40 Veranos

Tomorrow, Mexico plays England. Like millions of others, I'll be hoping we take another step toward history. But before tomorrow arrives, another match insists on being remembered.

Every World Cup returns me to a small living room in Ciudad Juárez.

In the summer of 1986, the World Cup came to Mexico, and in our house it occupied exactly three VHS tapes.

That was all we owned.

My parents had recently built our home. The walls were cream-colored. A wooden television cabinet stood at the center of the room, as though it knew it had become the most important object in the house.

Against one wall sat an ornate sofa with carved wooden arms that my family still has today. Beside it was a burgundy chair.

That chair belonged to my father.
Not because anyone said it did.
Memory simply decided.

He spent most of his days somewhere else.

He worked at Nielsen. He taught economics at the university. He rarely said no to another shift, another class, another opportunity to move our family one step closer to the future he imagined. By the time he reached home, the matches had already ended.

So they became my responsibility.
Every afternoon I sat alone in front of that television.
I watched the match.

I waited.

Somewhere between six and eight o'clock, I'd hear his keys.

Then the front door.
The smell of my mother's cooking drifted from the kitchen.

My father would loosen his tie, roll up his sleeves, open a beer, settle into the burgundy chair, and before taking his first bite, he'd look over and ask,

"¿Cómo estuvo el juego, mijo? ¿Lo grabaste? Ponlo… vamos a echárnoslo."

The tape was already in my hands.
The cassette slid into the VCR with its familiar click.

For the next ninety minutes,
time had the rare privilege of beginning again.
I watched every match twice.
The first time through the restless eyes of a six-year-old.

The second through my father's.

Sometimes I couldn't help myself.

A goal escaped my mouth before it reached the screen.

He'd laugh, shake his head, and my mother, without ever leaving the kitchen, would remind me that surprises only happen once.

Three tapes were never enough.

Every new recording demanded a sacrifice.
Sometimes it was an old movie.
Sometimes cartoons.
Sometimes another match that, only days before, had felt impossible to forget.

More than once, I recorded over matches my father loved.

Maradona.
Hugo Sanchez.
A brilliant save. La mano de dios.
A match he'd hoped to watch again.
"¿Y esa por qué la borraste, mijo?"

There was never much of an answer.
Only the arithmetic of childhood.
There wasn't enough tape.

Tomorrow, forty years later, I'll watch another World Cup. Not from Ciudad Juárez. From Mexico City. Not as a little boy waiting for his father to come home.

As a father myself.
León is only two.
He won't remember tomorrow's match.

Not the score.
Not the opponent.
Maybe not even the tournament.

Memory is curious that way. It lets entire stadiums disappear while holding on to the sound of keys turning in the front door.

It forgets formations.
It remembers the smell of dinner.
It loses scorelines.
It keeps a burgundy chair.

Tomorrow, Mexico will play England.

My father will watch from El Paso.
I'll watch from Mexico City.

Forty years ago, I waited for him to come home so we could watch the World Cup together.

Tomorrow, we'll watch it apart.
Somehow, it will feel exactly the same.

Press Record.
40 Veranos | 1986–2026
I.

León slept upstairs. My wife, Eri, was with him. My mother-in-law too. On the main floor, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and I watched Mexico play England. The television filled the room.

On the coffee table sat a Carta Blanca.
A bag of chips with lime and Tajín.

The Trionda.
Pique.
Zayu.
Dr. Simi in a football uniform.

No one had arranged them for meaning.
They were just there.

England scored twice in two minutes. For a moment, the room dropped.

Upstairs, Eri texted me.
No puedo creer esto.
¿Crees que sí podamos?
Sí, le contesté.
Vamos a ganar esto.

In my family chat, my sister Adriana started sending crying memes.

No puede ser.
Esto no nos puede estar pasando.
I answered in English.
I'll have none of that.
Same energy.
Same vibe.
We are going to win this.

Then Mexico scored.

England answered from the spot.

Then Mexico scored again.

Before the match, Eri had made me promise not to scream. The baby.

I screamed anyway.

¡Así mero, cabrones!
¡Lo que pensamos importa!
¡Nuestra energía importa!
¡Vamos a ganar!

Upstairs, León slept on.

And even my sister began to believe.

Mexico kept attacking. Even late. Even tired. Even after the match had begun leaning toward something cruel.

I kept saying things at the television.

One more.
Tírale.
Al arco.
Otro mas.
I believed until the last second.

Then the whistle came.
England had won. Mexico had lost.

For a while, the room held itself still.

Someone talked about the substitutions. Someone mentioned the chances. My brother-in-law got up and gave me a kind of high-five. Half consolation. Half habit.

I heard them. I nodded. Maybe I answered.

The coffee table had not moved.
The Carta Blanca.
The chips with lime and Tajín.
Pique.
Zayu.
Dr. Simi.

A few minutes earlier, they had belonged to the match.
Now they belonged to the room.
I stayed there a little longer. Then I went downstairs.
Not upstairs, where León was sleeping.

Downstairs. To the basement.
When we stay at my in-laws' house, that is where our family sleeps. There are two beds in the room. One is León's.

I went in and did not turn on a light. I lay down on León's bed. Chest down. Fully on it. My phone was in my hand.

The room was dark except for the screen and maybe a little light from the stairs. From above, I could still hear voices. The television. The match continuing after the match.

I tried to breathe.

At first I used the phone to disappear. A message. A score. A video. A comment. Anything that could make the room smaller.

It did not work.
I felt desesperado.

There is not a clean English word for it. It was not only sadness. It was not only anger. It was the feeling of wanting to cry and rage at the same time, while knowing I could not really do either.

Not there. Not fully.
I was a father now.

And above me, the house kept talking.

The whole country had believed. That was the part I could not get past.

Not only me. Not only the people in that room.
The country.
The streets.
The jerseys.
The songs.
The strangers.
The skeptics who had started to sound different.

For a few hours, Mexico had stood inside the same breath.
And still we lost.

Lying there in the dark, I had the strangest thought. Maybe the timeline had changed. Just a thought passing through the room because nothing else knew where to go.

Then another thought arrived, older than the match.

¿Ya ves?
Te lo dije.

It felt like everything was saying it at once.
The score.
The room.
The world.
Nothing changes. Not really.

I stayed there for a while. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Maybe longer.

Then my father's message arrived.

I did not play it right away. I had a feeling. Some part of me already knew the tone before I heard the voice.

When I finally pressed it, I kept the volume low. His voice came through the phone.

"Quieren llorar… quieren llorar…"

I tensed. Then I smiled. Then I exhaled. Then I rolled my eyes.

It was my father. It was familiar. It was almost funny.

The room stayed dark. I do not remember if I answered.

I only remember the phone in my hand. The bed under me. The voices above me. The effort of trying to let the match leave my body.

Eventually, I went back upstairs.

The conversation had turned to Europe again. Someone said our players would have to leave if they ever wanted to learn the real game.

I heard it and let it pass.

Not because I agreed. Because I was tired. Because I love the people in that room. Because sometimes the old story is not spoken by enemies.

Later, I understood something I did not understand that night.

I had gone downstairs to be alone. I had gone into the dark because I did not want to be the believer in the room anymore. I had gone to breathe.

At the time, the bed meant nothing. It was simply where I lay down.

Days later, after the noise had left the match, I understood where I had gone.

Not to my bed.
To León's.

Forty years ago, when my father came home, I had the tape in my hands.

That night, my father's voice came through my phone.
I was still holding the recording.

I listened once.
I have not listened again.

Pause.
40 Veranos | 1986–2026
II.

Mexico lost on a Sunday night.  The next morning, León woke up.

He had slept through all of it. The scream, the whistle, the voices, the long dark hour I spent in his bed. He woke up and the day simply continued. For him, nothing had ended.

He did not know the score. He did not need it. His morning arrived anyway.

When León was born, he came early, and we learned to breathe together. RESPIRA, we would tell him. Breathe. It was the first thing anyone ever asked of him. Not to win. Not to prove. To breathe.

That morning he breathed like it was nothing.

In the days after the match, the country did its postgame. The columns arrived on schedule. The old explanations came out of storage. Our players lacked this. Our league lacked that. The real game lived somewhere else, and we would always be visiting.

I had heard it all my life, from people I love.

Sometimes the old story is not spoken by enemies.

It is spoken by the people who were taught it, by a world that repeats it patiently, comfortably, the way a tape replays when nobody is holding the buttons.

For weeks, a whole country had tried to breathe together. Now the old recording was beginning again.

I keep coming back to the scream.

The night of the match, when the penalty went in and belief became arithmetic, I screamed something at the television. Not about the players. About us.

Lo que pensamos importa. Nuestra energía importa.

We lost anyway. So the question arrived, the way it always arrives after a defeat, wearing reasonable clothes: what was the belief for?

I did not answer it right away.

I returned to the work that never appears in any score. That week, I wrote letters I had waited twenty years to write.

Somewhere in those days, another question replaced the first: why did the loss feel like a beginning?

The understanding arrived while writing.

I had asked belief to do the wrong job.

Belief is not a prediction. It is a practice. It is what a family does when three VHS tapes have to hold an entire summer. It is what a man does with two or three jobs and a house half built. It is what a country does when it hosts the world and dances in its own streets, whatever the score says.

The score answers one question. It does not answer who we are becoming.

My grandfather left school in the sixth grade and drove all of Mexico selling what he could carry. A friend pulled him into radio, and he built a life out of a voice and a border. He never called it invention. He was trying to make a life.

My father crossed north twice, until it held, because that was the future he could see.

Forty years later, I crossed south for a different reason. My work had me everywhere in Latin America, most of the year in motion. Then, one week in Mexico City, I fell in love.

The future I could see had a face.

Nobody in this lineage ever waited for permission. We moved. On the jersey Mexico wore that night, I saw a symbol older than the country: Nahui Ollin. It does not promise victory. It demands movement.

So let me say this to anyone still carrying the loss, and to the boy who slept through it, whenever these words find him.

They will tell you the real game is somewhere else. The real schools, the real cities, the real lives. The old story is patient, and it is everywhere, and it is usually kind when it lowers your ceiling.

El miedo también se hereda. El movimiento también.

Do not spend your life arguing with it. Build until it is obsolete.

I wrote the day before the match, that watching this World Cup would feel exactly the same as it did forty summers ago.

It did not. It could not.

I am not the boy holding the tape anymore. I am the one deciding what gets recorded next.

The morning after the match, my son woke up in the city his great-great-grandfather once sold his way across, in the country his grandfather left, in the life his father chose.

He took a breath like it was nothing.

It was everything.

Fast Forward
40 Veranos | 1986–2026
III.

This week my phone kept handing me the same joke.

Cristóbal Colón and Hernán Cortés, somewhere in the next life, raising a glass. The conquest, they tell each other, worked better than we ever dreamed.

It arrived again and again. Group chats. Feeds. Half a continent passing it along, laughing.

I laughed too, the first time.

Then I read it again, slowly.

The final was Sunday. Spain lifted the trophy in New Jersey, and from Bogotá to Lima to my own feed in Mexico City, much of our America celebrated in red. The team that met them there had long told itself it was the most European country in the Americas. When Europe itself said no, the night ended in shoving and verdicts.

In the winners' photographs, the editing began before the confetti settled. Powerful men cropped into the frame, cropped out of it, depending on who was telling the story.

I know that motion.

I have known it since I was six years old, holding down two buttons at once.

In 1986 our family owned three VHS tapes. The tournament kept coming, and recording anything meant erasing something else. I was six. I decided. Maradona disappeared so a new match could exist. My father never punished the gaps. He just noticed them, and smiled, and let me keep the job.

There was never much of an answer for the things I erased. Whoever holds the recorder decides what the family remembers.

Power is that same motion, held longer.

Five hundred years is a long time to hold the buttons. Long enough that a continent can cheer for the crown and call it taste. Long enough that a country can lose a football match and hear it as a verdict on its blood.

For two weeks I have listened to our own verdicts, the ones that came out of storage the night Mexico went home. We lacked discipline. We lacked class. We lacked the mentality. We believe too much and prepare too little. We are not serious people.

Read that list again. Slowly.

I am not writing about futbol.

You have heard every one of those sentences before. Not about a team. About you. About your school. Your street. Your accent. Your last name. Your plan that everyone called a phase.

Somewhere along the way, somebody explained your ceiling to you, calmly, kindly, the way a commentator explains a defeat. They were not cruel. Some of them loved you. That is what makes it work.

Those sentences were not yours. You did not write one of them. Some sentences reach us so early that we mistake the recording for our own voice. It is the same recording that plays over a continent, turned down to kitchen volume. The voice that tells half a hemisphere it was made to watch is the voice that told you your ceiling had been measured.

It says the serious world is somewhere else. The serious schools. The serious cities. The serious futures. I heard it in Juárez, in El Paso. I heard it when they told me my scores meant Georgetown was not for me. I heard it gently, from people who loved me, which is how it works best.

I went anyway.

You have a tape too. You did not choose what is on it.

Before you ask whether it is true, ask a better question. Ask who recorded it. Ask what it protects. Ask who benefits when you believe it. Ask why every version of it ends with you staying exactly where you are. Then ask it about your family's tape, and your country's, and the one a whole continent has been passing along for five hundred years, laughing so it does not have to listen.

For one month this summer, the recording was interrupted. The world sat in my country's living room. My city filled with languages, unity, excitement, faith and for a while there were no verdicts, only the game. Then the whistle, then the joke, and everyone went back to their tapes.

The divisions came back.

Now we know they can be interrupted.

Colón and Cortés can keep the joke. We keep the recorder.

So here is what I want from you, and I am asking directly.

Find one sentence on your tape. The one you have obeyed the longest. Say it out loud, once, and notice that it is not your voice.

Do not argue with it. Nobody has ever won an argument with a recording.

Record over it.

There is one more tape in this story. When we were high school "men" on scholarship and parent payment plans at Cathedral, my best friend and I spent two weeks of one spring filming a movie on VHS at another friend's house. It was terrible. It was ours. We have always said he still has the cassette. This week I am asking him to go look for it.

I do not know if the tape survived. I know what is on it: a couple young guys who had not yet heard a single verdict.

My son has not heard one either. Between those two facts is everything I am building.

It is our turn to hold the buttons.

Record Over

40 Veranos | 1986–2026
IV.