His college, one of the most prestigious schools in Latin America, has long sponsored Pumas, the best-known and most successful football team in the country. It was always packed.”Ĭastro is 62 years old, a medical doctor and a graduate of the University of Mexico, or UNAM.

“Football was more popular than soccer,” Hector Castro tells me. University of Mexico graduate Hector Castro, 62, is an ardent, longtime Pumas football fan. Nor did I know that after the Tlatelolco Massacre, as it is called, the government-in an attempt to prevent future student unrest-broke up the most glamorous football program in the country. Or that this country’s legendary student uprising of 1968 started at a football game, and ended in gunshots right here in the plaza. I never realized that in Mexico football was once the most popular university sport. I knew that football was played here, but I thought its presence was minor, perhaps on the scale of cricket in the United States. Charreada, which is similar to a rodeo, is Mexico’s official national sport. There’s boxing and bullfighting, also the physical theater of lucha libre. I think of soccer, of course, and then baseball. When I’ve thought about Mexico and sports, football never came to mind. “We have a tremendous, passionate fanbase in Mexico.” “Expanding our international series of regular-season games to Mexico marks an important step in our continued international growth,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said when the game was announced in February. Tickets for the contest between the Oakland Raiders and Houston Texans, to be played in the enormous Estadio Azteca, sold out in minutes. In three weeks, the National Football League will play its second-ever regular-season game in Mexico, and the first since 2005. Somehow my journey led me here to this plaza, and specifically to this memorial. I came to Mexico to look at the country’s relationship with football, that most American of sports. The memorial honors the victims of what’s widely regarded as Mexico’s darkest and bloodiest day. Incorporated into the plaza is a wide slate patio, on which a small memorial has been erected. Finally there’s the skyscraper former home of Mexico’s Department of Foreign Affairs, representing the current state. Looming over the ruins is a Catholic church built by Spaniards, who colonized the country in the 1500s. Aztec ruins date back to the ancient city they called Tlatelolco. It’s an archeological treasure, common ground for different empires that have occupied Mexico over the centuries. There’s a space in Mexico City called the Plaza of the Three Cultures.

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