“It’s More Important Than the Oil”: Eugenics, the Ejidal Leagues, and the Federalization of Campesino Sport in Revolutionary Mexico, 1921–40

During the Porfiriato (1876-1911), sports participation largely served as an exclusionary practice among elites or foreign workers, but after the violence and instability of the early Mexican Revolution, military and cultural leaders looked to ancient Greek sporting philosophies, German gymnastics, Soviet socialist principles, and more to reinvent sporting culture in the country as something more incorporative. Indeed, in the 1920s and 1930s, a time when many enthusiastic rural federal teachers met violence and harsh resistance to the scientific doctrines of socialist education, sports and physical education programs found wide acceptance among communities as a form of entertainment and pastime, while officials, using eugenic principles, described it as “regenerative” for the Mexican race and believed it instilled modern principles such as hard work and discipline in its participants. 

In these decades, various physical education bureaus were developed, but rural regions drew the focus of the president, who often personally oversaw the cultivation of fields and the creation of regional and national sporting tournaments often referred to as "campesino" or "ejidal" championships. This process involved the centralization of disparate sporting programs and clubs under the official state party, giving campesinos direct access to the presidency to request sporting spaces, equipment, and other public works, and allowing the government easier channels to distribute aid and control curricula and bureaucracy. Most importantly, administrations prioritized the diffusion of sporting culture and considered it essential for the transformation of rural and "degenerate" masses, believed religiously fanatical and genetically sick, into a productive modern Mexican citizenry. This presentation argues that sporting programs and scientific philosophies helped reshape expectations for modern revolutionary citizenship in racial and gendered terms through the body.