This study utilized a literature review and an analysis of Google Trends and Google News data in order to investigate the coverage that American men’s soccer gets from the media compared to that given to other major American sports. The literature review called upon a variety of peer-reviewed, scholarly entries, as well as journalistic articles and stories, to holistically argue that soccer receives short-sighted coverage from the American media. This section discusses topics such as import substitution, stardom, and American exceptionalism. The Google analysis consisted of 30 specific comparisons in which one American soccer player was compared to another athlete playing in one of America’s major sports leagues. These comparisons allowed for concrete measurements in the difference in popularity and coverage between soccer players and their counterparts. Overall, both the literature review and Google analysis yielded firm and significant evidence that the American media’s coverage of soccer is lopsided, and that they do play a role in the sport’s difficulty to become popular in the American mainstream.

Although photography has played a pivotal role in how people see themselves and how they see “others,” scholars have written very little on the (self)representation of Afro-Latin Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century photography. This study argues that photographic portraits produced during this period contributed to creating negative stereotypes about Afro-Latin Americans and legitimizing Black subalternization. However, it also contends that photography served as a means of Afro Latin American self-representation. This dissertation begins by contextualizing the subjugation and exclusion of African cultures that started with the colonization of the Americas. It uses the findings of the Subaltern Studies as a methodological tool in revisiting the past; and offers a theoretical conceptualization of the photographic practice, pointing out its limits and possibilities. Subsequently, it analyzes the corpus, which consists of photographs produced in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. These are examined taking into account their context of production and reception. As a result, this research indicated that mainly two types of photographs of Black people were produced in Latin America during this period: photographs taken for commercial purposes, which highlighted the “exoticism” and “otherness” of Afro-Latin Americans; and anthropometric portraits used by scientists to “prove” the biological and cultural inferiority of Black people. However, the analysis also showed that Afro-Latin Americans appropriated the medium to express their subjectivity. These photographs should be seen as counter-images that subverted the photographic practice in vogue. They open new ways of thinking about Black representation throughout history.