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Reviews
| Mexican Americans and Sports: A Reader on Athletics and Barrio Life. Edited by Jorge Iber and Samuel O. Regalado. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. viii + 262 pp. Notes and index. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
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This collection of articles is intended to fill a major gap in the historiography of Mexican Americans: their participation in community-based, interscholastic, and professional sports. Defining Mexican Americans as "people who were born or reared in the United States but who trace their ancestry to Mexico" (p. 14), the editors have nonetheless included one article on Mexican nationals competing in the United States—the famed Tarahumaran distance runners of the 1920s—and offer little on women in sports; only one of the nine articles, Katherine M. Jamieson's exploration of Latina collegiate softball players, is dedicated to the topic. While a variety of sports are considered, most essays are set in Texas or California from the 1920s to the present. Despite these structural limitations, Mexican Americans and Sports is an admirable addition to the tiny but growing corpus of literature on U.S.-based Latinos in organized sports. |
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As the subtitle suggests, this volume addresses not only the complex narratives of Mexican Americans in sports but also the realities of life in rural colonias (communities) and urban barrios. As co-editor Samuel O. Regalado notes, "for ethnic Mexicans, their traditions and economic circumstances proved to be factors as difficult to overcome as the prejudices they contended with outside of their ethnic circles.... Rising to the challenge of social discrimination was thus not always the initial step in the development of identity and acceptance. For most, reckoning with poverty lay at the beginning of that task" (p. 243). While most contributors examine social history from below, they also stress the cultural dimensions of athletes' struggles to come to terms with their ethnic, racial, class, and gendered selves—none more so than Gregory S. Rodríguez, who stretches the boundaries of Mexican American identity in his study of Los Angeles-based boxers in the 1960s and 1970s. As Regalado notes, Rodríguez shows that in the boxing subculture of Los Angeles, "Mexican identity ... had no borders and, in some cases, was culturally, not ethnically, driven" (p. 237). Afro-Cuban boxers who moved to Mexico after the Cuban Revolution, including Ultiminio "Sugar" Ramos and José Angel Nápoles, were warmly embraced by both Mexican and Mexican American fans, as were non-Mexicans such as the French Algerian boxer Alphonse Halimi, who shared his poverty, fighting style, and work ethic with Los Angeles-based Mexican audiences. Rodríguez thus complicates what makes athletes "Mexican" and how a transmigrant fan base—located as much in Tijuana as Los Angeles—influenced the sport of boxing itself. |
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Regalado's examination of Spanish-language press coverage of Major League Baseball teams in California offers further insights into the construction of ethnic identity. Founded in Los Angeles in 1926, La Opinión was originally intended to be "a Mexican paper published in the United States" (p. 149). In keeping with that agenda, the paper made no attempt to disguise its preference for Mexican national over Mexican American players, who in turn received more favorable coverage than other Latino players. Although it took decades for a Mexican baseball superstar to emerge in Los Angeles, the promotion of young Fernando Valenzuela to the Dodgers franchise in late 1980 finally offered the paper "an opportunity to magnify the message of Latin achievement in an otherwise Anglo world" (p. 156). |
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This sense of achievement is stressed in the lone essay on football in co-editor Jorge Iber's exploration of the first high school state champions from Texas's Rio Grande Valley, the predominantly Mexican American Donna Redskins. Iber deftly analyzes academic and media sources from the 1920s to 1950s which held that Mexican Americans were intellectually and physically inferior to whites—and that they could not play football. He argues that Donna High School's improbable victory in 1961 was life-changing, not only for the Mexican American players themselves, many of whom went on to middle-class careers, but also for the wider South Texas community. |
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While Borderlands scholars and sports historians may not find every article equally compelling, the volume as a whole offers a strong starting point in bringing these two fields together. More broadly, with its call for the recognition of long-forgotten Mexican American athletes, this collection can only positively impact the mainstream media's coverage of Latinos in sport and, in so doing, further encourage their fuller entry into the annals of American society.
Anju Reejhsinghani
University of Texas at Austin
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