Boxing Cultures and Perceptions of Violence in Venezuela

Abstract

This article stresses the ways in which Venezuelans came to understand and explain the connections between boxing and violence from the 1960s through the early 1980s. As in other Latin American countries, Venezuelans were consumed during the Cold War by what they saw as a dramatic rise in societal violence often associated with the perceived ills of rapid urbanization. However, the public narrative about violence in boxing had little bearing on that wider understanding of social problems. Like other narratives about boxing, the cultural construction of boxing violence in Venezuela derived almost exclusively from US media and other popular transnational narratives, which reflected the weight of the United States on the business, practice, and development of boxing in Venezuela.