Soccer teams from Mexico bring a sense of home, new and old

Friday, July 20, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.

A party for thousands happened Wednesday night and you probably weren't invited.

For only the fourth time in recent history, two Mexican professional soccer teams faced off at Sam Boyd Stadium. For the record, Monterrey beat Pumas, 2-0, in a mostly lackluster game.

But the interesting thing was, despite there being no advertising for the event in English and with most tickets for sale only in supermercados, 8,000 people showed up.

And not only did they have a blast, but many probably woke up the next morning feeling a little more at home in their adopted valley, with a greater sense of belonging, of su casa really being mi casa.

In a way that is difficult to measure but nonetheless real, bringing the beloved sport to any city that has a large Hispanic population somehow contributes to assimilation.

Take Carlos Santiago.

The 34-year-old Caesars Palace busboy had a Pumas tattoo on his right shoulder, a Pumas jersey for waving in the air and a Pumas purple banner to hold up with his 9-year-old son, who wore a Pumas jersey bearing his nickname, "Carlitos."

Santiago is originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, but moved to Las Vegas from Santa Monica, Calif., nine months ago.

During his 14 years in California, he had seen Mexican teams play, he guessed, about 100 times.

Santiago was at the game with a pass to skip work from his boss, a brief time out from his 60 hours of weekly work.

Bubbly before the game began, he waxed on what it would mean to have 22 men from the same land as him kicking a ball back and forth on the green below.

"For all of us who work, this is a necessity," he said. If you know there's a game coming, you work with that in mind, it lowers your stress, you feel better at the end of the day, he added.

Also, it's a family thing. "Seeing how he gets excited, it was important to bring him," Santiago said, pointing to his son.

If more teams came to the valley, he concluded, life would be somehow better.

A few sections to the right, up behind the goal, stood Death, Super Clown and Crazy Goat. These were three fans wearing lucha libre masks, the kind of wrestling that Jack Black took on in the movies.

Jorge Antonio Gonzalez struggled to make himself understood through his mask, making the listener lean close enough to feel Death's breath.

Gonzalez, like his friends, went with neither team. They were there, he said, for the fact of being together with so many fellow Mexicans.

Nearby, 12-year-old Juan Elizondo had landed in the stadium after winning two free tickets for being the top goal scorer on his team. Born in Las Vegas, he had never seen his beloved game played in a stadium before.

It felt, he said, "like we're all united."

Maria Ramirez, out in the parking lot afterward with about 10 friends in a tequila-fueled version of tailgating, had some help from the spirits in putting her finger on what it's all about.

"You get used to living here, but you don't leave your roots behind," she said.

If she and buddies could see more soccer in the Las Vegas Valley, Ramirez said, "it would be more like a community, more like we all live together."