Article Review: Joseph, Gilbert M. "Forging The Regional Pastime: Baseball And Class In Yucatan". 1988.

Players Hacienda Yaxcopoil 1924

Joseph, Gilbert M. "Forging The Regional Pastime: Baseball And Class In Yucatan". Sport And Society In Latin America. Joseph L Arbena, ed.. 1st ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. 29-61. Print.

This is something of a classic in the literature of Mexican baseball studies.  I’ve seen several references in my reading, most recently in Klein’s Baseball on the Border.  However, as the paper appears to have been published only once in a 1988 collection of essays on Latin American sport, it seemed I might never have a chance to read it.  Thankfully used copies are currently not that expensive and several online booksellers have it in stock.

What Joseph sets out to demonstrate is why baseball is far more popular in Yucatan than other areas of Mexico and how this happened.  The latter turns out to be clearer than the former. While there is still no undisputed account of the introduction of baseball into Mexico, there seem to have been several contact points, including the Yucatan, which lies closer to Cuba than it does to Mexico City.  Joseph remains uncertain about the lines of diffusion, but feels that Cuba was the touch-point, specifically Cuban immigrants escaping revolutionary turbulence of the latter 19th century.  He notes the game was picked up in Meridia in the 1890s by what was then a very small segment of the population, the children of urban barrio dwellers.  Concomitantly, baseball was enjoyed by the fad conscious sons of the planting class, many of whom may have learned the game while studying at US boarding schools.  But it was most certainly not played by the large majority of the Yucatan population, which consisted of rural labor strictly controlled by the planters and rarely the beneficiary of planter largess, such as leisure time or sports facilities.  Organized baseball in this early period was the province of the planter families, who had the time and resources to devote to constructing fields and viewing stands, importing equipment, and managing a league.  But when their support shriveled along with the world economy, so too did the fortunes of baseball.

Book review: Klein, Alan M. Baseball On The Border. 1997.

Klein, Alan M. Baseball On The Border. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

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.”