By Juan Medina
Although the opposite is many times claimed—that sports competitions smooth political tensions between countries—the truth is that more often than not, they end up putting them on display. Sport echoes existing rivalries, politics infiltrates and permeates the sporting event. In Nuyorican Básquet, Julio César Torres and Ricardo Olivero Lora choose to not shy away from this fact, and instead address it head on.
Nuyorican Básquet is a documentary about the Puerto Rico National Basketball Team that participated in the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This team stands out not only because of its exceptional sporting performance, but also because of the origin of its players. Its main figures were Nuyoricans: young players born and/or raised in New York City to Puerto Rican parents.
With a relatively keen level of awareness and interest in their Caribbean roots, all of them—Raymond Dalmau, Nestor Cora, and Angelo Cruz, among others—brought to the island a new and more dynamic way of playing basketball. They had learned it in the basketball courts of their neighborhoods in New York and it was highly influenced by African American culture.
The political aspect of the documentary opens on different fronts, explored mostly through its (perhaps too many) interviews with players, coaches, sports journalists and political figures. On the one hand, the film addresses one of the most notable consequences of the colonial relationship between the two countries: an increasingly numerous diaspora, which currently exceeds the total population of the island—and which Puerto Rican documentary tradition has addressed on multiple occasions, for example in Los Sures (1984) by Diego Echevarría, one of the most interesting portraits of these communities.
On the other hand, the complex contradictions around the island's colonial status that the documentary makes explicit are striking: although we see that back then, as now, a significant part of the population was in favor of annexation to the United States—the Governor at the time was Carlos Romero Barcelo, an annexationist figure par excellence—we also see that on the other side, the Puerto Rican fans’ repudiation of the North American team was unanimous. So the basketball court becomes a kind of battlefield, the only one in which the colony has real opportunities to defeat its colonizer. In this sense, the documentary aims to evoke the air of political tension that was experienced on the island at the time, reminding the viewer that these were years of intense—and even bloody—oppression by a government in favor of annexation against pro-independence groups.
There are many factors that connect Nuyorican Básquet with another Puerto Rican documentary similarly focused on the 1979 Pan American Games. We are referring to A Step Away, by Roberto Ponce and Marcos Zurinaga, and which in its English version was narrated by Orson Welles himself. Released in 1980, the documentary broke the box office record at local theaters.
A Step Away follows some of the main sporting figures on the continent during their participation in these games. We get to see up close and personal portraits of Cubans Teófilo Stevenson and Alberto Juantorena, Mexican Carlos Girón, American Denise Christensen, and Brazilian João Carlos Oliverias, among others.
Nuyorican Básquet not only includes footage from A Step Away, but it follows its same intention of revealing the political aspects of the competition. In their documentary, Ponce and Zurinaga pay special attention to the tension between the United States and Cuba that is reflected in the 110-meter hurdle competition between then-champion Alejandro Casañas from Cuba and the young American Renaldo Nehemiah. The two-way jokes and trash talk between their coaches reveal a tension that goes far beyond the sports field.
After being released in theaters in Puerto Rico in 2017, Nuyorican Básquet arrives on Amazon Prime where it is available for online streaming. The documentary can also be acquired in DVD format through the virtual bookstore, Libros787.com.
