The Uruguayan journal La Cruz del Sur (Montevideo, Year 1, nº 1, 1924–Year 6, nº 33/34, 1931), directed by Alberto Lasplaces, was founded in 1924, amid a period that witnessed the launching of many cultural publications in Latin America—among them, in Uruguay specifically, La Pluma, Alfar (the Uruguayan edition), Cartel, and Teseo. Interest in critical observation of the cultural development of the region and of each country in it was growing. The article “Uruguay Olímpico” is euphoric in tone as it addresses the 1924 victory of the Uruguayan soccer team at the seventh Olympic Games in Paris—the first in a series of international triumphs for Uruguay in that sport during the 1920s (specifically, at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam and at the first World Cup, which was held in Uruguay in 1930). At the height of a period of democratic consolidation, Uruguay—a country later known as “the Switzerland of the Americas”—beat all of its rivals to win its first Olympic gold medal. Considering the symbolic value of the accomplishment, it is understandable that the victory was celebrated beyond the sphere of sports. This unsigned article praises physical beauty born of hard work and discipline in sport in a vision that looks back to ancient Greece; it describes the celebrations in the streets pursuant to the soccer team triumph, and argues that art lies in those cultural expressions as well. That connection to Greek culture confirms in the realm of sport the classical references at the basis of analysis of modern aesthetics in Montevideo at the time. In the framework of a journal of “art and ideas,” the article takes part in euphoric celebration of a sport that would become “native,” that is, an integral part of local culture. Owing to those values, soccer is linked, according to the euphoric writer of this article, to other cultural products that local sectors of the intelligentsia would introduce as part of “nativism”—a major cultural strain in the 1920s.
