| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | August 2009 
Mexico Players Fight for Pre-Hispanic Game Site
 Sophie Nicholson – Agence France-Presse
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August 26, 2009
| | A player holds a colorful glove weighing almost five kilos (11 pounds) during a protest match of a prehispanic ball game at the Zocalo square in Mexico City. Because their playing courts were bulldozed to rubble, the players have set up improvised courts next to government buildings in the capital. (AFP/Alfredo Estrella) | |
Mexico City – A pre-Hispanic game has played into the public eye in Mexico City in recent weeks, in protest matches by youths using rubber balls and colorful gloves weighing almost five kilos (11 pounds).
Bulldozers sent by city authorities last month reduced to rubble the only courts in Mexico City set up for Pelota Mixteca and Tarasca - modern versions of ball games once played for princes and now popular among poor communities in south and central Mexico and immigrants in California.
The players now set up improvised courts next to roaring traffic and government buildings on the capital's vast main square, or Zocalo.
"It's an act of protest for that act of barbarity, because that's what it was," Cornelio Perez, head of an association of some 300 players of pre-Hispanic ball games, told AFP.
Ball games with ritual associations, including with a ball of fire or a human skull, were played for over 3,000 years in Mesoamerica in pre-Hispanic times.
Mexico City authorities declared pre-Hispanic ball games part of the capital's cultural heritage last year.
But they destroyed the city's only courts during negotiations to take over the land to make way for a crime monitoring center.
"I think the confusion is that the leaders of the association are in a legal dispute over real estate that has nothing to do with games," Juan Jose Garcia Ochoa, a deputy minister in Mexico City's government, told AFP.
The city's public security ministry has owned the site since the start of the last century and had turned a blind eye to the games being played there, Garcia said.
Now they needed the land and they had a budget of three million pesos to construct new courts, Garcia added.
Although the Mexico City courts did not date back to the Aztecs, they were built more than half a century ago and were used by a network of players.
Artisans in southern Mexico still make the rubber balls and nail-studded gloves, and crowds gather for tournaments on public holidays, sometimes with trophies and animals for prizes.
Some historians say the courts have symbolic value as part of age-old traditions which are still alive and evolving.
"Many people say 'What's the problem? They can play in another place. They can't go to another place because they've laid down important symbolic capital there," Teresa Mora Vazquez, an investigator at Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, told AFP.
"This manner of taking root in a place is exactly what they (the players) are struggling to defend."
The players have vowed to continue their protest matches until they can meet again with government officials in a bid to reconstruct the courts on the original site.
Meanwhile, the game has won some new admirers.
"I'd never seen this game until we came here today," said an elderly woman who looked on with her grandson.
"It's good. It's entertainment for us and the players." |
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