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Frontera Dreams: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (review)
- Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
- University of Arizona
- Volume 7, 2003
- pp. 316-318
- 10.1353/hcs.2011.0163
- Review
- Additional Information
316 Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies some of die greatest btino players of all time. The authors take advantage of what turned out to be a great stroke of luck: starting in about 1993, Villegas began following the development of a young prospea named Miguel Tejada in his native Dominican Republic and through the minor leagues in the U.S. Tejada has since blossomed into a star with the Oakland Athletics and won die American League Most Valuable Player award in 2002. While we are introduced to die charismatic Tejada in the second chapter, it is in the chapters concentrating on life in the U.S. that the authors rely on images of him in the U.S. as a sort of case study of a ballplayer trying to succeed here. Tejada embodies the two lives Caribbean ballplayers lead here: in some shots we see Tejada entirely in his element both on the field and happily bantering among other btino players, where he is the center of attention, clearly enjoying and benefiting from the camaraderie. In others, the cultural and linguistic divide between btino players and the Anglo-American players is evident, as the talented Tejada is largely ignored by the Anglo players. Following the photos and descriptions of his trajectory through the minor leagues and his success in die majors, the final shot of the fifth chapter is of Tejadas triumphant homecoming after his rookie season, where his friends and neighbors flock to the street as he walks down it greeting them, summing up the titular notion of "home" being everything. The straightforward, bilingual text of "Home is Everything" is intended for fans of all ages, and as such it occupies an interesting place in recent photo books on baseball. For btino readers , this book is intended to inspire cultural identification with some of baseball's greats. For Anglo readers the intention is to show not only the hard work required for a Caribbean ballplayer to succeed in the U.S., but also how the hardships they face are quite different from those faced by middleclass American ballplayers. The book also departs somewhat from a recent trend in baseball marketing, as the element of nostalgia, ubiquitous over the past fifteen years, is curiously absent. During this time the marketing forces of Major League Baseball have packaged and sold their sport as far more than the game of great skill, chess-like strategy, competitive intensity, and, of course, the barrel-chested, mustachioed , and masculine heroism that made baseball "America's Pastime" over a hundred years ago. As competition for the "sports entertainment" dollar has intensified and baseball has lost ground to sports perceived as requiring greater athleticism and often violently confronrational physicality such as basketball and especially American football , baseball has steered itself on a course of nostalgia -based marketing designed to manufacrure a certain cultural consciousness among more affluent fans, seeking to provoke a heightened sense of American cultural identification via baseball as an inextricable and indispensable cog in our nation's cultural identity. The modern game of baseball is offered as a bridge between the present and our own cultural history through an aesthetic of nostalgia in which fans experience not only a wellplayed game, but also a dreamy, soft-focus homecoming to an ostensibly less-complicated, moreinnocent and pastoral time in our history. With marketing that seeks out a fan base with everdeeper pockets, baseball has been transformed from a working-class sport, beloved also by the middle class, to a middle class sport that has grown increasingly inaccessible and irrelevant to the working class. For Caribbean ballplayers and fans, however , such nostalgia is unnecessary to the maintenance of baseball as a national passion. For them, baseball is the here and now, and not a stylized hearkening back to a time that may or may not have existed as packaged. Keith Johnson The University of Arizona Frontera Dreams: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel Cinco Puntos Press, 2002 Por Paco Ignacio Taibo II Traducido por Bill Verner Una joven conrrata los servicios de un detective independiente, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, para que encuenrre a su madre que desapareció sin dejar rastro. De esta...