In the early 2000s, Ronaldo Nazário and Ronaldinho popularized “the snake.” The trick move involves nudging the ball with the outside of your foot and, in the same motion, flicking it with the inside of the same foot; the defender goes one way before being deceived by the sudden change of direction. Each time they performed it, the crowd cheered. I went wild the first time I saw Ronaldo do it, watching Inter Milan on TV. A flick out, then a flick in, the defender left in the dust. But Dad was unimpressed by the snake. “It’s called la Culebra Macheteada,” he said. I perked up my ears because it was a way better name. Culebra Macheteada: a snake cut up by a machete. Violent, but sonically beautiful. By then, Dad was explaining that Jorge “El Mágico” González had invented the move.
Dad had been telling me about the legend of El Mágico for a while. When I’d arrived in the U.S. a year earlier, in 1999, my parents had signed me up for a summer soccer camp so I could make friends. I was nine years old. The camp had hired an alleged former—or current, or phony?—Boca Juniors trainer, who led sessions for one week, and, most impressively, could juggle indefinitely while sitting down. It’s this Argentinian who convinced my father that I had an “innate soccer talent he should nourish.” Prior to the camp, I’d only played soccer on a team twice, for the annual third grade to fifth grade soccer tournaments at my Catholic school in El Salvador. My team never made it past the first match and both times I had to borrow cleats from my friends. Dad listened to the Argentinian coach, bought me my first pair of used Nike R9s, and signed me up for the local U-10 team, the Canal Clash. Sometime, between Dad and I passing the ball, between watching soccer matches or highlights, he began to tell me about this player from San Salvador, born into poverty, who played with FAS and helped El Salvador qualify for their last World Cup: El Mágico González.
I wondered why I’d never heard of him when I was in El Salvador, or why none of my teammates knew who he was when I mentioned him.
Based on the state of our national team, it was hard to imagine that El Salvador had been to the World Cup before. The very first game I watched was the 1994 World Cup final between Brazil and Italy. This was when Mom and I were still living in El Salvador; the final was played in California, where I knew my father lived. “Maybe your dad is in the stands,” Mom said, pointing at the black and white television. The United States back then seemed so far away, the place Dad had left to, but it was also the country where cool and happy things happened, like the World Cup final. Mom and Grandma’s screams had woken me up from my nap, they were rooting for the verde amarela. I remember Roberto Baggio terribly missing his penalty, Mom and Grandma jumping up and down, the loud screams coming from the TV, people in the neighborhood setting off fireworks. I fell in love with soccer that day: July 17, 1994. I played metegol every lunch, and in the lead-up to the 1998 World Cup, Grandma and I watched every El Salvador national team match. In the Hexagonal, we beat only Costa Rica and Canada, and ended up fifth out of six. We didn’t qualify but I still watched, feeling good that we weren’t in last place like Canada. During the commercial breaks, clips of historic players aired: Cruyff, Pelé, Platini, Zico, and the player who had two clips, Maradona. The Hand of God and The Greatest Goal Ever Scored were the titles of his clips. Watching these, I never imagined a Salvadoran player being a “great.”
Dad and I had higher hopes for El Salvador qualifying for the next World Cup, that Cerritos and Cienfuegos would play in Japan and Korea. While watching La Selecta, on our way to soccer practice, whenever we kicked the ball in the parking lot, Dad would tell me a different story of the soccer player that Maradona considered the best he ever played against. “He’s Salvadoran,” Dad said, “and he’s made two VHS tapes, I’ll get them for you so you can understand.” Dad always finished his stories by mentioning these tapes. The tapes were going to teach me the secrets of la culebra macheteada, el auto-pase, and all of El Mágico’s other tricks. I wondered why I’d never heard of him when I was in El Salvador, or why none of my teammates knew who he was when I mentioned him.
One day in February of 2000, Dad came rushing through the door after work. He was yelling, screaming: “¡Let’s go! ¡Grab your jersey! ¡El Mágico is here!” Somehow, he’d found out that El Mágico was visiting Pickleweed Park, the same park where I practiced with the Clash every Tuesday and Thursday. We ran the three blocks from our apartment to Pickleweed Park, cutting through the apartment complexes around ours, Dad clutching the blue La Selecta jersey in his hand. When we got to the park, I couldn’t stop staring at my father’s eyes. It was his enthusiasm that inspired me, that told me of the greatness of the man we were about to meet—his idol, the actual greatest of all time, El Salvador’s pride and joy.
“¡There he is!” Dad screamed and jumped and grinned like a kid smaller than me. I expected TV cameras, having to fight through a huge crowd, for the parking lot to be full—it’s why we ran—but instead, there were only a few grown men. In the middle of them, there was a thin wrinkly man with curly black hair that bounced just above his bony shoulders. Dad let me hold the jersey and asked the thin bony man for his autograph, holding out a Sharpie that I didn’t know he’d grabbed as we were running out of the house.
“¿Y vos jugás cipote?” El Mágico asked me.
“Sí, Señor,” is all I remember saying.
“Va, que bien, vos seguí jugando, uno nunca sabe donde te va llevar la pelota, ¿mentendes?” He didn’t sound fancy, didn’t sound like he’d played in Spain. I recognized his accent. I missed hearing a soft jaw pronounce the words. He sounded like the people in La Herradura I’d left behind.
“You too, if you can, Chelona.” Dad said, holding the jersey for the muscular guy behind El Mágico. La Chelona was smiling but serious, and signed it quickly without speaking.
There were a few portable cameras flashing, but the greatness of El Mágico was at once confirmed and denied on that cold February night. He looked so normal, humble even. If I had met him on the soccer field, I wouldn’t know he was once a professional who’d played in the World Cup.
It didn’t really make sense: If this guy was better than Maradona, if he was voted one of the ten greatest ever on the recent ESPN poll that Dad had printed out and I had tacked onto my bedroom wall, where were the TV cameras? Why wasn’t he as famous as other players of his generation? When I asked Dad these questions, he pointed to the Salvadoran Football Federation for not supporting El Mágico—or any other athlete of his and other generations. Other times, he blamed El Mágico for having thrown it all away by partying and not caring enough about soccer.
If you ask any Salvadoran, I guarantee they’ve heard a Mágico story. Maybe the one when he slept through the Barcelona trial that Maradona had personally requested for him; or how he never showed up to fitness practice because he refused to train unless it involved a soccer ball; or how Cádiz was down 2–0 at halftime against Maradona’s Barcelona, and when El Mágico was substituted into the game after a night of partying, he helped Cádiz win 3–2. Dad always said that if El Mágico had wanted to, he could’ve played for the best teams of the 1980s, that he could’ve been the greatest of all time. But, for one reason or another, he loved partying more than soccer; he couldn’t be disciplined enough to act “professional.”
What Dad never mentioned while talking about El Mágico was the Salvadoran Civil War. In fact, Dad never truly mentioned it until I started asking questions as a history major at UC Berkeley in 2009. Watching game footage now as a thirty-six year old, I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for twenty-four-year-old Mágico González to sing the national anthem on live television, about to face Hungary for his first World Cup game. What did that moment feel like for this young man who played his club football in Santa Ana? The same area where, in 1932, one of the biggest massacres in Latin American history was committed—La Matanza. In 1982, fifty years after thousands of indigenous and black people were murdered, El Mágico and his teammates were the last to arrive in Spain for the World Cup. The Salvadoran Federation sent the team with limited supplies and just two kits, a blue home and a white away.
That year, my father was eleven years old and had just seen his older brother forced onto a military pickup truck only to never be seen again. Months earlier, the fiancée of my father’s brother, Maria de los Ángeles, was murdered and left on the side of the road. My mother, nine years old at the time, found Maria’s body. Maria, my would-be-aunt. Wetzi, my uncle that I never met. My father already carried these losses while he listened to the games, the last time his country played in the World Cup.
I can’t help but think of the anguish each player felt every time they played a World Cup match. What other losses were the players of La Selecta carrying as they heard their national anthem ring loud in Spanish stadiums? Did they blame their government? Did they blame the U.S. government for sending money to the Salvadoran military to displace, murder, and disappear their loved ones? The dissonance of playing on the biggest world stage, millions watching worldwide, while back home their families were stuck in the middle of a civil war. No wonder they made history by enduring the worst ever World Cup defeat, losing 10–1 to Hungary. In their second match, El Salvador only lost 1–0 to Belgium. But what every Salvadoran remembers, at least Dad does, is that they only lost 2–0 to Argentina, the previous World Cup winners. A young Maradona was man-marked by La Chelona and couldn’t do much. It was a victory in the smallest of details. Pieces here, pieces there. A macheted snake.
I can’t help but think of the anguish each player felt every time they played a World Cup match. What other losses were the players of La Selecta carrying as they heard their national anthem ring loud in Spanish stadiums?
The brilliant display of skills El Mágico showed in those three games were enough for Cádiz to offer him a contract. He stayed far away from El Salvador. Who wouldn’t? Most of his teammates returned to a country at war. By 1992, when the peace accords were signed, close to 80,000 of the country’s five million citizens had been murdered, 10,000 had been disappeared, and one fifth had left for other nations, mostly to the United States. When I met El Mágico, I didn’t quite understand why we were meeting in a foreign country. I hadn’t asked the right questions yet. I hadn’t yet started my journey of understanding how my family had ended up in the United States. I hadn’t taken Modern Latin American History 8b to learn the politics of the machete, a tool most campesinos carried in rural El Salvador. I didn’t yet know that the machete had been used as a symbol during early twentieth century uprisings, including the 1932 indigenous uprising in Western El Salvador, or that by the 1980s, the FMLN had swapped the machete for an AK-47—anything to defend their dream of a better society than the one they were born into.
Not long after meeting El Mágico, my family interviewed for our immigration application. Dad had chosen to self-represent himself. He thought our refugee application was a shoo-in. September 11, 2001 was a few weeks earlier. We were denied and by sheer luck, the immigration officer allowed us to look for a lawyer to argue our case. In the meantime, we were allowed to stay in this country. We were undocumented for a while, then we were granted Temporary Protected Status. We were allowed to work, but not to leave the U.S., unless we never wanted to return.
“Maybe they’ll host the World Cup here again,” Dad said, every time I mentioned my dream of watching a World Cup game in person. “Or maybe we’ll have papers by then,” he’d sometimes add. For the 2002 World Cup, Dad and I stayed up and watched every single game. The time difference didn’t matter. It made me feel like I was on the other side of the world, traveling freely. How could we not lose sleep after watching Senegal defeat France, the reigning champions? While watching that inaugural game on Univision, I heard the commentators speak about the giant upset in terms of colonization, “the colonized beating the colonizer,” shouting about the power and beauty of soccer. When the final whistle blew, Dad jumped with joy, along with every Senegalese on the screen. Then, Dad turned to me and spoke of justice, of how everything was possible in soccer, of how empires can and should fall on and outside of the soccer field. I understood it as a win for all of us, the collective that as an adult I’ve learned to refer to as the Global South, or the Global Majority.
To play soccer all you need is a ball. I love writing because I only need a pen and a piece of paper. Both writing and soccer are egalitarian in that way: the art and the sport of the people, for the people. Like any soccer fan, I’ve always wanted to go to the World Cup. On the field, anything is possible. Underdog nations can make a surprise run with a real shot at reaching the finals, like Turkey and South Korea in 2002, Uruguay in 2010, Croatia in 2018, Morocco in 2022. I can only imagine what celebrating a goal from the stands must feel like, but what I do know is that in that moment of exhilarating joy, the whole world is either heartbroken or celebrating with you. An individual moment, a global moment, in real time.
Yet soccer is never just about what’s in front of you. Throughout my teenage years, I saw its promise in the chance to triumphantly rise up against empires, oppressors. I learned to view Maradona as the biggest anti-imperialist figure and became obsessed with him and Che Guevara. I learned to view El Mágico in the same vein, as a figure who rejected everything the empire had to offer. They rejected the empire, the empire rejected them. I learned about moments of principle, like the USSR refusing to play against Chile in the stadium in which the Pinochet regime had recently detained, tortured, and killed opposition supporters, losing the chance to qualify for the 1974 World Cup. I remember first watching that clip and thinking how pathetic it looked for Chile to score into an empty net. Then, I grew angry for the Chilean fans who couldn’t safely protest their comrades who had been murdered on that same field. The USSR’s absence enacted the absence of all of those punished for their ideas. The red Chilean shirt, ironic, and morphing into the military uniforms of the Pinochet regime.
In 2026, where are these principles? The German Federation has spoken of boycotting the U.S., but it has stayed as mere talk. The World Cup will be held in the United States, a country that, in the past few months alone, has launched strikes in Iran, Venezuela, Ecuador, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria. The Global North is still cutting the rest of the world like a snake, not with a machete, but with carriers, B-52s, and Tomahawk missiles.
I’m not a U.S. citizen, but I now hold a green card. I’ve been granted the right to leave and return to this country—although that seems more uncertain with each passing day under this administration. I’ve never been to a World Cup game, and now that I can afford it and can fly to one, I will not be doing so. Watching FIFA’s president give a “Peace Prize” to a president who is using ICE in unprecedented ways is beyond mind-boggling. It angers me. As a previously undocumented person, as someone who crossed the border unaccompanied as a child, I can’t bring myself to enter a stadium that Trump claims will also use ICE as security. I also can’t stop thinking of the tons of bombs that have hit so many countries under this administration alone, of the Iranian absence, of the Palestinian genocide, of the way American tax dollars have killed so many for decades, centuries. What will the players be carrying inside when the anthems play? Will they know that as they play, tens of thousands will be under ICE detention, many possibly from their own countries? Tens of thousands facing deportation proceedings?
If there is any justice, at least we will be granted the chance to see the teams of the Global North fall to the ones who are suffering back home. The nations that are debuting, too: maybe they won’t lose 10–1 like El Salvador did, but will triumph like Senegal did. Maybe some players will stand up, risk being banned or fined like Maradona, and say something, and maybe someone from an unexpected nation will emerge and become a legend, just like El Mágico.
To this day I’ve always wanted to walk in Cádiz and see his face painted all over the murals. I hear he’s still appreciated there. It was the Cádiz public who gave him the nickname El Mágo, later becoming El Mágico. Some have said that watching him play was akin to watching a matador. I spent tens upon tens of hours practicing his trick. To do it well, you have to almost convince yourself that you’re going one direction before suddenly going another. They think that it is our love of the game that will keep us coming back; it is because I love the beautiful game that I’m turning away. La culebra macheteada.