Atlanta Mexican community turns out for soccer
by Kate Brumback
ATLANTA (AP) With wide green, white and red stripes of body paint running down his bare chest and a giant sombrero on his head, Daniel Trujillo was one of thousands of festively dressed fans who turned out June 24 to watch the Mexican and Venezuelan national soccer teams play an exhibition match in Atlanta.
“We wanted to see them play because we are Mexican, and it’s an honor to have them come to Atlanta,” said Trujillo, 25, who moved to the United States from Guadelajara, Mexico, about six years ago and attended the game with his wife and two younger brothers.
“It’s the first time they’ve ever played in Georgia, and we wanted to be here for that,” said 27-year-old Sandra Trujillo, his wife, who had small green, white and red lines of paint on each cheek. “Let’s hope Mexico wins and that they have more games in Georgia in the future.”
More than 50,000 fans were expected to attend the friendly game at the Georgia Dome and the crowd seemed to favor Mexico almost exclusively. The lines of people streaming toward the stadium and attending a pre-game Futbol Fiesta event wore green soccer shirts or other green, white and red gear. Some had Mexican flags draped around their shoulders and many had their faces and hair painted in the flag’s colors.
For many, the game was a rare chance to actually see the players they are used to watching via satellite television. It was the Mexican national team’s first game in Atlanta and its first visit to the Southeast since an appearance in Birmingham, Ala., for the 1996 Olympic Games.
More than 40,000 advance tickets had been sold prior to game day and organizers expected more than 10,000 walk-up sales on game day, Georgia Dome spokeswoman Ashley Boatman said.
“I cannot think of a person in the Latino community here who does not know about this game,” said Salvador de Lara, Mexican consul general in Atlanta.
“Mexico is a country that has always had a strong interest in sports, and soccer has become one of the most important because it allows people from all different backgrounds to come together and play a game that is very complex but also very basic,” he said.
Jeffrey Lesser, a professor of Latin American history at Emory University who is in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for the summer researching a book on soccer, said he wasn’t surprised to hear the high attendance projections.
“For Latin Americans, and especially Latin American men and boys, soccer is the sport, in a way that we don’t understand in the U.S.,” he said. “There’s a level of engagement with it that we’re not used to.”
While sports fans in the United States tend to focus on rivalries within the country and don’t put as much emphasis on international competition, soccer games can elicit strong feelings of national pride in Latin America, Lesser said.
“It becomes a means by which Latin Americans, or Latin Americans in different countries, get to be the best in the world,” he said. “These matches are really kind of clashes between national cultures.”
As such, Lesser said, soccer can be a unifying force, bringing together people from different class backgrounds and different parts of a country to forget their differences and rally around their national team for a few hours.
De Lara said the fact that a game was held in Atlanta shows that organizers are finally realizing the significance of the large Latino community in the Southeast and said he hopes it will be the first of many games in the region.
The match-up was the third game of the Mexican squad’s 2009 U.S. tour. The team headed to San Diego next to play Guatemala. |
