When discussing the use of sports such as football to integrate immigrants into the national fold, one cannot help but study Brazil, especially that of Italian immigrants relations to each other and to the sport. The author, Gregg P. Bocketti offers up a case that sport such as football aided in both the maintaining of a separate, Italian ethnic identity among the immigrant communities in Brazil as well as offering gradual assimilation into the Brazilian nation through participation in the common sport.
For the case of maintaining ethnic identity, the Italian immigrants were not alone in forming football clubs based off their heritage. For example, in Brazil, the football club Portuguesa de Desportos was tied to the Portuguese national identity, along with the Sport Club Syrio, these were not uncommon in Brazil or in Latin America. Many of these ethnic clubs controlled recruitment with a preeminent focus on ties towards the community of origin during the selection process. This can be towards the detriment of poorer immigrant communities such as the Italians and other Southern European arrivals in Brazil whom did not have the resources to afford the best pitches, equipment, uniforms, and access towards the game. A grouping of problems familiar with the non-white Brazilian football players, who, while having de jure access to the Brazilian national team, many de facto couldn’t due to entrenched poverty along with lacking the connections and influence of different ethnic communities to get on the national team.
Palestra Italia, one of the ethnic based, Italian football clubs, came into being in 1914 by Sao Paulo Italian immigrants. It quickly grew to become a middle class club through its success on the football pitch as well as its skillful recruitment of talent within the Italian community in Sao Paulo. However, despite the club only playing in Italian communities, and practicing the recruitment of solely Italian footballers, it became more integrated into the Brazilian national fold due to its wealth. As a middle class and a working class club, it was more palpable to the Anglophile Brazilians due to its status as opposed to The Corinthians, a strictly working-class club out of the poor suburbs, along with any other football club that included players of color. The acceptance of Italian clubs such as Paestra Italia by the Brazilian football elite aided in the ethnic group’s assimilation into Brazilian society and culture over the next few generations. This is evident by the decline of ethnic centered community organizations with there being 392 mutual aid societies, schools, newspapers, churches, and sports clubs that had a focus on the Italian-Brazilian community in Sao Paulo in 1912, by the 1930’s there were around 100-150 of these organizations in Sao Paulo. While still plentiful, it represents more than a fifty percent decline in ethnocentric organizations, a key finding that indicates the assimilation of Italian immigrants into the Brazilian nation due to its acceptance in sports and in other facets of the national apparatus.
Photograph of the 1929 Paestra Italia club football team
