“El Equipo del Pueblo”: The Making of Brazil as the “Latino” Team During the 1994 World Cup

This paper asks how did the Brazilian men’s national team become the team of choice for Latinx fans in the United States during the 1994 World Cup? Through this question, it gets at a larger one about Latin American and Latino cultural identity, and if and how Brazil fits as part of that construct. It has been long debated in Brazil, Spanish America, and beyond the Americas, about whether Brazil really is a constitutive part of the cultural fabric of Latin America? It is interesting to get at this larger question through the world cup, and to interrogate the soccer-specific stakes of that question; as well as, to consider Latino soccer fandom as related to adjacent questions about Latin American immigration and the evolving urban cultures of the US in the late-twentieth century. The paper touches on Latino communities in predominantly the Bay Area and Los Angeles, places where Brazil played several games apiece, and which include sizeable Latino populations and a vibrant Spanish-language media. It explores the street parties that raged on for days in Los Gatos, the affluent and predominantly white, suburb in the Bay Area where the Brazilian side was initially based; and, it follows the public festivities that erupted in Los Angeles around Brazil’s semi-final and final victories. The paper also draws on the Brazilian media’s perspective of this phenomenon, of Brazil becoming the ‘team of the people,’ or ‘el equipo del pueblo.’ Broadly, the paper situates the implications of this sporting phenomenon among the Latin American diaspora to expand our understandings about Latino urban cultures and its formations in relation to Latin America.