Memory, history, and sports in the border: a hermeneutic view of football in Tijuana

Abstract

The following article has the objective of introducing some notions about football (or soccer) as a total social fact; it alludes to collective memory and history as part of its symbolic universe. In this sense, the understanding of sports opens the possibility of going further than the ludic aspect of the activity in order to link the sports with other social processes like the urban growth, migration and the genesis of institutions with great impact in the community. We use the concepts provided by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck ‘experience space’ and ‘expectative horizon’ to explain how Tijuana's inhabitants made football part of their identity construction. Both notions made possible the analysis of spots in the city connected to time concatenation between past and present, which includes a reflection about collective memory as a complex analytic category to discuss.