Sports Creating Cross-Cultural Opportunities in Las Vegas

By Ozzie Godinez – CEO and Co-Founder at PACO Collective

Even though the city was built on gambling and vice, the new Las Vegas has proven to be so much more. A-list theater and restaurants dominate the Strip and there are family friendly opportunities around every corner. In 2017, this is definitely not the Vegas of your childhood and even your parents’ childhood.

It also doesn’t have the demographics of many years ago. The 2015 U.S. Census reports that about 31 percent of Hispanics live in Clark Country, Nevada. That makes the Hispanic population precipitously close to whites, 45 percent of whom live in the same county.

These numbers reflect relatively swift growth: The Hispanic population of Las Vegas grew more than 63 percent between 2000 and 2010 alone. Forty-four percent of Hispanic households in the city are Spanish-speaking. And the Latin Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas reports that there are 6,600 Hispanic-owned businesses currently in operation.

So the diversity of Las Vegas means that people of different races and ethnicities live closer together. Ethnic food is no longer “ethnic” — It’s the mainstream. The same is true of fashion, entertainment, and sports.

And talking about sports, in case you missed it, the Raiders will soon become the first NFL team to take root in Las Vegas. After long stretches in Oakland and Los Angeles, the football team will have its own world-class stadium in coming years, a venue that is expected to also host professional soccer matches when the Raiders are out of town or during the off season.

That’s not all. Las Vegas is also headquarters for the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC), a series that is incredibly popular with Hispanics and that dominates the city’s sport landscape each year. Each year the UFC declares October its official month for Hispanic heritage and says it has several notable Hispanic fighters in its line-up. In 2011 it launched UFCLatino.com, a special site dedicated to bilingual fans located in the U.S.

Boxing is another sport driven by Hispanic audiences in Las Vegas with Mexican-based beer companies often the biggest sponsors of Vegas-based megafights. In fact, the sport is so strong that promoter Bob Arum announced earlier this year that he will rename the all-Hispanic undercard for his pay-per-view show “the Donald Trump Undercard” to protest the U.S. president’s ambition to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

Needless to say that moving the Raiders to Las Vegas is not seen as that much of a risk because the city has become such a melting pot of people from many different destinations. Unlike other places where Hispanics operate more on the fringes, sport represents a true cross-cultural phenomenon. The Raiders will not be seen as one group’s team or another, but everyone’s team. The same is true of boxing matches or UFC fights where Mexican-born fighters vie for titles cheered on by different racial and ethnic groups.

The greatest illustration of cross-cultural in action will be when the Raiders stadium is up and running. There, NFL and MLS games, as well as international soccer competitions, will take place under one roof. Bilingual cheers in the stands, bilingual messages on the scoreboard, and bilingual players on the field: The future of how we view sport may never be the same.

 

 

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