Critical Geographies of Sport by Natalie Koch

Author:Natalie Koch [Koch, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138927124
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Part II

Sports, community, and urban space

Chapter 9

Soccer and the mundane politics of belonging

Latino immigrants, recreation, and spaces of exclusion in the rural US South

Lise Nelson1

Introduction

“Oh, they don’t let Mexicans play on those fields.”

This matter-of-fact comment was made to me during a 2010 interview with Alejandro, a 33-year-old undocumented immigrant who had lived and worked in Rabun County, Georgia, for the previous 12 years.2 His comment emerged in the context of describing how, despite long hours on two different jobs to help support a wife and three children, he loves to play soccer at least once a week. Yet he had never played on the plentiful and often-empty sports fields that happened to be right next to where we were sitting during the interview (see Figure 9.1). His comment led me to ask about soccer as I continued to interview adult male Latinos for a larger study in Rabun County. These subsequent interviews, conducted between 2010 and 2012, repeatedly affirmed that Latino immigrants – documented or otherwise – were not allowed to play soccer on sports fields in the community. This is not a formal rule to be found in any recreation department handbook, but a de facto practice. The only space Latino immigrants could access for soccer was an abandoned parking lot, a space prone to serious injury and bloodletting (see Figure 9.2). Despite the dangers of playing on it, a group of 10–15 Latino men played on this concrete “field” almost nightly during the summer months during our visits to northern Georgia.

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