June, 1986, was a month of wonder, a month of falling in love. I was nine years old. By then, my family had been living for six years in Birmingham, Alabama, where being from Peru and speaking Spanish made us a somewhat exotic species of suburban Americans. That summer, our local cable company added the Spanish-language channel Univisión and, like magic, the World Cup in Mexico began. It was my first—the first I can remember—and the tournament, even if narrated in an unfamiliar Mexican accent, was much more than a sporting event. It was a chance to learn something about the place my parents called home. World Cups are one of the ways we mark the passing of time in Latin America.

I watched the first game (Italy, 1; Bulgaria, 1), the last (Argentina,
3; Germany, 2), and nearly every game in between. Listening to my father
and his friends talk about the matches, about World Cups past, I formed
strong opinions about players I’d never seen in action. Pelé was a god;
Cruyff, a magician; Rossi, an opportunist. I made several rather
arbitrary decisions: I liked the French team, for example, disliked the
Italians, was indifferent to the English. These are, broadly speaking,
views I still hold. An uncle told me one day that the Dutch were the
greatest team never to win a World Cup, a fact I memorized then and have
never really questioned. When Argentina prevailed in the final, I felt
as if I’d won something. In a sense, I had.

Mexico ’86 was also the first of eight consecutive tournaments for which
Peru would not qualify. I was so in thrall to the spectacle that I
hardly noticed. Before that summer, I didn’t know what a World Cup was,
had no point of comparison. It didn’t even cross my mind that we were
supposed to be there.

Later, I learned about our pedigree, about the elegant Peruvian teams of
the seventies, stories my father and uncles shared with pride,
nostalgia, and, increasingly, a touch of melancholy. Our sporting heroes
had names like Cubillas, Chumpitáz, Sotil, Oblitas, but they were old
now, fading glories who had never really been replaced. As our World Cup
drought stretched longer and longer, it began to feel as if they never
would be. A good player might appear here and there, a flash of talent
or fighting spirit, but not the kind you could build a team around, or
certainly not a team good enough to compete in South America, generally
thought of as the most difficult region from which to qualify. Two World
Cups without Peru became three. We came close for France ’98, needing
only a draw against Chile in our final game. We travelled to Santiago
full of hope. We lost, 4–0.

In 2001, I moved to Lima to study literature at a local university. I
fell in with a group of art students—painters, illustrators,
sculptors—and even after I’d quit attending classes I’d still visit
them, spending long afternoons on the cement floor of a cramped studio
that two of them shared. This group became my first real friends in Peru who
were not family, and their approbation meant a lot to me. One afternoon,
I casually mentioned that I was going to the stadium to watch the
national team play. It was a World Cup qualifying match against Uruguay,
I said, and my cousin César had gotten us tickets.

The studio went quiet.

You’re doing what?

I remember the chorus of voices very clearly: don’t go. It’s going to be
cold. It’s a shit stadium for a shit team. You’ll get mugged on the way
home. I’ll lend you my knife. We’re going to lose; you know that, right?
We always lose. We’re not going to qualify. Are you insane?

I could feel my face beginning to flush, but there was no stopping them
now. Before long, they’d begun analyzing me: my emotional connection to
the national team was a side effect of having been raised in the U.S. If
you’d grown up here, they all agreed, you wouldn’t care. If you’d grown
up here, and insisted on being a sports fan, perhaps you’d like
basketball. Not soccer, which is so ordinary. You’re overcompensating.
There’s probably some fucking Inca tattoo on your chest that you got as
a teen-ager to prove to American girls you weren’t white.

Everyone laughed.

I have that tattoo, of course. I got it when I was seventeen.

I went to the game anyway. We lost, 2–0.

My friends were right. Some days, I do feel inauthentic—not fully
American, not quite Peruvian. I’m certain I’m not the only immigrant to
confront a version of this. You feel there’s a part of you slipping
away, becoming dulled by your surroundings. Your language gets rusty.
Your tastes are indistinguishable from those of your unhyphenated
American friends. And, meanwhile, your home country is complicated,
troubled, its politics opaque. What you know of your country has been
shaped by a few visits home, filtered through your parents and extended
family, colored by their nostalgia or their disappointment, occasionally
by their rage. It’s an inheritance that can feel like a privilege at
times, a window into another, more interesting world, and an
inconvenience at others. But it’s always there, taking up space in your
heart, in your head. Sometimes you wish it were simpler to explain what
happens inside you when you hear the word Perú. You hold fast to those
things that feel simple, that feel like pure expressions of a love so
complex and layered and hurtful and deep that you can’t articulate it,
not even to yourself. You look for a celebratory strain of nationalism.

So, even when there was, objectively speaking, very little to celebrate,
supporting the Peruvian national team felt necessary to me, a way of
reminding myself who I was.

Which brings us to this year. A talented generation of young players,
mostly from the local league, began to string together a series of
improbable results—last-minute equalizers, stalwart defensive
performances, epic comebacks, and a not insignificant dose of good
fortune—that left us fifth in the South American table after eighteen
matches, ahead of Chile on goal difference. The top four teams in South
America qualified directly to next summer’s tournament, in Russia; we
had to play New Zealand in a two-leg playoff—a match in Wellington, one
in Lima. After thirty-six years of disappointment, a place at the World
Cup was tantalizingly close. After a scoreless draw in New Zealand, the
teams travelled to Lima for the deciding game, which was played,
last Wednesday, at the Estadio Nacional.

It was just as I’d expected, only more so. My phone buzzed only minutes
after my plane landed—it was my friend Julio, sharing the comforting
news that three shamans—Chinese, Brazilian, and Peruvian—had consulted
their oracles and predicted Peru would win that evening. I normally
don’t put much faith in shamans, but in this case I was relieved. All
the newspapers had the game on the front page, of course, to the
exclusion of nearly everything else. New developments in a widening
corruption scandal that could threaten the Presidency? Be serious. Page
4. There’s a World Cup berth on the line.

In the streets, it seemed everyone was wearing the national-team
jersey—kids at the bus stop, babies in strollers, grandmothers shopping
for groceries, ice-cream venders, an office worker wearing slacks and a
blue blazer over the traditional white jersey with the red sash. I saw
several dogs being walked in red-and-white Peruvian-flag onesies. A few
blocks from my family’s apartment, a man on crutches maneuvered
delicately between idling cars at a traffic light. He’d gone further
than most fans: not just the jersey but also a bright red cap, red
shorts, and long red socks, pulled up high over his thin, atrophied
legs, patriotically asking for spare change, a red plastic cup in his
outstretched hand.

Earlier that morning, around two, Peruvian fans had gathered outside the
hotel where the New Zealand team was sleeping, and put on an impromptu
fireworks show. Later, around eleven, I was awakened from a nap of my
own by the deafening roar of two Air Force fighter jets flying over
Lima. I watched them crisscross the sky from the window of our
apartment, buzzing several circles around the hotel where the New
Zealand players were presumably trying to rest. Later, a government
spokesman said it wasn’t meant to intimidate our visitors but was simply
the armed forces offering “supersonic support” for the Peruvian squad.
The underside of the jets’ wings had been painted red and white.

All week, I’d been walking around in a state of frankly unsustainable
anxiety. Back in New York, I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d wake up
thinking about the game, about this moment I’d been dreaming of for so
many years. In that sense it was comforting to be in Lima, where
everyone was feeling the same thing. I met up with Julio to buy a jersey
to wear to the stadium, and as we chatted with the young man selling the
merchandise we quickly veered to memories of games we’d seen, and from
there to something more personal, more meaningful—memories of those
moments we’d shared with our fathers, our brothers and sisters, our
extended families. We recalled certain victories, sure, but more than
that we invoked the closeness and clarity of purpose we’d felt
celebrating them. The merchant’s name was Marlon; he was thirty-two
years old. Like twenty million Peruvians, he wasn’t alive the last time
our country played in a World Cup. His father gave him a poster of the
national team during the 1998 qualifiers, the year we came within a
point of the tournament. His father was dead now, Marlon told us, and
all he’d been able to think about these days was that poster. “We didn’t
have money growing up,” he said, rubbing his thumb and index finger
together. “Just buying that poster would’ve been hard for my parents.”

And now Marlon wondered where it was, when he’d lost it. What his father
would think. How much he wished he could watch tonight’s game with his
old man. We all fell silent. He sold us the jerseys and we embraced,
fiercely, as if we hadn’t met just ten minutes before.

That evening, when New Zealand’s players emerged from the tunnel to warm
up, they looked a little stunned, a little overwhelmed. Many had their
phones out, taking pictures or shooting video of the scene, forty
thousand Peruvians at full voice, the entire stadium in red and white.
With the exception of a few who play professionally in Europe, most had
never seen anything quite like this. Rugby is the national sport there,
not soccer. A screen cap of a Kiwi Facebook comment had been making the
rounds on social media. It read, “Honestly if Peru care that much, let
them have it, only sport”—a fundamental misunderstanding of what was at
stake.

The singing in the stadium began two hours before the first whistle, and
it wouldn’t stop until more than an hour after the game had ended. It was a
way of pushing away the nerves, and it felt good, but still I could feel
the tension gathering in my shoulders. Thirty-six years is a long time.
Thankfully, our players were less nervous than I was: just two minutes
after kickoff, we hit the crossbar, and after that our attack didn’t let
up until we’d scored. The first goal went in around the
twenty-six-minute mark—a lightning counterattack down the left flank
finished off by a right-footed bullet from the striker Jefferson Farfán.
The ball made the net bulge, and the stadium exploded. Farfán ran to the
sideline, where he crumpled, overcome with emotion, weeping.

Lots of people were.

I was.

We scored again in the second half, and then it was done. The final
whistle blew at 11:06 local time, a triumph, but also an exorcism.
Later, I walked out of the stadium into an early morning like none
before it, a gleefully cathartic strain of madness and euphoria in the
air. In the park by the stadium, people sang and danced and climbed
statues of forgotten Peruvian heroes, stretching soccer jerseys over
their stone torsos, tying red scarves around the statue’s necks. I saw a
police paddy wagon roll by, its side doors open, drunken fans singing
from inside, writhing and shouting like caged animals. Above, on the
roof, two boys jumped up and down as the truck edged forward, leading
the crowds along the sidewalk in a song:

Loosely translated:

I’ve waited a lifetime to ask that question.