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| Players Hacienda Yaxcopoil 1924 |
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.
By the early years of the 20th century the economy was booming again and Meridia’s largely agrarian-based economy generated sufficient income to support new investment in industry, which in turn led to growth in urban areas. “The broadening of society's base, coupled with the prosperity of the boom, gave greater initiative to the popular classes” who now took up baseball as a leisure activity of their own. The oligarchy saw the potential for using sport to entertain and thereby placate a growing urban class. It saw as well the possible financial return on an entertainment product that could be sold to the same audience, and supported some of the biggest and most popular working-class teams.
The Mexican Revolution arrived in Yucatan in 1915, five years after it had roiled much of the rest of the country. The effect was to replace the old feudal hierarchy with capitalist relations of production; rural slavery was abolished and replaced with wage labor, while unproductive land was opened for development. As an educated work force was central to growth, thousands of schools were established, and an extensive road network was constructed linking the interior to major urban centers. Baseball now spread quickly through the countryside.
When the first revolutionary governor was replaced by socialists committed to the protection of labor, baseball became a tool for mobilizing the agrarian and urban working classes. For two years beginning in 1922, the legally elected governor of the Partido Socialista del Sureste (PSS) carried out widespread education, health, labor and land reform, into which baseball fit both as a means of raising the health standards of the laboring class, as well as a tool for organizing: bringing people together in leisure activity that served as a vector for recruiting, information dissemination, cultural exchange, and strengthening worker solidarity.
It was also a game uniquely suited to its age. “Baseball seemed singularly appropriate to the social transition that the party would carry out in Yucatan. It was a game that in itself marked the transition from individual to corporate values. Beisbol preserved elements of personal accountability and enabled the individual to achieve recognition, but inevitably it was a team game that subsumed the individual into the collective.” (For more on this perspective, see Gelber's "Working at Playing.") Among the hundreds of teams formed in this period were such revolutionary standard bearers such as Carlos Marx, Emiliano Zapata, Maximo Gorki, and Los Mairtires de Chicago.
When the socialist experiment ended in a military coup d'etat, much of the funding and other support for rural baseball dried up, but by then the game had become institutionalized and is now a part of Yucatan’s contemporary culture, practiced in both urban and rural areas across the peninsula. What remains unclear from Joseph's account is why baseball, and not some other sport, captured the attention and interest of the people of Yucatan. In a similar investigation of the Philippines, Antolihao believes basketball, as a game of the educated and moneyed classes, appealed to Filipinos because of its prestige value, while baseball was seen as a game for rural dwellers. Were there no other sports competing for the attention of the people of Yucatan? Is baseball's popularity down to it being the only sport available, or perhaps the only one anyone knew anything about?
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