At Play | Overview

The At Play: Futbol in the Land of Football project started in Fall 2015, with a proposal for a class on the global history and local realities of soccer to the Honors College. The course description proclaimed “A ball, a field, at least five people: elements which have evolved into a global phenomenon, providing fodder for claims about national identity, and establishing the most watched activity ever. Soccer is too important to leave to fans. This course investigates the institutions, aesthetics, and ideologies shaping the game.” I wanted the class to research what soccer meant to people playing the game in central Texas, to use the tools of collaborative social history to turn soccer into a mirror on life in Texas.

Like many other historians, I [John Mckiernan-González] sought to capture a moment before the moment irrevocably changed.³ San Marcos, Round Rock, Georgetown, Cedar Park, and Austin have been among the top 10 fastest growing cities in the nation since the start of the new millennium. The movement of people from across the United States and the world to Central Texas has placed stresses on existing societies, a burden that can be seen in changing traffic patterns, rising rents, rising property taxes, a construction boom, a thriving knowledge economy and a growing discussion of the relationship of growth to quality of life. People express their tensions about these changes through bumper stickers like “keep Austin weird,” and “Don’t mess with Tejano Music” Cecilia Balli’s retort “If Austin is so great, why am I so unhappy,” sharply captures a wide frustration in her essay, “What nobody says about Austin.”⁴ Nationally, demographers and sociologists have pointed to Austin being possibly the most income-segregated metropolis in the United States, making Central Texas emblematic of the ways “the rich are walling themselves off” from the rest of us.⁵

I have been playing soccer in Texas since 2004, and what strikes me about the scene here in greater Austin is that people have built a space that dot-commers and construction workers, mechanics and teachers, nurses and state employees, waiters and C.F.Os share and have agreed to continue sharing, in order to continue playing full field soccer. As long-term Austin resident Kirsha Haverlah noted, “People from all walks of life come together to play this sport.”⁶ The central league, once the Austin Municipal Soccer Association and now Austin Men’s Soccer Association, is the largest single soccer league in Texas and perhaps the United States. The league shares fields and players with the Austin Co-ed Soccer Association and the Austin Women’s Soccer Association, playing on public parks, league-managed floodplains and – sometimes – Zilker Park. Nearly every Sunday, people drive close to an hour to fields in south, east, north and central Austin to touch base with their teammates and have their weekly communion with the gods of soccer, to become protagonists in “the drama of fortune in the world,” to be physically involved in a situation where managers and employees are all caught “in a relentless way, week after week, the incertainty, fluctuation and possible reversals offered by the present.”⁷  As Jacqueline Ibarra put it, “it’s the adrenaline.”⁸

With recent political developments changing the national conversation about who gets to play in the United States, I thought a public history project about who has been playing futbol in the land of football might resonate with many audiences.

Methods

The project’s methods are rooted in social history, ethnic studies, and collaborative public history. At Play started with essays by Texas State Honors College students on the place of soccer in their lives. The next stage in the At Play project then focused on people who had spent a large portion of their adult lives ferrying themselves to the fields to play. Students completed some of these interviews; I completed the majority of the interviews during my weekly communion with my fellow soccer believers. We asked players the same four intentionally open-ended questions:

• How did you become aware of soccer?
• When did you first start playing soccer?
• When did you start playing organized soccer?
• What keeps you playing soccer?

This consistency should allow readers to compare responses across three generations of players, given that the age range spans from 19 to 78. The majority of interviewees came from three randomly selected teams that had been playing together from the late 70s [The Romulans], the late 1980s [The (Travis High) Rebels], and the early 1990s [the (Del Valle) Grassy Stains]. These teams have won their divisions; these teams have been relegated from their divisions. What connects these three teams is that they have managed to play together for at least twenty years. They have weathered the ups and downs of a weekly “feast for the eyes that watch it and joy for the body that plays it.”⁹ They also randomly accepted my presence on their roster, making this a participant-observer sort of history.

Students then transcribed their interviews, turned them into profiles and shared them with each other. After reading the papers and analysis, students then submitted exhibit proposals for a project on soccer in Texas; I shared selected proposals with AMSA board members and they ranked the different proposals. I followed the coordinator’s lead and asked the student the Board representative selected to work on the collaborative history project.

Once the AMSA board staff had their say, the selected student and I started searching digitally searchable archival collections of central Texas based Spanish-language and English language papers for traces of futbol soccer in Texas. We then looked for place names and places in the interviews where people played soccer, be it in Texas or the world. We looked for sites in the newspaper collections to mark where people played, to put these games and players in the Texas landscape. The search for geographic markers in interviews and archival collections gave us a sense of where people played in the segregated spaces of Jim Crow and Sunbelt central Texas; the stories of people becoming soccer players gave us a sense of changes in the institutions that enabled adult play across the world as well as Central Texas.

<sub>1. Eduardo Galeano, Futbol en Sol y Sombra, (Barcelona & Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2015, 5ta edicion), 244
2. Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, (New York: Nationbooks, 2013), location 2661 of 3159.
3. Eric Hobsbawm, “Inventing Traditions,” Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, ed., The Invention of Tradition, (cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 2012), page#. See also Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 107-22
4. Cecilia Balli, “What Nobody Says About Austin: Is Austin the state’s most segregated city?” Texas Monthly, February 2013, https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/what-nobody-says-about-austin/, accessed 08/06/2018
5. Jim Tankersley & Ted Mellnik, “Exclusive neighborhoods, exclusive recovery,” Washington Post: the Divided American Dream: Wonkblog,” May 4, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonk/housing/charlotte/ , accessed 08/06/2018
6. John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, “interview with Kirsha Haverlah, 11/2017,” At Play, CSSW/atplay, citaton? URL?
7. Christian Bromberger, “Football as World-View and Ritual,” French Cultural Studies, 6 (1995): 204. From Laurent Dubois,
8. John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, “Interview with Jacqueline Ibarra, 08/04/2018” [website]
9. Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, kindle location 2653 of 3159.</sub>