Knew: When reading this article, I already knew that Brazil was struggling with racial identity because of past articles that I had read and the class lectures. During the early 1900s, the Brazilian national team was unsure of letting players of African descent play on their team. Mostly, the Brazilian national soccer team was made up of white elite. However, when players of African descent first joined the Brazilian national soccer team, they were on the whiter side. Another thing I knew when reading this article was that Argentina viewed itself as a European nation based on class lectures. Argentina’s view as a European nation helps to explain its material wealth and racial exceptionalism. During the 1910s and 20s in Argentina, European racial ideologies of racial supremacy, scientific racism, and eugenics continued to command great influence.
New: One thing that was new to me was that 1912-1930 in Argentina was a period particularly rich in the production of popular culture. Crítica, established in 1913, ditched the old French daily model, which had 16 plus pages of classifieds and advertising at the front of the newspaper, for the splashy American-style front page, which grabbed readers’ attention with headlines. Another thing new to me from this article was that I had no idea that some Argentine newspapers wrote about Brazil in this way, where Brazilians were referred to as monkeys. Palacio Zino, the author of the article in Crítica about Brazil, wrote many articles similar to that one. However, none of his previous articles received formal diplomatic protests. What made this article different from the rest was timing. This newspaper article was published on October 3, 1920, the same day the Brazilian national team arrived in Buenos Aires. This article upset many of the Brazilian national teams that when they were supposed to play the Argentine national team a few days later, half of the Brazilian national team refused to take the field. This resulted in the Argentine and Brazilian national teams playing a game of seven-on-seven instead. Although this incident placed race at the center of its discussion of Brazil, many expressions of Argentine apprehension toward Brazil focused on geopolitical concerns rather than racial ones.
