The last time I played fútbol, I failed miserably defending against the younger, faster and more steely-eyed Miskito Messis scoring golazo after golazo in Mabita, a hamlet in “the second Amazon,” the remote, colossal pine forests and rainforests of Gracias a Dios in eastern Honduras. In April, just weeks before the start of the World Cup, I was in my thatched wood hut, on a hammock, scratching bites from mites living in the endless fields of grass and coconut palms, when the soft, high-pitched challenge was issued from the smiling faces of the Afro-indigenous boys: “Kaia football pulaia! Kaia football pulaia! Kaia football pulaia!” Let’s play football!

The words “Kaia” and “puliaia,” meaning “let’s” and “play,” originated with the ancient Sumu and other languages of the Miskito, who, for centuries, have inhabited the thousands of miles of golf course-looking grass fields, forests and Caribbean coast known as “La Moskitia.” The boy’s tongues bore a uniquely stunning mix of migration, conquest and history: West and Central African languages, South American Chibcha, Nahuat (the language of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples), Spanish, and Caribbean languages. It was not unlike the beautiful game they played.

“Kaia football pulaia! Kaia football pulaia! Kaia football pulaia!” they repeated. 

“Football,” the one word I recognized, likely came to the Miskito Coast in the 17th century on the tongues of the English explorers, bureaucrats, pirates, and the enslaved people who escaped plantations in Jamaica. Before migrating (or being forced to migrate) to the Caribbean, many of those who first came to Miskito country came from the formerly rural mass of people —the English working class— displaced by the newly-landed gentry and the private, fenced off lands born of thousands of enclosure laws. 

The poor English majority found solace from their increasingly landless state in kicking balls. Lacking areas designated for them to play on, the ball players turned entire hamlets, towns and, eventually, cities into their fields of play. Their sport sprawl disturbed the peace created by the gentry and other elites, who outlawed the game. The elite disdain for the sport can be heard in Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which the phrase “you base foot-ball player” is used as an insult to those who played on their feet instead of on horses. 

I stared and smiled at the Barcelona shirt-clad boys as they taunted me to join their game. I couldn’t help but think that they resembled Neymar, the Afro-indigenous former blaugrana, who I accidentally ran into on the streets of Sevilla before a game in 2015. Like the racial makeup of the futbolistas, the game itself has always had hybridity baked into it. Long before the rule-based version of fútbol arrived here in the 19th century, Mayans in Copán — the storied city I visited for the same research on scarlet macaws that brought me to Honduras — played a similar game. It centered around a ball made vulcanized rubber centuries before Spaniards and the English learned to process the material. 

Swinging in the hammock, I listened to how the boys speaking in words indigenous and Spanish—the dominant Western language absorbed into the boy’s Miskito language, which arrived with Hernán Cortés, the conquistadores, and the priests who outlawed the ball games they considered demonic rituals. It reminded me of the ways in which football, like language, has been used to whitewash history, liquidate opposition and prop up empire. It took me back to the 1970s El Salvador, where I met the U.S.-loving military men obsessed with the sport, and to San Francisco, where I played on a team my recently-deceased brother, Omar, and his friends baptized Club Conquistadores. It was then that I first sensed the difference between the game played by my Latin American family and friends and the one we played back home in the U.S. 

Fútbol was one of the most popular words I heard while on vacation to San Salvador with my family in the 1970s. We often heard the word during tortilla delivery runs with Rolando, my best friend, in the shantytowns, mansions and lower middle class homes of Colonia El Bosque, the neighborhood where my Tia Esperanza lived. IT sounded backward to my adolescent ears, which knew “football” to be something bigger and more important: my San Francisco 49er heroes, our quarterback John Brody, wide receiver Gene Washington and, towards the end of the 70s, my super running back hero, O.J. Simpson. 

Another popular word I had no clue about was painted in red on the walls and black asphalt streets was “revolucíon.” I’d heard chatter in the homes we visited about how El Salvador beat Honduras in something referred to as the “Soccer War.” Later on, as an adult, I’d come to realize that the causes and effects of that war—migration, population pressures, extreme poverty and border disputes—led directly to the conflict that some called revolucíon. I had no idea what that phrase referred to either. Back then, the idea that these poor countries went to war over a sport added a violent quality to the negative perception I had of my parent’s homeland and its people. “Fútbol” was the name for the lesser sport we hardly played back home. 

Rolando delivered the tortillas his mom made on the wood-fired comal that would smoke up the tin shack he and his family lived in. When he wasn’t delivering tortillas or going to school, he played soccer barefoot and sometimes cut his feet on the rocky asphalt edges my Converse All Stars protected mine from. 

A lot of the men whose homes and mansions we delivered tortillas to were called militares. Some had funny names, the product of the raw Salvadoran humor that used to bother ears more attuned to suburban sounds of Alice, Bobby and Cindy’s Brady Bunch humor. One guy, a mean-ass sergeant in the Salvadoran Army who hollered at us for playing fútbol in front of his house, was called carne asada, probably because his dark face had scars that made his face look like grilled steak. Another, a very handsome mustachioed policeman who rode a Harley, was known as “Pedro Infante” because he looked like the great Mexican crooner. He was rumored to be part of something called an escuadron de la muerte. 

Whatever their rank, all the militares of Colonia El Bosque, a neighborhood built to house military people by El Salvador’s first dictator, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, loved that game of fútbol. Hernández Martínez, who was backed by the U.S. in 1934, shortly after he seized power in a military coup, also built the first national soccer stadium in 1935, not far from Colonia El Bosque. Three years earlier, he perpetrated what is considered perhaps the single most violent episode in Latin American history: the slaughter of 10,000 to 30,000 indigenous people over three weeks, known today as “La Matanza.” The militares that followed Hernandez Martinez loved los Uniden, their word for the U.S., a fact that benefitted me. I gained status just because I was born and raised, spoke the language and bore the passport of a country that, in the eyes of men trained to worship and do the bidding of power, meant life and death. In pre-war El Salvador, I was a Roman and they were praetorian provincials.

The military fútbol fan I most remember, Manuel Alemán Manzanares, was a dark older man who always wore long sleeve guayaberas and never left his mansion unless he was accompanied by one or two armed men in his white Toyota Cressida. The kids and adults of El Bosque called him “El General.” I would later discover that he was famous for, among other things, persecuting and jailing Roque Dalton, the legendary poet who grew up just a short walk from Tia Esperanza’s house. Dalton, a poet warrior and guerrillero, once described El General as an “obese indigenous man” who looked “extraordinarily like” the stereotypical Latin American military man. As an adult, I would remember El General after looking at the comical paintings of chubby military guys by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero. 

Dalton, who had his nose broken for claiming that a rival fútbol team’s victory was stolen, dedicated one of his early books to the former head of the Salvadoran police who persecuted and jailed him. “To General Manuel Alemán Manzanares, who by securing severe punishment for me paid me the greatest compliment of my life, although to tell the truth it was a bit exaggerated,” he wrote with his characteristically sardonic wit. “My actual works were so insignificant that they weren’t even mentioned in the police charges: General Manzanares acted to rectify a real vacuum in my life.”

When we’d delivered tortillas to El General’s house, he looked askance at Rolando and hardly spoke to him. But when he’d turn to me he’d flash his big-toothed smile when I’d reach the top of the stairs of his mansion, greeting me in his loud, broken English: “Hola, Mr. Robert. How guar yu?” 

His failed attempt at speaking the language irked me. El General acted as though he liked me, even though I was nothing like him, a working class son of immigrants in the United States. My uniform—striped orange Levis, white Converse All Stars and signature yellow OJ Simpson number 32 jersey—made me acceptable in his eyes and those of many other Colonia El Bosque residents. He, like some of my cousins and friends, also took to calling me “Michael Yakson” because of my big head of curly hair, striped pants and passport from the U.S., the country that trained him, politically supported his government and paid for the TVs that daily fed their love of fútbol. 

It was El General who first made the connection between fútbol and power. He was sitting in front of his Sony TV, watching Brazil play in the 1974 World Cup. “What a foot Rivellino has,” he said. Then he turned to me: “Do you like fútbol, Mr. Robert?”

“No,” I responded rapidly, and tersely. I did so more because the “fútbol” word annoyed me than because El General and other Salvadorans loved Rivellino more than OJ.

After a brief pause, he said: “that negro de mierda decided not to play with his national team in this Copa. What an idiot.”El General was referring to none other than Pelé, the soccer god who decided not to play in the tournament as a way to protest the sins—torture, disappearances mass murder and military dictatorship—of the U.S.-backed government of another General, Brazilian President Ernesto Geisel. “That asshole is dirtying the sport with his political bullshit.” 

Years later, I would discover that El General himself dirtied the sport by participating in the so-called Soccer War. The conflict was a brief but intense military engagement between Honduras and El Salvador in July 1969. The true origin of the war stemmed from long-standing conflicts over migration, land, and political tensions: at the time, some 300,000 Salvadorans had migrated to and were living and working in Honduras, most often settling on lands that were not formally titled. . The World Cup qualifying matches simply injected a strong dose of nationalist fury into the already-volatile situation.

The fights that broke out at World Cup qualifying matches between El Salvador and Honduras, then, had little to do with the sport. As Roque Dalton describes in “Las Historias Prohibidas del Pulgarcito”:

For different reasons (the massacre of 1932, the eviction from their lands, chronic unemployment, and hunger), a great current of migration left overpopulated for foreign lands. More than 35 thousand Salvadorans live in San Francisco, California. In Mexico there are 60 thousand, many illegally. In Guatemala there are some 75 thousand. In Honduras, the Salvadoran population has risen to over 350 thousand, the better part of whom are poor campesinos, squatting on virgin land in underpopulated Honduras.

“We have to distribute some land,” the narrator of Dalton’s poem goes on to say, only to later concede that “to affect the properties of the U.S. United Fruit Company is taboo.” He concludes: “the President of the United States is more President in my country and that “The History of the so-called “Football War” / has been written by the CIA and the Pentagon / and the intelligence services of the governments / of El Salvador and Honduras.”

Several of the soccer-loving militares I delivered tortillas to with Rolando were participants in the Soccer War. The same social pressures would lead to a discontent that boiled over in revolutionary sentiment, enlisting the guerrillero Roque Dalton along with thousands of others. One of them, Victoriano Gomez, was an early member of one of the Salvadoran revolutionary organizations that sprung up in the 60s and 70s and will always be associated with fútbol and the nascent imperial spectacle of neoliberalized soccer. While fighting in the run up to El Salvador’s civil war and revolucíon against El General, Carne Asada and other militares, he was captured after leaving the guerrilero camps where the rebels like Dalton sometimes played fútbol.

On February 8, 1971, Victoriano Gomez was taken to the fútbol stadium of San Miguel, in the southern part of El Salvador. Television and radio vans were parked around the stadium to broadcast his execution by the militares. The TV reporters present shouted at Gomez, telling him to walk to the middle of the stadium so they could get a better picture for viewers across El Salvador. More than likely, the viewers included El General and other militares of Colonia El Bosque. They watched as soccer, not fútbol, killed the revolutionary.

I wouldn’t learn this until much later. That summer, I returned to San Francisco, where fútbol finally reached my immigrant family’s crowded apartment through Club Conquistadores, a club team my older brothers started.For several years, from junior high through high school, I proudly wore the vivid sky blue jersey with the black numbering. My favorite part of the jersey was on my chest, next to my heart: the drawing of the bearded guy with the steel helmet, the conquistador. 

Years later, soon after the end of El Salvador’s Civil War in the early 90s, I would try to redeem myself for cosplaying as a conquistador by playing fútbol near the conflicted area of the Soccer War, in the mountains of Chalatenango, where I traveled to work in communities of refugees and displaced people near the Honduran border. In the refugee camps made up of shacks with cardboard roofs, I played fútbol with barefoot kids whose jersey was often a worn out t-shirt or no shirt at all. 

Seeing the broken bodies of some of those young refugee futbolistas after the cardboard roofs of their homes were pierced by bullets and bombs made in America moved me to quit playing soccer altogether.  I made a life-altering decision: to fight and play fútbol in the mountains and other clandestine hideouts, among the guerrilleros who followed in the steps of Roque Dalton and Victoriano Gomez. Besides the present-day political descendants of the Romans, conquistadores, English colonizers, Hernandez Martinez and others who kill for empire, our common enemy was the soccer spectacle distracting us—and the world—from the immigrant and other realities that make fútbol.

After another round of “Kaia football pulaias!,” I finally rose to the boys’ challenge. Minutes later, after unsuccessfully dribbling among them, my lungs and my legs gave out and I returned to swinging in the hammock. My failures on the field were more than compensated by the infectious joy of the kids who wore their victory and Barça shirts majestically, before moving on to more urgent matters.

“Cree que van a ganar la Copa Mundial Messi y Argentina?,” their soft voices asked with the most hopeful lilt. Do you think Messi and Argentina will win the World Cup? They’d perhaps heard their parents talking about how Messi was in the news again after visiting Donald Trump along with the rest of Miami Inter. “The United States military, together with the wonderful Israeli partners, continues to totally demolish the enemy, far ahead of schedule and at levels that people have never seen before,” ⁠Trump had said. Messi stood next to him, applauding. “You may be better than Pele,” Trump later told him.

I looked at the boys and remembered that the “enemy” that Trump demolished included 165 Iranian elementary school girls who were about the same age as them. 

As the hammock swung, my heart-mind went south, to memories of Diego Maradona, the Argentinian superstar who never would have gone to the White House unless it was to protest. That Argentinian superstar did, in fact, attend a protest in Buenos Aires wearing a shirt bearing a picture of George W. Bush with the words “War Criminal” on it. I wondered what the Miskito Maradonas might’ve been like.

“I don’t think Messi and Argentina will win the Copa this year,” I blurted out after thinking about how much I missed the less-neoliberalized and more insurgent age of fútbol and América embodied by Maradona.

I looked around the carpet of coconut palms and grass around us and remembered that Mabita’s bucolic remoteness did not completely separate me from the vagaries of a world crafted in the visage of the U.S. Throughout the region were grassy fields that served not just as fields for fútbol, but as landing strips for the narco game of life, death and massive profits.

Noting how the smiles left several of the boys’ faces after my response to their question, I got up and started moving the ball, taunting them to take it from me again as I dribbled around them. The light on their faces quickly returned, just before my lungs and legs gave out for the last time. I had to make the effort. Whatever one thinks of Messi, he provided a dreamy alternative to the narco fandom I heard among some kids in the state capital, Puerto Lempira, and other parts of the continent. 

The Miskito Messis stirred thoughts of how fútbol has ever and always been associated with the phrase Latwan kaikaia, which means “love” in Miskito. My friends here taught me that it can also mean “pain” or “it pains me to see you.” 

While it does bear some resemblance to reality, the idea that futbol equals love and soccer equals pain is too neat and simple to describe the sport’s current state of play. FIFA’s corruption and alignment with Big Capital and the imperial elite, the absurd salaries and ticket prices, and the dangerous fictions of nation and nationalism the sport breeds all seem to indicate that our beautiful game increasingly belongs to the gentry. But on the grass of Mabita, in the streets of El Salvador, and on the soccer fields in my San Francisco, the heart of digital fascism, the beautiful game abides along with the struggle to bring our troubled planet, that big ball spiraling out of control, back to its essential beauty.