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BOOK REVIEW
| Adrian Burgos Jr, Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line, University of California Press, Berkley, LA, 2007. pp. xx + 362. US $21.95 paper.
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| Slavery is a stain that has afflicted the United States of America. Whites imported people from Africa, people with black skins, to work as slaves. In the 1860s there was a civil war which put an end to slavery. Despite being freed, African-Americans experienced segregation and discrimination. It was not until after World War II that a civil rights movement experienced success in challenging such prejudice, which enhanced the ability of African-Americans to have the same opportunities as others. |
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Baseball, America's national pastime was one of the spaces where this struggle for equality was played out. Baseball had traditionally operated a 'gentlemen's agreement' which barred the employment of African-Americans. This came to an end in 1947 when the legendary skin-flint manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, employed Jackie Robinson. Because of the prominent and public role performed by sport, particularly baseball a game which is so central to America's sense of itself, Robinson's employment is seen as a seminal event in the civil rights struggle. |
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Issues of race and racism in baseball, as embodied in the signing of Jackie Robinson, have been seen in terms of black and white. The point of departure for Adrian Burgos Jr, in Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line, is that this is too simplistic. It is not so much that the picture is complicated by shades of grey, but rather that the history of employment practices in baseball, the 'quest' to ensure that players are employed on the basis of talent and not prejudice, has been subject to a more nuanced colour schema; that of white, black, red, brown and yellow. The first two are self explanatory; red refers to Native-Americans, brown to Latino players and yellow to the recent employment of Asian players, mainly from Japan and to a lesser extent Korea. The Latino category, however, is far from homogeneous (which bespeaks the problem of using labels and categories to define the hatred that cannot stop itself from speaking its name). Latinos can be distinguished in terms of what part of the 'Latino', or Caribbean, world they come from; their ancestry, in terms of whether it is linked back to a long standing association with a place of birth, it is European? (and what part of Europe?) and whether or not it there are African forebears; whether or not the player and his family emigrated to America; the colour of the player's skin and whether or not he has features which suggested he was 'black' (as distinct from some other colour). |
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In theory at least, sport is about teams attempting to employ the best players to enhance their competitive success. Baseball's 'gentleman's agreement', banning African-Americans transgressed this precept. Burgos points out that one of the ways clubs attempted to overcome this problem was by employing talented Latino and, to a lesser extent, Native-American players. Sporadic attempts were also made to pass off African-American players as Latinos (such players were said to have Cuban or Spanish heritages). The employment of such players, legitimate Latinos or the masquerades was dependent on the lightness of the colour of their skin and facial and other features which did not suggest an ancestral link with blackness. |
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Burgos has conducted painstaking research on the longstanding involvement of Latino players with America's game. There have been successive waves of Latinos, in both major and minor league baseball, from when the game became first became professional in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Most significantly, Burgos sees such players as an important force in testing and helping to bring about baseball's eventual racial integration. Integrated teams, that is, teams of whites, blacks, browns and reds played integrated ball in the Negro Leagues, which operated in America in the first half of the twentieth century, and in various Caribbean Leagues and in barnstorming tours from America into the Caribbean, and vice versa. Burgos describes these various spaces of playing as baseball's transnational circuit. |
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