Peru national football team popular culture during the 1900s and 1910s. Over the following decades, Augusto Leguía's government institutionalised the sport into a national pastime by promoting and organising its development. Consequently, the national football team became an important element of Peru's national identity. According to the historian Carlos Aguirre, nationalist fervor spiked during the qualification phase for the 1970 World Cup finals, because the revolutionary government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado tied the national team's success with the alleged cultural, social, and psychological changes spurred by the country's new political project. Peruvian football fans are known for their distinctive cheer "¡Arriba Perú!" ("Onward
Juan Bautista Alvarado was born in Monterey, Alta California, to Jose Francisco Alvarado and María Josefa Vallejo. His grandfather Juan Bautista Alvarado accompanied Gaspar de Portolà as an enlisted man in the Spanish Army in 1769. His father died a few months after his birth and his mother remarried three years later, leaving Juan Bautista in the care of his grandparents on the Vallejo side, where he and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo grew up together. They were both taught by William Edward Petty Hartnell, an English merchant living in Monterey. In 1827 the eighteen-year-old Alvarado was hired as secretary to the territorial legislature. In