What’s one of your earliest sports memories?

Pursuing this degree has helped me mend my relationship to sport. My earliest memory of sport is fraught with resistance and pain since I never wanted to play sports. I grew up in dance since the age of two years old and was taken out of dance and forced into recreational soccer as a nine-year-old by my father. Therefore, my relationship to sport was not built around agency or desire but rather enduring the long relationship to soccer that would be expected of me. My distanced relationship to sport was skewed by my father’s borderline obsession with soccer, having grown up playing semi-professionally in Ecuador it is an understatement to say he loved soccer. He was a volunteer for the 1994 World Cup in the US and has never missed a World Cup since. Continuing to play soccer as I grew up was more of an expectation to a desire until I met my first girlfriend playing. Only after I realized I was gay and how many opportunities I had to explore that because I played soccer did I begin to appreciate playing the sport. I only started to like soccer when I realized it meant I had a safe place to explore my sexuality. The recompositing of my relationship to sport through academia has been pivotal for me I don’t think I would be able to have a relationship with soccer today without the Ph.D. This degree has helped me see how soccer has been a platform for me to develop my social, sexual, and cultural identities throughout my lifetime.

How did you first decide to pursue graduate study and specifically study sport?

As a first-generation student my options for careers felt limited always framed by a medical or law degree, neither of which interested me. When I chose to pursue an undergraduate degree in the humanities continuing towards a graduate degree didn’t feel like a desire but a need to justify the decision to follow such a “precarious” career. When choosing a graduate project, I felt that my research on sexuality studies had been done before and when I was asked to think more critically about my project framings, I realized my lived experiences were valid enough to formulate into an area of study because they sit at the intersection of sport and identity formation particularly for an underexplored population. The pursuit of sport studies became more of a self-reflective chase to understand how sport shaped me growing up. I am grateful that the academic space and mentors I have at USC encouraged me to cultivate this and the support of the ASA SSC have only validated my academic pursuit further.

What are the key questions or issues that animate your work?

The key issue that animates my work is the intersectionality of my project. One of my main questions is what is the role of recreational sport for identity formation? Queer identity formation is particularly underexplored for Latinx women and sport provides me an opportunity to do so through a broader cultural avenue of soccer. I think that the topics of Latinx people, sport, and sexuality often exist in a siloed manner and my work feels important because it highlights the importance of how these facets exist in relationship to each other. My project is exciting because it analyzes sport at a grass roots level providing a context that is overlooked but growing in sports studies. Recreational sport becomes particularly important for the development of marginalized identities like queer peoples, women, and immigrant or first-generation people. I think a major question we should think about in my work is what is the potential scope of impact of recreational sports for communities of color? I think this question can be more broadly applied to sport studies because room is being made for how we conceptualize and converse about sport outside the frames of professionalism.

Your work engages in ethnographic methodologies that require quite a bit of time, energy, and resources to bring these vibrant spaces to academic settings? What are the biggest opportunities and challenges of this work?

The biggest opportunities are an unexplored narrative or perspective that you can’t pick up and find in any archive or oral history repository. The beauty of ethnography is you can generate knowledge that you think is missing from a larger cannon as you cull from peoples lived experiences. You get to decide that some seemingly small detail of someone’s life is important and that is what makes ethnography special what scholars have excluded before can become significant in your work because you dedicated yourself to the process of documenting it in a safe way in a way that gave their actions and feelings a platform. The biggest facets of this kind of ethnographic work are things like field work, participant observations, and interviewing which means you are constantly recalibrating your approach with careful consideration of your respondents as a researcher. The biggest challenge is creating an ethical approach to your area and community of study and finding a system to house all your data which can become unmanageable over time as a single researcher. So transcription systems become crucial however costly and time consuming they may be. The safety and well-being of your respondents is the primary concern, so you are constantly treading a line between overexposing and not exposing enough. Trying to find that considerate median is difficult in a space like academia which is traditionally rooted in exploitation and voyeurism of peoples of color. So using the same methods can feel scary but new approaches rooted in anti-colonialism, feminisms, and intersectionality help recognize and bridge these harmful gaps in how academia can work with instead of harming the communities they are learning from. My personal challenge is navigating my role as an insider outsider in this space this is not only my area of exploration, but it is also a social space that has housed me for years and it is also a personal network for my partner who is an active pillar in the community. I think my personal concerns about my insider outsider status challenge my ability to feel like this project is ever addressing all concerns and issues adequately. However an iterative process with my respondents helps ensure that I am not straying from the core of this work and their vision in it as well.  

What has the ASA SSC meant for you so far as an emerging scholar?

ASA SSC was the first place where I really felt seen for my scholarship outside of my immediate dissertation committee. Dr. Cox (U of O), Dr. Davis (University of Austin), and Dr. Darda (Michigan State University) have been absolutely pivotal in my development as a rising scholar. As a first-generation scholar navigating a Ph.D. program feels impossible but trying to cultivate an academic network seems out of reach, yet these faculty have accompanied me over the years and have not only done that but have gone out of their way to connect me, invite me into these spaces, and work closely with my project. These scholars and several others in the SSC have gone the extra mile and truly embodied a form of mentorship that is nearly impossible to find in academia now a days. They truly care about my personhood and provide a supportive environment for not only academic growth but also the exploration, set-backs, and difficulties of academia that no one really provides a space to talk about and work through. They are so generous with their time and lives making academia feel less isolating and defeating. As the SSC grows I can only hope that this model of mentorship is replicated and impacts more scholars circulating the SSC because it has truly changed my life.