Knew:
Coming into this reading I knew that modern Brazilian culture borrows aspects from many other countries, including soccer from England and their national language from Portugal. This reading also touched on aspects of colonialism in Brazil that I was familiar with due to the class I took on modern Latin America. I also knew that missionaries had huge impacts on virtually all of Latin America. Although the impacts discussed in this article are not shown in a particularly terrible light, most of everything else I have read or been taught on the subject has been negative.
New:
One idea that was new to me from this reading involved all of the different sport brought to Brazil by other European countries. The fact that England also introduced cricket and Germany introduced gymnastics, swimming, and boating was very interesting to me. The Scottish impact on soccer stemming from Charles Miller was also new to me. I had never considered how soccer finally got its foothold in Brazil and tracing it back to two company teams as the first real game reminded me of the early NFL teams (for example the Green Bay Packers were originally the Acme Packers). The impact that the YMCA and missionaries had on sports in Brazil is still seen today with sports like volleyball and basketball being some of the most popular and internationally successful. On that note, I was under the impression that Brazil was only internationally accomplished in soccer with FIFA championships in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002 and silver medals at the 1984 and 1988 Olympic games. It was new to me to find out that Brazil has also won world championships in women’s sports as well as Volleyball. The championships in women’s soccer were not super surprising, but the volleyball was a different story. With soccer being the much more dominant sport, it makes some sense why I was not familiar with the success Brazil has found in Men’s volleyball. But, I would have assumed that there would be more attention drawn to the success that men’s volleyball has found considering they won gold in 1992 and 2004 Olympics and first in FIVA championships in 2003 and 2007.
