Victorious Trade: The Journey to the Coliseum
Under the blazing September sun, you sit in the scorching Coliseum, awaiting the start of a USC Trojans football game. Big men in cardinal and gold jerseys, including your favorite, Caleb Williams’ “13,” burst from a tunnel. The replica jerseys you bought at the USC Bookstore hours before made an unnoticed journey from overseas factories to the Coliseum. The thread and fabric sewn to make them overseas, to the planes, trains, and trucks that got them to the US, then to Los Angeles, to the Bookstore, and onto your family’s backs.
The story of these jerseys’ journey is part of a larger tale of American consumption, particularly of apparel. As one of the largest consumers of clothing and footwear in the world, Americans spend an average of $1,460 on apparel per capita every year. American textile manufacturing, which once employed millions of Americans on the Southeastern seaboard, has been dwarfed by manufacturing giants in the developing world, especially in China. Smaller countries in Central America and West and Southeast Asia, from Guatemala and Honduras to Bangladesh and Indonesia, are burgeoning producers of cheap textiles — and even cheaper labor. Guatemala is where our journey will start today.
Guatemala, a relatively small country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north, Belize to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the south, has become a textile manufacturing superstar in the past three decades. The country exports apparel more than anything else, generating 8.9% of the country’s nearly $90 billion GDP.
Funneling more than $1.9 billion worth of clothing and footwear into the global economy in 2021, much of the clothing found in stores across America got their start in a country similar in size to Tennessee. This figure includes our $110.00 replica jerseys, where they are mass-produced and transported to Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala’s largest Pacific-facing port, aptly named after its national symbol. Laid flat and endlessly stacked, these jerseys join a mix of other clothing in hundreds of TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) shipping containers. From there, they make the nearly 3,000-mile journey to the Port of Los Angeles, arriving according to a precise docking and unloading schedule to reach adoring fans right on time.
These TEUs are hoisted up and off the ship by gigantic cranes, where they await further transport by truck, then possibly train. Assuming there are no hiccups in processing, your jerseys will be loaded onto trucks and won’t travel very far — after a half-hour trip up the 110-N to University Park, the university Bookstore will intake their newest shipment, tagging and hanging them for our purchase in a matter of hours. Soon enough, the inevitable happens: Your family will shell out the dollars to support our beloved Trojans.
The story of the ubiquitous replica jersey is just one part of a larger saga of Americans’ obsession with sports, shopping, and spending. All those machines are fueled by trade: Of ideas, of people, of goods. Any glitches in the system can throw off its entire mechanism, and could, potentially, lead us all to looking like the Trojan Knights — painting our jerseys on instead of donning them.
