Soccer is the national sport of Mexico. The ongoing World Cup and the early success of the Mexican national team have sent a country of devoted fans to the street for huge parties that have bordered on absurdity.
The origins of that fervor can be traced to a mountainous region about two hours northeast of the capital, Mexico City. This is where miners from Cornwall, England, who first came here in the early 19th century to salvage and modernize the Mexican mining industry in Hidalgo State, introduced soccer.
But where exactly in that region, an area known as Mexico’s Little Cornwall, depends on whom you ask. In Mineral del Monte, a town of 16,000 residents that sits nearly 9,000 feet above sea level and still has remnants of Cornish influence, a few plaques and paintings adjacent to an old silver mine near the main square commemorate its place in history.
“Soccer in Mexico was born in a place close to the heavens: Real de Monte,” one painting reads, using the name that Spanish colonizers gave the town and many still use today. Nearby, one plaque claimed that the first game was played in the courtyards of the Dolores Mine.
There are a few other reminders throughout the town: One of the biggest bakeries selling Cornish-style pasties, baked meat and potato turnovers that have been adapted with Mexican fillings such as mole or beans, has a sign out front that calls the town “the cradle of Mexican soccer.” In an alleyway honoring the town’s soccer heritage, the writing on a wall calls it “the seed and root of soccer in Mexico.” News reports over the years have repeated these claims.
Some would disagree.
Sharron Schwartz, a leading historian on Cornish migration to Latin America, said that although Cornish miners first arrived in 1824, they originally brought cricket, as soccer was not formalized until the 1860s in England. The earliest recorded soccer game in Mexico, Dr. Schwartz said, was in 1889 in Pachuca, the capital of Hidalgo State, about 30 minutes away. It later became home to the country’s first soccer club.
That first soccer game in Mexico was played between workers from a Pachuca mine and a Mineral del Monte mine, a rivalry that she said mirrored those between mining communities back in Cornwall.
“And we only know about the game because it descended into a brawl and several of the miners were hauled before the court in Pachuca,” Dr. Schwartz said in a phone interview.
Belem Oviedo Gámez, the director of the Historical Archive and Mining Museum in Pachuca that oversees the old mines in Mineral del Monte, said that “nowhere in the archive is there any record of a soccer field or game played” at Dolores Mine.
But that is not the story that generations of Mineral del Monte residents have handed down.
Edmundo Méndez Tejeda, who is the town’s mayor and whose family sells pasties (pastes in Spanish), said his parents and others taught him as a child that Mineral del Monte and specifically the Dolores Mine courtyards were the site of Mexico’s first soccer game. Others in the town said their grandparents or relatives had told them the same.
Even though no one could provide evidence of this claim, they insisted that their town had a rightful place in Mexican soccer history.
“If Pachuca is, indeed, the cradle, and before the cradle comes the birthplace, so where was soccer born? Real del Monte,” Mr. Méndez Tejeda, 45, said.
In 2014, Hidalgo’s state congress named Pachuca the cradle of Mexican soccer and the site of the country’s first match. (Pachuca is also home to the International Soccer Hall of Fame.)
Giovanni Romero López, who runs a council recognizing soccer history in Mineral del Monte, said the declaration was “unfortunate.” He compared the congress to referees at a soccer game making a call in “bad faith.”
“They didn’t defend Real del Monte as they should have,” he said, pointing to a long list of soccer figures, from players to executives, who either came out of Mineral del Monte or have visited, such as the Argentine legend Diego Maradona. (King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, visited in 2014.)
Rosa María Durán Mejía, 62, who owns pasty shops and leads a Real del Monte-Cornwall cultural heritage council, which organizes the world’s largest pasty festival annually in October, said her town had “an obligation” to preserve its culture. But she admitted that its claim to soccer history relied more on oral histories (her great-grandfather, in her case) and less on firm evidence to challenge Pachuca.
“It’s funny,” she said, “because human beings are complex and we always want to be right.”
A planned small museum honoring the town’s soccer history was never completed by previous governments, the mayor said, and instead a local group runs its own little private gallery.
He and Mr. Romero López said they were working to better recognize Mineral del Monte’s soccer heritage, such as erecting a monument of a soccer player melted from old keys donated by the public and another of a metal soccer ball that says that the town is the “cradle of Mexican soccer” — the same title given to Pachuca.
The rivalry between Pachuca and Mineral del Monte, Dr. Schwartz said, has not disappeared since that first soccer game. “And that rivalry is what enabled football to flourish in the first place,” she said.
While Mineral del Monte’s mayor downplayed the competition with Pachuca, Mr. Romero López said that “there’s always been fights” between the two communities.
As the World Cup was played in Mexico, Dr. Schwartz, who is Cornish, said she rejoiced in the influence that her small community in the southwest corner of England, now numbering nearly half a million people, had on a non English speaking country in Latin America. But she said Mineral del Monte’s soccer claims have “kind of blown up.”
The town’s final mines closed 20 years ago, so it reinvented itself as a weekend destination and is part of the national tourism ministry’s magical town registry.
Dr. Schwartz credited the town for converting itself into a tourism star and acknowledged its nods to Cornwall, but she said she did not like when people there have “tried to twist history” for marketing purposes.
Mr. Méndez Tejeda said that at least 80 percent of the town lives off tourism. An average of 30,000 people visit per weekend, he said, mostly from greater Mexico City, adding up to roughly 1.5 million per year. He and others said that the town’s pasties and history overall, not its soccer heritage, are its biggest draws.
Mineral del Monte features several old mines, colorful architecture and a 19th-century Cornish cemetery where all the graves except one face east, toward England. The Cornish, English, United Kingdom and Mexican flags dot the town.
In terms of soccer, Dr. Schwartz said, it would be better if Real del Monte and Pachuca together, rather than individually, claimed that Mexico’s Little Cornwall region was the birthplace of Mexican soccer.
And its cradle.
