ABSTRACT
Inaugurated in 1940, and extensively renovated for the 2014 Olympics, the Estádio de Pacaembu (officially known as the Estádio Municipal Paulo Machado de Carvalho), located in the middle-class neighborhood of Consolação, 1 in central São Paulo, was originally meant to promote the social-nationalistic programs of the Getúlio Vargas government. 2 Vargas came to power via a military coup in 1930 and declared in 1937 a new vision for Brazil called the Estado Novo (which lasted until 1945). How much the Estado Novo was fascistic in nature has been extensively debated, but there is no question that Vargas intended to follow the rule of his European social nationalism mentors in making sports an integral part of the mass mobilization of the populace in the form of unquestioned and unquestionable so-called Brazilian populist values. I have written elsewhere about how the German-Swiss immigrant photographer Hildegard Rosenthal (1913–90), who undertook the first systematic photographic project of the city of São Paulo, provided memorable historic photographs of the fascistic display of the inauguration of the Pacaembu in 1940 (Foster 2011: 55–68). Rosenthal, for personal reasons, discontinued her photographic work on São Paulo. It was left to others to focus on the actual uses of Pacaembu for actual sports events, paradigmatically soccer, which went on to become the largest-grossing sport in Brazil and, increasingly and far beyond Vargas’s interest in the ideological uses of populist events, one of that country’s most complex sports phenomena. Indeed, soccer journalism, in multiple media venues, is a major cultural undertaking that has yet to be systematically examined for its contributions toward solidifying the sociohistorical meanings of soccer in Brazil, far, far beyond whatever meanings Vargas originally had in mind.
