Playing America's game: Latinos and the performance and policing of race in North American professional baseball, 1868--1959.

Abstract

Hailed as America's game, baseball has long served as a metaphor for one's inclusion in U.S. society. Since its inception, the professional game provided a stage for men from different economic, national, and racial backgrounds to demonstrate their manliness, American-ness, and race. Jim Crow segregation, which lasted from the late 1880s to 1947, made baseball more than leisure and entertainment; it reiterated the sport's significance in terms of affirming one's place in wider society. The globalization of American culture that followed the Spanish-American War contributed to professional baseball's expansion and the incorporation of players from the Spanish-speaking Americas. The inclusion of these players who could not simply be marked as Negroes blurred the association between skin color and outright exclusion. Indeed, contrary to popular perception, several groups had endured the indignities of crossing established lines of exclusion before Jackie Robinson's 1947 appearance as the first undeniably black major leaguer in the twentieth century. No group destabilized baseball's Jim Crow system as much as players from the Spanish-speaking Americas did. Totaling fifty-five players in all, their participation between 1902 and 1947 prompted Major League officials and North Americans to reconsider the color line that divided America's game into white and non-white playing fields---the Major Leagues and the Negro Leagues. In challenging the traditional narrative of integration, this dissertation does not deny the critical role Robinson performed. Rather, its focus pushes the narrative beyond the black-white binary and into the in-between spaces where much tension resided. Placing Latin players at the center of the process of baseball integration, this dissertation engages three intersecting fields of inquiry---American Studies, African American Studies, and Latino History---and offers three theoretical concepts to analyze America's game as a site of performing and policing lines of racial and national identity: racial masquerade, race-making, and racial knowledge. Interweaving popular press coverage, interviews, and autobiography, this project examines the interpenetration of racial systems between the United States and the Spanish-speaking Americas, particularly as it pertains to the impact of the African Diaspora. This dissertation argues that this expanded story of race and place in the U.S. playing fields unveils a critical period where several Major League organizations tested the color line's breaking point and ultimately presaged baseball integration. The experience of living in the in-between spaces of Jim Crow, moreover, contributed to the articulation of a Latino identity among players from the Spanish-speaking Americas.