“Y si sí?”: What if we refuse to let the wound be the only story? México and the World Cup.
Why is this defeat tan encarnada, lodged in the chest? Is it because fútbol has never just been fútbol for us? Eduardo Galeano, in Soccer in Sun and Shadow, writes that soccer’s history is “a sad voyage from beauty to duty,” and that the game, like our labor, like our land, gets converted into something to be extracted and managed by others. In Open Veins of Latin America, Galeano names the mechanism directly, writing, “our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others,” describing how the wealth of the colonizer has always been built on the poverty of the colonized. When México played England, the game became a small, compressed reenactment of five hundred years of that same history, the empire’s team, built on resources the empire never had to bleed for, against a nation still sanando la Conquista y la extraccion. “Y si sí?” isn’t really about a scoreline. It’s about wanting, for once, to rewrite history.
Get CGB’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, said there is a place where all these feelings live, “la herida abierta,” the open wound. She described the U.S.-México border as “an open wound where the lifeblood of two worlds is merging to form a third country,” a raw, unhealed seam that keeps reopening. Every time México steps onto a field against a colonial power, that llaga reopens, too. It’s not an exaggeration to call this political, it’s structural memory. Our need to prove we are “enough,” worthy of the same respect and dignity the colonizer never had to earn, is the same need Anzaldúa spent her life writing about, the emotional cost of living as people are constantly asked to justify their belonging. “Y si sí?” What if we refuse to let the wound be the only story? What if we dare to imagine we get to win, get to dream, get to see our people thrive despite everything designed to keep us small?
And this is why joy is not a distraction from politics, it is the politics. Galeano insisted that soccer’s real value lies in “soccer’s capacity for beauty,” in its dance, precisely because that beauty survives despite the “overlords” (FIFA) who try to reduce the game to pure business. Our joy works the same way. When we celebrate the goals and the saves, we insist that our capacity for beauty and excellence was never in question, only ever denied a stage. So, when I say “we needed this” in a moment when our communities are denied access to health, housing, education, economic and environmental justice, and when our people are surveilled, assaulted, and disappeared with impunity, I am not talking about football at all. I am talking about how people who are worn down by centuries of oppression still get to resist, still get to hope, and still get to say “y si sí?”.
