States Fernando Mahía portrays the United States through basketball in ‘Coast to Coast’ – Ferplei

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, 24 (EUROPE PRESS)

The writer Fernando Mahía (A Coruña, 1990) traveled more than 15,000 kilometers in just over three months with an ancient minivan over 20 years old that took him from one end of the United States to the other to draw a portrait of the North American giant with the excuse of the sport of the basket.

Three years later, this freelance journalist and translator based in Donostia captures the trip of that summer of 2019 in the book ‘Coast to coast. A journey through the margins of the United States through basketball’, the literary debut of the writer from Coruña who has edited Contra.

“From the outside it is always said: ‘America is like that’. But there are many United States within the United States. It has nothing to do with an upper-middle class town on the California coast where almost all are vegan and progressive in a certain sense , with a town or a small city in Alabama, where they are super conservative. There is structural racism throughout the country, but there in those areas the differences are much more noticeable, “summarizes the author in conversation with Europa Press.

Throughout almost 300 pages, the portraits of Latino emigration intersect in the neighborhoods of New York, the “holes in the world” of the oppressed neighborhoods of the Big Apple, the decline of the post-industrial areas of the ‘Rust Belt’, the cultural mixer of the South, the isolation of what little remains of the Native American peoples or the opulence of the prosperity of the West, confronted face to face with the thousands of people who survive on the streets of San Francisco.

“There are cities that are entirely Latin, with all that that entails culturally and sociologically. When people think of the country, they identify it more with New York or with the more Anglo reality. But there is much more than that,” he remarks.

To unmask this polyhedral reality of American society, Fernando Mahía draws on two of his passions: travel and basketball. “Basketball is the sport that allows you to encompass and put into context everything that America is,” he says.

“With basketball you can reach all layers of American society. It is a multi-colored sport. It was invented by a Canadian, African-Americans took it to another level and it is played in all corners of the country, regardless of whether they are rich or poor. , because all you need is a fairly flat surface, a hoop and a ball”, says the author.

Thus, he emphasizes that in sports that have the label of being “more American”, such as baseball or American football, “half of the population does not exist” because female practice is little more than residual.

WOMEN’S BASKETBALL ACTIVISM

“Women’s basketball has become very important in recent years. Not only in sports, but also on a social level, with a very active commitment to racial or LGTBi issues,” says Fernado Mahía, who narrates in one of the book’s chapters that Players from the Minnesota Lynx of the WNBA (sister of the world’s largest basketball league) were the pioneers in wearing shirts with the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’, long before their NBA teammates did.

The writer from A Coruña’s journey through the North American giant allowed him to meet Ryneldi Becenti in person, the first Native American to reach professional basketball and whom Fernando Mahía accompanied in Shiprock, one of the towns of the Navajo Nation, in the state of New Mexico. .

However, he acknowledges that the person who left the greatest impact on him throughout the trip was Lusia Harris, the first to be chosen by an NBA team. Fernando was able to converse in it on the porch of his house with a Harris who was already well overwhelmed by the physical ailments and by the passage of time that left the best basketball player of a time in which the women’s basketball was little more than a rarity.

The inequality of women with their male partners in the world of the basket is another of the issues in which the writer from Coruña delves, who decorates the pages with the music that accompanied him in his van during the trip: hip hop born in the Bronx, to the blues that came to Chicago after accompanying the blacks from the south where it originated or the ‘Americana’ from the Mid West.

“Inequality is present wherever you look. It happens all over the world, but in the United States, as the flag of savage neoliberalism, it is much more evident,” says Fernando Mahía, who before embarking on this trip lived for almost two years in San Francisco, where he worked in a hotel located in the Tenderloin neighborhood where hundreds of people live on the streets, camping a few meters from the headquarters of the technological giants that serve as the engine of one of the richest cities in the world.

San Francisco, where the idea that took him to the road in the summer of 2019 was born, the journalist from Coruña concluded that trip that he narrates in ‘Coast to coast’, written in his current place of residence, the capital of Guipúzcoa. There he works on his new project, another travel book, in this case, a closer one: a journey on foot through the eastern margin of Galicia, where the Galician community is confused with Asturias.