Though published twenty years ago, this study remains intriguing and perhaps instructive in how to operate sport franchises across cultural and national divides. It tells the story of Los Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos), a Mexican baseball team that from the mid-1980s to early 1990s represented bordering cities in Mexico and the United States. The team split its home schedule between a Mexican and American stadium, and as is typical of Mexican league teams, featured a number of American players on its roster. Shortly after completing research for this book, the binational project collapsed. Writer/researcher Alan Klein explains this failure largely in terms of structure. Owners and managers were entirely Mexican and employed a largely conservative philosophy: field a good team and attendance and finances would take care of themselves. No one on the Mexican side seemed to understand the Tecolotes as a cultural phenomenon that could be sold to audiences far beyond the Laredos, “a binational phenomenon more as ideology than as fact, and it was in the distinction between the two that the relationship failed.”
