El discurso histórico

The central issue in writing this thesis was how to balance two levels of narrative. At once this is a story about the high-level structural factors that were taking place within two national soccer federations and two national governments, and it is also an individual narrative encompassing four biographies of the players at the heart of the thesis. At first the lack of extant materials caused me to favor the structural approach, and that story is still critical in advancing the narrative. But after receiving comments on an earlier draft paper regarding this line of inquiry, I realized that the story could not be effectively told without being able to weave in more biographical detail to help reveal the anecdotal impact of the broader multinational dynamics at play. Without being able to ground this research at a granular level, the underpinnings of the research would remain theoretical.

Working in sport history engages with figures who were publicly well-known, yet there is often scant ephemera from individual players to be found in archives. Finding a journal or a cache of correspondence from even one of the Argentine-born players who went to Italy between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s might have eased the effort, but the search for such material proved fruitless. Because no primary documentation of this nature was accessible, if it indeed even exists at all, a different approach was needed to piece together the stories of the four oriundi. Thus, finding a way to answer the questions at the heart of the thesis required greater creativity and a willingness to incorporate a variety of sources into the list of research materials.

This project could never have been completed without digital access to several important primary source collections. For a group of players whose backgrounds have been

largely glossed over in the histories of both Argentine and Italian soccer, the FamilySearch website has been indispensable in providing access to multiple sources of Argentine documents. Parish records (see Appendices C-F) provided the first clues as to each player’s genealogical history; hunting down the baptismal record for each of the four players provided the names and nationalities of their respective parents, something which had not turned up in any of the secondary research already conducted on the subject. Using this information, I was then able to cross-check each player’s parents (and where relevant grandparents) in the records of both the 1869 and 1895 Argentine national census, offering a chance to learn more about their employment background and better understand the family dynamics within each household.

From that basic genealogical work, I could then put into better perspective the extensive Italian-language newspaper and sports magazine resources available from the Fascist period via the digital archives of the Italian National Olympic Committee (Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano, henceforth CONI). This archive offers a searchable database that provides access to Fascist periodicals such as Il Littoriale and Lo Sport Fascista as well as independent publications including Tutti gli Sports and Corriere dello Sport. Coupled with the digital database of La Stampa, the Torino-based newspaper that is among the oldest continuously-published periodicals in the country, the Italian-language source material presents a window into the period when South American players were playing an integral role in the growth of Italian soccer.

The combination of genealogical information and media portrayals also allowed each player to serve as a test case. Their stories allow for an evaluation as to how their families fit into the demographic patterns revealed in the research of Baily and others. In

this way, the thesis builds upon these models to help further extrapolate what possible motivations might have existed to inspire oriundi to represent Italy. This material helps reveal not only the ways in which Argentine players were received in Italy and sold to the public, but they also help illuminate the fact that contemporary audiences had a very real understanding that the system was predicated on Italy’s Serie A maintaining a privileged professional status vis-à-vis South American soccer leagues.

The one place where the primary research might ultimately be strengthened further is in terms of incorporating more Argentine media resources into the analysis. The main digital database for Latin American periodicals only contains material through 1922, which predates the beginning of the period in which players signed professional contracts with Italian clubs. A cache of periodicals from Rosario offered nothing in terms of relevant material with which to formulate any better understanding. Hoping that this collection would allow for an examination of how the movement of soccer players across the Atlantic was perceived outside of Buenos Aires, its limitations in terms of search functionality, discontinuity of volumes available, and periodicity instead prevented it from serving any use in this thesis.

Time limitations precluded the possibility of obtaining microfilm of Argentine periodicals. A further look through Spanish- and Italian-language newspapers from Argentina, especially sports publications such as El Gráfico, could offer yet another perspective on the perception of this talent shift. Without the direct evidence that this class of sources might provide, though, secondary scholarship has helped to fill in those gaps and buffer the impact of the material limitations that arose over the course of researching and writing this thesis.