Deportes: The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora

DEPORTES

LATINIDAD

Transnational Cultures in the United States

This series publishes books that deepen and expand our understanding of Latina/o populations, especially in the context of their transnational relationships within the Americas. Focusing on borders and boundary-crossings, broadly conceived, the series is committed to publishing scholarship in history, film and media, literary and cultural studies, public policy, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Inspired by interdisciplinary approaches, methods, and theories developed out of the study of transborder lives, cultures, and experiences, titles enrich our understanding of transnational dynamics.

Matt Garcia, Series Editor, Professor of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies, and History, Dartmouth College

For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

DEPORTES

The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora

JOSÉ M. ALAMILLO

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alamillo, José M., 1969- author.

Title: Deportes: the making of a sporting Mexican diaspora / José M. Alamillo.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020. | Series: Latinidad: transnational cultures in the United States | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044874 (print) | LCCN 2019044875 (ebook) | ISBN 9781978813663 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978813670 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978813687 (epub) | ISBN 9781978813694 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978813700 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Sports—Mexico. | Athletes—Mexico. | Mexican American athletes.

Classification: LCC GV587.A53 2020 (print) | LCC GV587 (ebook) | DDC s 796.0972—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044874

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044875

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by José M. Alamillo

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

Para mis padres,

Rosa y José Alamillo

por su cariño y apoyo incondicional.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1Deportes, Americanization, and Mexican Sporting Culture

2El Boxeo, Immigration, and the Great Brown Hope

3 Playing Béisbol across Borders

4 Forging Transnational Sporting Networks

5 Becoming Good Neighbors through Wartime Sports

6 Sporting a New Identity in Postwar America

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

DEPORTES

INTRODUCTION

Even before I learned about César Chávez, Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders, I had one Latino role model—Fernando Valenzuela. As a skinny immigrant kid growing up in Ventura County, California, north of Los Angeles, I did not speak English very well. Strangers had even told me, Go back to Mexico. To avoid being hit by racial slurs—beaner, wetback, and more—I used to downplay my ethnic background. But that all changed during a fateful baseball season. On April 9, 1981, Valenzuela made his major league debut as a starting pitcher with the Los Angeles Dodgers, shutting out the Houston Astros. Fernandomania erupted after he won his first eight starts, tossing five shutouts and posting a miniscule 0.50 ERA during that stretch. With his signature screwball and eyes-to-the-sky windup, Valenzuela earned an unprecedented National League Rookie of the Year Award and Cy Young Award while helping the Dodgers win the 1981 World Series.¹ Every time Fernando pitched when I was young, my cousins and I got together and cheered for El Toro. And afterward we always played ball. We tried throwing screwballs but were lucky if they even crossed home plate.

Apparently, I was not alone. A 1983 Los Angeles Times poll asked Californians to name a person they most admired, and Valenzuela ranked behind Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan.² He is one of us, explained an East Los Angeles butcher. I like him because he makes me feel proud. In this country, you have to be pretty good in any field to be recognized.³ Media recognition on Valenzuela’s meteoric rise to superstardom gave rise to the Fernandomania that made millions for the Dodgers franchise. Valenzuela fans bought baseball cards, magazines, jerseys, pennants, buttons, vinyl records, even boxes of gum emblazoned with their idol’s image. However, something more culturally and politically significant accompanied the craze. Valenzuela inspired the Latino population of Los Angeles, immigrant and U.S. born alike. His humble demeanor, combined with his improbable success as an unassuming son of Sonora, Mexico, helped to instill a feeling of unity and optimism among Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Latino/as.

Besides uniting the Latino community, Valenzuela helped counter the anti-immigrant sentiment that seemed to reach a peak in the early 1980s. In my own family, this attitude freed my father to boast about how he had also overcome humble beginnings as an immigrant working long hours as a lemon picker and ironworker. But with hard work and a Sí, se puede mind-set, my father exemplified that one could accomplish anything in this country. My father is still convinced that when President Ronald Reagan invited Valenzuela to the White House for a luncheon with him and Mexico’s president José López Portillo in the middle of the 1981 season, they talked more about immigration than baseball.

Perhaps my father isn’t far off. One could convincingly argue that Valenzuela’s success on the mound helped change attitudes toward Mexican immigrants. When Congress passed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act just a few years later, it included a compromise about legalization for immigrants. The law enabled my family and nearly three million undocumented immigrants to gain legal status. My mother, who was not a big baseball fan, still believes that Fernando was touched by God, not because he looked up to the heavens when he pitched but because he had helped change people’s minds. My sisters and female cousins, who were discouraged from playing sports, even got on the Fernandomania bandwagon. This cultural phenomenon was so powerful that it brought more women into sports spectatorship.

Valenzuela quickly became a national hero in Mexico. My relatives in Zacatecas also referred to him as El Toro, and his popularity eclipsed the national politicians who scrambled to take a photo with the baseball celebrity.⁴ Fans from the border cities of Mexicali and Tijuana made the long drive to watch El Toro on the Dodgers Stadium mound. Even this soccer-loving country started to play and watch more baseball. More than twenty thousand kids showed up to Valenzuela’s baseball clinic in Mexico City. Televisa broadcasted all his games during the 1981 season, surpassing soccer matches. Valenzuela became a national hero and the unofficial ambassador of Greater Mexico setting a positive example for the youth and poor alike.

Why did such a talented pitcher have to leave Mexico to become a hero in his country of birth? Was he the first Mexican to make it in the big leagues? Why did it take so long for a Mexican-origin athlete to become a big sport celebrity in the United States? Why has the U.S. sports industry failed to recruit and develop Mexican talent? These questions led me to explore the historic role of sports on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Deportes examines the sporting experience of Mexicans, Mexican immigrants, and Mexican Americans, both men and women, in Greater Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. Although the term Greater Mexico encompasses all geographic areas inhabited by people of Mexican descent, I primarily focus on Southern California and its connections with Mexico. In terms of sports, I examine baseball, boxing, basketball, softball, track and field, football, soccer, and tennis at the amateur, semiprofessional, Olympic, and professional levels. I argue that Mexican-origin males and females in the United States have used sports to empower themselves and their community by developing and sustaining transnational networks with Mexico.

Sport narratives are too often centered around individual achievement, which obscures their communities of support.⁵ Latino sports heroes have been made not through individual effort alone but through the support of a network of families, coaches, managers, promoters, organizations, sportswriters, and fans who have opened athletic opportunities to compete and represent their community and nation, at home and abroad. These networks are not tethered to the nation-state; rather, Mexican-origin athletes have used transnational networks to challenge racial, gender, and class barriers imposed by the sports industry, government officials, and media and in the process have created a sporting Mexican diaspora.

SPORTING MEXICAN DIASPORA

This book is indebted to the field of African American studies that pioneered the study of race and sport.⁶ From the physical educator and civil rights activist Edwin B. Henderson, who wrote the first book on black athletic achievements in hopes of eliminating racial discrimination in sports, to the scholar-activist Harry Edwards, who published the groundbreaking book The Revolt of the Black Athlete and founded the Olympic Project for Human Rights that inspired the famous Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, these and a new generation of scholars have enriched our understanding of the sporting black experience in the United States.⁷

Much of sport history tends to be conducted within national boundaries. Anthropologist Alan Klein urged sport scholars to shed national identities to keep pace with a rapidly globalizing sports world.⁸ Yet, most transnational sports history has focused between United States and Canada, rarely crossing into Mexico.⁹ Recent studies on the sporting black experience have shown the utility of studying race and sport diasporically.¹⁰ In Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora, Ben Carrington contends that black athletes competing in the diaspora were central to challenging white supremacy in the Western world. Building on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic, Carrington defines the sporting black diaspora world as a complex, transnational, cultural and political space that exceeds the boundaries of the nation state, whereby the migrations and achievements of black athletes have come to assume a heightened political significance for the dispersed peoples of the black diaspora.¹¹ Similarly, I use a diaspora framework to examine the migrations, networks, and political dimensions of the Mexican sporting experience.

The term Mexican diaspora resembles Américo Paredes’s concept of Greater Mexico, defined as all areas where people of Mexican descent have established a presence and have maintained their Mexicanness as a key part of their cultural identity.¹² This pioneering folklorist offered an early transnational vision of Mexican expressive culture that crossed political, economic, and geographic borders.¹³ Paredes reminded scholars long ago that the North American cowboy originated with the Mexican vaquero who had long participated in rodeo and charrería competitions along the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.¹⁴ Since Paredes work was published, scholars have examined musical, literary, artistic, cinematic, religious, and political encounters in Greater Mexico.¹⁵ Yet they have paid little attention to sporting practices in Greater Mexico.¹⁶ This is not surprising since high-brow American academics have traditionally not taken sports seriously, and thus it remains ghettoized in many disciplines.¹⁷

In his critical assessment of Chicano historiography, Samuel Regalado argues that the topic of sport has remained largely invisible even though Mexican American competitive sport has crossed class and regional lines, stimulated hybrid and fluid identities, and enhanced a transnational culture.¹⁸ With Playing America’s Game, Adrian Burgos Jr. raised the level theoretically and methodologically in the study of Latinos, race, and sports.¹⁹ Drawing from research in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States and interviews with former professional players, Burgos championed the overlooked Afro-Latinos who became integration pioneers in the major leagues. By transnationalizing America’s Game, Burgos proposes the writing of sport history beyond a single nation, including sources, ideologies, and frameworks from and across multiple nations. Following this lead, I trace the movement of Mexican athletes from and across Mexico and the United States to participate in a wide range of sports-related activities.

In Deportes, I develop the concept of sporting Mexican diaspora to reveal the imaginary and material interactions between athletes, team managers, and coaches across and within national borders as they organize, promote, and compete in sports-related activities. Diaspora involves the migration of Mexican athletes, teams, and sporting institutions from their once-territorial homeland held together by shared memory, loss, longing, and a sense of history and culture. This migration is anchored in social networks of affiliation, communication, and attachment across and beyond widely scattered diasporic communities that produced a vibrant sporting culture. In the face of alienation, a culture of sports has allowed athletes and their supporters to develop various forms of diasporic consciousness, whether a renewed sense of cultural and national pride, a heightened political awareness of civil rights, or a newly formed hybrid sporting identity. Deportes focuses on five dimensions of the sporting Mexican diaspora: (1) a physical, political, and economic displacement; (2) a transnational sporting network that has shaped political activism; (3) a sporting racial project; (4) a gendered sporting experience for male and female athletes; and (5) a diasporic consciousness that has informed the construction of hybrid sporting identities.

The first dimension encompasses the long history of physical, political, economic displacement of Mexican people as a result of U.S. imperialism. After the United States annexed Mexico’s northern territory in 1848, the Mexican population found themselves physically displaced and in a precarious position where they had to renegotiate their relationship to their homeland, while at the same time trying to eke out a living in their new hostland. This new relationship was ambivalent at best. The property and citizenship rights guaranteed under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo proved to be fragile, though. Since former Mexican citizens could no longer rely on their new government for protection, they turned to family and community for support. Soon thereafter, their leisure and sporting practices came under attack by Anglo-American newcomers. In 1855, the California legislature passed a law banning bear and bull fights and other barbarous amusements.²⁰ But horseracing and other roping and riding contests survived into the late nineteenth century and influenced the modern sport of rodeo.

Economic necessity also fueled displacement throughout the Mexican diaspora. When the United States exported American sports into Mexico, President Porfirio Díaz and the Mexican elite enthusiastically embraced them as part of the country’s modernization program. Although the Mexican Revolution disrupted sporting activities, there was renewed growth under President Venustiano Carranza, who linked the physical betterment of Mexican citizens with building a stronger and modern nation. To bolster its international standing, Mexico competed at the Olympic Games in 1924, and although they did not win any medals, they showed the world that they could compete.²¹ Despite increased government promotion of sports, the country’s economic downturn during the Great Depression made it difficult to send athletes abroad. As a result, to field and sponsor teams at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the Mexican Olympic Committee reached out to México de afuera (Mexico outside) for assistance. The successful fund-raising efforts revealed how México de afuera saw themselves as members of a sporting diaspora.

The 1930s was a crucial period for the reformist administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas, who pushed for agrarian reform, public education, and state-sponsored sports programs to promote teamwork, cooperation, and nationalism. The late British historian Eric Hobsbawm recognized the role of sports in the creation of a sense of nationalism: The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.²² This sporting nationalism reached its peak in the 1940s with the rise of Jorge Pasquel’s Mexican League, which challenged the hegemony of U.S. Major League Baseball. Ultimately, sports policy was not a priority for Mexican government officials, forcing athletes to join the northward migration stream due to economic reasons. In reality, U.S. domination and influence on Mexico forced their physical displacement to the United States with dreams of becoming a professional sport star, earning higher wages to support their families, as well as creating options to stay or return home. While economic necessity kept many from returning home, Mexican athletes in the United States still found ways to build and maintain transnational ties with their homeland.

The second dimension involves building community and transnational networks for political empowerment. Institutional politics, community organizations, and family and kin networks helped facilitate the rise of a transnational sporting network within and beyond the Mexican diaspora. A network of sporting organizations (from the amateur to the professional), athletes, coaches, promoters, and sportswriters promoted a cross-border sporting culture, not limited to national boundaries. Sports provided more than recreation and entertainment that also helped offset the alienation and cultural displacement they felt in their hostland. For members of the Mexican diaspora, sports and its associated practices of gambling, drinking, and socializing provided solace from the negative social encounters they faced. Sporting transnational networks could be activated for political purposes in the Mexican diaspora. Members of the Mexican Athletic Association of Southern California (MAASC) and the Mexican Athletic Union (MAU), for example, forged ties with Mexico’s sport federation during the 1930s and 1940s to provide more cross-border athletic opportunities but also to advocate for more recreation and sports programs from city officials. These networks allowed athletic organizations and their members to gain confidence in their ability to exert political influence on U.S. institutions.

The state played an important role in mediating the cross-border networks of Mexican athletes. The nation-state—through Mexican consular offices, embassies, or the Immigration and Naturalization Service and Inter-American Affairs Office—mediated these cross-border sporting networks in an attempt to control their mobility and citizenship status. To travel and compete abroad was not easy; it required sport migrants to navigate the U.S. immigration regime with assistance from a team of coaches, trainers, managers, and promoters. Before Valenzuela, many athletes had traveled north to find opportunities to play and compete, but the vast majority were not sport celebrities. Rather, these migrants were lesser-known athletes who toiled far away from the media limelight, routinely crossing national borders for a chance to compete on a baseball diamond, in the boxing ring, on a soccer field, or on a basketball or tennis court.

In the case of Mexican Americans, sports became the training ground for political activism. As high school student athletes, Bert Corona and Emma Tenayuca learned their first lessons about political organizing by playing basketball. Additionally, Mexican athletes and their supporters used their celebrity status and resources to call attention to civil rights problems affecting their community. One major civil rights issue to emerge was the battle over media representation of Mexican athletes in the sports pages. Mexican and Mexican American sports journalists played an essential role in breaking down racial barriers for athletes of Mexican descent. This book contends that sports journalists and editors writing for the Spanish-language press, with a wide circulation across the United States and Mexico, helped develop awareness of sports as civil rights in the Mexican diaspora. As Thomas Guglielmo observed, The Mexican American civil rights struggle … can be known only by examining developments, institutions, and ideas on both sides of the border.²³ This includes athletes and sporting institutions that flourished across both sides of the border and were instrumental in raising awareness of civil rights within and beyond the sports industry.

The third dimension considers the sporting Mexican diaspora as a racial project. Michael Omi and Howard Winant advanced the concept of racial project to capture how racial formation processes occur through a linkage between structure and representation.²⁴ Building on Omi and Winant, sport sociologist Ben Carrington coined the term sporting racial projects to show that the sports industry, like other social institutions, determines larger processes of race making.²⁵ As Carrington stated, Sports become productive and not merely receptive, of racial discourse and this discourse has material effects both within sports and beyond.²⁶ In this book, I examine those sporting racial projects that constructed Mexican athletes into a brown racial category within the U.S. sporting world.

The sporting body that makes physical activity possible is one example of how the sports industry shapes our understanding of race. Historically, U.S. academics, travel writers, and physical educators sought to control the Mexican body through supervised play and good sportsmanship that reflected a muscular Christianity and Americanization ideology that originated in Anglo-Protestant circles. These racial discourses positioned Mexican athletic ability as lesser to that of white athletes due to a presumed inferior athleticism, smaller stature, lack of coaching, poor sportsmanship, and uncivilized play. These racial ideologies traveled back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border and shaped local, regional, and state institutional practices toward Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans.

The Mexican sporting body also became a site of resistance by challenging racial assumptions about their supposed physical and mental inferiority., Through their actions on and off the playing field, Mexican athletes challenged prevailing racial assumptions about their community and nation. For example, when Mexican prizefighters defeated their opponents in the ring, they became heroes to their community at a time when they were viewed and treated as a racial problem. These sports heroes had an affective connection with fans who instilled a sense of cultural pride and national identification.²⁷ In a sense, the athletic successes of Mexican athletes and their supporters were subtle attempts to subvert social hierarchies and power dynamics in society.

This book considers the spatial and relational dimensions of sporting racial projects to better understand the role of Mexican athletes within U.S. sports and society. Restrictive racial covenants and segregated schooling practices confined Mexican athletes to barrio parks and playgrounds with limited sporting facilities. George Lipsitz reminds us about the white spatial imaginary of publicly subsidized sports stadiums that cater primarily to white suburban spectators at the expense of impoverished black neighborhoods.²⁸ Despite few opportunities to recreate, Mexican athletes transformed playgrounds, gyms, sandlots, courts, and stadiums into nonwhite spatial imaginaries where they could they get a fair chance to compete, make lifelong friendships, and build solidarity with other racial and ethnic groups. To better understand the interactions and dynamics of different racialized groups, Natalia Molina urges scholars to examine race relationally, not comparatively.²⁹ Molina suggests that we need to ask who else is (or was) present in or near the communities we study—and what difference these groups’ presence make (or makes).³⁰ By placing Mexican athletes in a relational framework, I examine interactions and connections between them and African American and Asian American athletes, even when they were not in direct or frequent contact.

The fourth dimension explores the sporting Mexican diaspora as a gendered experience. Modern sports represent a privileged arena for men that perpetuates greater gender inequities and contributes to the oppression of women athletes. Sports have provided an important vehicle for men to gain status and deploy political power, while claiming a masculine identity.³¹ In a classic study of gender and sexuality in women’s sports, Susan Cahn argues that sports is a site for producing the norms that govern manhood and masculinity, womanhood and femininity.³² Female athletes were encouraged to follow a strict definition of femininity that encouraged sex appeal and heterosexuality while discouraging mannish attributes to avoid accusation of lesbianism.³³

This book also examines the relationship between masculinity, femininity, and sporting cultures in the lives of Mexican male and female athletes in order to understand how they negotiated gender identities in the sporting world. Monolithic generalizations about Latino masculinity have been criticized by scholars for ignoring changing historical and social contexts as well as race, sexuality, and class factors.³⁴ Recent works have adopted a more critical approach toward Mexican American masculinity in boxing and baseball.³⁵

Sport has been absent in the writings of women of color. As Susan Birrell points out, "If we are to understand gender and racial relations in sport, particularly as they relate to women of color, we cannot remain in our old theoretical homes.… Instead we need to increase our awareness of issues in the lives of women of color as they themselves articulate these issues.³⁶ Sport sociologist Katherine Jamieson urged sport scholars to pay more attention to the intersectional identities and multiple feminisms of Latina athletes.³⁷ Few have heeded Jamieson’s call for more scholarship in Mestiza Sport Studies.³⁸ In Deportes, I examine Mexican sporting cultures through a gendered lens to uncover the multiple forms of masculinities and femininities of male and female athletes.

Mexican women gradually inserted themselves into male-dominated sports despite widespread myths about female physical fragility and male spectators sexualizing athletic female bodies. By the 1940s Mexican female athletes had formed basketball, baseball, and softball teams and tennis clubs to compete in local, regional, and international tournaments, allowing them to exercise, socialize, and develop their own sporting networks in the diaspora. This is reminiscent of Tejanas in Houston, whom Emma Perez aptly described as using what was available to them to intervene with their own tactics as diasporic subjects claiming survival.³⁹ Although most female athletes had limited travel opportunities compared to their male counterparts, they also cultivated transnational networks and embraced diasporic sporting identities. Take, for example, the Southern California shortstop Marge Villa Cryan, who played for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in the Midwest and during the postseason traveled throughout Latin America for exhibition games.

The fifth dimension involves the formation of a diasporic consciousness that produces hybrid sporting cultures and identities. As James Clifford explains, diaspora consciousness emerges out of experiences of loss, marginality, and systematic exploitation, and this constitutive suffering coexists with the skills of survival: strength in adaptive distinction, discrepant cosmopolitanism and stubborn visions of renewal.⁴⁰ Imagined connections to their homeland and experiences of racial subordination in their hostland lead racially marginalized and disempowered people to develop a new sense of identity. As Stuart Hall suggests, Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.⁴¹ Sports, like music, literature, film, and visual art, makes it possible to unite dispersed populations across space and time. Consequently, sporting diasporas allow athletes to develop connections between their identities and homeland while at the same time claiming legitimacy in their new host country.

Sports provides a site for the Mexican diaspora to develop a strong sense of belonging and to forge hybrid identities. Mexicans in the United States are not fully accepted by their host country nor in their homeland. They occupy an in-between position that is popularity known in Spanish as ni de aqui, ni de alla, neither here, nor there. Such ambiguity and blurring of borders are what Gloria Anzaldúa characterized as a "mestiza consciousness.⁴² In particular, Mexican American athletes faced racial discrimination on U.S. playing fields, so they looked for playing opportunities in Mexico. While some welcomed a more relaxed racial climate for professional competition, they also faced accusations of being a pocho or an Americanized Mexican. The México-El Paso semipro baseball team, for example, comprised members with mixed citizenship status who traveled back and forth to Mexico and the United States, allowing them to connect to their Mexicanness in hybrid ways.

In Becoming Mexican American, George Sánchez argued that children of Mexican immigrants forged a new identity as Mexican Americans.⁴³ In contrast, in Rebirth, Douglas Monroy contended that Mexican immigrants and their children constructed a Mexican national identity in the United States.⁴⁴ These two competing historical trajectories have been the subject of much debate in Chicano/a history. Throughout Deportes, I show how Mexican and Mexican American identities were simultaneous rather than sequential amid the sporting Mexican diaspora. Sporting diasporas can help us rethink our understanding of hybrid identity in Chicano/a history.

WHY DOES SPORTS MATTER?

In Deportes I demonstrate that sports are central to the making of Latino/a identity, community, and civil rights. Latino/a athletes often penetrate the consciousness of young fans as role models to emulate well before civil rights leaders. Take, for example, Julio César Chávez, the professional Mexican boxer who gained widespread popularity among Mexican youth before they learned about the civil rights leader César Chávez. The successes of Latino/a athletes, both amateur and professional, reflect a wider sense of cultural pride and belonging to a local and national community. In this regard, more resources and opportunities for Latino and Latina sport participation are needed at all levels and in a wide variety of sports. The talent exists, but collegiate and professional sports teams and national governing bodies need to develop a pipeline for Latino/a sports talent ready to seize athletic opportunities.

American sports matter for people of color who have endured a long history of oppression and marginalization.⁴⁵ As Trinidadian intellectual and sportswriter C. L. R. James observed long ago about West Indian cricketers, sports can be a source of social solidarity and group and individual pride and confidence as well as a vehicle for transformative resistance.⁴⁶ In the wise words of Nelson Mandela, Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite that little else has.… It is more powerful than government in breaking down racial barriers.⁴⁷ However, when the public thinks of sports and civil rights, they remain stuck in a black-white binary.⁴⁸ This book will educate the public about Mexican American civil rights and sports activism prior to the well-studied period of the 1960s. Although Mexican Americans faced discrimination and marginalization in the U.S. sports world, they used sports as a venue to redress and advance their rights. By forging transnational networks with Mexico, athletes empowered themselves and their communities and gained more leverage with U.S. institutions. In effect, sports became a driving force in shaping the political consciousness of Mexican Americans.

SOURCES AND ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

This book makes a case for a hemispheric approach to the study of sports across national borders. I consciously sought and found primary sources, read in two languages, and engaged with scholars and historiographies in both countries. This was no easy task since few sport archives exist in Mexico. Nevertheless, I found enough sources to shed light on the little-known athletic experiences of Mexicans across national borders. The following chapters rely on presidential papers, government agency records, immigration files, YMCA records, consul and diplomatic correspondence, sports publications, newspapers and magazines in Spanish and English, sport biographies, and other archival documents. Where there were gaps and omissions in written records, especially on female athletes, I relied on oral history interviews for insight into their everyday sporting experiences.

Deportes comprises six chapters, each organized chronologically and thematically with emphasis on one or more sports. Chapter 1 examines the rise of sports in Mexico and in México de afuera communities in Southern California. It focuses on the YMCA’s promotion of physical education and sports to instill a muscular Christianity ideology among its middle-class male membership in Mexico City. In the United States, Anglo-American reformers attempted to Americanize Mexican immigrants via sports. Mexican immigrants and their children were also introduced to sports through mutual aid organizations, the Spanish-language press, and Mexican consulate offices. Although many embraced American sports, they did so while maintaining their culture, enhancing their national identity, and constructing a unique Mexican sporting culture.

Chapter 2 focuses on boxing, one of the most popular sports in Greater Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century, and how it helped shape a sporting Mexican diaspora. It examines the relationship between U.S. immigration policy, the boxing industries, and the construction of race, gender, and nationality in the experiences of Mexican prizefighters. Mexican prizefighters navigated an increasingly rigid U.S. immigration regime that prohibited entry to some and allowed entry to others under a temporary admittance system during the 1920s and 1930s. The U.S. boxing industry, with its teams of promoters, managers, matchmakers, and trainers, acted like a transnational corporation in the recruitment of cheap male boxing talent from Mexico to attract larger audiences and higher profits. I show that despite encountering exploitation and racialization by U.S. immigration and boxing authorities, Mexican prizefighters used their network, mobility, and visibility to make a living and represent their community and nation in a positive manner, with the hope of becoming world champions.

Chapter 3 focuses on baseball, another popular sport in Greater Mexico, which contributed toward the making of a sporting Mexican diaspora. It explores the local and transnational connections of baseball in Southern California and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. By focusing on Mexico–El Paso, a semiprofessional barnstorming team from Los Angeles, I show how Mexican American ballplayers forged transnational networks with the Mexican Baseball League to overcome racial and class barriers on the U.S. playing fields. Although Mexican women were discouraged from playing baseball, considered a man’s game in both U.S. and Mexican society, they still found ways to become part of the national pastime. Despite deeply entrenched racial, class, and gender barriers, Mexican American women became peloteras, and in the process gained more freedom and developed their own sporting networks. Ultimately, male ballplayers forged transnational connections to the Mexican nation to overcome racial and class barriers on the U.S. playing fields, whereas peloteras were constrained by gender expectations and patriarchal structures that limited their mobility within and across the nation-state.

Chapter 4 uses the case of the Mexican Athletic Association of Southern California (MAASC) to examine the transnational sporting networks between Southern California and Mexico. MAASC organized sports leagues, tournaments, and exhibition matches as well as secured recreation facilities, provided entertainment, and offered other athletic opportunities. A unique feature of MAASC was its transnational ties with the Mexican government and its sports federation, Confederación Deportiva Mexicana. MAASC sports forged transnational ties with Mexico that allowed mostly male athletes to adopt a Mexican national identity outside of Mexico and others to adopt a Mexican American identity that connected them more closely with Southern California and American society in general. Ultimately, they created a hybrid sporting identity that helped to instill a new confidence among MAASC members to challenge the Los Angeles Department of Playground and Recreation to provide more recreation and sports programs for their community.

Chapter 5 shifts to the international arena to examine U.S.-Mexico relations through sports during World War II. It focuses on the little-known sports office within the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), led by Nelson Rockefeller to promote the Good Neighbor Policy with Mexico and Latin America. Despite the intentions of the OIAA to promote good neighborliness and good sportsmanship with Mexican sporting institutions, U.S. efforts represented a soft power attempt to achieve, impose, and consolidate U.S. cultural imperialism on Mexico. This chapter shows how Mexican athletes provided a counternarrative to claims of American exceptionalism in sports and used their athletic skills during goodwill tours in the United States to claim real and symbolic victory against their more powerful northern neighbor.

Chapter 6 returns to Southern California to examine the sporting experiences of Mexican Americans, both men and women, during and after World War II. It profiles three organizations—the Coordinating Council for Latin-American Youth, the Mexican American Movement, and the Mexican Athletic Union—and their efforts to combat juvenile delinquency and advance a civil rights agenda through sports. Mexican American women also stepped up to demonstrate their wartime patriotism through work and play. As they became independent wage earners, they began to participate in sports in higher numbers, including joining the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. These Mexican American women used sports to exercise, travel, socialize, and redefined gender roles within the family and community. Some even adopted a sportswoman identity by traveling abroad to compete and developing a strong sense of physical confidence and empowerment. These women made remarkable athletic achievements that need to be recognized for advancing gender equity in the Mexican diaspora.

1  ◆  DEPORTES, AMERICANIZATION, AND MEXICAN SPORTING CULTURE

Lamberto Álvarez Gayou was a leading sports promoter in Greater Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. Born to a wealthy family in Mexico City, Gayou studied engineering in college but preferred to compete in the pentathlon and gymnastics at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). His passion for sports motivated him to earn a master’s degree in physical education at the University of California, Los Angeles.¹ To earn extra income, he wrote for the sports pages of El Eco de Mexico and El Heraldo de México. In his spare time, he organized baseball and basketball games for Circulo Latino Americano, one of many mutualistas that served the recreational needs of México de afuera.

In 1926, Gayou moved to New York City to write in English and Spanish for the Associated Press on Latin American sports. He wrote for the Pan American Union Bulletin about Latin American athletes who have most highly distinguished themselves in the United States, winning athletic fame for the Latin race.² A devoted boxing fan, Gayou wrote about the early Mexican prizefighters who traveled from Mexico City to Los Angeles and New York City to fight in the big arenas with the hopes of becoming a world champion.³ In 1929, he moved to Mexico City to become secretary of the Mexican Olympic Committee and head coach of the Military College. A year later, Gayou moved to Tijuana to be closer to family as the government’s newly appointed director of athletics for the northern territory of Baja California.

Living and working in a border town, Gayou organized cross-border sporting exchanges with amateur baseball and basketball teams from Southern California. He staged Olympic tryouts for the track and field team and hosted Mexican Olympians to train in Tijuana several months before the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.⁴ Gayou served as manager of the Mexican Olympic team in Los Angeles and even proposed a Latin American Olympic Games to be held in Tijuana, but the idea failed due to limited funding and facilities.⁵ Despite this unfulfilled goal, though, San Diego newspaper sports columnists praised Gayou for his ability and energy to put his plans through.⁶ Gayou was a genius sports promoter who preached true sportsmanship and clean sports, but focused primarily in developing the Mexican male athlete. He once wrote, The boys down in Mexico are doing things. They are advancing in every field of athletics in such fashion that I confidently predict that the day is not far distant when they will be stout rivals to their neighbors to the north.⁷

Gayou was referred to as the Father of Athletics in Mexico for launching a "peaceful