Inside the 25,000-seater Estadio Hidalgo in east-central Mexico, fans unfurl a tifo featuring a miner holding a pickaxe and a distinctly crimped pastry.
The figure is flanked by two identical flags, both black with a white cross, immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with England’s southernmost county.
The fans of CF Pachuca, widely recognised as Mexico’s first football club, are paying tribute to the Cornish miners who helped introduce the game to the country.
The transatlantic connection between Hidalgo and Cornwall stretches back to 1824, when Mexico’s mining sector lay in ruins after a decade-long war that delivered independence from Spain.
A mining engineer called John Taylor, who had found success investing in Cornish mines particularly around the village of Gwennap, turned his attention to the struggling Mexican operations.
“He had taken a group of failing and flooded mines and turned them into a success and he looked at the mines of Real del Monte and thought, ‘I can do the same there’,” Cornish mining migration specialist Dr Sharron Schwartz tells BBC Sport.
Taylor’s involvement brought hundreds of Cornishmen back and forth between Cornwall and Hidalgo over the following decades, carrying with them their culture, ideas, and sporting habits.
The first recorded reference to Cornish miners playing sport in Hidalgo was actually about cricket, with Cornish native and mining magnate Frank Rule establishing a cricket team in Pachuca in the late 1850s.
“The football clubs came out of the cricket clubs,” Dr Schwartz explains, adding: “In fact some of them were interchangeable and the cricketers were the footballers.”
The first mention of a football team in Pachuca appeared in 1892, when a local newspaper article reported on a reorganisation of the team following a “schism” between those in Pachuca and those referred to as “the mountain men” in Real del Monte.
“When I read this I laughed, I thought ‘how Cornish’. The Cornish love a schism,” Dr Schwartz says, noting the two groups were urged to unite and strengthen their team.
In 1895, a meeting led by Rule resulted in the amalgamation of the Pachuca Cricket Club, the Pachuca Football Club, and the Velasco Cricket Club to form Pachuca Athletic Club.
Rule donated land near his hacienda for the club to host matches, on the condition that games would not be played on Sundays due to his Methodist beliefs.
By 1902, other clubs had emerged in areas such as Orizaba in Veracruz, with that club contesting Pachuca’s claim to being Mexico’s first football club to this day.
Those two clubs, alongside three others, came together to form the first recognised football league in Mexico, the Liga Mexicana de Football Amateur Association, with Orizaba claiming the first title in 1902.
Cornish women were also a visible presence at matches, with Dr Schwartz noting: “They loved to turn out [for matches] and often wore the club colours.”
Pasties were central to the Cornish experience in Mexico, with Dr Schwartz pointing to an early reference of them being consumed during a cricket match stoppage, likely cooked by Cornish women at the ground.
Pachuca welcomed their first Mexican player, David Islas, in 1908 when he was invited to join by Alf Crowle, the son of a Cornish miner from St Blazey, who became player-manager and was praised for breaking down ethnic and social barriers.
“He’s probably Cornish-Pachuca’s most famous son, as far as football goes,” Dr Schwartz says of Crowle, who later left the club in the early 1920s following the Mexican Revolution.
The original club folded shortly after playing their last tournament in 1922, before being reformed in 1950, folding again, and then returning once more in 1960, going on to win seven Mexican league titles and the Copa Sudamericana in 2006.
Pachuca fan Eduardo Hernandez says the club’s heritage remains central to supporters today, explaining: “The club is very proud of it. We were founded by miners and they brought the football to us. People are aware of that.”
Real del Monte still hosts the annual International Pasty Festival, which has been held in the town since 2009, and a pasty museum, while pasties remain a matchday staple in Hidalgo, traditionally filled with beef, vegetables, and chilli.
Kernow FA, who represent Cornwall at international level, want to arrange a match between their Cornish team and Pachuca in Mexico, while Mexico prepares to become the first nation to host a men’s World Cup on three separate occasions.
