Some Post-World Cup Thoughts on Language, Prejudice and Identity
I usually try to offer arguments here, however flawed. This post will have some arguments but the first part will be mainly about feelings. My feelings, those of an Irishman resident in Barcelona, deeply marked by his years in Argentina.
The World Cup final and its aftermath has had a useful effect in that it has disinhibited many people here, into expressing their true feelings about Argentine immigrants.
Football has acted as a socially acceptable pretext for saying things that would have been unacceptable in any other context. National sporting rivalry has licensed people to express prejudices that normally remain hidden behind progressive language.
My neighbours, who were silent for Spain’s victories throughout the tournament, went bananas when Spain scored against Argentina. Would they have reacted similarly if Spain had beaten, say, Ecuador or Colombia in the final? I doubt it, they are the acceptable face of Latin American immigration to Spain, they know their place, they keep their heads down.
Unlike other LatAm immigrants in Barcelona, Argentines don’t look or act grateful to be here, there is zero forelock tugging. They are perceived by some/many as loud and overconfident, so some of the people who live near me will have seen Sunday night’s result as particularly irritating immigrants getting what they deserved. And Catalans of a nationalist disposition are dismayed by our lack of interest in their language and cause.
The night of the game I had to block various Spanish mutuals on social media, people on the left like me, with whom I’d had many fun and interesting exchanges. They couldn’t content themselves with their well-deserved win but spewed hate against Argentina in general. One compared el Dibu to a guard at the ESMA concentration camp.
What struck me wasn’t criticism of the team’s goalkeeper or of Argentine football. That’s fine. It was the ease with which criticism of Martínez became sweeping judgments about an entire people: uncivilised, violent, emotionally stunted, morally suspect.
A lot of their language reflected classic orientalist stereotypes: we are polite and rational, they are violent and emotional, we take problems in our stride, they get upset too easily, they rely on their raw talent, we have systems and progress.
I haven’t come across a hint of self-awareness from progressive Spanish people about the irony of them criticizing their former colonial subjects like this, given that Spain once had a massive and brutal empire, and that the noble buildings of Barcelona were built with resources extracted by force from Latin America.
It’s not that Spaniards shouldn’t criticise Argentina. It’s that so many progressive Spaniards, ordinarily alert to colonial power relations down to the microagression level and everywhere else, seem remarkably uninterested in how those same dynamics might shape the language they use about Argentines.
What has surprised me is how one football match dissolved years of carefully cultivated anti-racist and anti-colonial language. Underneath, for a surprising number of people, there still seems to be an Argentina that is uncivilised, unstable and in need of instruction from Spain, of all places.
Experiencing that has made me feel much more identified with Argentina than I was before. I now regret not having done the paperwork to obtain Argentine citizenship when I lived there.
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I’m not the only one whose eyes have been opened. Many Argentine progressives spent years believing they belonged to a common international progressive culture. They studied in London, Paris or New York, read the same authors, attended the same conferences, supported the same causes and spoke the same political language. The World Cup has been a rude awakening for them. They have discovered that membership of that club is conditional. Many of their erstwhile comrades turned on them without a second thought.
For Argentina’s Judith Butler-reading intelligentsia, the episode has exposed an uncomfortable truth. However fluent they may be in the language of global progressive politics, they are still not regarded as intellectual or moral equals by many of their counterparts in Europe and North America.