Capítulo I: estado, política y deporte en El Salvador (1885 - 1921)

Abstract

The economic-cultural entailment with the world-wide economy that brought the coffee to El Salvador at the end of century XIX made the arrival of new cultural products and new forms of sociability and urban recreation possible. In its beginnings the access to the practice of the sport was monopolized by the economic and cultural elite of the country, national as much as foreign. It is with sprouting of the collective sports like baseball and soccer that the working sector incursions in the sport activity. This last discipline will be distinguished to the others by its appropriation on the part of the children, workers and to the support that some women did in the economic support and the maintenance of the soccer clubs and in the inclusion of soccer in the communal festivities. Nevertheless, soccer was dominated in its practice by the masculinity. The meager economic support of secular the communal leaders as much religious and the little availability of fields adapted for the practices caused that the soccer associations had a short life. The regime of Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez (1931-1944) contributed to the expansion of soccer by means of its political use, mainly in the search of legitimacy of this dictatorship. The mass media as the written press and the radio gave to soccer a greater diffusion and consolidation on national scale.