Playing with the Lines
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Playing with the Lines
In 1935, Roberto "Bobby" Estalella signed a contract to play baseball for the Washington Senators. Estalella was from Cuba, and for the financially tightfisted Senators' owner Clark Griffith, this worked to his advantage. Players from the Caribbean were talented, cheap, and plentiful. Major league teams did not even have to pay them a signing bonus. However, Estalella came with a hitch. His complexion was, in the words of Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich, "swarthy," his hair dark and curly. During the Jim Crow era, when baseball held firmly to a "color line" barring African Americans from playing, was Estalella going to be accepted as "white"? Was he actually breaking the color line twelve years before Jackie Robinson's celebrated debut with the Dodgers in 1947? If so, how did he get away with it? Organized baseball's color line was never written down anywhere as a legally binding contract, so the test of whether a player would be accepted was how he was treated by fans, opponents, teammates, and the press. According to them, did he "pass"?
As Adrian Burgos Jr. argues in his valuable new book Playing America's Game, these kinds of questions are not just about baseball, but about racial knowledge. They are questions that sports writers, players, fans, league officials, radio talk show hosts, and casual observers all asked, and still ask, about the participation of Latinos in "America's Game." As such, they illustrate how the story of Latino inclusion and exclusion from baseball is connected to larger, ongoing processes of racial formation in the United States—how America's game of baseball is historically interwoven with America's race game. Burgos's book at first appears to be about the place of Latinos with regard to baseball's color line, but it is also about how playing "America's Game" is about boundaries of race that extend beyond the baseball diamond and that intersect color lines in the Americas beyond the boundaries of the United States.
Burgos's work is part of an emerging body of sports scholarship that connects the study of sports to cultural categories and meanings. Like music, literature, [End Page 193] art, and drama, sports have become part of the fabric of commercial mass media and consumer culture. Much of their social importance derives from the fact that sports constitute a significant site for the production of cultural meanings.1 Burgos interrogates these meanings within baseball by digging into the past, looking at the history of Latino baseball and its relationship to what historian Frank Guridy has termed racial knowledge, or a system whereby common patterns of human physical appearance are accorded meanings. Actors within the world of baseball during the Jim Crow era, like those in any other aspect of life in the United States, created, revised, re-created, nullified, negotiated, and invented racial categories to serve their interests or to create group identities. Burgos reminds us, however, that "the machinations involved in positioning individuals along the color line constitute a social version of America's racial game, one played with dire consequences and life-altering stakes" (6).
The segregation of baseball arose out of an ideology of purity associated with the game, one that positioned baseball as an exhibition of "respectability and masculinity." Because baseball was maintained as a segregated institution, it heightened the value of whiteness and helped to maintain the broader institutionalization of Jim Crow. Yet, as the history of Latino baseball makes clear, the color line could become as blurred as the batter's box in the fourth inning, and required constant re-definition and policing.
Burgos's book teaches us these things because the author probes deep into the history of Latino baseball, and because he refuses to accept an arbitrary, absolute distinction between Latino baseball in the United States and Latin American baseball in the rest of the Americas. He shows how, contrary to many contemporary accounts in the sports media, Latin involvement in baseball in the...
