Presenter: Zachary Bigalke
Mentors: Robert Haskett and Carlos Aguirre, History
Oral Presentation
Major: History
Bartolomé Mitre’s election as president in 1862 commenced a series of political, economic, and demographic developments that radically altered Argentine culture. Immigration fueled exponential population growth and rapid urbanization, and British capital drove a pattern of railroad construction that concretized Buenos Aires’ primacy as the political and financial capital of Argentina. The British also imported soccer, a sport that gradually gained purchase among the various immigrant groups as well as the extant population. Politics created the conditions by which the sport proliferated through the capital and the nation; in turn, soccer became an anchor in the political process after the 1912 enactment of universal, compulsory suffrage for all adult male citizens. Soccer clubs, already expanding in number throughout the country, became focal points for the construction of power bases for aspiring politicians. The dynamic processes that contributed to the development of modern Argentinian national identity molded and were molded by soccer’s evolution from a wholly British enterprise into a multiethnic national pastime. Through an evaluation of newspapers from the period as well as official publications from the various soccer federations of the sport’s early years, this paper builds upon previous studies that have evaluated facets of this subject to illuminate the inextricable push-pull factors linking soccer, immigration, and politics as essential elements in the formation of patriotic sociocultural identity through the presidency of Hipólito Yrigoyen.