Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (review)

The Brooklyn Dodgers' signing of Jackie Robinson in 1945 and the (re)integration of major league baseball two years later were milestones in the game's history and in American race relations. But, as University of Illinois historian Adrian Burgos emphasizes, these developments were part of a larger, longer, and more complex process whose significance remains incorrectly "submerged beneath a black-white narrative that renders the contributions of Latinos as inconsequential to the story of race in organized baseball" (p. 201). Even as professional leagues were moving toward segregation in the late 1880s, baseball was gaining popularity around the Caribbean, creating a talent pool that soon caught the attention of the sport's management. Cuban Esteban Bellán was the first of 55 pre-1947 Latino major leaguers, 13 of whom also played on U.S. Negro teams. Some of those 55 "brown" players surely had African or indigenous ancestors, but they were accepted, not as white but as "Spanish," a category of ambiguous and flexible boundaries invented to avoid baseball's Jim Crow character. Therefore, one recurrent theme of the book is "the capriciousness of racial perception" (p. 93): race is socially/subjectively, not biologically/objectively defined. This leads to a second theme, that Latinos are often viewed as neither black nor white, though perpetually foreigners or outsiders, thus making it difficult to pigeon-hole a person based on race or ethnicity; "a two-tone racial order simply did not exist" (p. 193).

A third theme is that economics drove much of baseball's attitude towards race: players wanted to play on winning teams but feared that blacks and Latinos would take their jobs; management wanted winning teams and more spectators, but feared players would rebel and fans might boycott if they signed U.S. or Latino blacks. The Washington Senators, with Joe Cambria working in Cuba, illustrate how the search for cheap labor could bend those racial boundaries, even more so during World War II when U.S. players shipped out.

Significant was the evolution of a transnational circuit involving organized white baseball, the Negro Leagues, and the Spanish-speaking Americas. While those 55 lighter-skinned Latinos played for white teams, numerous darker ones enhanced the Negro Leagues. They and North American whites and blacks played and coached winter ball around the circum-Caribbean, where blacks were treated with respect and judged by their skills not their skin color, disproving the arguments that blacks were inferior athletes and incapable of playing with white teammates and managers, and that American racial attitudes were somehow sacrosanct.

Major league baseball's end of the unofficial ban on American blacks opened the door to admittedly black Latinos. Between 1947 and 1959, when the last team integrated, roughly three-dozen Afro-Latinos entered the majors. When Orestes "Minnie" Miñoso joined the Chicago White Sox in 1951, he was that club's first black; three other black Latinos were also racial pioneers. By 2005 "Latinos, [most of them black or brown], accounted for 44 percent of all players in organized baseball and filled nearly a quarter of all major-league roster spots" (p. 244), despite visa quotas. In short: "Latinos are increasingly becoming the face of America's game" (p. 261) yet receive insufficient credit for their historical role.

But increased access has not always guaranteed an easier life, as the plight of Latino ballplayers has not progressed "as much as one might have supposed" (p. 258). Being black and Latino is still a double stigma. Add to that the language barrier and a press corps prone to exaggerate linguistic and cultural differences as signs of moodiness and stupidity. The lack of a draft, except in Puerto Rico, encourages wannabes to falsify their ages and consume steroids, and scouts, including the controversial buscones, to lie to recruits and sign "boatloads" for low bonuses. Although major league academies in the Dominican Republic...