Racism in Argentine stadiums coexists with classism and migratory tradition

Saturday afternoon at the Boca Juniors stadium, the Bombonera. Boos can be heard as the day’s rivals, Barracas Central, enter the field. Soon after, the festive singing welcomes the local team, in a practically unique melody that goes until the end of the match, won by Boca with ease by 2 to 0.

Throughout the game, several of Boca’s “classical” songs are heard, from the romantic “Boca Mi Buen Amigo” to others with homophobic content (such as those referring to the opponent as “putos”, slang for homosexuals), classist (” villero”, inhabitant of the favelas) or racist (“morocho”, for mestizos and blacks). Even though the match is not against arch-rivals River Plate, there are constant threats to kill their fans or “burn the chicken coop” (River fans are identified as “gallinas”).

It is always difficult to make generalizations about nationalities and fans. But, just as passion and insult coexist in Argentine stadiums, fans interact in a more peaceful environment today than in the past, especially in matches played at home, since the presence of opposing fans in local football was no longer allowed. . “That made the stadiums, in a way, safer environments, in the sense that parents bring young children, you see families and couples, as if you were going to the movies”, he tells the Sheet the chronicler and football scholar Ezequiel Fernández Moores.

For Moores, sexist jokes or chants have been disappearing, due to the greater presence of women in the crowd and the acceptance of women’s football, as well as the feminist movement that is very strong in Argentina, having achieved several advances in recent years, among them the law that allows abortion only by the woman’s will.

In fact, next to the bleachers where the reporter was housed, a couple with two very young children sat down, one of them a baby, wearing a bib with the Boca crest. “Don’t you mind that your son is listening to all this swearing?” I ask. The father’s answer: “he doesn’t understand the words, and when he understands, he’ll know it’s all a joke, common stadium stuff. We come here as a family outing”, he says, as he takes the boy’s pacifier and teaches him singing “dale Bo, dale Bo” (the most common cry of breath).

Meanwhile, in the ring of bleachers below where the report is, you can hear the loudest screams and loaded with the most offensive words of the famous La 12, a controversial organized crowd that has links to politics.

To another fan, I asked what he thought of the arrest of a Boca supporter in Brazil for a racial offense. “That’s not racism. It’s fan jokes. The way to provoke Brazilians is to call them ‘monos’ (monkeys), as River’s are ‘gallinas’ and so on, it’s a tradition,” says another.

Boca Juniors and Corinthians will face each other again on May 17, for Libertadores.

“A tradition that is stupid, it is necessary to make it clear that it is racism. But I have not seen that, after someone calls a fan a ‘monkey’, a chorus is formed from that, these episodes have to be nuanced”, says the sports journalist Andrés Burgo, who was at the stadium on the day that a similar episode occurred in a match between River Plate and Fortaleza, on the 14th, when a fan of the Argentine club threw a banana into the Brazilian team’s rostrum. “Some laughed and applauded, but apart from this episode, it was a good atmosphere between the two groups of fans, they exchanged shirts. You can’t generalize.”

In all Argentine stadiums, this apparent tranquility coexists with the possibility of imminent violence and a shower of insults. According to data from Inadi (National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism), a government agency dedicated to reporting such episodes, in Argentina, skin color is the third type of discrimination in stadiums. The first two are the socioeconomic level and immigration. Those who frequent the playing fields often hear a lot of insults to foreign fans from countries in the region that make up the fans of the big teams, especially Peruvians, Bolivians and Paraguayans. There is a percentage of more than 30% of the population composition of the Argentine favelas that come from these countries.

Boca’s own fans are the target of xenophobic and racist songs, due to the fact that their fans are popular and the location of their stadium, in a neighborhood away from the center and marked by Italian immigration. One of them, for example, says: “The ‘bosteros’ (Boca fans) must be killed, they are all homosexuals, they are all slum dwellers, they must be thrown into the Riachuelo” (a tributary of the Rio de la Plata, which is close to the Bombonera ).

​For the social scientist Javier Bundío, who is dedicated to studying the chants of Argentine fans, the songs and battle cries to support the teams make up an environment of “stereotyped and evaluative representations that are censored in other spaces, there they are allowed” , says.

Bundío says that there is an essential particularity in the Argentine fans, where “the opposition between an enunciator who imagines himself European and white and a subject represented as Latin American and mestizo” is revealed. This initial opposition can be well demonstrated by the two stereotypes of mascots of fans of the biggest clubs in the country. On the Boca side is “Pedrín, el fainero”, who is dark-skinned and of Italian descent, is dedicated to making pizzas, on the other side is “el Millonario”, who is aristocrat, cultured and essentially white.

This dichotomy dates back to the 19th century, when Argentina’s reduced post-Independence elite began to promote continuous and intense European immigration campaigns, in an attempt, as politicians and intellectuals claimed, to “whiten the country”. But while presidents such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) expected that, with this, the Dutch, English or Germans would come, the ones who came the most were Italians and Spaniards, who were seen, by the looks and concepts of the time, as second-class Europeans. category, and who would occupy smaller jobs, such as commerce, gastronomy.

Although this is the origin of a certain classism in Argentine society, current political analysts believe that history cannot be used to justify abuses.

This dichotomy of the past, explains Bundío, went “from the comic to the tragic”, in the 1970s and 1980s, years of dictatorship and crisis in the country. “The support of the fans based on support for the team moved to confrontation. And the chants and battle cries show how from ironies they passed to insults, jokes, threats”, he says.

Also according to Andrés Burgo, “it is necessary to take one more step in the fight against racism in stadiums in Argentina, and it is not possible to do so until serious fines and punishments are applied. for education, to tackle the problem head-on”.