Miguel Sifuentes is a fixture in the stands at the Colorado Rapids’ suburban stadium. He can be found joyfully beating a drum behind the south goal, where the soccer club’s most ardent supporters stand and chant in hopes of creating a fortress that opponents fear.

Sifuentes, 38, used to give little thought to one chant pervasive in his native Mexico — shouting “puto!” when opposing goalkeepers boot goal kicks downfield.

Translated from Spanish, “puto” means male prostitute. But like a lot of words, it has different meanings depending on your point of view and, even moreso, your identity.

Viewed in the worst possible light, “puto” is a derogatory term used against gays. But to legions of Latino fans, it means “coward, “jerk” or other unkind (and unprintable) equivalents. Not nice, but not a slur against a segment of the population that’s been subjected to hate.

At the construction company where Sifuentes works, he and his coworkers who share Mexican roots casually throw around “puto” in ways that other people say “dude.”

Then Sifuentes became a father. His 3-year-old son goes by the nickname “Punch,” plays stingy defense in backyard soccer games and repeats everything his father says.

Sifuentes concluded “puto” was not something he wanted to hear out of his son’s mouth.

“I think it’s wrong,” said Sifuentes, who prepares carne asada street tacos at Rapids tailgates and befriends Latino players new to town. “But it is hard to take that word out of my system.”

Heated discussion over the “puto!” chant comes and goes like the chant itself. If you have watched any of the Mexican national team’s games in this month’s Copa America tournament, “puto!” is an inescapable part of the soundtrack as El Tri fans pack U.S. football stadiums.

Whether it has any place in soccer stadiums is about more than than sports and fandom. The debate raises questions about identity, community and mutual respect in our increasingly diverse country at a time when divisive racial politics dominate a presidential campaign.

I, too, am a father and Rapids season ticket-holder who sits with hard-core supporters in a section of Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. I’ve brought my sons — 10 and 7 — to most of the games in a season that finds the Rapids unexpectedly on top of the Major League Soccer standings.

During a match last month, a half-dozen fans in the row behind us yelled “puto!” When my boys asked what it meant, I said it wasn’t nice and left it at that. On Twitter, I called it an anti-gay slur and urged the soccer club and its fan-run supporters group to do something about it.

For the record, I’m a middle-class Gen X white guy born and raised in the suburbs.

There was something else that bothered me about “puto.” I fell for soccer relatively recently, watching the U.S. men’s national team make a deep run to the finals of a top-flight 2009 tournament in South Africa that was a run-up to the 2010 World Cup in that same country.

I was won over by the moments of individual brilliance and collective heart. Soccer inspires entire nations to hold their collective breaths over 90 minutes, then exhale in ecstasy or collapse in agony. There is a reason soccer is known as the beautiful game. To those who call soccer boring, consider that NFL games run over three hours and feature about 17 minutes of action.

Soccer fans pledge allegiance to club and country. My first loyalty is to country. The Mexican national team is the United States’ biggest rival. “Puto” is a popular Mexican chant.

So I don’t want to hear it for that reason, either. Yet in the U.S., where soccer culture remains young, imitation runs rampant. The vast majority of chants and tradition are borrowed.

The governing body of world soccer, FIFA, has taken baby steps toward trying to eradicate insulting and discriminatory chants in the stands. In January, the organization fined the national soccer federations of six Latin American nations — Chile faced the harshest sanctions — after disciplinary inquiries related to “homophobic chants by the respective team’s fans.”

After the Mexican federation was hit with a $20,600 fine, Mexican soccer stars appeared in a video campaign promoting social tolerance. Although the spots did not call out “puto” by name, media reports suggested it was the intended target. It seems to have changed little.

In this country, questions about “puto” put Colorado Rapids and Major League Soccer officials in a tough spot.

The Rapids have struggled to find a foothold in a market saturated with professional sports teams. To grow the sport and the business, club officials need to cobble together a motley fanbase of families from nearby Stapleton and elsewhere, Latino fans and twentysomethings.

The Rapids front office can’t afford to either be insensitive to gay rights or alienate Latino fans.

The club’s officially recognized supporters group, Centennial 38, faces a similar predicament.

Out of concerns that it could be viewed as homophobic, among other reasons, the volunteer-run group decided before the 2015 season to prohibit its chant-leaders from using “puto” from the “capo stand” facing their rowdiest fans, said Dave Wegner, a C38 board member.

The group did not go so far as to ban the term from the three sections of the stadium it controls. (C38, not the front office, sells tickets in these sections.)

The compromise, in part, was reached out of respect for the group’s Latino members. An outright ban, Wegner explained, might be viewed as disrespecting Latino culture and unfairly suggesting the people who use it at games are homophobic.

“The action, I think, was appropriate — to respect all sides,” said Wegner, who noted that C38 participates in Denver’s annual gay pride parade and league-promoted anti-racism campaigns. “People can call it political. People can call it whatever they want. We’re not trying to create fires. We are trying to keep fires from starting.”

The move seems to have made an impact. “Puto” is not nearly as commonplace in the stadium as it once was, showing up only sporadically. At a Memorial Day weekend home game packed with visiting youth soccer players in town for a tournament, I didn’t hear it once.

Teddy Montoya is a longtime Rapids fan with strong feelings about “puto” born from his own identity. A 27-year-old who works in public health, Montoya is Mexican-American and gay.

He sat a couple of rows in front of us at a recent game with his fiancé.

Montoya mostly attributes the appearance of “puto” at U.S. soccer stadiums to “new members in the supporters groups not really understanding soccer culture in the United States.” He believes more should be done to eradicate the chant — starting with education.

“In the U.S., we are trying to make it as inclusive as possible,” Montoya said. “I respect other cultures and the way they do things. But that chant has no place.”

Asked to comment for this piece, a Rapids spokesman said in an e-mailed statement that the club opposes discrimination of any kind and that club staff is “vigilant and trained to act where appropriate.” He didn’t address whether the club considers “puto” a discriminatory term.

Is an outright ban of “puto” necessary? Probably not. Conversation and education can be more effective than handing down rules. But if the self-policing efforts of the supporters group aren’t enough, then Rapids and MLS ought to launch educational campaigns of their own.

My stance on the “puto” chant hasn’t softened since I fired off that tweet.

I don’t think it has any place in the stadium. If people who are most hurt by hearing the term are offended and made uncomfortable, that’s good enough for me. But I don’t take such a dim view of fans who use the term, either, in part because of my conversation with Miguel Sifuentes.

That is what talking to people from different backgrounds and cultures can do.

In Section 117, Sifuentes is trying to get his soccer-crazy young son to embrace an alternative goal-kick chant to the one he has decided to leave behind.

The replacement chant is one championed by Centennial 38.

It is, simply, the Spanish word for the beautiful game: “Futbol!”

Eric Gorski is a Denver journalist, reporter for The Denver Post and member of the Centennial 38 supporters group. Follow him on Twitter: @egorski