of the global community. Guaita and the other Argentineborn talent on Italy’s 1934 FIFA World Cup roster forced Fascist Italy to sell the players’
Italian traits at a time when the government was also working to cement diasporic ties and
beginning a course toward territorial expansion with the Ethiopian campaign.
The media served as one component of a system that allowed Argentine-born
players to take advantage of their Italian heritage to navigate their way into Italian soccer.
Fascist charters passed during the late 1920s provided a framework for centralizing sport
across the country at all levels, facilitating in part the development of a nationwide
professional soccer league. While restricting participation to Italian players, this legislation
operated with a liberal interpretation of Italian nationality which allowed Italo-Argentine
athletes to identify as Italian and avoid the restrictions on foreign-born talent.
9
Robert S.C. Gordon and John London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” in National Identity
and Global Sports Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football
World Cup, ed. Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2006), 45.
88
This chapter delves into the structural factors that opened the door for ItaloArgentine players to flock to the Italian league during the late 1920s and into the 1930s.
Through a look at both the demographics of Argentine talent in the Italian league and the
mythmaking of the Fascist media, we can begin to deconstruct what brought players such
as Guaita to Italy and what caused them to either stay or return to South America. This
culminates in a look at the 1934 World Cup and its aftermath, providing the lens through
which to examine the conflicted nature of national identity for the oriundi who traded one
national-team jersey for another.
Legislating Oriundi Inclusion in Italian Soccer
Three decades after the sport first reached Argentina, soccer was introduced to Italy
in the 1890s and began to take root as a popular pastime in parts of the north. At its earliest
point, the sport first became popular in cities such as Genoa and Turin—the heart of the
same northwestern regions from which much of the Argentina’s Italian immigrant stock
originated. Clubs proliferated in the early 1900s, and leagues and competitions began to
form in their wake to facilitate regular domestic competition. But it was not until the 1920s
that the sport became solidly institutionalized as a spectator sport on a national level, in
large part because the Fascist government asserted control over soccer’s organization.10
Once Mussolini rose to power, the push to create a Fascist interpretation of Italian
national identity that emphasized unified nationalism rather than a confederation of
regional identities extended to sport. A critical component of this revisionism involved
10
Simon Martin, “Football and Fascism: Foreign Bodies on Foreign Fields,” in In Corpore:
Bodies in Post-Unification Italy, ed. Loredana Polezzi and Charlotte Ross (Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 80.
89
framing the sport of soccer as quintessentially Italian. The Renaissance sport of calcio
fiorentino was propagandized as the origin of modern Association football, a storyline that
asserted English evolutions of soccer as mere reinventions of an Italian game.11 While this
runs counter to the story of the sport’s modern dissemination throughout Italy, the trope
nevertheless persisted through the Fascist era. Citing public orders banning local variants
of the game in several areas within Italy throughout the fifteen and sixteenth centuries,
these polemics focused on Florence as a key site of the sport’s diffusion.12 This revisionist
history presented these facts without attempting to counter the evidence available about
concurrent English developments.13 Despite the questionable historicity, the Italian origins
of soccer continued to be trumpeted by Fascist media outlets until calcio became the
preferred Italian nomenclature for the sport.
In the earliest days of Fascist rule, the primary focus of the government as it related
to sport was ostensibly geared not toward international prestige and propaganda but rather
toward using physical education as a means of creating a strong generation capable of
defending the nation.14 This resulted in the establishment of the Ente Nazionale per
l’Eduazione Fisica (National Institute for Physical Education, henceforth ENEF) in March
11
John Foot, Winning at All Costs: A Scandalous History of Italian Soccer (New York: Nation
Books, 2007), 2-3.
12
Articles positioning calcio fiorentino as the origin of modern soccer proliferated especially in
1929. This is likely the result of the increased emphasis on propagandizing competitive sport that
was a key component of the Carta dello Sport passed in December 1928. Examples of this
polemic include A. Nobili, “La storia e le origini del gioco del calcio,” Gran Sport 3, no. 4 (April
1929), 33-34 http://dlib.coninet.it/bookreader.php?&c=1&f=5075&p=21#page/20/mode/2up, and
Guido Bustico, “Il Calcio Fiorentino,” Lo Sport Fascista 2, no. 10 (October 1929), 42-44,
http://dlib.coninet.it/bookreader.php?&c=1&f=5248&p=44#page/44/mode/2up.
13
The most thorough scholarship detailing the complex developments of English soccer in the
recent historiography can be found in Graham Curry and Eric Dunning, Association Football: A
Study in Figurational Sociology (London: Routledge, 2015).
14
Angela Teja, “Italian Sport and International Relations Under Fascism,” in Sport and
International Politics: The Impact of Fascism and Communism on Sport, ed. Pierre Arnaud and
James Riordan (London: E & FN Spon, 1998), 147.
90
1923, which attempted to centralize control over scholastic physical education. Local
authority over physical education was replaced by sports clubs operating under the auspices
of ENEF management. The institute’s lack of technical expertise ultimately doomed it to
failure, though it laid the groundwork for future attempts to organize physical education on
a national level.15
Even after the ENEF was replaced by the Opera Nazionale Balilla (National Youth
Organization, henceforth ONB) in 1927, sport continue to be viewed by the Fascist leaders
more as physical education than an ideological vehicle. Italy began shifting toward a policy
of using sport as propaganda after the passage of the Carta dello Sport (Sport Charter) in
December 1928. Thereafter, athletes were presented as national ambassadors who “display
glorious actions in sports struggles against the strongest representatives of other races in
the world.”16 Under this new policy, sport shifted from being the means to create new
Italian soldier-citizens toward an end in which sports itself served as a proxy for military
competition between nations.
The most significant legislation passed by the Fascist government, in terms of
creating the structural conditions which opened the door for South Americans in Italian
soccer, came in August 1926 with the passage of the Carta di Viareggio. This charter
revolutionized the Italian game, legalizing professionalism for clubs and laying the
foundation for the introduction of a national league by the end of the decade. A sport that
had remained regionally focused into the 1920s began to expand nationwide, and Serie A
15
16
Teja, “Italian Sport and International Relations Under Fascism,” 148-149.
Teja, “Italian Sport and International Relations Under Fascism,” 156.
91
came into existence in the 1929-1930 season as a means of crowning a national champion
over an annual calendar of round-robin fixtures.17
Most importantly, the charter restricted the use of foreign players by clubs.
Confident in the advances that had taken place in Italian soccer after World War I, the
Fascist government inserted this language into the charter in hopes of increasing
opportunities for the development of local talent. While the charter did succeed in causing
more southern clubs to employ northern Italians rather than looking to foreign markets for
talent, the ultimate impact was to stunt the sport’s tactical development in Italy as the
country shut itself off from the sport’s global developments. As a result, Italy failed to gain
ground on soccer’s global powerhouses of the era and the Carta di Viareggio seemed to
produce initial results counter to what was hoped.18
Recognizing the need to fortify the stock of talent available to clubs, the Fascist
government introduced a critical loophole: the prohibition on foreign players did not
include the descendants of Italians. Through the introduction of joint citizenship, clubs
could repatriate players of Italian ancestry to play immediately as full professionals.19 After
the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, though, the recognition that a ready-made talent pool of
Italian-descended players existed across the Atlantic was brought to light. Articulating a
notion of stirpa italica (Italian stock), the Fascist authorities argued that there was an
essential Italian characteristic that transmitted generationally regardless of whether one
was actually born on Italian soil.20 Under such an interpretation the geographic location of
17
Simon Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini (Oxford, UK:
Berg, 2004), 59-61.
18
Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini, 63-64.
19
Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini, 195.
20
Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto, Fascist Hybridities: Representations of Racial Mixing and
Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3.
92
one’s nativity proved less important than genealogical and sociocultural connections to
Italy. Thus, in accordance with the Fascist conception of Italian nationality oriundi players
were linked through their ancestry to peninsular roots that served as the basis for Fascist
interpretations of nationality.21
Though he was not the first Argentine-born player to suit up for an Italian club,
Orsi was the first to enter Italian soccer under these new conditions. Thus, while it did not
have an immediate impact the Carta di Viareggio created the conditions that facilitated the
redistribution of athletes from Argentina to Italy in the late 1920s and through the 1930s.
This belated impact is borne out through the demographic influx of South Americans that
took place especially after 1930. By the time Guaita was arriving in Italy, the trend was
already at its apex.
The Demographics of the Transatlantic Talent Shift
Several Italo-Argentine athletes played soccer in Italy during World War I and
through Mussolini’s early rise to power. The Badini brothers, born in Rosario to Bolognese
immigrants, returned to Italy with their parents as teenagers. The oldest pair, Angelo and
Emilio, began playing with Bologna in 1913, and all four brothers suited up for the club.22
Augusto, the youngest brother, played through the 1926 season. Around the same period
the Mosso brothers, born in Mendoza, began playing for Torino after their family had
21
Giuliani Caponetto, Fascist Hybridities, 59-60.
Istituzione Bologna Musei, “Badini Angelo,” Storia e Memoria di Bologna, accessed February
11, 2017, http://www.storiaememoriadibologna.it/badini-angelo-484131-persona; Istituzione
Bologna Musei, “Badini Emilio,” Storia e Memoria di Bologna, accessed February 11, 2017,
http://www.storiaememoriadibologna.it/badini-emilio-484057-persona. Emilio became the first
Argentine-born player to represent Italy in international competition when he was selected to play
against Norway at the 1920 Olympics.
22
93
returned to the Piedmont region.23 Both examples are more reflective of traditional
migration stories, indicating that immigration to Argentina was not always permanent, and
migratory patterns included the movement of Argentine-born children and their integration
into Italian life.
Prior to the passage of the Carta di Viareggio, the only player to leave Argentina
specifically to play soccer in Italy was Rosario-born Julio Libonatti. In 1925, Libonatti left
his local club Newell’s Old Boys to play for Genoa. After transferring to Torino a year
later, Libonatti played the first of his seventeen matches for the Italian national team in
October 1926 in a friendly against Czechoslovakia.24 The Italo-Argentine star remained in
Italy for more than a decade, playing for Torino until 1937. Once he retired from the sport,
though, he set another general trend when he returned to Rosario rather than continuing to
live in Italy.
After the 1928 Olympics, Italian clubs finally set about in earnest scouting South
American diasporas to replenish a domestic talent pool that had been depleted by the ban
on foreign players.25 Orsi was the first to follow in Libonatti’s footsteps, and over the next
decade a stream of oriundi made the transatlantic voyage along the same route that
agricultural labors had endured to exploit work opportunities for decades. At least 60 ItaloArgentine players and over 100 South American oriundi in total signed with Italian clubs
after 1928.
23
See Appendix A, “Italo-Argentine Players in Italy Before World War II.”
Matías Rodríguez, “Julio Libonatti: Goleador de Exportación,” El Gráfico, November 18,
2014, http://www.elgrafico.com.ar/2014/11/18/C-5833-julio-libonatti-goleador-deexportacion.php.
25
Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini, 64.
24
94
Figure 13. South American Players in Serie A, 1910-1941
Source: The data was primarily drawn from Davide Rota’s work compiling lists of South
American players in Italy by nationality. (See bibliography for full citations of each list by
nation.) Data was also cross-checked against club rosters from those seasons using a
combination of online club player databases, newspaper searches, and FIFA data for players
who participated in international competition.
To put this in perspective, it is worth looking further at the Italian league in the
season prior to the 1934 World Cup. Eighteen clubs across Italy participated in the 19331934 season of the top division, Serie A. In a period when in-match substitutions were not
yet permitted by the laws of the game, there were fewer employment opportunities all
around. On average, each club employed around sixteen players on their first-team roster—
eleven starters, and five players available in case of injuries.26
26
This number may have fluctuated by club, but the roster for the 1933-1934 Juventus squad that
won the league title was used as a basis for calculation. “Scudetto 1933-34,” Juventus Official
Website, accessed March 18, 2017, http://www.juventus.com/en/club/torphyroom/scudetto/scudetto-1933-34.php.
95
Calculating out these numbers reveals that an estimated 288 roster spots were
available for professional players in Serie A during the 1933-1934 season. Nearly ten
percent of those positions were occupied by the twenty-six Italo-Argentine players
employed by Italian clubs in the top division. An additional eighteen Brazilians, ten
Uruguayans, and two Paraguayan players were also employed by Italian clubs that season.
At this point, it is evident that clubs were fully exploiting the loophole provided within the
Carta di Viareggio, as nearly twenty percent of the roster spots in Serie A were occupied
by foreign-born players from South America.27 This pipeline, however, would soon dry up
as professionalism took hold across the Atlantic. While the trend lasted, however, it was a
boon for Italian soccer.
This influx of Italo-Argentine talent, along with other players from South America,
raised the standard of play throughout the Italian league. As much as the direct
contributions of oriundi such as Orsi, Monti, and Guaita helped Italy win the 1934 World
Cup, the increased level of competition in league play helped raised the skill level of
domestic players as well. The tactical evolutions these players brought from South America
to Italy filtered throughout the various levels of soccer to bolster the talent pool across the
board, as evidenced by the victory of an azzurri team that won the 1936 Olympic
tournament in Berlin with a roster of student amateurs.28
At once South Americans helped fortify and build Italian soccer even as they
brought traits that defied the traditional, more direct style of play that eschewed dribbling
in favor of long passes. Opponents of the oriundi infiltration insisted that “the art of the
27
See Figure 11, “South Americans in Serie A, 1910-1941” on previous page for a detailed yearby-year chart of foreign participation in the top division of the Italian league.
28
Gordon and London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 41.
96
South American is to play the game, our art is to resolve the game.”29 This critique lacks
empirical weight, however, especially considering that Guaita and Orsi scored pivotal goals
in the semifinal and final respectively. Without their timely contributions, Italy might not
have won its first World Cup title. But Guaita and Orsi are also interesting regarding the
fact that they both only had a patrilineal connection to Italy; in Guaita’s case, his mother
was a Spanish immigrant, while Orsi’s mother had been born in Argentina to a Spanish
immigrant father and a criollo mother. It is unknown to what extent detractors knew this
about both players, but one imagines that there would be plenty of evidence of
denunciations had opponents of oriundi realized this fact about two of the most visible
foreign-born athletes.
Thus, the project to incorporate Italo-Argentine talent into the Italian national team
can be viewed in retrospect as a successful endeavor. The oriundi players were in effect an
extension of a Fascist attitude toward nationality that deliberately avoided racial definitions
in favor of a concept of stirpa italica (Italian stock) that incorporated aspects of both
northern and southern Italian ethnicity and provided the framework for including diasporic
communities into conceptions of national identity.30 These players were effectively sold to
the Italian public as Italian in identity. What must be asked next, though, is how much of
this identification was a media creation.
29
30
Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini, 195.
Giuliani Caponetto, Fascist Hybridities, 3.
97
The Media’s Role in Selling the Italian Traits of Oriundi
Italo-Argentine players benefitted from a series of legislative maneuvering that
allowed them to join Italian clubs. Though sanctioned to participate as Italians, though,
there was no guarantee that spectators would accept the repatriated players as Italians.
These players also benefitted from complimentary press coverage, as media outlets were
complicit in framing the discourse around oriundi to the public. This favorable treatment
helped drown out the rumblings of opposition against the participation of repatriated
foreigners and reinforced their claims to Italian identity.
As the Fascist regime began to place greater emphasis on spectator sports, the
government introduced periodicals such as Il Littoriale and Lo Sport Fascista. These
outlets served as a direct voice for the ruling regime, but they were hardly the only sources
of support. Other independent media throughout the country likewise employed Fascist
rhetoric in their reporting of soccer.31 As the introduction of this chapter reveals in the
example from Tutti gli Sports, not only local media but periodicals throughout the country
had an incentive to sell oriundi as Italians to their reading audience.
This coincided with efforts to create a full Italian-language soccer lexicon to replace
the English-language terms that persisted from the sport’s introduction (or reintroduction,
in the Fascist reimagining) to the country.32 This was taking place at a time when media of
all forms strove to limit the use of foreign language in articles and broadcasts.33 Such
attempts were not always successful, as Anglicized terminology persisted among the media
covering soccer into the 1930s.34 Nevertheless, the attempt to create Italian-language
31
Gordon and London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 45-46.
Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini, 66.
33
Teja, “Italian Sport and International Relations Under Fascism,” 160.
34
Gordon and London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 55.
32
98
terminology for the sport demonstrates the desire of the Fascist government to appropriate
sport and couch it in a nationalist framework.
Vittorio Pozzo, the manager of the victorious 1934 World Cup team, was another
significant voice contributing to the mythmaking about the South American oriundi in
Italy. Having previously managed the azzurri at the 1912 and 1924 Olympic Games, Pozzo
assumed full-time duties over the Italian national team in December 1929. He was the first
Italian manager to enjoy the freedom to select players without interference from FIGC
administrators.35 Entrusted with the mission of building the Italian team into a powerhouse,
Pozzo set about identifying the talent that would win two World Cup titles and an Olympic
gold medal between 1934 and 1938.
Even after taking over the reins of the national team, Pozzo continued his regular
work as a reporter for La Stampa, the daily newspaper in Turin, as well as continuing to
write as a correspondent for Lo Sport Fascista. In his first report for the monthly Fascist
sports magazine following his appointment as the full-time coach of the national team,
Pozzo reported on his team’s 6-1 victory over Portugal. “Writing about an event in which
one has played an active part is something a bit different from writing as a mere observer,”
Pozzo noted in the first lines of an eight-page article. “It is one thing to be an actor, another
thing to be a spectator.”36
35
“Vittorio Pozzo - 'Old Master' helped make Italian football,” FIFA.com, accessed March 14,
2017, http://www.fifa.com/news/y=2007/m=4/news=vittorio-pozzo-old-master-helped-makeitalian-football-512633.html.
36
“Scrivere su un avvenimento al quale si è preso parte viva ed attiva, è cosa un po’ diversa dallo
scriverne come puro e semplice osservatore. Una cosa è far l’attore, e l’altra il far lo spettatore.”
Vittorio Pozzo, “Come ho rifatto la Nazionale,” Lo Sport Fascista 2, no. 12 (December 1929):
20-27, http://dlib.coninet.it/bookreader.php?&c=1&f=5250&p=23#page/22/mode/2up.
99
Instead of attempting to downplay his new position, Pozzo freely admitted that he
wrote from a privileged position. There seems to have been no consideration for resigning
his journalist position after taking the job as national team manager, and Pozzo continued
to report from this new vantage point even as he reinvented the azzurri during the 1930s.
From the outset, not only did he file eight pages in Lo Sport Fascista on the win over
Portugal but he also published two full columns on the match in La Stampa the day after
leading the Italian team.37 By remaining on staff at La Stampa through his time as the
national team manager and continuing to publish in other magazines, Pozzo could direct
the narrative from both sides and ensure favorable coverage match after match.
Beyond the print media, though, the Fascist regime also benefitted from other
burgeoning formats. While there were few privately-owned radios, the medium was
disseminated as radios became a popular source of collective entertainment in public
places.38 The voice of Nicolò Carosio first became identified with soccer over the radio in
1933, when he won a contest held by state radio corporation Ente Italiano per le Audizioni
Radiofoniche (EIAR) and began broadcasting matches. Carosio called Italy’s matches
during the 1934 World Cup, and for nearly four decades thereafter Carosio was a familiar,
recognizable voice for several generations of listeners on both the radio and television.39
Newsreels served as another means of disseminating favorable coverage of the
Italian national team. The Fascist government first started producing newsreels in 1924
after the foundation of Istituto L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (Union of Educational
37
Vittorio Pozzo, “Vittoria che convince, La Stampa (Torino), December 2, 1929, 1.
Gordon and London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 46.
39
Salvatore Falzone, “Nicolò Carosio Una Voce di Sicilia,” La Repubblica (Roma), March 15,
2007, accessed March 12, 2017,
http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2007/03/15/nicolo-carosio-una-voce-disicilia.html.
38
100
Cinematography Institute, henceforth LUCE Institute). Following the passage of
legislation in April 1926, cinemas were required by law to show the growing number of
LUCE Insitute productions.40 A critical part of these newsreels was coverage of sports
events, which further helped to popularize soccer on a national level. By familiarizing the
public with the national team and its players, these newsreel images depicted both nativeborn and oriundi players working in unison without drawing attention to the players as
anything but wholly representative of Italy.
The newsreels and the radio, under the control of the state, were predisposed toward
playing up the Italian credentials of foreign-born players. Not every media outlet was keen
to sell oriundi as legitimate Italian citizens, though. Il Bargello in Florence, for instance,
argued that “whoever has not carried out his military obligations in Italy cannot and should
never be considered an Italian citizen.”41 Serving as a dissident voice in the weeks leading
up to the 1934 World Cup, Il Bargello articulated the conflicted attitude that many felt
toward South American-born players who were being sold as ineluctably Italian.
While most of the media was inclined to sell these players as patriotic citizens, this
was hardly a universal attitude even among journalists. The general trend toward
sacralization of oriundi stars in media portrayals, though, tended to drown out dissenting
voices. The team which Italy fielded at the 1934 World Cup was perceived by most to be
unquestionably Italian. Orsi and the rest of the South American oriundi on the roster were
no different than their native-born counterparts on the azzurri, all striving in what had
become “one of so many expressions of national will” upon which Mussolini and the rest
40
Federico Caprotti, “Information Management and Fascist Identity: Newsreels in Fascist Italy,”
Media History 11, no. 3 (2005): 182.
41
“Italiano o argentino?,” Il Bargello (Firenze), May 13, 1934, 2, as translated by and quoted in
Martin, “Football and Fascism: Foreign Bodies on Foreign Fields,” 101.
101
of the country had pinned their hopes of attaining “a position of supremacy in each field of
human activity, especially in those chiefly dominated by effort and individual risk and the
spirit of organization and collective discipline.”42
Successes and Failures of 1934 World Cup Propaganda Efforts
Originally, the Fascist government campaigned for the rights to host the 1936
Summer Olympic Games in Rome. After losing out to Berlin in 1930, Italy shifted its focus
toward winning the bid for the 1934 World Cup. The FIGC was informally promised the
rights to the 1934 tournament by FIFA in 1930, but the country had to wait two more years
until the 1932 FIFA meetings in Stockholm and Zurich to know for certain that they would
host the event. Even then, FIGC international secretary Giovanni Mauro was forced to
negotiate terms favorable for FIFA to guarantee the final rights for Italy. Though they did
not fund the travel costs for each visiting team as Uruguay had in 1930, Italy did guarantee
to underwrite any losses that might accrue from the tournament.43
While Italy worked hard to obtain a popular tournament to host, it ultimately
seemed to utilize the competition as a means of spreading domestic more than international
propaganda. The tournament itself was largely a European affair, lacking much in terms of
South American representation. Defending champions Uruguay stayed home in 1934 in
protest of the way many European powerhouses had spurned the offer to participate when
Uruguay hosted in 1930.44 Argentina fielded a team, but the loss of captain Luis Monti and
42
“Volontà di primato,” La Tribuna, June 12, 1934, 1, as translated by and quoted in Gordon and
London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 49.
43
Gordon and London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 47.
44
Terry Crouch, The World Cup: The Complete History (London: Aurum, 2002), 16; Brian
Glanville, The Story of the World Cup (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 25.
102
so much other talent to Italy was clearly felt. Twice the Argentine side gained the lead, and
twice it was overpowered for an equalizer by a stronger Swedish side that ultimately
prevailed 3-2 to advance to the next round.45
The Asociación Argentina was already concerned about the impact of losing talent
to Italy as early as Orsi’s departure in 1928. In a complaint to the FIGC, the Argentine
federation argued that “the Italians want to form a national team at the cost of Argentine
football” and that the Fascist government “has set its eyes on well-known creole players
and wants to tie them to Italian clubs to make them Italian players.”46
While the Fascist government installed the structural conditions by which this
process of repatriation took place, though, it still required the willing participation of ItaloArgentine players to function. As noted at the end of the previous chapter, the loss of talent
began to taper off soon after open professionalism was introduced in Argentine soccer. By
the time the national federation and the professional league had reconciled in 1934, the
talent drain was already reaching its apex and preparing to decline. Argentina was not the
only South American country weakened by the transatlantic talent shift, but it was certainly
hit hardest in terms of the number of players lost to Italian clubs.47 The loss of talent to
Italy had strained the relationship between the two countries.
With every representative from the Americas eliminated in the opening round of
the 1934 World Cup, the tournament became a fully European affair by the quarterfinals.
Even though European teams dominated the competition, much of the European press
seemed to pay little attention to the tournament itself. Interest was highest in those
45
“1934 World Cup Match Report: Sweden v. Argentina,” FIFA.com, accessed March 16, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/matches/round=204/match=1102/index.html.
46
Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini, 195.
47
See Appendix A.
103
countries, such as Germany, where their national teams advanced furthest in the
tournament. In France (whose team was ousted by Austria in the opening round) and
England (which had stoically avoided participating in international tournaments after
separating from FIFA in 1920), coverage of the tournament was minimal.48 The absence
of powerful South American entrants surely played one part in this reduced coverage, and
the relative newness of a tournament being staged for only the second time also affected
the level of global interest.
Because so many key international opponents had opted to remain home, Italy was
forced to legitimate its championship by invoking transitive logic. Because England had
yet again abstained from participating, for instance, journalists looked to the victories of
common opponents over the English as a means of extolling Italy’s legitimacy as world
champion. Noting that the Czechoslovak team had defeated England in Prague, one
reporter argued that England “will have to bow to the winner of the World Cup.”49 Often,
the reports celebrating Italy’s run through the tournament took on this sort of defensive
undertone as a means of building up the validity of Italy’s title.
This speaks to another reason for the limited international propaganda value of the
1934 World Cup—much of the focus was directed toward using the tournament to further
cement the links between the Italian public and the Fascist government.50 This is illustrated
through the finalists to determine the official poster of the tournament. The winning design
from Luigi Martinati incorporates a stylized representation of the fascio littorio (the bundle
48
Gordon and London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 56.
Emiio De Martino, “Si accende domain su otto fronti diversi la battaglia per il campionato del
mondo,” Corriere della Sera, May 26, 1934, 6, as translated by and quoted in Gordon and
London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 55.
50
Teja, “Italian Sport and International Relations Under Fascism,” 162.
49
104
of sticks and axe that served as a primary icon of the Fascist movement). The original
design by Gino Boccasile also included the fascio littorio, but later eliminated overt Fascist
symbolism and over time has been the most familiar and iconic poster linked to the 1934
tournament. Mario Gros went even further in identifying the 1934 World Cup as a Fascist
enterprise by depicting an athlete giving the arm-upraised Fascist salute.51 While Boccasile
eventually excised the direct Fascist references in his poster, the finalists all originally
made conscious efforts to link the World Cup with Fascism.
The attempt to link soccer and the World Cup with Fascism and Italy was also part
of advertising campaigns by private corporations. Especially after the Italians defeated
Czechoslovakia in the final, companies angled to gain endorsements and use the images of
World Cup-winning soccer players as a means of selling their products. Consumer
products, ranging from canned goods to soft drinks to beer to chocolates, all sought to
include references to soccer and to the World Cup in their imagery as a means of bolstering
sales.52 The World Cup had created new avatars for projecting Fascist physical strength,
and the prevalence of soccer iconography in corporate advertisements is indicative of the
level to which these connections were successfully created.
The tournament thus fit into the broader context of trying to position soccer as a
national sport in Italy. By 1934, the nationwide league had been operating for five full
seasons. The Carta di Viareggio had proven effective in shifting the sport from a regional
affair into one that garnered national interest. The siting of the final match in Rome was
significant, given the fact that the Italian national team had only played its first match in
51
52
Gordon and London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 48.
Martin, “Football and Fascism: Foreign Bodies on Foreign Fields,” 94-97.
105
the capital city six years earlier.53 No longer the exclusive pastime of one region or one
socioeconomic class of Italians, the sport and the international championship were linked
as representative of the larger rise of Italian society under Fascism.
In this context, newspapers tended not to mention anything about the foreign origins
of the key players on the azzurri as the team marched through the bracket. In Vittorio
Pozzo’s article in La Stampa after the championship victory over Czechoslovakia, only
Orsi was mentioned among the three oriundi that participated in the final, and there was no
mention of his foreign origins in an article that hailed him as the man of the match.54 Fascist
and independent media outlets would sometimes reference the foreign origins of players.
But these references either occurred at the point when players either signed with or left
Italian clubs, or were brought up during longer interviews. Rarely was the foreign nativity
of Italian national team players mentioned in match coverage, though it did occasionally
occur in notes about Italian league matches when players first arrived from South America.
Conclusions
In a December 1934 profile focusing on the family life of Enrique Guaita, Il
Littoriale articulated hopes that he would recommence the university studies in Rome that
he had begun in Argentina.55 He was at the top of his game, coming off his World Cup
heroics, and when the Serie A season concluded a few months later Guaita sat decisively
atop the scoring list. After making the decision to move to Italy, he was developing into
53
Gordon and London, “Italy 1934: Football and Fascism,” 52.
Vittorio Pozzo, “I calciatori italiani alla presenza del Duce conquistano il campionato del
mondo,” La Stampa (Torino), June 11, 1934, 1.
55
“Guaita, idolo anche fra la pareti domestiche,” Il Littoriale (Milano), December 11, 1934, 1-2.
54
106
one of the best offensive talents in the country. And then, just as quickly as he had arrived
in the country, he was gone.
After just two seasons, Guaita raised perhaps the biggest questions about nationality
and patriotism when he found himself at risk of being drafted into military service in
Ethiopia. Attempting to escape conscription, he was caught with his Roma teammates
Scopelli and Stagnaro at the Italy-France border.56 Even though Guaita (as well as Scopelli)
had represented the nation in international competition, Italians turned on these individuals
as imposters who were shirking their civic duties and exploiting their dual nationality in
opposition to Fascist values.
By 1935, when Italy embarked on its campaign in Ethiopia, any lingering
propaganda value from the World Cup had dissipated both home and abroad. Thus, the
project to incorporate Italo-Argentine talent into the Italian national team can be viewed in
retrospect as having mixed results. The lasting impact of the World Cup victory was to
cement soccer’s place within the Fascist sport project. Oriundi players were the
beneficiaries of official attitudes toward nationality that deliberately avoided racial
definitions and provided the framework for including diasporic communities into
conceptions of national identity. Their inclusion in the 1934 World Cup team was a
successful endeavor insomuch as they played pivotal roles in allowing Italy to win the 1934
World Cup on home soil.
Beyond that, though, the legacy of the players themselves is far more conflicted.
Despite the official line that individuals of Italian lineage were Italian citizens, there was
still an undercurrent of skepticism as to the patriotism of Italo-Argentine players. While
56
Martin, “Football and Fascism: Foreign Bodies on Foreign Fields,” 101.
107
Mussolini, the government, and much of Italian society were willing to accept the sons and
grandsons of Italian immigrants as legitimate representative of the nation, there were limits
to how patriotic these players really were toward their adopted country. Now that the
structural factors that allowed Italo-Argentine players to integrate into the Italian league
and the Italian national team are clearer, it is now time to answer to what extent these
Argentine-born players viewed themselves as Italian.
108
5. CONCLUSION: THE LIMITS OF ITALIANITÀ IN THE
AFTERMATH OF THE 1934 WORLD CUP
Vittorio Pozzo was willing to justify playing Argentine-born players by arguing,
“If they can die for Italy, they can play for Italy!” As a journalist as well as the manager of
the national team, he played a major role in scripting the narrative about these players in
ways that downplayed their foreign attributes and accentuated the ways in which they were
no different than other Italians. Pozzo had a clear incentive to believe his own agitprop, as
the questions about these players’ patriotism cast the legitimacy of an Italian-won World
Cup in a skeptical light.
As dual citizens who carried Italian nationality, the four men from Argentina who
represented Italy in 1934 were certainly eligible to be conscripted into Mussolini’s
militaristic projects. The question underpinning this research, though, is not whether these
four men could die for Italy, but rather whether they and other Argentine-born players were
willing to die for Italy. Guaita’s case is certainly the most visible repudiation by these
individuals of their desire to bear arms for the Italian state. But there are clear indications
that his actions mirrored the hesitation of other players when it came time to represent Italy
in anything more than an athletic context.
The limits to the patriotism of oriundi athletes was evident from Orsi’s arrival. As
Tutti gli Sports noted in its profile on Orsi upon his arrival in 1928, he entered the country
109
“free from any military commitment.”1 This had always been the biggest argument against
including oriundi from Argentina and elsewhere on the Italian national team. There is no
indication that other players who followed Orsi overseas received this same preferential
treatment from the Fascist government. But, as discussed above in the last chapter
regarding the limited media opposition to oriundi representing the Italian national team,
the primary argument against their inclusion almost always stemmed from this perceived
lack of military obligation to the nation.
Over the next few years after the World Cup victory in Rome, many of the oriundi
who helped Italy win the championship began to trickle back to South America. The Guaita
case presented in the previous chapter offers the most salacious evidence for eschewing
Italian identity, but it is hardly the only example. There seems to have been a clear limit to
identifying as Italian among these Argentine-born players, who for the most part chose to
return to South America after their playing careers had concluded.
By April 1935, Orsi had taken advantage of his exemption from military service
and departed from Genoa back to Buenos Aires. He expressed his regret for having to leave
Italy, and contended that he would not play soccer again in Argentina. La Stampa was
skeptical about the notion that Orsi would return to play again either for Juventus or for the
azzurri. Though he ostensibly left due to his mother’s poor health, the press was quick to
note that he presented an Argentine passport at customs as he boarded the steamer for the
transatlantic voyage.2 The skepticism was well-founded, as Orsi went on to play nine more
seasons for clubs in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile.
1
2
“Raimondo Orsi in Italia,” Tutti gli sports (Napoli), October 14-21, 1928, 4.
“Orsi dichiara a Genova,” La Stampa (Torino), April 8, 1935, 6.
110
Atilio Demaria, one of the reserves on the 1934 World Cup team, returned to
Argentina after the World Cup to fulfill his national service as an Argentine citizen.
Perceived as “compromising the good name of Fascist Italy,” such actions were anathema
to the all-or-noting dialectic that marked Fascist discourse.3 After fulfilling his duties as an
Argentine citizen, Demaria returned to Italy in 1938 and played for four Italian clubs until
his retirement in 1948. But he eventually made his way back to Buenos Aires, where he
lived until his death in Haedo in 1990.
Ideologically, Fascism is an anti-individualist doctrine that “stresses the importance
of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of
the State” and emphasizes militaristic collective nationalism.4 Because the doctrine rejects
individualism, it also rejects what Mussolini called “the absurd conventional lie of political
equalitarianism” that is a hallmark of liberalism.5 It is a totalitarian ethos in which “all the
political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation... circulate within the State” in a way
that demands “discipline, the coordination of efforts, [and] a deep sense of duty and a spirit
of self-sacrifice” from the populace.6 Orsi, Monti, Demaria, and Guaita each eschewed this
line of reasoning as they navigated between nationalities.
As the trend line illustrated in the chart on page 92, the dependence on oriundi
talent waned throughout Italian soccer after 1935. Having benefitted from the infusion of
athletic talent and technical skill that had developed among the diaspora communities of
Argentina and elsewhere within South America, there was little left to be gained either
3
Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini, 196.
Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, “The Doctrine of fascism,” originally published 1932,
trans. 1935, accessed via SMU.edu December 8, 2016,
http://faculty.smu.edu/bkcarter/THE%20DOCTRINE%20OF%20FASCISM.doc, 4.
5
Mussolini and Gentile, “The Doctrine of fascism,” 13.
6
Mussolini and Gentile, “The Doctrine of fascism,” 19-20.
4
111
domestically or internationally in continuing to utilize foreign-born talent. As a generation
came of age, raised from youth in a Fascist society, there was also less incentive to risk the
special dispensations and individualism that marked the lived experiences of the oriundi
who played in Italy under the restrictions of the Carta di Viareggio.
Ultimately, the Italian sports project under the Fascist regime was as ideologically
chameleon as the broader political theory of Fascism as articulated by Mussolini. Born as
“a doctrine of action” that was less inclined to account for long-term impacts of decisions
in favor of style over substance, Italy was willing to grant special dispensations to players
when it was beneficial to their immediate goals.7 After the World Cup, South American
professionalism and the questionable patriotism of Italo-Argentine players shifted the
impact of dual nationalism and forced clubs and the national team to rethink the
composition of their rosters.
By 1936, when Vittorio Pozzo led a group of Italian-born university students to the
Olympic gold medal in Berlin, the gap in talent between South American players and their
Italian counterparts had dissipated to the point where clubs had less incentive to look
overseas to stock their rosters. Once amateurism was dropped permanently in Argentine
soccer, the economic pull factor dissipated and only an appeal to family heritage seemed
like a rationale for playing overseas. South American oriundi continued to join Italian
clubs, but their numbers as a percentage of the total number of professionals steadily
dropped through the latter half of the 1930s.
Over time, these foreign stars were viewed with nostalgia for their contributions to
Italy’s first World Cup title. Yet, even decades after they helped lead the azzurri to victory
Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2000), 24-25.
7
112
in 1934, players such as Orsi and Monti still felt the need to reiterate their Italian identities
in interviews with the Italian press.8 The fact that there remained questions about the
national identity of these players long after their retirement indicates the ephemeral quality
of Fascist efforts to sell oriundi as Italians, but they also operated in ways that were
anathema to Fascist principles. The fact that these athletes were still compelled to repeat
these expressions of patriotism, long after Fascist control of Italian politics had dissipated
and despite their achievements being mythicized in the historical record, seems to indicate
that even they were never entirely sure where they stood within the broader context of
Italian history.
Oriundi contributions to the Italian national team did not entirely end after 1934.
While there were no Argentine-born players on the 1938 World Cup team that repeated as
champions, Uruguayan-born Michele Andreolo was in the starting eleven for all four of
Italy’s matches in France.9 With the tournament interrupted by World War II, Andreolo
represented the end of an era. He would be the last oriundi to represent Italy in World Cup
play for more than two decades.
The 1962 tournament in Chile saw the azzurri turn toward four South Americanborn players to bolster the roster. Two of the players, Omar Sívori and Humberto Maschio,
had arrived in Italy for the 1957-1958 season to great fanfare from Argentina. When
Argentina requested their return to participate for their native country in the 1958 World
8
Giulio Accatino, “Orsi e Monti, con nostalgia,” La Stampa (Torino), June 7, 1973, 20.
Cervi, “Azzurro oriundo, ma serve in un Mondiale?,” GQ Italia, published June 9, 2014,
https://www.gqitalia.it/sport/calcio/mondiali-calcio/2014/06/09/azzurro-oriundo-mumo-orsipaletta-i-mondiali-dei-naturalizzati/; “1938 FIFA World Cup France: Matches,” FIFA.com,
accessed May 2, 2017, http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/france1938/matches/index.html.
9
113
Cup in Sweden, the Italian federation turned down the request. After one season in Serie
A, Italy was already working to clarify whether these players were eligible to represent
their own national team.10
What we learn from this incident,
however,
is
limited.
dynamics
within
the
The
global
Figure 14. Photo of Omar Sívori
political
soccer
community come to the forefront, as the
case plays out on an administrative level.
Nobody seems to have inquired, at least in
the press, as to whether these players had
any desire to represent Argentina in
international play. Instead, much as it had
been when Orsi, Monti, Demaria, and
Guaita were among the most prominent
South Americans plying their trade for
Italian soccer clubs, the decision to move
to Italy seems to have been perceived (or
Source: “Enrique Omar Sívori, el último
carasucia,” El Gráfico, August 25, 2015,
http://www.elgrafico.com.ar/2015/08/25/C8330-enrique-omar-sivori-el-ultimocarasucia.php.
at least sold) as a tacit acceptance of Italian
identity.
Though they would not play for either Argentina or for Italy at the 1958 World
Cup, Sívori and Maschio were joined by Brazilian-born oriundi José Altafini and Angelo
Sormani on the 1962 Italian World Cup team. Altafini followed a similar path to Monti, in
10
“Sivori chiesto dall'Argentina per i mondiali di calcio,” Stampa Sera (Torino), February 19,
1958, 5.
114
that he started three matches for Brazil during the team’s 1958 World Cup title run.11
Arriving in Italy for the season immediately following the World Cup in Sweden, Altafini
seems to have been predisposed to take on Italian citizenship and represent the azzurri in
part due to the glut of talent available to the Brazilians.
Italy bounced out of the tournament before the knockout stage, but each of the four
oriundi managed to start at least one of the three matches during the group stage.12 Maschio
had his nose broken in the second match, felled by a left hook from Chile’s Leonel Sánchez
in the second half of Italy’s second Group B match. The “Battle of Santiago” saw two
Italian players sent off by English referee Ken Aston, three interruptions for police to
restore order on the playing field, and numerous injuries as Chile prevailed 2-0.13
While players such as English-born Giuseppe Wilson and Libyan-born Claudio
Gentile would represent Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, no other South American oriundi
took the field for the azzurri in World Cup play during the rest of the twentieth century.
Four decades after the 1962 World Cup, Mauro Camoranesi became the first oriundo of
the twenty-first century. Born in Tandil in 1976, Camoranesi capitalized on his genealogy
that included a great-grandfather who had left the Marche region for Argentina more than
a century before Camoranesi’s birth to represent Italy fifty-five times in international
competition.14
11
“1958 FIFA World Cup Sweden: Matches,” FIFA.com, accessed May 2, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/sweden1958/matches/index.html.
12
“1962 FIFA World Cup Chile: Matches,” FIFA.com, accessed May 2, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/chile1962/matches/index.html.
13
Scott Murray, Georgina Turner, and Sean Ingle, “The Knowledge: The greatest-ever European
Cup thrashings,” The Guardian, published November 6, 2003, accessed April 30, 2017,
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2003/nov/06/theknowledge.sport.
14
Greg Lea, “Arrigo Sacchi and Italian football's ethical dilemma about foreign players,” The
Guardian, published February 18, 2015, accessed May 2, 2017,
115
Camoranesi became a mainstay for
Figure 15. Photo of Mauro Camoranesi
Italy soon after making his first appearance
for the national team in 2003. He was part
of the 2006 roster that won Italy’s first
World Cup in twenty-four years, starting
four of the team’s seven matches on the
way to the championship.15 Four years
later, he was a substitute in two of three
matches as the Italians defended their
world title by exiting the 2010 World Cup
in South Africa after the group stage.16
Later in his career, though, Camoranesi
returned to his native Argentina to play the
last years of his career. In an interview
Source: Matthew Ashton, “Mauro
Camoranesi,” EMPICS/Getty Images, March
26, 2005.
with FIFA soon after leaving Europe and
returning to South America, he acknowledged missing Italy. “Yes, sometimes I get the
urge to go back. I’ve got a house there and it’s where I spent many years of my life.”
https://www.theguardian.com/football/these-football-times/2015/feb/18/arrigo-sacchi-italyfootball-ethical-dilemma-racism-foreign-players.
15
“2006 FIFA World Cup Germany: Matches,” FIFA.com, accessed May 2, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/germany2006/matches/index.html.
16
“2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa: Matches,” FIFA.com, accessed May 2, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/southafrica2010/matches/index.html.
116
Expanding on the sentiment, he noted, “I do have moments when I miss my home, my
friends and certain customs. The feeling washes over me sometimes.”17
Those feelings of nostalgia, though, have not been enough to inspire his return to
the country. Instead, he has commenced a coaching career that has involved stops in
Mexico and Argentina. In a similar fashion to the oriundi stars of the 1934 World Cup and
the players that were on the 1962 World Cup roster, Camoranesi retains ties to Italy largely
due to his career and history with the Italian national team. One can imagine Camoranesi
giving a similar interview to the one Orsi and Monti conducted in the 1970s, where he will
reassert his Italian heritage and identity.
Gabriel Paletta, the only other Argentine-born oriundo to play for Italy in a World
Cup match, did so when he started in the 2-1 win over England during the group stage of
the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.18 Like every previous generation of foreign-born talent to
suit up in the azzurri, Paletta has been forced to confront his own heritage and how it fits
into the story. “I grew up in Argentina but I feel Italian when I think of my greatgrandfather,” Paletta said in 2015. “He wanted his children to return to Calabria with some
extra money in their pockets, so he could say he’d done what he set out to do. In a certain
sense, wearing the azzurri would complete his journey.”19
17
“Camoranesi: Football can be very cruel,” FIFA.com, published April 4, 2011, accessed May 3,
2017, http://www.fifa.com/news/y=2011/m=4/news=camoranesi-football-can-very-cruel1411576.html.
18
“2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil: Matches,” FIFA.com, accessed May 2, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/brazil2014/matches/index.html.
19
Lea, “Arrigo Sacchi and Italian football's ethical dilemma about foreign players,” The
Guardian, published February 18, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/football/these-footballtimes/2015/feb/18/arrigo-sacchi-italy-football-ethical-dilemma-racism-foreign-players.
117
One imagines that Orsi, Monti, Demaria, and Guaita were confronted by this range
of emotions as well when they were assessing whether to move to Italy to embark on a
professional career in Serie A. In many cases, Argentine-born players spent long careers in
Italy, and like Camoranesi they became accustomed to the lifestyle in their adopted
country. For the sons of Italian immigrants, even those whose mothers were not Italian,
this connection to the land of their fathers would have been even stronger than the
connective pull which drew Paletta to represent Italy at the most recent World Cup.
Italy had a clear incentive to incorporate these individual talents into their national
team. And the mission was indeed accomplished, as Italy improved its overall talent pool
thanks to the wider policy of allowing Italian clubs to sign foreign-born talent with Italian
ancestry. Along with Brazilian-born Anfilogino Guarisi, the four Argentine-born stars who
helped steer Italy to the World Cup title over Czechoslovakia in Rome had any number of
reasons why they might choose to represent Italy. There were plenty of sociocultural
factors at play that emphasized the Italian influence on Argentine society in the early
twentieth century, helping reinforce their familial links as Italians were accepted more
broadly by the ruling sectors of Argentina.
The example set by Orsi, Monti, Demaria, and Guaita in going overseas for
employment echoed the generations of Italian agricultural migrants who wandered back
and forth across the Atlantic to capitalize on hemispheric seasonal patterns and maximize
their earning power. They were also part of a wider soccer talent shift that presaged the
modern global marketplace for soccer stars. While most players still choose to represent
the nation in which they were born for international competition, the example of
118
Camoranesi and Paletta shows that this is hardly an absolute even under modern FIFA
guidelines that are far stricter about eligibility requirements.
Ultimately, what we can learn from the four oriundi stars of 1934 is an important
lesson about the fluidity of national identity. Ethnicity is not an inborn trait, and the ability
to identify with multiple nationalities on different levels is possible even among those who
are not physically gifted enough to consider representing a nation in international sport.
These men made a calculus that included economic considerations, family history,
competitive quality, the chance to win championships, and any other number of
conditioned responses to Italian identity when they decided to make the transatlantic
journey to play in Italy.
While the Fascist government in Italy was all too happy to coopt their talents, it
was ultimately the players themselves who read their options and recognized that they
could make more money in Italy. At the same time, they could fulfill family dreams of
returning from South America after finding success overseas. In this way, men like Orsi,
Monti, Demaria, and Guaita were proxies who were helping carry out ancestral longings.
The opportunity that existed to play in Italy was the result of the structural push and pull
factors that existed on both sides of the Atlantic.
The agency to join Italian clubs, to represent the Italian national team, and even to
abandon obligations to the state outside of soccer were all within the players’ hands.
Because they were theoretically capable of fighting and dying for Italy on the battlefield,
they were eligible to pull on the azzurri and represent the country on the pitch. But in the
case of the four World Cup stars from Argentina, none actually chose to take the Fascist
government up on that offer.
119
APPENDICES
This section provides several charts and tables that were too large to fit legibly into
the main body of the thesis. The data provide more detailed information on the ItaloArgentine players who ultimately made their way to play for Italian league clubs (Appendix
A) and a look at where the four Italo-Argentine players who suited up for Italy in 1934 fit
into the broader history of foreign-born players who represented other national teams on
the World Cup stage (Appendix B).
Appendix A: Italo-Argentine Players in Italy Before World War II
NAME
Francisco Mosso
Benito Mosso
Eugenio Mosso
Angelo Badini
Emilio Badini
Cesare Badini
Augusto Badini
Júlio Mosso
Júlio Libonatti
Artur Quini Ludueña
Raimundo Orsi
César Bertolo
Domingo Bertolo
José Carlos Ponzinibio
Alejandro Giglio
Nicolás Italo Lombardo
Rodolfo Orlando Orlandini
Juán Fernando Pratto
Guillermo Stábile
Eugenio Castellucci
Angel Capuano
José "Pepito" Agosto
Juán Esposto
Luís Monti
Atilio Demaria
Juan Maglio
Alberto Bernasconi
Franco Ponzinibio
Félix Demaria
Carlos Volante
Carlos Garavelli
José Carlos Miliozzi
Antonio Ganduglia
Enrique Guaita
Alejandro Scopelli
Andrés Stagnaro
Attilio Bernasconi
Francisco Garraffa
Alfredo De Vincenzi
Roberto Allemandi
Evaristo Vicente Barrera
Antonio Ferrara
Mario Evaristo
Juán Salvador Rizzo
Silvio Bonino
José Spirolazzi
Emanuel Interlandi
DOB
4/10/1892
11/5/1894
8/10/1895
9/23/1894
8/4/1897
1898?
1900?
1899
7/5/1901
10/21/1904
12/2/1901
9/19/1911
5/25/1913
5/30/1906
8/30/1905
3/13/1903
1/1/1905
6/6/1903
1/17/1906
4/21/1903
1/25/1910
1/22/1914
3/7/1907
4/15/1901
3/19/1909
2/22/1904
9/15/1912
7/16/1914
4/27/1912
11/5/1905
4/6/1911
3/20/1910
5/14/1907
7/11/1910
5/12/1908
11/19/1907
9/23/1905
5/17/1910
6/9/1907
1/8/1912
12/30/1911
4/4/1912
12/10/1908
6/7/1906
1/20/1913
9/21/1915
10/22/1915
BIRTHPLACE
Mendoza
Mendoza
Mendoza
Rosario
Rosario
Rosario
Rosario
Mendoza
Rosario
Canodà de Gomez
Avellaneda
Rosario
Rosario
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Haedo
Lanús
Las Perdices
Suipacha
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Avellaneda
Buenos Aires
Oliva
Rosario
San Fernando
Buenos Aires
La Plata
Leones
Rojas
Tucumán
121
IN ITALY
1912 1922
1912 1915
1912 1925
1913 1921
1913 1920
1915 1918
1918 1926
1920 1923
1925 1937
1926 1934
1928 1935
1929 1943
1929 1941
1930 1931
1930 1932
1930 1936
1930 1936
1930 1936
1930 1935
1930 1931
1931 1936
1931 1939
1931 1939
1931 1939
1931 1948
1931 1932
1932 1937
1932 1944
1932 1935
1931 1934
1932 1948
1932 1933
1932 1934
1933 1935
1933 1936
1933 1935
1933 1934
1934 1943
1934 1936
1934 1940
1934 1948
1934 1939
1935 1936
1935 1938
1934 1943
1935 1950
1935 1940
CLUB(S)
Torino
Torino
Torino
Bologna
Bologna
Bologna
Bologna
Torino
Torino
Roma
Juventus
6 clubs
4 clubs
Milan
Genoa
Roma, Pisa
Genoa
Genoa
Genoa, Napoli
Juventus
Genoa, Napoli
4 clubs
Genoa, Lecco
Juventus
4 clubs
Juventus
Varese
6 clubs
Inter
3 clubs
8 clubs
Inter
Genoa, Pisa
Roma
Roma
Roma
Torino
3 clubs
Inter
3 clubs
7 clubs
3 clubs
Genoa
3 clubs
7 clubs
7 clubs
Messina
NAME
Angel Rosso
Arcangel Di Reda
Juán Pozzi
Rizieri Vallari
Víctor José Pozzo
Antonio Campilongo
Tomás Garibaldi
Francisco Providente
Eduardo Rossi
Cataldo Spitale
Silvestro Pisa
Miguel Angel Pantò
Pedro Pablo Pompei
José Juán Compagnucci
Enrique Flamini
Aldo Raccone
Alberto Fazio
Anselmo Pisa
Salvador Gualtieri
Hugo Lamanna
Américo Luís Menutti
Américo Ruffino
Angel Raccone
DOB
8/28/1915
1/10/1912
12/20/1916
11/7/1911
12/1/1914
11/18/1911
4/8/1914
1/1/1914
11/2/1909
10/5/1911
4/4/1916
11/26/1911
12/19/1913
7/24/1917
4/17/1917
9/17/1919
9/15/1918
7/4/1918
5/14/1917
3/3/1913
5/1/1915
7/27/1905
2/12/1915
BIRTHPLACE
Buenos Aires
Mar del Plata
Rosario
Rosario
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Rosario
Rosario
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
IN ITALY
1936 1938
1936 1943
1936 1937
1936 1938
1938 1949
1939 1940
1939 1941
1939 1941
1939 1941
1939 1941
1939 1943
1939 1947
1939 1951
1934 1951
1939 1955
1939 1941
1940 1943
1940 1943
1940 1951
1941 1947
1941 1947
1927 1936
1933 1953
CLUB(S)
Alessandria
Foggia, Savoia
Fano
Mantova
8 clubs
Roma
Genoa
Roma
Albenga
Roma
Lazio
Roma
4 clubs
6 clubs
3 clubs
Derthona
Lazio
Lazio, Inter
3 clubs
Atalanta
Bari, Lecce
5 clubs
4 clubs
SOURCE: The data was primarily drawn from Davide Rota, “List of Argentine Players in Italy
before 1945,” Rec.Sports.Soccer Statistics Foundation, updated May 22, 2014, accessed February
7, 2017, http://www.rsssf.com/players/arg-players-in-it.html. Data was also cross-checked against
club rosters from those seasons using a combination of online club player databases, newspaper
searches, and FIFA data for players who participated in international competition.
NOTES: Players listed in BOLD played for the Italian national team during their time in Italy.
This list does not include Renato Cesarini and Nicolás Ferrara, who were born in Italy and then
migrated to Argentina as children. Cesarini was born in Ancona but moved to Buenos Aires as an
infant. Cesarini played for five clubs in Argentina before moving to Juventus in 1929, where he
played for six seasons before returning to finish his career in Buenos Aires. Ferrara was born in
Chiaromonte, but also migrated in his first years of life. His brother, Antionio, was born in
Argentina after the family emigrated from Italy and is included on the list.
122
Appendix B: Foreign-Born World Cup Representatives
YEAR
1930
1934
1938
PLAYER
Pedro Suárez
Ernest Libérati
Émile Veinante
Alexandre Villaplane
Alfred Eisenbeisser
László Raffinsky
Andy Auld
Jim Brown
Jimmy Gallagher
Bart McGhee
George Moorhouse
Alexander Wood
Pedro Cea
Lorenzo Fernández
Constantino Urbieta Sosa
Géza Kalocsay
Joseph Alcazar
Roger Courtois
Joseph Gonzales
Fritz Keller
Émile Veinante
István Avar
Jeno Vincze
Mario Varglien
Enrique Guaita
Anfilogino Guarisi
Luis Monti
Raimundo Orsi
Attilio Demaria
Beb Bakhuys
István Klimek
Lazar Sfera
Ramón Zabalo
Walter Dick
Jimmy Gallagher
Willie McLean
George Moorhouse
Werner Nilsen
Herman Rapp
Joseph Nelis
Charles Vanden Wouwer
Karel Burkert
Jean Bastien
Abdelkader Ben Bouali
Michel Brusseaux
Hector Cazenave
Roger Courtois
BIRTHPLACE
Santa Brigida, ESP
Oran, ALG
Metz, GER
Algiers, ALG
Chernivtsi, UKR
Miskolc, HUN
Stevenston, SCO
Kilmarnock, SCO
Kirkintilloch, SCO
Edinburgh, SCO
Liverpool, ENG
Lochgelly, SCO
Redondela, ESP
Redondela, ESP
Asunción, PAR
Beregszász, Austria-Hungary
Oran, ALG
Geneva, SUI
Béni Saf, ALG
Strasbourg, GER
Metz, GER
Arad, ROU
Vrsac, SRB
Fiume, Austria-Hungary
Buenos Aires, ARG
São Paulo, BRA
Buenos Aires, ARG
Avellaneda, ARG
Buenos Aires, ARG
Pekalongan, IDN
Timisoara, HUN
San Mihai, SRB
South Shields, ENG
Kirkintilloch, SCO
Kirkintilloch, SCO
Clydebank, SCO
Liverpool, ENG
Skien, NOR
Stuttgart, GER
Tutbury, ENG
Teignmouth, ENG
Ujpest, HUN
Oran, ALG
Sendjas, ALG
Oran, ALG
Montevideo, URU
Geneva, SUI
123
REPRESENTED
Argentina
France
France
France
Romania
Romania
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
Uruguay
Uruguay
Argentina
Czechoslovakia
France
France
France
France
France
Hungary
Hungary
Italy
Italy
Italy
Italy
Italy
Italy
Netherlands
Romania
Romania
Spain
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
Belgium
Belgium
Czechoslovakia
France
France
France
France
France
YEAR
1938
1950
1954
PLAYER
Julien Darui
Lucien Jasseron
Auguste Jordan
Ignace Kowalczyk
César Povolny
Émile Veinante
Mario Zatelli
Wilhelm Hahnemann
Hans Mock
Leopold Neumer
Hans Pesser
Rudolf Raftl
Willibald Schmaus
Stefan Skoumal
Josef Stroh
Franz Wagner
Jeno Vincze
Michele Andreolo
Silviu Bindea
Vasile Chiroiu
Ioachim Moldoveanu
Gheorghe Rasinaru
László Raffinsky
Robert Sadowski
Lazar Sfera
Alfred Bickel
Alessandro Frigerio
Ernst Lörtscher
Eugen Walaschek
Roberto Capparelli
Francisco Urroz
Alfred Bickel
Jacques Fatton
Hans-Peter Friedländer
Geoff Coombes
Joe Gaetjens
Gino Gardassanich
Joe Maca
Ed McIlvenny
Walter Johannes Stein
Adam Wolanin
Ernesto Vidal
Walter Schleger
Abderrahmane Mahjoub
Abdelaziz Ben Tifour
Richard Herrmann
Josef Posipal
Mihaly Toth
Carlos Blanco
Hong Deok-Young
BIRTHPLACE
Oberkorn, LUX
Oran, ALG
Linz, AUT
Castrop, GER
Recklinghausen, GER
Metz, GER
Sétif, ALG
Vienna, AUT
Vienna, AUT
Vienna, AUT
Vienna, AUT
Vienna, AUT
Vienna, AUT
Vienna, AUT
Vienna, AUT
Vienna, AUT
Vrsac, SRB
Carmelo, URU
Blaj, HUN
Nagykomios, HUN
Marosujvar, HUN
Szaszsebes, HUN
Miskolc, HUN
Chernivtsi, UKR
San Mihai, SRB
Eppstein, GER
Tumaco, COL
Bucharest, ROU
Moscow, RUS
[unknown], ARG
Higuerote, VEN
Eppstein, GER
Exincourt, FRA
Berlin, GER
Lincoln, ENG
Port-au-Prince, HAI
Rijeka, CRO
Brussels, BEL
Greenock, SCO
Vienna, AUT
Lviv, UKR
Buje, CRO
Prague, CZE
Casablanca, MAR
Hussein Dey, ALG
Katowice, POL
Lugoj, ROU
Bezdan, YUG
Madrid, ESP
Hamheung, PRK
124
REPRESENTED
France
France
France
France
France
France
France
Germany
Germany
Germany
Germany
Germany
Germany
Germany
Germany
Germany
Hungary
Italy
Romania
Romania
Romania
Romania
Romania
Romania
Romania
Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland
Bolivia
Chile
Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
Uruguay
Austria
France
France
West Germany
West Germany
Hungary
Mexico
South Korea
YEAR
1954
1958
1962
1966
1970
1974
PLAYER
Choi Chung-Min
Chu Yung-Kwang
Norbert Eschmann
Jacques Fatton
Basri Dirimlili
Juan Hohberg
Walter Schleger
Just Fontaine
Célestin Oliver
Carlos Blanco
John Hewie
Dimitar Yakimov
Frantisek Schmucker
Humberto Maschio
José Altafini
Omar Sivori
Angelo Sormani
Yozhef Sabo
Alfredo di Stéfano
Ferenc Puskás
Eulogio Martínez
José Santamaría
Roberto Frigerio
Norbert Eschmann
Dimitar Yakimov
Néstor Combin
Héctor De Bourgoing
Vicente
Hilário
Mário
Eusébio
Yozhef Sabo
Erwin Vandendaele
Dimitar Yakimov
Alexander Vencel
David Primo
Zvi Rosen
Itzhak Shum
Mordechai Spiegler
George Borba
Yisha’ayahu Schwager
Rachamim Taibi
Lajos Satmareanu
Vasile Gergely
Jack Reilly
Doug Utjesenovic
Peter Wilson
Manfred Schaefer
Ray Richards
Jimmy Rooney
BIRTHPLACE
Pyongyang, PRK
Pyongyang, PRK
Besançon, FRA
Exincourt, FRA
Darstor, ROU
Córdoba, ARG
Prague, CZE
Marrakech, MAR
Mostaganem, ALG
Madrid, ESP
Pretoria, RSA
Slegovo, MKD
Horvatjarfalu, HUN
Avellaneda, ARG
Piracicaba, BRA
San Nicolás, ARG
Jaú, BRA
Ungvar, HUN
Buenos Aires, ARG
Budapest, HUN
Asunción, PAR
Montevideo, URU
Le Havre, FRA
Besançon, FRA
Slegovo, MKD
Las Rosas, ARG
Posadas, ARG
Lourenço Marques, MOZ
Lourenço Marques, MOZ
Inhaca, MOZ
Lourenço Marques, MOZ
Ungvar, HUN
Metz, FRA
Slegovo, MKD
Ilva Mare, ROU
[unknown], BUL
Köln, GER
Chisinau, MDA
Sochi, RUS
Macerata, ITA
[unknown], POL
Vidin, BUL
Nagyszalonta, HUN
Nagybanya, HUN
Stonehaven, SCO
Belgrade, SRB
Felling, ENG
Baltiysk, RUS
Croydon, ENG
Dundee, SCO
125
REPRESENTED
South Kores
South Korea
Switzerland
Switzerland
Turkey
Uruguay
Austria
France
France
Mexico
Scotland
Bulgaria
Czechoslovakia
Italy
Italy
Italy
Italy
Soviet Union
Spain
Spain
Spain
Spain
Switzerland
Switzerland
Bulgaria
France
France
Portugal
Portugal
Portugal
Portugal
Soviet Union
Belgium
Bulgaria
Czechoslovakia
Israel
Israel
Israel
Israel
Israel
Israel
Israel
Romania
Romania
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
YEAR
1974
1978
1982
1986
PLAYER
Jimmy Mackay
Attila Abonyi
Adrian Alston
Peter Ollerton
Ivo Rudic
Dave Harding
Johnny Watkiss
Branko Buljevic
Peter Ducke
Herbert Wimmer
Giuseppe Wilson
David Harvey
Christian Lopez
Jean-Paul BertrandDemanes
Claudio Gentile
Ramón Quiroga
Bruce Rioch
Rubén Cano
Nourredine Kourichi
Ali Fergani
Faouzi Mansouri
Bernd Krauss
Terry Butcher
Jean-François Larois
Christian Lopez
Jean Tigana
Gérard Soler
Claudio Gentile
Ahmed Al-Tarabulsi
Brian Turner
Dave Bright
Bobby Almond
Duncan Cole
Steve Wooddin
Steve Sumner
Sam Malcolmson
Adrian Elrick
John Hill
Allan Boath
Billy McClure
Jimmy Nicholl
Chris Nicholl
Ramón Quiroga
Roberto López Ufarte
Nourredine Kourichi
Fathi Chebal
Faouzi Mansouri
Rachid Harkouk
Halim Benmabrouk
BIRTHPLACE
[unknown], SCO
Budapest, HUN
Preston, ENG
Preston, ENG
Split, CRO
Liverpool, ENG
Willenhall, ENG
Split, CRO
Benesov nad Ploucnici, CZE
Eupen, BEL
Darlington, ENG
Leeds, ENG
Aïn Témouchent, ALG
Casablanca, MAR
REPRESENTED
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
Australia
East Germany
West Germany
Italy
Scotland
France
France
Tripoly, LBY
Rosario, ARG
Aldershot, ENG
San Rafael, ARG
Ostricourt, FRA
Onnaing, FRA
Menzel, TUN
Dortmund, GER
Singapore
Sidi Bel Abbès, ALG
Aïn Témouchent, ALG
Bamako, MLI
Oujda, MAR
Tripoli, LBY
Beirut, LIB
East Ham, ENG
[unknown], ENG
London, ENG
[unknown], ENG
Birkinhead, ENG
Blackpool, ENG
Dalbeattie, SCO
Aberdeen, SCO
Belfast, NIR
Dundee, SCO
Liverpool, ENG
Hamilton, CAN
Wilmslow, ENG
Rosario, ARG
Fez, MAR
Ostricourt, FRA
Lyon, FRA
Menzel, TUN
Chelsea, ENG
Lyon, FRA
Italy
Peru
Scotland
Spain
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Austria
England
France
France
France
France
Italy
Kuwait
New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Peru
Spain
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
126
YEAR
1986
1990
PLAYER
Tino Lettieri
Carl Valentine
Gerry Gray
Branko Segota
Igor Vrablic
Randy Samuel
Paul James
Dave Norman
Colin Miller
Sven Habermann
Terry Butcher
John Barnes
William Ayache
Luis Fernández
Jean Tigana
Matthias Herget
Jimmy Nicholl
Bernard McNally
Jorge Amado Nunes
Richard Gough
Andy Goram
Oleh Kuznetsov
Alexandre Guimaräes
Terry Butcher
John Barnes
Tony Dorigo
Graeme Rutjes
John van ‘t Schip
Henk Fraser
Aron Winter
Stanley Menzo
Chris Morris
Mick McCarthy
Paul McGrath
Ray Houghton
John Aldridge
Tony Cascarino
Kevin Sheedy
David O’Leary
Andy Townsend
Chris Hughton
Bernie Slaven
John Sheridan
David Kelly
John Byrne
Alan McLoughlin
Gerry Peyton
Richard Gough
Andy Goram
Stuart McCall
BIRTHPLACE
Bari, ITA
Manchester, ENG
Glasgow, SCO
Rijeka, CRO
Bratislava, SVK
Point Fortin, TRI
Cardiff, WAL
Glasgow, SCO
Hamilton, SCO
Berlin, GER
Singapore
Kingston, JAM
Algiers, ALG
Tarifa, ESP
Bamako, MLI
Annaberg-Buchholz, GDR
Hamilton, CAN
Shrewsbury, ENG
Berazategui, ARG
Stockholm, SWE
Bury, ENG
Magdeburg, GER
Maceió, BRA
Singapore
Kingston, JAM
Adelaide, AUS
Sydney, AUS
Fort St. John, CAN
Paramaribo, SUR
Paramaribo, SUR
Paramaribo, SUR
Newquay, ENG
Barnsley, ENG
Ealing, ENG
Glasgow, SCO
Liverpool, ENG
St. Paul’s Cray, ENG
Builth Wells, WAL
Stoke Newington, ENG
Maidstone, ENG
Forest Gate, ENG
Castlemoat, SCO
Stretford, ENG
Birmingham, ENG
Manchester, ENG
Manchester, ENG
Birmingham, ENG
Stockholm, SWE
Bury, ENG
Leeds, ENG
127
REPRESENTED
Canada
Canada
Canada
Canada
Canada
Canada
Canada
Canada
Canada
Canada
England
England
France
France
France
West Germany
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Paraguay
Scotland
Scotland
Soviet Union
Costa Rica
England
England
England
Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Scotland
Scotland
Scotland
YEAR
1990
1994
1998
PLAYER
Oleh Kuznetsov
Mike Windischmann
Tab Ramos
Robert Prosinecki
Josip Weber
Carlos Trucco
Gustavo Quinteros
Darío Rojas
Luis Cristaldo
Minas Hantzidis
Savvas Kofidis
Ulrich van Gobbel
Aron Winter
Efan Ekoku
Karl Petter Løken
Terry Phelan
Paul McGrath
Andy Townsend
Ray Houghton
John Aldridge
John Sheridan
Alan Kernaghan
Phil Babb
Tommy Coyne
Tony Cascarino
Eddie McGoldrick
Alan McLoughlin
David Kelly
Jason McAteer
Alan Kelly, Jr.
Sergei Gorlukovich
Yuriy Nikiforov
Vladislav Ternavsky
Andrei Piatnitski
Valeri Karpin
Omari Tetradze
Ilya Tsymbalar
Viktor Onopko
Sergei Yuran
Christophe Ohrel
Nestor Subiat
Thomas Dooley
Hugo Pérez
Earnie Stewart
Tab Ramos
Roy Wegerle
Frank Klopas
Fernando Clavijo
Ivica Vastic
Gordan Vidovic
BIRTHPLACE
Magdeburg, GER
Nuremburg, GER
Montevideo, URU
Schwenningen, GER
Slavonski Brod, CRO
Córdoba, ARG
Santa Fe, ARG
Buenos Aires, ARG
Formosa, ARG
Kettwig, GER
Alma-Ata, KAZ
Paramaribo, SUR
Paramaribo, SUR
Manchester, ENG
Karlskoga, SWE
Manchester, ENG
Ealing, ENG
Maidstone, ENG
Glasgow, SCO
Liverpool, ENG
Stretford, ENG
Otley, ENG
Lambeth, ENG
Govan, SCO
St. Paul’s Cray, ENG
Islington, ENG
Manchester, ENG
Birmingham, ENG
Tranmere, ENG
Preston, ENG
Baruny, BLR
Odessa, UKR
Kiev, UKR
Tashkent, UZB
Narva, EST
Velospiri, GEO
Odessa, UKR
Luhansk, UKR
Luhansk, UKR
Strasbourg, FRA
Buenos Aires, ARG
Bechhofen, GER
Morazán, SLV
Veghel, NED
Montevideo, URU
Pretoria, RSA
Prosymna, GRE
Maldonado, URU
Split, CRO
Sarajevo, BIH
128
REPRESENTED
Soviet Union
United States
United States
Yugoslavia
Belgium
Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia
Greece
Greece
Netherlands
Netherlands
Nigeria
Norway
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Russia
Russia
Russia
Russia
Russia
Russia
Russia
Russia
Russia
Switzerland
Switzerland
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
Austria
Belgium
YEAR
1998
2002
PLAYER
Luís Oliveira
Mbo Mpenza
Joseph-Désiré Job
Goran Juric
Anthony Seric
Robert Prosinecki
Mario Stanic
Ardian Kozniku
Krunoslav Jurcic
Vladimir Vasilj
Brian Laudrup
Patrick Vieira
Marcel Desailly
Roberto Di Matteo
Fitzroy Simpson
Marcus Gayle
Andy Williams
Robbie Earle
Deon Burton
Frank Sinclair
Darryl Powell
Paul Hall
Wagner Lopes
Gharib Amzine
Ali Elkhattabi
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink
Clarence Seedorf
Edgar Davids
Aron Winter
Espen Baardsen
Roberto Acuña
Ricardo Ismael Rojas
Neil Sullivan
Matt Elliott
Jonathan Gould
Joan Antonio Pizzi
Cláyton
Thomas Dooley
Earnie Stewart
Tab Ramos
Roy Wegerle
David Regis
Jeff Agoos
Preki
Slobodan Komljenovic
Branko Strupar
Mbo Mpenza
Joseph-Désiré Job
Anthony Seric
Robert Prosinecki
BIRTHPLACE
São Luis, BRA
Kinshasa, ZAI
Vénissieux, FRA
Mostar, BIH
Sydney, AUS
Schwenningen, GER
Sarajevo, BIH
Gjakova, KOS
Grude, BIH
Hanover, GER
Vienna, AUT
Dakar, SEN
Accra, GHA
Schaffhausen, SUI
Bradford-on-Avon, ENG
Hammersmith, ENG
Toronto, CAN
Newcastle-under-Lyme, ENG
Reading, ENG
London, ENG
London, ENG
Manchester, ENG
Franca, BRA
Montbéliard, FRA
Schiedam, NED
Paramaribo, SUR
Paramaribo, SUR
Paramaribo, SUR
Paramaribo, SUR
San Rafael, CA, USA
Avellaneda, ARG
Posadas, ARG
Sutton, ENG
Wandsworth, ENG
Paddington, ENG
Santa Fe, ARG
São Luis, BRA
Bechhofen, GER
Veghel, NED
Montevideo, URU
Pretoria, RSA
La Trinité, MTQ
Geneva, SUI
Belgrade, SRB
Frankfurt, GER
Zagreb, CRO
Kinshasa, ZAI
Vénissieux, FRA
Sydney, AUS
Schwenningen, GER
129
REPRESENTED
Belgium
Belgium
Cameroon
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Denmark
France
France
Italy
Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica
Japan
Morocco
Morocco
Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
Netherlands
Norway
Paraguay
Paraguay
Scotland
Scotland
Scotland
Spain
Tunisia
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
United States
Yugoslavia
Belgium
Belgium
Cameroon
Croatia
Croatia
YEAR
2002
PLAYER
Josip Simunic
Stjepan Tomas
Boris Zivkovic
Niko Kovac
Mario Stanic
Robert Kovac
Vladimir Vasilj
Jan Michaelsen
Owen Hargreaves
Patrick Vieira
Marcel Desailly
Claude Makélélé
Oliver Neuville
Miroslav Klose
Gerald Asamoah
Alessandro Santos
Gabriel Caballero
Efe Sodje
Roberto Acuña
Emmanuel Olisadebe
Abel Xavier
Petit
Jason McAteer
Matt Holland
Kevin Kilbane
David Connolly
Gary Breen
Dean Kiely
Clinton Morrison
Andy O’Brien
Steven Reid
Lee Carsley
Alan Kelly, Jr.
Yuriy Nikiforov
Viktor Onopko
Valeri Karpin
Sergei Semak
Sylvain N’Diayé
Habib Beye
Zoran Pavlovic
Amir Karic
George Koumantarakis
Cha Du-Ri
Curro Torres
Tobias Linderoth
Selim Benachour
Cláyton
Yıldıray Baştürk
Muzzy Izzet
Tayfur Havutçu
BIRTHPLACE
Canberra, AUS
Bugojno, BIH
Zivinice, BIH
Berlin, GER
Sarajevo, BIH
Berlin, GER
Hanover, GER
Nantes, FRA
Calgary, CAN
Dakar, SEN
Accra, GHA
Kinshasa, ZAI
Locamo, SUI
Opole, POL
Mampong, GHA
Maringá, BRA
Rosario, ARG
Greenwich, ENG
Avellaneda, ARG
Warri, NGA
Nampula, MOZ
Strasbourg, FRA
Tranmere, ENG
Bury, ENG
Preston, ENG
Willesden, ENG
London, ENG
Salford, ENG
Tooting, ENG
Harrogate, ENG
Kingston-upon-Thames, ENG
Birmingham, ENG
Preston, ENG
Odessa, UKR
Luhansk, UKR
Narva, EST
Sychanske, UKR
Paris, FRA
Suresnes, FRA
Tuzla, BIH
Orahovica Donja, BIH
Athens, GRE
Frankfurt am Main, GER
Ahlen, GER
Marseille, FRA
Paris, FRA
São Luis, BRA
Herne, GER
London, ENG
Hanau, GER
130
REPRESENTED
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Denmark
England
France
France
France
Germany
Germany
Germany
Japan
Mexico
Nigeria
Paraguay
Poland
Portugal
Portugal
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Rep. of Ireland
Russia
Russia
Russia
Russia
Senegal
Senegal
Slovenia
Slovenia
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sweden
Tunisia
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkey
Turkey
YEAR
2002
2006
PLAYER
İlhan Mansız
Ümit Davala
David Regis
Jeff Agoos
Earnie Stewart
Pablo Mastroeni
Carlos Llamosa
Archie Thompson
Victor Núñez
Guy Demel
Abdoulaye Méïté
Emerse Faé
Josip Simunic
Niko Kovac
Robert Kovac
Mario Tokic
Joey Didulica
Stjepan Tomas
Ivan Klasnic
Anthony Seric
Owen Hargreaves
Jean-Alain Boumsong
Patrick Vieira
Claude Makélélé
Oliver Neuville
Miroslav Klose
Gerald Asamoah
Lukas Podolski
Otto Addo
Ferydoon Zandi
Simone Perrotta
Mauro Camoranesi
Alessandro Santos
Sinha
Guillermo Franco
Roberto Acuña
Petit
Deco
Ivan Ergic
Ognjen Koroman
Savo Milosevic
Oliver Kovacevic
Mladen Krstajic
Danijel Ljuboja
Mariano Pernía
Marcos Senna
Tobias Linderoth
Johan Djourou
Blerim Dzemaili
Valon Behrami
BIRTHPLACE
Kempten, GER
Mannheim, GER
La Trinité, MTQ
Geneva, SUI
Veghel, NED
Mendoza, ARG
Palmira, COL
Otorohanga, NZL
Santo Domingo, DOM
Orsay, FRA
Paris, FRA
Nantes, FRA
Canberra, AUS
Berlin, GER
Berlin, GER
Derventa, BIH
Geelong, AUS
Bugojno, BIH
Hamburg, GER
Sydney, AUS
Calgary, CAN
Douala, CMR
Dakar, SEN
Kinshasa, ZAI
Locamo, SUI
Opole, POL
Mampong, GHA
Gliwice, POL
Hamburg, GER
Emden, GER
Ashton-under-Lyne, ENG
Tandil, ARG
Maringá, BRA
Itajá, BRA
Corrientes, ARG
Avellaneda, ARG
Strasbourg, FRA
São Bernardo do Campo, BRA
Sibenik, CRO
Pale, BIH
Bijeljena, BIH
Split, CRO
Zenica, BIH
Vincovci, CRO
Buenoa Aires, ARG
São Paulo, BRA
Marseille, FRA
Abidjan, CIV
Tetovo, MKD
Mitrovica, KOS
131
REPRESENTED
Turkey
Turkey
United States
United States
United States
United States
Unitd States
Australia
Costa Rica
Côte d’Ivoire
Côte d’Ivoire
Côte d’Ivoire
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
Croatia
England
France
France
France
Germany
Germany
Germany
Germany
Ghana
Iran
Italy
Italy
Japan
Mexico
Mexico
Paraguay
Portugal
Portugal
Serbia & Montenegro
Serbia & Montenegro
Serbia & Montenegro
Serbia & Montenegro
Serbia & Montenegro
Serbia & Montenegro
Spain
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland
YEAR
2006
2010
PLAYER
Thomas Dossevi
Robert Malm
Eric Akoto
Richmond Forson
Alaixys Romao
Ludovic Assemoassa
Shaka Hislop
Ian Cox
Chris Birchall
Karim Essediri
Alaeddine Yahia
Mehdi Nafti
Francileudo Santos
Adel Chedli
Chaouki Ben Saada
David Jemmali
Hamed Namouchi
Andriy Nesmachniy
Artem Milevskiy
Vladyslav Vashchuk
Pablo Mastroeni
Madjid Bougherra
Nadir Belhadj
Antar Yahia
Yazid Mansouri
Ryad Boudebouz
Medhi Lacen
Abdelkader Ghezzal
Rafik Djebbour
Habib Bellaïd
Karim Matmour
Karim Ziani
Adlène Guedioura
Carl Medjani
Hassan Yebda
Foued Kadir
Djamel Abdoun
Raïs M’Bolhi
Gonzalo Higuaín
Dario Vidosic
Nikita Rukavytsya
Benoît Assou-Ekotto
Sébastien Bassong
Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting
Jorge Valdivia
Mark González
Matías Fernández
Guy Demel
Sol Bamba
Patrice Evra
BIRTHPLACE
Chambray-lès-Tours, FRA
Dunkerque, FRA
Accra, GHA
Aflao, GHA
L’Haÿ-les-Roses, FRA
Lyon, FRA
London, ENG
London, ENG
Stafford, ENG
Paris, FRA
Colombes, FRA
Toulouse, FRA
Zé Doca, BRA
La Ricamarie, FRA
Bastia, FRA
Toulouse, FRA
Cannes, FRA
Bryansk, RUS
Minsk, BLR
Ashgabat, TKM
Mendoza, ARG
Longvic, FRA
Saint-Claude, FRA
Mulhouse, FRA
Revin, FRA
Colmar, FRA
Paris, FRA
Décines-Charpieu, FRA
Grenoble, FRA
Bobigny, FRA
Strasbourg, FRA
Sèvres, FRA
La Roche-sur-Yon, FRA
Lyon, FRA
Saint-Maurice, FRA
Martigues, FRA
Montreuil, FRA
Paris, FRA
Brest, FRA
Osijek, CRO
Mykolaiv, UKR
Arras, FRA
Paris, FRA
Hamburg, GER
Maracay, VEN
Durban, RSA
Caballito, ARG
Orsay, FRA
Ivry-sur-Seine, FRA
Dakar, SEN
132
REPRESENTED
Togo
Togo
Togo
Togo
Togo
Togo
Trinidad & Tobago
Trinidad & Tobago
Trinidad & Tobago
Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia
Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine
United States
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Algeria
Argentina
Australia
Australia
Cameroon
Cameroon
Cameroon
Chile
Chile
Chile
Côte d’Ivoire
Côte d’Ivoire
France
YEAR
2010
2014
PLAYER
Steve Mandanda
Miroslav Klose
Lukas Podolski
Piotr Trochowski
Cacau
Marko Marin
André Ayew
Quincy Owusu-Abeyie
Kevin-Prince Boateng
Sotiris Ninis
Loukas Vyntra
Avraam Papadopoulos
Mauro Camoranesi
Marcus Tulio Tanaka
Guillermo Franco
Edson Braafheid
Tim Brown
Shane Smeltz
David Mulligan
Tommy Smith
Peter Odemwingie
Jong Tae-Se
An Yong-Hak
Jonathan Santana
Lucas Barrios
Néstor Ortigoza
Rolando
Liédson
Danny
Pepe
Deco
Daniel Fernandes
Milos Krasic
Neven Subotic
Zdravko Kuzmanovic
Zlatko Dedic
Bongani Khumalo
Cha Du-Ri
Xherdan Shaqiri
Albert Bunjaku
Gélson Fernandes
Valon Behrami
Blaise Nkufo
Stuart Holden
Benny Feilhaber
Fernando Muslera
Cédric Si Mohamed
Madjid Bougherra
Faouzi Ghoulam
BIRTHPLACE
REPRESENTED
Kinshasa, ZAI
France
Opole, POL
Germany
Gliwice, POL
Germany
Tczew, POL
Germany
Santo André, BRA
Germany
Bosanska Gradiska, YUG
Germany
Seclin, FRA
Ghana
Amsterdam, NED
Ghana
Berlin, GER
Ghana
Himara, ALB
Greece
Město Albrechtice, CZE
Greece
Melbourne, AUS
Greece
Tandil, ARG
Italy
Palmeira d’Oeste, BRA
Japan
Corrientes, ARG
Mexico
Paramaribo, SUR
Netherlands
Congleton, ENG
New Zealand
Göppingen, GER
New Zealand
Liverpool, ENG
New Zealand
Macclesfield, ENG
New Zealand
Tashkent, UZB
Nigeria
Nagoya, JPN
North Korea
Kurashiki, JPN
North Korea
Buenos Aires, ARG
Paraguay
San Fernando, ARG
Paraguay
San Antonio de Padua, ARG
Paraguay
São Vicente, CPV
Portugal
Cairu, BRA
Portugal
Caracas, VEN
Portugal
Maceió, BRA
Portugal
São Bernardo do Campo, BRA Portugal
Edmonton, CAN
Portugal
Mitrovica, KOS
Serbia
Banja Luka, BIH
Serbia
Thun, SUI
Serbia
Bihac, BIH
Slovenia
Manzini, SWZ
South Africa
Frankfurt am Main, GER
South Korea
Gjilan, KOS
Switzerland
Gjilan, KOS
Switzerland
Praia, CPV
Switzerland
Mitrovica, KOS
Switzerland
Kinshasa, ZAI
Switzerland
Cults, SCO
United States
Rio de Janeiro, BRA
United States
Buenos Aires, ARG
Uruguay
Roanne, FRA
Algeria
Longvic, FRA
Algeria
Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, FRA
Algeria
133
YEAR
2014
PLAYER
Hassan Yebda
Medhi Lacen
Nabil Ghilas
Sofiane Feghouli
Yacine Brahimi
Carl Medjani
Nabil Bentaleb
Liassine CadamuroBentaïba
Saphir
Taïder
Aïssa Mandi
Riyad Mahrez
Mehdi Mostefa
Raïs M’Bolhi
Gonzalo Higuaín
Dario Vidosic
Anthony Vanden Borre
Emir Spahic
Sead Kolasinac
Muhamed Besic
Zvjezdan Misimovic
Mensur Mujdza
Izet Hajrovic
Allan Nyom
Joël Matip
Charles Itandje
Benoît Assou-Ekotto
Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting
Jorge Valdivia
Miiko Albornoz
Óscar Duarte
Sol Bamba
Giovanni Sio
Jean-Daniel Akpa-Akpro
Mathis Bolly
Eduardo da Silva
Mateo Kovacic
Sammir
Nikica Jelavic
Ivan Rakitic
Dejan Lovren
Vedran Corluka
Raheem Sterling
Rio Mavuba
Patrice Evra
Miroslav Klose
BIRTHPLACE
REPRESENTED
Saint-Maurice, FRA
Algeria
Paris, FRA
Algeria
Marseille, FRA
Algeria
Levallois-Perret, FRA
Algeria
Paris, FRA
Algeria
Lyon, FRA
Algeria
Lille, FRA
Algeria
Toulouse, FRA
Algeria
Castres, FRA
Algeria
Châlons-en-Champagne, FRA
Algeria
Sarcelles, FRA
Algeria
Dijon, FRA
Algeria
Paris, FRA
Algeria
Brest, FRA
Argentina
Osijek, CRO
Australia
Likasi, ZAI
Belgium
Dubrovnik, CRO
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Karlsruhe, GER
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Berlin, GER
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Munich, GER
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Zagreb, CRO
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Brugg, SUI
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Neuilly-sur-Seine, FRA
Cameroon
Bochum, GER
Cameroon
Bobigny, FRA
Cameroon
Arras, FRA
Cameroon
Hamburg, GER
Cameroon
Maracay, VEN
Chile
Stockholm, SWE
Chile
Catarina, NCA
Costa Rica
Ivry-sur-Seine, FRA
Côte d’Ivoire
Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, FRA Côte d’Ivoire
Toulouse, FRA
Côte d’Ivoire
Oslo, NOR
Côte d’Ivoire
Rio de Janeiro, BRA
Croatia
Linz, AUT
Croatia
Itabuna, BRA
Croatia
Capljina, BIH
Croatia
Möhlin, SUI
Croatia
Zenica, BIH
Croatia
Derventa, BIH
Croatia
Kingston, JAM
England
[born at sea off Angola coast]
France
Dakar, SEN
France
Opole, POL
Germany
134
YEAR
2014
PLAYER
Lukas Podolski
Albert Adomah
Jordan Ayew
André Ayew
Adam Kwarasey
Kevin-Prince Boateng
Panagiotis Kone
Loukas Vyntra
José Holebas
Daniel Davari
Steven Beitashour
Gabriel Paletta
Thiago Motta
Gotoku Sakai
Isaác Brizuela
Miguel Ángel Ponce
Jonathan de Guzmán
Bruno Martins Indi
Terence Kongolo
Peter Odemwingie
Nani
Éder
William Carvalho
Pepe
Diego Costa
Xherdan Shaqiri
Johan Djourou
Gélson Fernandes
Valon Behrami
Admir Mehmedi
Blerim Dzemaili
Fabian Johnson
Timmy Chandler
Jermaine Jones
Mix Diskerud
John Brooks
Fernando Muslera
BIRTHPLACE
REPRESENTED
Gliwice, POL
Germany
London, ENG
Ghana
Marseille, FRA
Ghana
Seclin, FRA
Ghana
Oslo, NOR
Ghana
Berlin, GER
Ghana
Tirana, ALB
Greece
Město Albrechtice, CZE
Greece
Aschaffenburg, GER
Greece
Giessen, GER
Iran
San Jose, CA, USA
Iran
Buenos Aires, ARG
Italy
São Bernardo do Campo, BRA Italy
New York, NY, USA
Japan
San Jose, CA, USA
Mexico
Sacramento, CA, USA
Mexico
Scarborough, CAN
Netherlands
Barreiro, POR
Netherlands
Fribourg, SUI
Netherlands
Tashkent, UZB
Nigeria
Praia, CPV
Portugal
Bissau, GNB
Portugal
Luanda, ANG
Portugal
Maceió, BRA
Portugal
Lagarto, BRA
Spain
Gjilan, KOS
Switzerland
Abidjan, CIV
Switzerland
Praia, CPV
Switzerland
Mitrovica, KOS
Switzerland
Gostivar, MKD
Switzerland
Tetovo, MKD
Switzerland
Munich, GER
United States
Frankfurt, GER
United States
Frankfurt am Main, GER
United States
Oslo, NOR
United States
Berlin, GER
United States
Buenos Aires, ARG
Uruguay
SOURCE: This list was compiled from World Cup rosters as listed on the FIFA website, and
cross-checked against newspaper sources from each period. FIFA World Cup rosters can be
accessed through “World Cup Index,” FIFA.com, accessed February 23, 2017,
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/index.html.
135
Appendix C: Baptismal Record of Raimundo Orsi
SOURCE: “Bautismos 1901-1902,” Parroquia Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (Avellaneda),
550 of 815. Via FamilySearch, digitized June 4, 2014, accessed March 9, 2017,
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939D-G6DP-D?mode=g&i=549.
136
Appendix D: Baptismal Record of Luis Monti
SOURCE: “Bautismos 1901-1902,” Parroquia San Juan Evangelista (Buenos Aires), 257 of
1012, Via FamilySearch, digitized May 14, 2016, accessed April 16, 2017,
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939D-GZTZ-H?i=256&wc=MDBG8NL%3A311514201%2C321662601%2C314274101&cc=1974184.
137
Appendix E: Baptismal Record of Atilio Demaria
SOURCE: “Bautismos 1909-1911,” Parroquia San Lucas Evangelista (Lucas González), 105 of
158. Via FamilySearch, digitized May 19, 2014, accessed March 11, 2017,
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:9396-8M96-M?i=104&wc=M8JT568%3A256498101%2C256498102%2C256508001&cc=1974185.
138
Appendix F: Baptismal Record of Enrique Guaita
SOURCE: “Bautismos 1909-1910,” Parroquia de San Bernardo (Buenos Aires), 286 of 800. Via
FamilySearch, digitized May 19, 2014, accessed April 19, 2017,
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939D-G6X6-3?mode=g&i=285&wc=MDBLZM3%3A311514201%2C319904101%2C312964801&cc=1974184.
139
NOTES ON PRIMARY SOURCES
The central issue in writing this thesis was how to balance two levels of narrative.
At once this is a story about the high-level structural factors that were taking place within
two national soccer federations and two national governments, and it is also an individual
narrative encompassing four biographies of the players at the heart of the thesis. At first
the lack of extant materials caused me to favor the structural approach, and that story is
still critical in advancing the narrative. But after receiving comments on an earlier draft
paper regarding this line of inquiry, I realized that the story could not be effectively told
without being able to weave in more biographical detail to help reveal the anecdotal impact
of the broader multinational dynamics at play. Without being able to ground this research
at a granular level, the underpinnings of the research would remain theoretical.
Working in sport history engages with figures who were publicly well-known, yet
there is often scant ephemera from individual players to be found in archives. Finding a
journal or a cache of correspondence from even one of the Argentine-born players who
went to Italy between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s might have eased the effort, but the
search for such material proved fruitless. Because no primary documentation of this nature
was accessible, if it indeed even exists at all, a different approach was needed to piece
together the stories of the four oriundi. Thus, finding a way to answer the questions at the
heart of the thesis required greater creativity and a willingness to incorporate a variety of
sources into the list of research materials.
140
This project could never have been completed without digital access to several
important primary source collections. For a group of players whose backgrounds have been
largely glossed over in the histories of both Argentine and Italian soccer, the FamilySearch
website has been indispensable in providing access to multiple sources of Argentine
documents. Parish records (see Appendices C-F) provided the first clues as to each player’s
genealogical history; hunting down the baptismal record for each of the four players
provided the names and nationalities of their respective parents, something which had not
turned up in any of the secondary research already conducted on the subject. Using this
information, I was then able to cross-check each player’s parents (and where relevant
grandparents) in the records of both the 1869 and 1895 Argentine national census, offering
a chance to learn more about their employment background and better understand the
family dynamics within each household.
From that basic genealogical work, I could then put into better perspective the
extensive Italian-language newspaper and sports magazine resources available from the
Fascist period via the digital archives of the Italian National Olympic Committee (Comitato
Olimpico Nazionale Italiano, henceforth CONI). This archive offers a searchable database
that provides access to Fascist periodicals such as Il Littoriale and Lo Sport Fascista as
well as independent publications including Tutti gli Sports and Corriere dello Sport.
Coupled with the digital database of La Stampa, the Torino-based newspaper that is among
the oldest continuously-published periodicals in the country, the Italian-language source
material presents a window into the period when South American players were playing an
integral role in the growth of Italian soccer.
141
The combination of genealogical information and media portrayals also allowed
each player to serve as a test case. Their stories allow for an evaluation as to how their
families fit into the demographic patterns revealed in the research of Baily and others. In
this way, the thesis builds upon these models to help further extrapolate what possible
motivations might have existed to inspire oriundi to represent Italy. This material helps
reveal not only the ways in which Argentine players were received in Italy and sold to the
public, but they also help illuminate the fact that contemporary audiences had a very real
understanding that the system was predicated on Italy’s Serie A maintaining a privileged
professional status vis-à-vis South American soccer leagues.
The one place where the primary research might ultimately be strengthened further
is in terms of incorporating more Argentine media resources into the analysis. The main
digital database for Latin American periodicals only contains material through 1922, which
predates the beginning of the period in which players signed professional contracts with
Italian clubs. A cache of periodicals from Rosario offered nothing in terms of relevant
material with which to formulate any better understanding. Hoping that this collection
would allow for an examination of how the movement of soccer players across the Atlantic
was perceived outside of Buenos Aires, its limitations in terms of search functionality,
discontinuity of volumes available, and periodicity instead prevented it from serving any
use in this thesis.
Time limitations precluded the possibility of obtaining microfilm of Argentine
periodicals. A further look through Spanish- and Italian-language newspapers from
Argentina, especially sports publications such as El Gráfico, could offer yet another
perspective on the perception of this talent shift. Without the direct evidence that this class
142
of sources might provide, though, secondary scholarship has helped to fill in those gaps
and buffer the impact of the material limitations that arose over the course of researching
and writing this thesis.
143
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