Turns at BatBaseball and the United States in Dominican Literature and Print Culture

The opportunity to situate baseball’s emergence in Dominican writing comes to me by way of Manuel de Jesús Galván, one of very few nineteenth-century Dominican writers whose work reached readers outside the country. In 1884, as baseball along with a host of other US imports was beginning to take root in the Dominican cultural landscape, the Dominican Republic sent one of its most respected cultural figures, Galván, to the United States as Minister Plenipotentiary. The week after Galván’s arrival in Washington, Enrique Henríquez, editor-in-chief of El teléfono, comments on and transcribes Galván´s introductory speech, in which the writer-turned-diplomat states,

The Dominican government, motivated by sound principles of political economics, offers to a significant portion of US production freedom from tariffs on goods exported to the Dominican Republic, and resigns itself to the considerable detriment the policy will surely cause our meager public revenue, trusting compensation to the future, when we expect that the US will reciprocate by lifting tariffs on Dominican agricultural goods.

El Gobierno Dominicano, inspirándose en los más sanos principios de economía política, ofrece a una parte importante de la producción de los Estados Unidos la libertad de derechos de aduanas en la República Dominicana, y se conforma con el menoscabo considerable que sus escasas rentas públicas han de sufrir con esta franquicia, fiando al porvenir la compensación, por la recíproca libertad de derechos que espera obtener de la Unión Americana para los productos agrícolas del suelo dominicano.¹

From our twenty-first-century perspective, the terms of Galván´s generous offer are striking. A little over one hundred years before neoliberal globalization trends would be boosted by treaties like NAFTA, Galván was attempting to shepherd a free-trade agreement of sorts with the US. Offering open Dominican ports for US products and asking in return only for the hope that at some moment in the future Dominican products would have access to the US market, Galván marks the one-sided nature of trade agreements that would be the hallmark of US-Latin American relations for the century to follow and beyond. Without a hint of irony, both Galván and Henríquez speak of the uneven relationship as if it were the natural order of things, an exchange inspired by “los más sanos principios de economía política (sound principles of political economics).”

At the time that Galván is looking forward with optimism to free commercial exchange with his nation´s large and increasingly powerful neighbor, some Dominican communities were beginning to experience the first stages of a cultural exchange through baseball that would gain steady momentum for about 100 years before expanding exponentially in the latter third of the twentieth century. In the 1880s, baseball had already arrived in the Dominican Republic, brought by Cubans exiled during the Ten-Year War, but it was still not widely distributed throughout the country. Its proliferation would be impeded for thirty years or so by well-rooted activities and diversions that had previously taken hold. As the Dominican Republic was moving to ease— or in some cases to lift entirely— import tariffs on US commercial products, baseball, a US cultural product whose reach in Dominican society would be as durable and dramatic as any other, commercial or cultural, snuck in and slowly began to permeate isolated pockets of the nation’s cultural landscape. While baseball experienced this modest circulation, US commercial products took advantage of lowered import tariffs and eventually a trade treaty in 1891 to flood the Dominican market. Dominican sugar did move in the other direction, but by the 1890s US investment was radically shifting the flow of capital produced in the industry away from Dominican hands. That reality is of course not unrelated to another product (of sorts) that the US would export to the Dominican Republic in 1916: occupying military troops. It goes without saying that this particular US export entered the...