WORLD CUP USA 1994 : ‘Americatown’ Shows Up : Host Country Has Done a Fine Job of Providing the Antiseptic Venues, but It’s the Immigrants Who Give This Competition Its Culture and Passion

Who are these people?

That is the question we have asked ourselves, time and again, during the often dazzling first week of the World Cup.

We have asked it while watching a craggy-faced Irishman weep.

We have asked it while watching a young Mexican drape a red, white and green flag around his shoulders and begin singing in the middle of a crowded subway car, a song carried up to the street by hundreds.

We have asked it while standing amid hundreds of Argentines underneath the stands at Foxboro Stadium. Their country had defeated Greece an hour earlier, yet they refused to leave, beating drums and bouncing on the concrete, anthems tumbling from their mouths like Sunday morning alleluias.

Who are these people filling our major stadiums with this unrecognizable passion?

Before this week, Washington’s RFK Stadium reminded us of Redskins and Cowboys and a few fans daring enough to dress up as hogs.

But now we have seen it filled with thousands of Norwegians wearing horned caps and lighting flares, and we will never see it the same way again.

We are used to seeing the Foxboro Stadium field covered with snow, not confetti and streamers. We are used to hearing piped-in music, not deep-throated songs about patriotic dreams.

In a World Cup that has so far thrilled fans, delighted advertisers and surprised skeptics, this is the question that dominates:

Who are these people?

After spending a week being jostled around upper decks that feel like foreign lands, we have come to a conclusion that should not surprise, but does:

Mostly, these people are us.

They are waiters from New Jersey, students from South Dakota, nannies from Washington, D.C.

They are U.S. residents and citizens who came here from other places for education and opportunity. They have paid our taxes and fought in our wars.

But they are people with long memories, people with roots we sometimes do not understand.

Certainly, several thousand fans at each game are foreign tourists, having flown here from distant countries for a chance to cheer their favorite sport.

We were prepared for them. We knew we would be playing host to 5,000 Irish from Dublin, 20,000 Brazilians from Rio, not to mention all that Saudi royalty.

But what we forgot were the 60,000 Irish from New York. And the thousands of Greeks from Boston.

And the Italians from Providence, R.I., who have lived here 25 years or more, yet still tremble upon hearing the national anthem of their homeland.

We forgot that this melting pot in which we live still contains thick, rich chunks of international passion.

We forgot about Norma Cornejo.

It was midway through the second half of the game between Argentina and Greece. The stands inside Foxboro Stadium were full. But some of the most heartfelt cheering was coming from outside the front gates.

There, in a spitting rain, her face pressed against a fence, was Cornejo. Behind her, crowding for a better look, stood three relatives.

Through the chain link, between the heads of security guards, they could see the game being played on the big-screen video scoreboard at the far end of the field.

They could not afford to pay scalpers $250 a ticket. But that didn’t stop them.

“We can see a little of the game, we can feel the crowd, it is enough,” Cornejo said.

A factory worker from Buenos Aires? Not quite. Cornejo works for a stock brokerage in Manhattan.

Her family has been in this country for 21 years, more than half of her life, yet she still stays awake past 1 a.m. to watch the Argentines play soccer on a Spanish-language station.

She took two vacation days for the long drive to Massachusetts, a trip that fell just short of allowing her to see her heroes in person.

Her family’s cheers could barely be heard above the noise of trash removers and golf carts and passing cars. A group of teen-age boys gathered behind them, laughing.

But then national icon Diego Maradona scored in the 60th minute, and those cheers become screams.

The Cornejo family hugged and danced in the rain and swirling trash. Two other women from Argentina, one of them a U.S. resident, joined the celebration.

Then those six people, standing outside a stadium in a country that knows little about soccer, began singing an anthem.

Maintenance workers and security guards stopped to stare. Nearby policemen shook their heads, then chuckled.

And that ominous pack of teens?

They began chanting, earnestly, “Ar-gen-tin-a! Ar-gen-tin-a!”

“I live in the United States. I love the United States,” said Christina Urrutia, a recent immigrant who teaches in Columbus, Ga.

She pats her heart over her orange poncho.

“But the flag of Argentina will always live in here,” she said.

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Who are these people?

They are Los Angeles resident Fernando Lima, 37, who recently drove to Palo Alto with his head shaved and painted in the Brazilian colors of green and gold.

“My hair will come back after the World Cup,” he said.

They are Guy Bavaro, a computer consultant from Manhattan who has lived in this country for 30 years.

Before the game between Italy and Ireland, Bavaro was spotted in the Giants Stadium parking lot holding a flag and singing.

He is a Vietnam veteran, yet the flag was Italian. So were the songs.

“I know I’ve been in this country a long time, but I want to keep alive my heritage, my culture,” Bavaro said.

In a few moments, like thousands of other Italian-Americans, he was watching his national team in person for the first time in his adult life.

“I am going to cry like a baby,” he said.

Who are these people?

One sociologist says they are people who have too long been ignored.

“The whole idea of this country being a melting pot is jargon, it’s a myth,” said Jay Coakley, sociology professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs.

“The people who immigrate here, they do not forget about their roots that quick,” he said. “Like our citizens who move to other countries, these people subscribe to the papers from their hometowns, they talk on the phone to friends back home, they stay in touch for two and three generations.”

The results, Coakley said, can be seen in the stands at the nine World Cup venues.

“We have ignored our ethnic diversity to the point where we forget it’s there,” he said.

Even this country’s soccer leaders had forgotten.

In addressing worries about crowd control, World Cup chairman Alan Rothenberg recently said, “Hey, the average people attending these games is going to be a family of four from the suburbs.”

With the exception of games involving the United States, he has been terribly mistaken.

The “suburbs” have been Little Italy, Greektown, Koreatown. These are places we visit for food and entertainment, scarcely pausing to realize that somebody lives there.

“It is in these neighborhoods that a lot of people in this country gain a reaffirmation of who they are,” Coakley said.

Louis Granero, a waiter from New Jersey, has lived here 25 years. That was him in the upper deck at Foxboro, draped in a blue and white Argentina flag, leading a chant of “Let’s go, champions!” in Spanish.

“During our anthem, my hair stood up,” he said, turning to a reporter. “Right now, I feel like kissing you.”

Even knowing who these people are, we are still bothered. There is something else we need to know.

Why can’t we feel what they feel?

When is the last time somebody refused to leave Foxboro stadium after a New England Patriots’ game?

Some of it is about playgrounds.

“I’ve been playing soccer since I was 5, on my street,” said Vasilis Adamakos, 47, who flew here from Greece for the games. “I wanted to a be a soccer hero, nothing else. Where I live, everybody feels that way. Nothing else.

“Do they feel that way here?”

No, not about soccer, not about any one sport. We have too many organized sports for our children to ever grow up with a unified passion.

Unlike in other countries, professional sports here compete not just with each other, but with college sports.

And the sports we do care about? They are run by businesses, fueled by corporate sponsorships, littered with athletes who no longer look or talk like us.

In other countries, soccer is a sport of the people. By the people.

“For us, these players are not idols,” said Cornejo. “These are our neighbors. They are like part of our family.”

Coakley, who recently returned from an assignment in England, noted, “Soccer teams in other places represent defined social classes, social areas, local clubs that are more than 100 years old.”

He added, “There is no big TV revenue, so these teams are supported by the people directly. Here, you have a team moving from Baltimore to Indianapolis and being hyped by Budweiser.”

Yet some of our differences remain too deep and vast to describe.

“We watch both the Spanish and English World Cup telecasts at home, and my sons keep asking me the same thing,” said Milton Jamail, professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas. “They said, ‘Dad, why does the Spanish announcer say, “Goal-l-l-l-l-l,’ and the English one just says, ‘Goal?’

“What can I tell them? I just say it’s passion.”

Fearing a lack of such passion, the rest of the world said the United States did not deserve to have a World Cup tournament.

But it forgot who we were.

Unfortunately, so did we.