This article examines how transnational feminist activists from Seattle built alliances with women activists in Cuba to challenge the blockade while simultaneously demanding stateside change during the 1990s and early 2000s. Seattle women activists, including Latinx, Asian American, Black, Native American, and white women, formed the Everywoman’s Delegation and the U.S. Women and Cuba Collaboration to reach across borders and racial lines in the quest to pair domestic systemic inequalities with critiques of U.S. foreign policy. Building movements across racial lines to gain numbers and power had a deep history in Seattle, which has always been an overwhelmingly majority white city, 85
This article reconsiders the 1994 FIFA Men’s World Cup in the United States by analyzing it alongside the era’s fierce immigration debates. While remembered for its financial and logistical success—and for launching Major League Soccer—USA’94 was simultaneously shaped by California’s racist, anti-immigrant Proposition 187 campaign. Focusing on Los Angeles—which hosted the most games of any World Cup site, including the final, and was home to the nation’s largest Latino population—this study uses Spanish-language newspaper sources to reexamine the event through a Latino lens. It highlights key moments of resistance, including fans booing Governor Pete Wilson at the Rose Bowl and street celebrations clashing with the police in Huntington Park. Ultimately, in this article I demonstrate how soccer became a battleground for Latino political engagement on immigration and provide historical perspective on the “long shadows” of USA’94 that still resonate.
