Race and the Color Line in Baseball: Latinos in the Shadow of Integration
In the lecture of Prof Adrian Burgos, Jr, he introduced:
Vincent Irwin, (Vincent "Sandy" Nava),
•First Mexican American player in the Majors (1882)
•Advertised as “Spanish” and a Spaniard
Troubling the Waters: Latinos in the Shadow of Integration by Adrian Burgos described the racial and cultural challenges foreign-born Latino baseball players faced during baseball’s segregated era (1889 – 1947) and integrated era (1947 – 1986). During the segregation, a strict color line was drawn to forbid black people from playing baseball games. Rather than considering “all white” baseball teams for this period, Latinos from foreign countries were actually able to play in the games. This often neglected fact therefore broadened the color line in discussion. The major motive to sign foreign Latinos by baseball management, suggested by Burgos, was to get talented yet much cheaper players, compared with American white players who required a bigger pay. During the integration period, Latino players, similar to black players, were challenged with racial judgements. Burgos described the tension between Latino players, especially “Latin Negroes”, and “American Negro” players under this situation. Not willing to be “socially inferior”, as Burgos suggested, “Latin Negroes” wanted to be viewed and treated differently from “American Negroes”.
Burgos suggests that, to deeper understand the process of “calling for equitable treatment and inclusion”, it is very important to recognize Latinos’ existence during the time, the racial and cultural challenges they faced, and the influence they had as “integration pioneers”. As mentioned in the article, it is an often neglected fact that Latinos played in both the segregated and integrated periods. This is because, as Burgos stated, foreign-born Latinos were viewed as foreign talents, rather than people who had “U.S. citizenship”, on which the civil right movements were based on. Therefore, Latinos were not considered in the public discussion of civil right campaigns. However, focus on Latinos, the article broadened the discussion of racial issues and racial campaigns during the period by including more racial groups, and by taking the economic and political aspects into account.
Latino baseball players at the time faced both racial discrimination and cultural differences, and the complicated effects of the two combined. It is true that Latinos, including “Latin Negroes”, were treated differently from “American Negroes”. For example, Latinos might be allowed to enter a “white only” restaurant if they speak Spanish; Latinos might have their own accommodation that’s “neither black not white”. However, this is not to say that they were treated equally; rather, it represented a more complicated racial and cultural situation that Latinos were in. An example provided in the article is that, Puerto Rican Carlos Bonilla faced “shifting racial perceptions” with Brooklyn Dodgers. During a training in Florida, Bonilla was initially living with his white teammates; however, a couple weeks later, as Bonilla’s skin got darker under the sun, he was “reassigned” to live with his black teammates. Bonilla, as a Latino player, was treated differently from his black teammates. However, being a person of color and under the white supremacy, he was still judged by his skin color and the racial beliefs during the time.
A very interesting angle presented by the article is how politics and economics intertwined with the racial and cultural beliefs during the time. Baseball management, to get people interested in buying tickets and watching
the game, were in need of shaping the sport games as professional activities, rather than leisure activities. Motivated by profits, the management used and manipulated the racial and cultural beliefs at the time and created a professional image of white male baseball player. Management used the beliefs that Latinos were lazy, and planted the idea that only white males could have professionalism and masculinity. By using the racial and cultural beliefs at the time, the management differentiated “man” and “boy”, and “amateur” and “professional”. In this way, management were able to create a system of disciplines that attracts people to watch “respectable” and “professional” baseball games, and therefore, created profits from the games.
Nowadays, inequality continues. An example provided by Prof Adrian Burgos, Jr is that in today’s American baseball society, the lowest level professionals are largely comprised of Latinos. The main reason behind this is similar to the reason discussed in the paper in the past, to get cheap labors with high talents. These Latino players are signed cheaply compared with white players. Prof Adrian Burgos, Jr also mentioned that, even when Latino players are able to work their way up to major leagues, they are still commented as “immature” from time to time on TV broadcast channels. Although nowadays, the situation of inequality has become better, the examples above still provide us the traces of how Latino players are viewed through a lens of race and economics.
