the adventures of dos tortas

When we moved to Mexico in 2013, we didn’t even know what the World Cup was. That changed quickly as life changed quickly in our adopted country and we became fans. Football is more than the Mexican national pastime, it’s THE national passion.

This week, Mexico’s passion spread to the entire world. The world tournament kicked off in Mexico City where El Tri (short for el Tricolor, three colors of the national flag, red, white, and green) beat South Africa by two points. I had traveled to my friend George’s house to watch in his “media room” in a comfy recliner with the largest television I’d ever had the pleasure of watching.

Mexico’s win against South Africa and then going on to beat South Korea set off a frenzy of celebration like only Mexico can do.

The following story showed up on my FB feed this morning which pens way better than I, the World Cup effect in the US. I must admit, my heart swells seeing the kindness, love and pride that USers have mustered in our painfully broken country. Thank you, football for bringing the world together in ways that I never could have imagined.

DOS TORTAS

I Was Wrong About the World Cup
How the world showed up, fell in love with ordinary America and reminded us why this country is still worth fighting for
by LADY LIBERTIE (Peter Brouwer)

I did not want this World Cup here.

Let me start there, because Lady Libertie must confess her sins before the congregation. I was angry at FIFA for coming to the United States while our country is in this much turmoil. I thought they should have refused. I thought the whole spectacle would be a five-week humiliation reel: foreigners gawking at us, mocking us, getting fleeced by our prices, bruised by our policing, stranded by our transit, and then flying home with fresh evidence that America had finally lost her marbles.

I imagined the worst version of it.

I imagined the world showing up to a country cracking down the middle and saying, “Good Lord, what happened to you people?”

And I was dead wrong.

Because what has unfolded instead is one of the sweetest, strangest, most culture-affirming things I have seen in a long time.

It has not felt like an invasion. It has felt like a great big international sleepover where everybody brought a flag, learned one another’s songs, got sunburned, ate too much, cried at midfield and discovered that America is not only the place they see in disaster clips, shooting headlines, political horror shows and social media sneer-posts.

America is also a Boston bar full of Scots belting out “Take Me Home, Country Roads” like West Virginia had just annexed Glasgow.

America is a Boston police officer juggling a soccer ball while a crowd of international fans loses its entire mind because, for one minute, nobody is performing a culture war. They are just watching a guy in uniform do keepie-uppies in the street, and the whole crowd becomes eight years old.

America is turning Fenway Park into a Scottish annex after Scotland’s first World Cup win in thirty-six years. It is Haitian fans marching from Copley Square, celebrating their country’s first World Cup appearance in fifty years. It is Scottish and Haitian fans dancing together before their teams play each other, because sometimes the point of the contest is not hatred. Sometimes the point is that everybody got here.

America is a German soccer fan named Freddy becoming a folk hero because he came here for the World Cup and fell passionately, hilariously, completely in love with the most ordinary parts of this country. Not the Grand Canyon. Not the Statue of Liberty. Not the official brochure America.

Waffle House.
Taco Bell.
Wendy’s.
Walmart.
Buc-ee’s.
Chili’s during the NBA Finals.

The man went to Waffle House at one in the morning and praised the food, the prices and the friendly staff like he had found a roadside cathedral. (I’ve never been to Waffle House, but that is not the impression I’ve ever gotten about it from social media posts.) He went to Wendy’s and treated the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine like America had handed him the controls to a spaceship. He looked at Buc-ee’s and had the correct reaction, which is: “This is a gas station?” Yes, sir. Yes, it is. Welcome to the republic.

And people loved it because he loved it. That is the part I did not see coming.

I did not expect how much Americans needed to watch other people enjoy America.

Not the empire. Not the oligarchs. Not the political machine. Not the billionaire rot sitting on top of us like a gilded vulture. I mean America. The actual country. The weird, generous, loud, excessive, funny, sincere, over-salted, underfunded, chaotic, open-hearted country where a hotel receptionist gives strangers a ride in the rain so they do not have to walk an hour to a stadium. The country where visiting fans discover ranch dressing, ballparks, gas-station empires, a gallon of milk and the strange civic sacrament of eating food you do not understand in a place you did not plan to love.

There have been moments that feel almost too on the nose. Japanese fans cleaning up the stands after a match in Dallas. The kind of quiet civic grace that makes everyone else look at the floor and think, “Well, now we all have to be better people.” Frenchmen adoring American pastries. Fans from everywhere filling our cities with song instead of contempt. Even the eagle flyovers and Americans of all race, color, gender and creed proudly singing the National Anthem—hand over heart—in the stands before a game. Not as swagger, or bluster. But with tears in our eyes; love for the promise of our country.

It matters because Americans have been force-fed contempt for ourselves for years. Some of it we earned. Let’s not get precious. We have real violence here, real poverty, real cruelty, real corruption, real democratic danger. Nobody needs to put a doily over the rot and call it patriotism. That is not love.

But the opposite is just as dangerous.

A people cannot fight for a country they have been taught only to hate.

You cannot build a democracy out of disgust alone. You cannot defend public life if you no longer believe there is anything public worth defending. You cannot ask people to sacrifice, organize, vote, march, strike, protect one another and hold the line if all they have been given is a picture of America as a scam, a punchline, a crime scene and a lost cause.

So yes, we need the indictment.
But we also need the reminder.

We need to see the world come here and find joy in us. We need to see strangers fall in love with our ordinary. We need to see our cities become meeting places instead of battlegrounds. We need to hear other people sing our songs badly and beautifully. We need to watch them eat our ridiculous food and call it wonderful. We need to remember that culture is not just museums and monuments. It is diners, ballparks, corner bars, street music, gas stations the size of airports and the particular American madness of giving a person one hundred drink options and calling that convenience.

This World Cup has not fixed America. Good grief, no. FIFA did not roll in with a soccer ball and heal the republic. Let us not lose our heads.

But it has done something I did not expect.
It has let us see America loved from the outside.

And sometimes, when you are tired, furious and half-convinced the whole thing is beyond saving, that matters. Sometimes you need to watch a crowd go still for the national anthem and remember why your throat tightens. Sometimes you need to see visitors cheer for our cities, laugh with our people, eat our food and sing our songs before you can feel, again, that this place is not only what has been done to it.

It is also what is still alive in it.
And that’s why we fight.

—Lady Libertie

Tags: expat living in Mexico, Inspiration, Laguna Bacalar, mundial, retire mexico, World Cup