José M. Alamillo

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José M. Alamillo | Peloteros in Paradise: Mexican American Baseball and Oppositional Politics in Southern California, 1930–1950 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.2 | The History Cooperative

PELOTEROS IN PARADISE: MEXICAN AMERICAN BASEBALL AND OPPOSITIONAL POLITICS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1930–1950

Throughout Southern California, Mexican Americans participated in baseball clubs, encouraged by employers and social reformers intent on controlling the immigrant population. Mexican American ballplayers, however, used baseball clubs for cultural pride, masculine expression, and political opposition against company authority that also reinforced unequal gender relations on and off the playing field.

En el sur de California mexicano-americanos formaron parte de los distinos clubes de béisbol auspiciados por los patronos y reformadores sociales en su intento de controlar ésta población de immigrantes. Sin embargo, los jugadores mexicano-americanos utilizaron estos clubes de béisbol para mostrar su orgullo cultural, expresar su masculinidad, oponerse politicamente a las compañías y reforzar la desigualdad an las relaciones sexos dentro y fuera del parque do pelota.

"I'VE BEEN IN BASEBALL SINCE I WAS THIRTEEN years old. I've been playing all sports and the only problem that kept me from making the majors was my color," bitterly complained Jess Guerrero. Before 1947, American baseball's deeply entrenched colorline kept African Americans, black Latinos, and dark-skinned Mexican Americans like Guerrero from playing in the major leagues. Despite racial segregation in baseball, Mexican American peloteros (ballplayers) took to the diamond fields every weekend afternoon to play independent sandlot and semiprofessional baseball. Community-based baseball clubs sprung up during the interwar years in Southern California's barrios and colonias, introducing immigrant children to America's national pastime at a time when Mexican sport heroes were few and far between. In the context of economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and resurgent nativist attacks aimed at the Mexican population, second generation Mexican Americans used baseball to proclaim their equality through athletic competition, without fear of reprisal, and to publicly demonstrate community solidarity and strength.¹

This essay examines the multiple meanings and uses of baseball clubs among Mexican Americans in Southern California during the 1930s and 1940s. First, it analyzes how employers and social reformers sought to use baseball clubs to Americanize and socially control the Mexican immigrant population. Second, this essay focuses on community-based semipro baseball clubs throughout Southern California to examine the attitudes and motivations of Mexican American ballplayers towards the game. One of these clubs was the Corona Athletics Baseball Club, which boasted a lineup of Mexican American male ballplayers that claimed several championship pennants and earned a reputation for producing major league players. In the face of racial discrimination and limited economic opportunities that afflicted the Mexican population in this agricultural-industrial town, baseball took on a symbolic and real social significance. Drawing upon C. L. R. James's idea on the political significance of cricket contests, this essay shows how Mexican Americans viewed baseball matches as mirroring larger racial and class struggles that transcended the playing field.² Mexican Americans used baseball clubs to promote ethnic consciousness, build community solidarity, display masculine behavior, and sharpen their organizing and leadership skills. In this regard, Mexican American ballplayers transformed baseball clubs into a political forum to launch wider forms of collective action. In arguing for viewing baseball clubs as sites of resistance, however, one must consider how sporting venues reinforced gender hierarchies. Baseball players re-created a masculine culture in sports clubs that extended into labor unions, effectively reproducing male domination and exclusion of women from leadership positions in the labor movement.

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