Peñarol

Peñarol enters the narrative through its historic football imagery: a black-and-yellow shirt provides the identifying clue in a search through old sports magazines. The episode connects the club to Magalí Guerra’s film work and turns its archive of players into a meeting point between football memory and present-day artistic collaboration.

Identity and Appearance

Peñarol is identified through the team shirt requested by Guerra: Lucas Pereyra is to find an issue showing a Black player wearing the club’s black-and-yellow colors. The passage does not describe the club’s organization or broader history; it presents Peñarol through this specific visual marker and the old photographs gathered around it.

The Search for Players

The search takes place in a shop where the owner allows Guerra and Lucas to rummage through piles of a worn sports magazine called Estrellas deportivas. Guerra directs Lucas toward covers from the 1960s, asking him to look for a Black player in a Peñarol shirt. The request is practical, but the magazines open onto a broader sense of the past: Lucas sees players with slicked hair and small mustaches, posed in old-fashioned shorts, among them men whose appearance recalls his grandfather, Ángel Pereyra. The club’s colors thus help guide a search through images that Lucas experiences as a passage into another era of football.

Lucas eventually stops at a photograph of a mixed-race player seated on the field and surrounded by balls. When he shows it to Guerra, she recognizes Spencer, praises Lucas, and kisses him. She then tells him that they must also find Joya, another Black player. The moment makes the Peñarol clue part of a collaborative hunt rather than an isolated piece of trivia: identifying a player advances the work Guerra has brought into their afternoon together.

Film Project and Narrative Significance

Guerra explains that the production of the film she is working on has asked her to find magazines featuring Joya and Spencer. The film is to be called Joya y Spencer; she sings a playful song about the two men as she and Lucas continue their search, briefly dancing among the dusty stacks while the shopkeeper watches them with discomfort. The passage identifies Spencer through the Peñarol-related search and places both players within the film’s subject, while noting that one was Peruvian and the other Ecuadorian.

Peñarol’s significance here is therefore specific and mediated: the club’s shirt acts as a way to locate a figure in an old printed archive, and that image leads Lucas and Guerra toward the people and material needed for her film. The club’s presence also helps join the scene’s two time scales—the faded football photographs Lucas reads as remnants of an earlier era and the contemporary creative project that gives those images a new purpose.