It was the stunned silence in the half-lit room that made Victor Sanchez realize he had spoken too soon.
Watching Senegal’s World Cup round of 16 match at the Senegalese Association in Harlem on Wednesday, the documentary filmmaker had already reached across the aisle to shake the hand of a fan wearing a Mané jersey — a tribute to left winger Sadio Mané — and congratulate him on what looked like a victory.
Senegal was leading Belgium, the favorite, 2-0. Then, in the 86th minute, the match turned. Belgium scored twice before converting a controversial penalty in the final minutes of extra time.
“Now I feel bad,” Sanchez said, his shoulders slumping as he shifted the Sony A7 III camera on his right shoulder. But such emotional swings have become familiar over the weeks he’s spent documenting World Cup watch parties across the city.
For his independent documentary project, “5 Boroughs/48 Nations,” Sanchez has followed gatherings from a book talk at the Brooklyn Public Library about a Haitian soccer icon who played for the U.S. in a history-making 1950 match to an outdoor watch party in Little Ghana in the Bronx. In the film, he asks what it means to cheer for countries whose soccer stars are celebrated while immigrants from those same nations often feel unwelcome in the U.S.
Little Senegal, big disparities
At the end of the watch party in Harlem, Ramata Sakho of the Senegalese Association summed up the group’s reaction. “I don’t know what’s going on with referees and these African countries,” she said. Earlier that day, the Democratic Republic of the Congo had also lost a match, 2-1, against England.
She added, half-joking, “Did Trump pay them? ’Cause he’s crazy. He wants to get us [Africans] out of here.”
Critics have argued that President Donald Trump’s immigration policies disproportionately affect Black-majority nations, pointing to travel restrictions and moves toward ending Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from several countries, including Haiti, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, who all appeared in this year’s World Cup. Trump has also repeatedly used racist language about Haiti and African countries.
Sanchez kept listening, camera ready. Outside the club, Michelle Londino, an Italian American New Yorker who had watched the game in a bar across the street said the Senegal team had been “robbed.” Some people of Senegalese descent Sanchez approached were too heartbroken to speak with him about the match. They sat slumped against a pole on the barricaded sidewalk across the street from the watch party venue.
Sanchez and others have contrasted the barricades and heavy police presence with the lack of similar law enforcement measures at watch parties for European teams. Meanwhile, Senegalese neighbors had seen police blockades go up since their first World Cup match, against France.
Londino called it “racist.”
The New York Soccer Journal reported that the NYPD said the use of the barricades stemmed from large “disorderly” crowds during a 2025 Africa Cup watch party, when streets were blocked and two officers were injured. Epicenter NYC had not received a response from the department by publication.
These are the kinds of conversations Sanchez was hoping to be able to find when he spent months building relationships in diasporic communities. Still, it doesn’t make them any less tough to witness.
“To see them not be able to do what other communities have been able to do, which is to have watch parties in the street, to go out and celebrate wins in the street, that has been the saddest and angriest thing for me,” Sanchez said.
He said members of the community, who often turn to the Senegalese consulate to advocate for them rather than the City Council or other local representatives, were hesitant to speak publicly about the recurring lockdown of West 116th Street, at the core of Little Senegal in Harlem, during Senegal’s games. He described watching barricades rise before each match as “depressing.”
Sports have always been political
In many ways, Sanchez’s whole life has prepared him for this project. He grew up in a progressive home where “politics was embedded in my soul by my parents,” he said. In the 1970s, Sanchez studied in a college media department that focused on deconstructing the power of traditional media and debunking the notion of journalistic objectivity long before those concepts became buzzwords.
It was also the era of activist athletes: boxing icon Muhammad Ali refused to enlist in the Vietnam War even though it cost him his boxing license. Sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who medaled at the 1968 Summer Olympics, raised black-gloved fists during the U.S. national anthem as a Black Power salute to protest racial discrimination and injustice. NFL great Jim Brown organized Black athletes, including basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to back Muhammad Ali in his stand against the war and racial injustice.
For many sports fans, “your politics [as an athlete] became a litmus test,” he said.
“You knew as much about somebody’s politics as the way they played,” Sanchez added, invoking a quote by the late Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano (sometimes called the “poet laureate of soccer”) that appears at the beginning of his book, “Soccer in Sun and Shadow.”
And true to his South Bronx roots, in what many longtime residents and hip-hop fans consider the realest part of the realest borough, Sanchez doesn’t let interviewees cop out of difficult questions by saying they didn’t want to get political.
“‘The whole thing has been political, so as a citizen, how come you don’t want to comment on that?’” Sanchez said. “I want to know, after the TPS ruling, after kicking a Somali referee out of the country as soon as he stepped foot in, do you really want to shout ‘USA, USA, USA?’”
Lessons from underdog watch parties
Talking politics at the World Cup diaspora parties has led to some surprises. In Little Ghana, an immigrant who wanted to chat with Sanchez outside Sanbra Door Restaurant on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx during the halftime break in Ghana’s game Friday against Colombia, said he was a Republican, supported Trump — and did not want to talk about immigration issues.
Sanchez didn’t press him. He didn’t “want him to feel like I was pinning him in a corner,” Sanchez said. And he thought his relationship with this man and others outside the restaurant was more important to maintain than a back-and-forth exchange. He also found the man’s perspective interesting at face value.
“I think he sees himself as a success — that he made it […] and why can’t other people make it like he did?” Sanchez said. He added that, unlike many of the Senegalese immigrants he interviewed, the Ghanaian man had opportunities, including a scholarship to the University of Rhode Island, that helped put him on the path to his current job at Toyota. Sanchez said he thought, “Is his story different than the story America has about recent immigrants?”
Sanchez has spent nearly five decades documenting overlooked communities. Starting with Downtown Community Television, he helped produce documentaries for PBS about everything from healthcare to portraits of working-class New Yorkers before covering El Salvador’s civil war and Haiti’s democratic movement in the late 1980s.
One recurring theme in conversations he has held throughout the diaspora communities he’s visited: that being an immigrant here is “an honest life,” but hard, he said. He added that, in interviews, the other side of that struggle is often mutual aid, “a tightly knit world of support and love for each other.”
More than anything, Sanchez said, the World Cup project has humbled him about how much there is to know in the city where both he and his parents were born and raised. “In some respects, I am a stranger in my own hometown,” he said. He challenges all New Yorkers to similarly leave their boroughs and meet their neighbors.
Sanchez said this film is about far more than soccer or crowds dancing in the streets: “Immigrants are under attack in this country, immigrants are demonized in this country, and I wanted my film […] to be a response to that.”
One of the moments that best captured that vision came on June 19 during a Brazil-Haiti watch party in Brooklyn when the countries met in the group stage. Fans shared what they saw as a remarkable historical convergence: Haiti, the world’s first Black republic, facing Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, while gathered in the United States on Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of U.S. slavery. Given these ties, it wasn’t uncommon for Haitians to also cheer for their rival on the field.
On Sunday night, after Mexico’s Round of 16 loss, Sanchez, who sometimes sports a Mexico jersey, stepped out of Juquila, a Mexican restaurant in Elmhurst, and into steady rain. “There was a real sense of just quiet,” he said. “Not despair, but quiet sadness, quiet resignation to what had happened.”
He wandered the neighborhood with his camera until he reached a corner where a group of Mexico fans had gathered, dancing in the streets to loud music in the pouring rain, “having the time of their lives in the face of defeat,” Sanchez said.
Police officers soon arrived to disperse the gathering. Still, for Sanchez, the scene captured what his documentary is really about.
“The film is not about wins and losses,” he said. “The film is about continuation, about an expression of folks who are here and want to make it here and feel they have a right to be here.”
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