In the first article for this week’s readings, “The Early Evolution of Modern Sports in Latin America,” it really struck me how the author described the European intrusion of Latin America in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century as more of a cultural imperialism rather than colonization. It’s not something that I think people see when watching sports commonly associated with Latin America. I also think it’s a shock that many of these sports, such as soccer and cricket, are the practice of the middle class in western civilizations. In my opinion, imperialism is largely seen as a mother nation latching onto a vulnerable nation to exploit for financial resources. Britain is the prime example. Britain has colonized and capitalized on country after country for centuries, including some in Latin America during the prime age of Imperialism. I feel as though many associate imperialism with a loss of culture, which dont get me wrong; it can be, but Mangan’s article sees this period as more of a blending of cultures. Middle-class cultures became ingrained in Latin American cultures to create, as Mangan puts it, “a heritage of humankind.” While I do agree with Mangan that sports are an example of a kind of “good” merging of cultures, I do still believe that in a broader context, imperialism does much more harm for culture than good, as seen in Sotomayor’s article “The Triangle of Empire.” Instead of a merging of cultures through sports, as seen in Mangan’s article, we see an attempt to mold and purify a culture through athletics, an attempt that ultimately failed. I had known that the YMCA had been around for a long time, and I knew that it had some roots in Christianity, but I had never known that it was once used tried to been used as a tool for cultural colonization. In the past, I have learned about the military being a tool to “deliver” Christianity to “savage” cultures, but had no idea that the US military tried to force Christianity through athletics. Reading it, I thought, “they can’t be this stupid to think they could implement American values through sports?” but they were. And to see how Puerto Ricans took the sports from the YMCA but left the Westernization behind was phenomenal. Overall, I see both of these readings as examples of cultural imperialism in Latin America, but with vastly different views on what this phrase meant for people on both sides of the aisle.
