The Dissertation Committee for Joel Huerta Certifies That This Is the Approved Version of the Following Dissertation

Joel Huerta

2005

The Dissertation Committee for Joel Huerta certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Red, Brown, and Blue: a History and Cultural Poetics

of High School Football in Mexican America

Committee:

______Robert H. Abzug, Supervisor

______José E. Limón, Co-Supervisor

______Emilio Zamora

______Ricardo Ainslie

______David Montejano

Red, Brown, and Blue: a History and Cultural Poetics of High

School Football in Mexican America

Joel Huerta, B.A.; M.F.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

the University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin December 2005

This otherness, this "Not being us" is all there is to look at In the mirror, though, not one can say How it came to be this way. A ship Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor.

--John Ashbery

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact.

--Raymond Williams

Red, Brown, and Blue: a History and Cultural Poetics of High School Football in Mexican America

Publication No. ______

Joel Huerta, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005

Co-supervisors: Robert H. Abzug; José E. Limón

High school athletics played an important role in the social, cultural, and political life of 20th century Texas. Football was especially popular. In south Texas, a region with a majority Mexican American population, school athletics served to maintain segregation between white and brown students and also to test its limits and viability. Small town institutions like the football team and the marching band were some of the first areas to experiment with inter-ethnic mixing. For the most part experiments proved successful. They helped pave the way for more substantive social and educational reforms. In the second half of the century Mexican Americans gave their own inflection to the football game. They blended traditional Mexican verbal arts forms like jests and playful insults with more conventional sports discourse. In the Lower Rio Grande Valley fans also composed corridos, traditional Mexican ballads, in honor of town and team. In this dissertation I use two major strategies: historical research and ethnography. Data have been collected from archives, newspapers, school yearbooks, interviews, fieldwork, and radio. This dissertation contributes to American and Chicano studies by presenting data and analysis from largely unexplored areas: the role of youth sports in the civil rights process and the formation of identity; and the expressive culture and folklore of Mexican American sports fans.

v Contents

Introduction 1

Part I: History Chapter One: Early Sport in Texas 33 Chapter Two: Modern Sport in the New South Texas 59 Chapter Three: Friday Night Rights, The High School Game and the Struggle for Equality 85 Chapter Four: The Golden Age of Football and the Break of Segregation 122

Part II: Ethnography Prologue: 140 Chapter Five: Good Game 142

Part III: Verbal Arts and Folklore Chapter Six: The Electronic Backyard Barbecue: Fans, Radio, and the Poetics of Place 189 Chapter Seven: With his Cell Phone in his Hand: the Football Corridos of South Texas 219 Chapter Eight: Conclusion 255

Appendices Appendix One-A: Football Scoreboard Transcript (Spanish) 270 Appendix One-B: Football Scoreboard Transcript (translation) 274 Appendix Two: Football Corrido Lyrics 278 Appendix Three: On Doing Ethnography 285

Notes 299

References 313

Vita 329

Introduction

...culture inspects our dreams also. --Emerson

Football, el deporte de las tacleadas; el deporte que reúne a las multitudes!1 --Hugo, radio commentator

On the eve of the 1998 gubernatorial election candidate Garry Mauro challenged then Texas Governor George W. Bush to a political debate. When the governor chose

October 16th for the match, a Friday night in the fall, Mauro responded by saying: “If I was governor, and 25 to 30 points ahead, I’d want the biggest audience so I could show off a little bit. I usually reserve Friday night for high school football, but if Governor

Bush wants to debate on high school football night, I’ll be there.”(Gaar 1998)

In Mauro’s coy (and surely scripted) invocation of Friday football, we see an attempt to put the governor’s authenticity as a Texan into question. The gibe frames

Friday night as a sacred, civic rite, corrupted only by carpetbaggers, elites, or both. The challenger’s comment also draws a parallel between the football arena, where Coach

Bush’s Republicans were four touchdowns ahead and “can show off a bit,” and the governor’s race where Mauro and his scrappy Democrats stood prepared to take them on. The football game remains a key symbol and metaphor in Texas’s peculiar nationalism; it constellates with cowboys, longhorns, oil, the Alamo, Tex-Mex food, and

the loaded half-ton pickup truck. Major college and professional football overshadow the high school game in glamour and visibility, but Texans like Mauro view the local

‘schoolboy’ version of the game as it purest and most Texan articulation. Bill Farney,

Athletic Director of the University Interscholastic League, the organization that governs high school competitions, explains: “I think Texas football is unique because Texas is unique. We’re a broad-shouldered, bustling society. We identify with our communities.

We like to say, ‘Our town is better than yours. Our football team beat yours.’” (Maher

1994) Writers and filmmakers like John Steinbeck, Larry McMurtry, Harold Ratliff, John

Toback, H.G. Bissinger, Geoff Winningham, Don Howard, and Richard Linklater have also sited the Texas soul on the small-town gridiron--celebrating it, deriding it, pondering the contradictions and symbols.

For the ranks of Texas-Mexicans who have embraced the game, Lone Star football is more ambivalent a symbol. In small and medium -sized cities, the high school team and band have long been cherished and storied symbols of place and people, but issues of race and class always enter the picture. People share wounds and victories.

This is especially true for that generation that came of age before the social reforms of the 1960s and 70s. For them, sentiment for dear alma mater is tainted by memories of personal encounters with institutionalized white supremacy. Thus, to invoke King

Football or participate in the football outing is also to hold a dialogue with the ghosts of

white supremacy in Texas. Town football is about statistics, records, bragging rights, and school spirit.

For Mexican Americans, however, it is also a symbol for modern masculinity, a liquid metaphor for conflict and struggle; a coda to a decades-long drama of racial conflict and conciliation, gains, and disappointments. It is all this, and it is also

(informants repeatedly reminded this researcher) just football.

With its bake sales, improvised songs and verse, dances, prayers, and pageants, small-town football sometimes comes across as quaint, traditional, unchanging, pure, and simple. In some ways it fits these labels, and it often deliberately cultivates them.

At the same time the production is jarringly modern and bureaucratic: it is a carefully choreographed and monitored show played out on a large numbered grid. It is a display of town and school performed by youth, engineered by adults, and consumed by all age groups and classes. As season, spectacle, and contest, football holds what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has called ‘cultural gravity’. It is a place of and tied to the world, but it also a world unto its own, where forces “pull away from the formation of large-scale ecumenes, whether religious, commercial or political, towards smaller scale accretions of intimacy and interest” (1994:324).

The rites of the Valley football spectacle are not unique or novel, they are familiar

Texan, Southern, and American stuff. At the same time their articulation here is undeniably Mexican and/or Tejano (Texas-Mexican). Here and there spectators stand

absorbed; they’ll yell ecstatically; they’ll sob. Most of the football experience is mundane, however. Fans thumb through programs, eat Frito Pies, gossip, network.

They daydream: headlights streaming on the highway; insects swarming around the violet floodlights. They chuckle at the awkward kid. They wave to an old neighbor.

They contemplate whether they’ll eat at the Whataburger or Ciro’s after the game. They look here and there...the band, the dancing mascot, the yawning junior ROTC guard, the phalanx of bus drivers smoking cigarettes along the fence.

In the student section they yell for their team, for their school, they want blood.

Other moments they poke fun at ‘how stupid this all is’, and how they can’t wait to get the hell out of this place--well, maybe not the town, but high school anyway. They sip mom’s vodka from flasks, maybe sneak a dip of Skoal tobacco. They court and glance; they date; they drop the ball; they score. Some of them make plans to cruise the strip in their second-hand cars, others to watch "the new Austin Powers," for the sixth, no, seventh time. All the while in the distance plastic crashes, boys grunt, whistles blow; it could be a stockyard. Others concoct plans for international travel: a hop over to Mexico where an adolescent can drink and dance till dawn. Mom and dad don’t have a clue.

The younger kids watch the high-schoolers from the periphery--so this is coming of age on the border.

Some folks will leave the game early to get the barbecue bote going and to prepare garnishes for the crock pot menudo before the guests arrive for the post-game

party. Some will walk down to the thick grass of the field when it is all over, mumble,

“Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be they name,” along with the kneeling athletes, coaches and their families. Some will wait by the band hall or the locker room to say “fine job” to the winners or “keep your head up...no te agüites, mi'jo ” to the losers.

On the rare night any number of elements can converge, and the night yields an exciting and exhausting contest--the kind that will be talked about for months if not years. The most rewarding and mem orable are those games ‘we’ win when they told us we couldn’t.

From the Thursday night junior high games to network televison's Monday

Night Football, in autumn, life is structured around the game. During the week parents, fans, and retirees venture out to watch team or band practice from the hoods of their cars. Some attend band, drill team or “quarterback club” meetings on Tuesday or

Wednesday nights. Here they review videos of performances, and plan events, fundraisers, and trips. Others attend Fellowship of Christian Athletes prayer breakfasts every other Thursday morning. And on the big night, fan attendance can be intense; it is not uncommon to have 10-15,000 people in a stadium. At a game I watched between two of Edinburg’s schools, there were some 15,000 spectators and participants--about a third of the town’s population.2

In some ways that football game occupies the same social space as the mid- century bailes. Organized by promoters, these paid-admission dances emerged in the

1930s and had become popular and widespread enterprises by the 1950s. The energies of the young drove the baile, but it attracted older dancers as well. To this day the ballroom or salon, usually housed in utilitarian metal-trussed structures, remains a fixture in all but the smallest of South Texas towns. In South Texas's larger the dances are multi- million dollar enterprises with high admission prices and close ties to broader music industry. (Peña 1999:95; Limón 1994:158)

This is Friday night football in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. On the one hand it is everyday, common stuff; it is the habitus: that which we do because it is the done thing--that’s all (Bourdieu 1990 (1980)). It is what Henri Lefevbre, the first to really theorize the concept of the everyday, defined as “what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted...it occupies and preoccupies [but] is practically untellable (Lefebvre 1971

(1968):24). Simple and mundane, the cultural production is also what John Macaloon has called in another context: a ‘megagenre’, an assembly of hundreds of specific practices, rituals, and discourses (1984).

Though it is primarily local, it is also ‘translocal’ and mobile, especially during playoffs and band competitions. And it is in this latter context where views or repressed sentiment on race, class, and region might bubble up--where what is "taken for granted" is suddenly thrown into a different, perhaps troubling, light. In fact, there exists a whole folklore and logic describing regional and ethnoracial characteristics of football: big white farm boys, black urban speed and ‘natural talent’, gutsy but ‘anemic’ border

Mexican footballers, and white suburban schools with ‘the best of everything’ (Ratliff

1963; Williams 1979; Winningham 1983; Buchanan 1996).

These currents and formations make football (and when I speak of football in this dissertation I am referring to the cultural production as a whole) an intriguing site for mining questions of identity, power, tradition, and invention. How do Tejanos use town football to make sense of their lives and times? Why do these people pour so much energy into this of all things? This is not to suggest that football holds the key to cultural knowledge. The football performance simply allows the participants to glimpse a dimension of his/her own subjectivity, to see what he/she makes and embodies.

This focus on cultural processes of signification, of how things mean in a particular historical moment, is sometimes referred to as ‘cultural’ or ‘social poetics’ (Greenblatt

1988; Herzfeld 1997). A focus on poetics allows us to understand better how a social group like the futboleros of South Texas fashions and refashions place and self through collective representations in tandem with individual sensibility or subjectivity. It gives us a way to speak of signs, symbols, metaphors, and power as active, polysemous, propagative, and, most importantly, fleeting. This is useful because things like tradition, identity, place, and fandom3 can only be made through the accretion and sedimentation of myriad signs--great, small, familiar, and strange. It also recognizes the limitations, frustrations, and serendipities experienced by the individual moving through and trying to make sense of large cultural forms.

To be concerned with poetics of culture is to be flexible and attuned to context and microexpression. We can find meaning and expression in all spheres of social activity, in art and ritual, of course, but also in the commonplace (Herzfeld 1985:xiv).

The ‘poetic’ not only appears in expressive language or poetry, but potentially in all spheres of human activity (Limón 1992:61). With cultural poetics we view creative human expression and figurative language as real and significant and tied, however tentatively, to the social and material world. Social science has traditionally viewed the figurative as an epiphenomenon to a real, tractable world or social structure, but the figurative and poetic are just as significant. Like the swirling and ephemeral aurora borealis, the figurative in human activity is an effect of material and invisible forces that effect real material change (tourism, poetry, science in the case of the aurora). What things mean are usually impossible to represent in a table or algorithm, but we can trace patterns, perhaps, we can posit causes and effects, and ruminate on curious semiotic alignments or negations. More provocatively, as theorists Roman Jakobson and those of the Bakhtin Circle have argued, the figurative is, in fact, the very engine of meaning and cognition; it makes the world.

In cultural poetics (and poetics here is much closer to poieo, the Greek verb for action, than to Dickinson), the performer(s) is never outside of his or her world, and vice versa. So if we meet with a prospective employer, let’s say, we are not only reading the official public welcome, the host’s comments, or the printed itinerary. We are ‘reading’

everything: an evasive glance, an accent, a neglected elevator, or a potential colleague’s flashy car. Of course, we recognize that these performances and inflections may be personal quirks or incidental details, but we also entertain the possibility that they reveal bits of information about class, taste, available monies, even politics. "Everything

‘depends’," as Kathleen Stewart put it; "meaning can only be made and read in a

‘context’ that is not just a ‘background’ for the ‘text’ but its very inspiration, its enabling condition" (Stewart 1988:228). This approach also recognizes that there exist performances in everyday life that are informal and fleeting, that flash with meaning in a situation. These performances, like an anecdote, joke, or witty phrasing, for example, leave no physical record and may never be performed again.

Because this approach deals with some of the finer and elusive points of the patterning of expression in human culture, one must use a rich and descriptive language, a language that is willing to chase after the subject a bit, even it means breaking a few conventions. We must allow ourselves to venture and conjecture, while acknowledging and remembering that we can’t get it all--much less get it right.

It is my hope that such an approach provides an optic for viewing some of the

‘lived topographies’ of modern South Texas. In other words, to be able to see the ways that people, schools, and towns construct local and regional selves and identities using extant institutions and an idiom (sports) that is public, mediated, ‘safe’, and ostensibly apolitical (Haag 1996). In a recent call for studies on people and place, Anthropologist

Keith Basso envisaged an anthropology of lived topographies as “a thematized concern with the ways in which citizens of the earth constitute their landscapes and take themselves to be connected with it” (1996:106). This approach recognizes that place is more than ‘setting’ or ‘context’, a mere background for texts, performance, or culture.

Place is sometimes their ‘enabling condition’, the goatskin on the drum of culture; places happen (Stewart 1988; Casey 1996). They are repositories of story, sentiment, and unwritten histories. Tumbling football players, toothsome cheerleaders, snide students, or hot-headed fans all enact it, contest it, and transform it, and most importantly, physically host it.

The high school football game helps us ruminate on, if not understand one's relationship to place—obviously, it is not exclusive in this regard, but it is interesting.

Whether training in the region’s notorious heat, riding in the dead silence of a school bus of sweaty losers, or sitting in the stands eating soggy nachos and feeling the creep of age, eventually everyone, even those who have made a decision to stay away, come to consider their place in these places.

On Choosing Football

Why study and write on football, and why such a localized version of it? People have often asked me these questions—primarily because of a concern for depth in the project, and the question of value—what value is the local outside the local? I will briefly address these questions here.

As I have already noted, in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, as in much of

Texas and the South, football is a tremendously popular and storied sport and spectacle.

Like soccer in Europe and Latin America or carnaval in the Caribbean and Brazil, for a portion of each year football is the well of community4 life. From Wednesday through

Sunday the media is awash with game predictions, highlights, and assessments. High school football stories will often headline newspapers. Players, cheerleaders, band members, and many of the other students involved enjoy the spotlight, and are promoted as role models for children. The game even has small ancillary businesses like fan magazines, cheerleading stores, dance and gymnastics academies, sports clinics, not to mention sports medicine clinics.

The vitality can be attributed to the fact that the population is a very youthful one. According to the 1990 Census, more than half of the Hispanics in the area are under age 25 (1993). The Texas Education Agency estimates that 30-40% of the population is of school age or below (Grant 1996). Along with Mormon Utah, the Valley is the youngest society in the nation. Because of this, the social lives of youth and the culture of the schools play more important roles than they do in more mature communities. Within this context schools, and especially high schools, become important community focal points for socializing and identity. This is even truer in areas with large rural populations. The school district of Edinburg, for example, covers a territory of almost 1,000 square miles. For the youth of the far-flung ranches and

farms, the school and town are a vital social nexus, whereas students in urban and suburban have greater access to entertainment, recreation, and cultural resources like music and dance lessons.

But there is a more personal reason for my focus. When I entered graduate school I entered with the intention of studying Chicano/a literature or literary history.

But being a Chicano who has written a lot and published some, I found it difficult to gain critical distance; I was too absorbed with craft and aesthetics. Loving poetry is one thing, analyzing it well is another. I also considered studying the tragically kitsch art of sculptor Luis Jimenez, or writing a cultural history that traced the intersection of poetry, drugs, and brown bohemianism in the Chicano Movement. But those ideas didn’t pan out for some reason or other. Throughout all this, and in my own creative writing, I kept returning to popular culture and everyday life in South Texas, especially those cultural productions or performances that were not expressly political. But I was stumped. Aside from the descriptive and poetic what was there to say? How did one make sense of the din of mass-authored and mass-experienced cultural productions, the commonplace?

One grad student midnight I stumbled across an essay entitled “Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies” by the British critic Angela McRobbie. A commentary on the state of cultural studies circa 1992 ; it ends with this observation and “plea” from the author:

the problem in cultural studies today is the absence of reference to real existing identities in the ethnographic sense. The identities being 12

discussed, and I am as guilty of this myself as anybody else, are textual or discursive identities. The site of identity formation in cultural studies remains implicitly in and through cultural commodities and texts rather than in and through the cultural practices of everyday life. This, then, is where I want to end with a plea for identity ethnography in cultural studies, with a plea for carrying out interactive research on groups and individuals who are more than just audiences for texts. (1994:58).

There it was. Ms. McRobbie voiced what had been nagging at me, but which I had had difficulty articulating and drafting. Granted, texts (liberally defined) are important agents in the making, expression, and circulation of culture and identity, but experience and what Raymond Williams called ‘ordinary’ culture, is not always or even primarily inscribed or manifested in the textual--all the world is not a text.5

Around the same time that I encountered McRobbie’s call for ethnographic study of everyday life, I was in the process of discovering and rediscovering the popular culture, folkloristic, autobiographical reflections, and everyday life analyses and reflections of Jovita Gonzalez, J. Frank Dobie, Américo Paredes, José Limón, Douglas

Foley, Norma Cantú, Richard Flores, and, of course, Rolando Hinojosa. That there existed a small and influential school of cultural criticism and ethnography based in

South Texas was terribly exciting. In their work I saw models, some long extant, for the kinds of inquiry McRobbie, Stuart Hall, and others in the broader cultural studies movement proposed. They held a discussion on Mexicans, Anglos, and border hybridities that I felt I needed to join.

I decided that my contribution would be a history and ethnography of high school football in South Texas--that 500-hundred-pound gorilla in the corner, that Tejano

Balinese cockfight, which all but Douglas Foley had overlooked. Yes, football--border, raza style--would work well. It was a popular culture energetically performed and widely embraced by its public. It combined elements of the local and national, traditional and novel, Mexican, Texan, and American; it was a gem.

History and Setting

While the bulk of the data I collected comes from Hidalgo and Cameron counties in the Lower Rio Grande Valley on the southern tip of Texas, much of the analysis applies to the larger Mexican American cultural region known as South Texas. This area is bounded by the Rio Grande in the south and San Antonio in the north with the

Nueces River cutting through the center of the region. The area south of the Nueces has a higher concentration of Mexican Americans, and is sometimes referred to as ‘deep

South Texas’.

"You'll know you're near when you start seeing the barbecue smoke on the horizon," one informant joked.

South Texas has had continuous European settlement since the 17th century. The

Lower Rio Grande Valley area was settled in 1749 when Colonel José de Escandón brought some 700 families from the interior of Mexico to found the province of Nuevo

Santander. The colony was intended to serve as a middle point between Monterrey and

Tampico and the Spanish colonies of San Antonio and Nacogdoches in central and northeastern Texas. The hot climate, semi-arid, terrain, and Indian resistance, kept the river towns and ranches south of the Nueces in relative isolation through most of the

19th century.

The wars for Texas independence and the Mexican War had a profound impact on the people of South Texas. In the war for Texas independence Texas-Mexicans were torn between loyalties to Mexico and the ideals and promise of a new republic free from the tyranny of Santa Ana. But history has not been kind to Mexicans north of the Rio

Grande. Although many of them sided with and fought for Texas independence, many

Texas-Mexicans were subject to violence, expulsion, and dispossession of land and property under the Republic of Texas (1836-1845). While they did not face the depredations that Mexicans faced in the central Texas area, the people of the Valley had to contend with cattle-stealing raids from the Anglo Texans who resided in the north, and Mexican military incursions from the south. (Montejano 1987:26-27; Paredes 1993

(1978): 25)

The Mexican War, fought ostensibly over boundary disputes in the Nueces

River-Rio Grande Strip, brought a large military occupation and the installment of military forts along the Rio Grande. (These remained in operation through WWII.) At the end of the war in 1848, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo established the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico at the Rio Grande. With an eye on California and its gold,

the United States made its destiny manifest by ceding Texas and what would become the states of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and parts of Wyoming and

Colorado.

The cession of the Mexican north had a profound impact on all North Americans.

New land and precious metals lured legions of speculators and settlers from the east.

There was also the question of whether to allow slavery in the new territories. For the

Texas-Mexican ‘borderer’ society, which had evolved along the Rio Grande, the treaty meant that the river, the arterial center of social life and trade, had become an international boundary that split a community in two. More like the Mason-Dixon line than the Berlin Wall, the U.S.-Mexico boundary in the Valley was permeable. People, culture, and products crossed at will. "[T]he general flouting of customs and immigration laws, [was] not so much a form of social or ethnic protest," the folklorist

Américo Paredes wrote, but "a way of life." (1993 (1978): 26)

During Reconstruction, the region saw periods of relative peace, but Mexican and Tejano power and wealth eroded with each coming decade. Between 1850 and 1900

Texas-Mexicans lost more than half of the land they owned. In 1850, for example,

Anglos owned only 2% of the ranches in South Texas, by 1900 they owned 31%

(Montejano 1987: 73). Many of the losses were a result of outright fraud and extortion, as well as legal and quasi-legal land and lifestock deals made under financial duress.

Stephen Powers, a writer who passed through Texas in the 1880s, said of the Anglo

Texan and the Texas Ranger in particular: "The people of Texas, like its weather, are a perpetual enigma, a tissue of contradictions...The Texans do everything for honor, but nothing for justice" (1886:119). Fencing, a glut in the cattle markets, and the advent of

Western-style capitalism in the region also eroded the base of Tejano power.

* * *

In his famous address at the World Columbian Exposition, historian Frederick

Jackson Turner deemed the western frontier, settled and tamed in 1893. The Texas-

Mexico border remained a notoriously bloody and violent territory, however. For example, there was the rebellion led by Catarino Garza, a rancher and journalist from

San Diego, Texas. Garza’s rebellion challenged the Porfirio Díaz regime, and among other things demanded free elections and civilian rule in Mexico. After raids into

Mexico, the Garzistas were captured by U.S. calvary and Texas Rangers in the U.S.

(though Garza escaped).

Clashes and small insurrections continued into the late teens. Though one typically thinks of conflicts between Texas Rangers and Mexicans, there were a variety of antagonistic factions: native rancheros, ‘old-timer’ Anglo ranchers and political bosses,

Mexican revolutionaries and seditionists, the U.S. Army, commercial agriculturists, settlers from the U.S. north and Mexican south, and border-crossing criminals and fugitives. A review of the popular literature and balladry of this era finds it rife with rustling, knifings, shootings, raids, counter-raids, ambushes, riots, and all manner of

chauvinistic displays of nation and subnation.6 Violent, sure, but it was a not a lawless society. Anglos, Tejanos, and Mexicans, allied and independently, administered the law if not always justice. There were periods of relative peace and stablility. Still, as David

Montejano and Armando Alonzo have detailed, the fragile Anglo-Tejano politics of accommodation had deteriorated by the turn of the century. "[Social] and class divisions between the Tejano and the U.S.-and European-born settlers were much more rigid than at any time in the previous century," Alonzo writes, "an omen that did not bode well for the future of ethnic relations." (1987; 1998:142)

The Agribusiness Era

With land promoters touting the area as an "oasis," "garden," "paradise" and

"Magic Valley," waves of settlers toured the area and settled. Lore has it that promoters tied fruit to trees and shrubs along the railway to catch the eye of prospective buyers.

With Mexican manpower and a huge investment in irrigation infrastructure (private and public), the Valley’s thicket of mesquite, grasses, and prickly pear cacti became citrus orchards, and ruler-straight fields of cotton, cabbage, onion, melon, sorghum, and sugar cane. The operations could be enormous. One veteran farmer with whom I spoke described working a field near Mission, Texas; he would ride five miles before he turned his tractor around to till the next set of rows.

David Montejano reminds us that Anglo settlement and investment in this era signaled much more than a mere transition from a traditional agrarian economy to one more modern, efficient, and tied to rapidly globalizing capitalism.

The transformation was not the result of some logic or imperative intrinsic to commercial farming, for Mexican rancheros and some Anglo old-timers proved themselves capable of shifting from livestock to farming while maintaining intact the character of the local order. It was the introduction not of farming but of ready-made farm communities, transplanted societies from the Midwest and the North, that produced the sweeping, dramatic changes in the region. In the midst of a ranch society based on paternalistic work arrangements, there emerged and grew a farm society based on contract wage labor and business rationality. Everything that held the ranch society together--shared interests, shared world views, conceptions of what was proper and just, rules concerning the use of force, in short, the substance of culture--was pulled apart. (Montejano 1987:104) * * *

Though South Texas is home to some of the oldest settlements in the United

States, the new Anglos tended to see themselves as intrepid pioneers (albeit via Pullman car) and "first settlers" (Montejano 1987:159). It is not that the Anglo agriculturists did not recognize that Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Texas Anglos had dwelt and labored there before them, it was just that these people had failed to exploit it, to

Americanize it. It was they who brought real democracy, capital, know-how, and proper

Christianity; they who transformed the desert into the garden; they who suffered and endured.

As a kid growing up in Edinburg, a hub of the produce packing and brokerage industry, I encountered this Anglo agriculturist narrative of development inscribed on 19

street signs (I grew up right off Sugar Road), curated in museum exhibits, celebrated in festivals and parade floats coated in vegetable seeds, flowers, fruit rinds, and onion skin.

We saw it on the annual television broadcast of the Algodon (Cotton) Ball, a debutante ball for Anglo agriculturalists. It was also the motif of our art deco movie house The

Citrus.

It was at the Citrus in 1978 that this self-congratulatory narrative of know-how and pluck struck me in any political way. Our cool, young teacher, Ms. Guzman, had taken our club, the Junior Historians, on a field trip to watch the film She Came to the

Valley. Shot in our very own Valley and based on a novel published in the 1940s, the movie chronicled the trials and tribulations of the Westalls, an Anglo pioneer family that had struggled "to transform a valley of hardship into a lush earthly paradise." The story takes place during the Valley’s bloodiest decade, the 1910s, and is a composite of the histories of regional agriculturalist families like the Hills, Closners, Sharys, and

Bentsens. (Band 1977)

As one of Ms. Guzman’s Junior Historians, I had learned enough local history to know that the saga unfolding on the screen was a bit distorted and self-serving. Anglos were bold, sexy, and industrious. While, with the exception of a boisterous Pancho Villa

(played by Freddy Fender), Mexicans were portrayed as superstitious, backward, ambitionless, blindly loyal, conniving, or at best--good but doomed folk. Worst of all, like Margaret Mitchell’s ‘darkies’, they were happy to be in the company and service of

Anglos. I was suspicious, embarrassed, angry, and more than a bit confused--what if this was the way it had really happened? I come from old Valley stock, so these were my people weren’t they? Was that me smiling gratefully from the sun-soaked fieldrow?

I was somewhat relieved when at our discussion circle at a picnic later that day,

Ms. Guzman chortled and called the story a "fantasy."7

Commenting on this period in South Texas history, Walter Prescott Webb, the historian (and founder of the Texas Junior Historians), was less gracious than Guzman.

"Americans instituted a reign of terror against the Mexicans and many innocent

Mexicans were made to suffer," he wrote. With the aid of the Texas Rangers, the new pioneers Americans wrought "an orgy of bloodshed." In Webb’s estimation, anywhere between 500 and 5,000 Mexicans were killed in the early 20th century (1935:478).

Part II

The Contemporary Setting

For most of the 20th century fruit and vegetable production served as the base for the local economy. Vegetable, cotton, and citrus farming generated great wealth for packing plants, produce brokers, and large farms like that of Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s family. It was also an economy marked by booms and busts. Hart Stilwell, a writer from

Brownsville and sometime colleague of folklorist Américo Paredes, wrote that the Valley had "managed to telescope the entire panorama of American economic history into the span of the 43 years since the railroad reached Brownsville in 1904. It has got rich and

gone broke about as many times in those 43 years as the rest of the nation has in all its history." Severe freezes, droughts, NAFTA, and the curtailing of federal agricultural subsidies in the 1980s and 90s had shut down many farming outfits by the end of century. The economy is now more diverse and globalized. (1947:14)

The huge growth of the maquiladoras (manufacturing and assembly plants) immediately south of border has generated some new wealth for the retail, warehousing, and transportation sectors north of border. The managerial class stimulates the American border economy, but the bulk of the profits, however, leave the area for New York, Detroit, San Jose, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other corporate meccas. Double-digit unemployment persists in many areas.

The international drug trade’s goods and profits also percolate through the

Valley’s official, mensurable economy. According to the U.S. government, contraband worth tens of billions of dollars passes through the Valley every year (Sharp 1998:146).

For example, in 1997 the Border Patrol was seizing an average of 7.5 tons of marijuana per month in the county of Starr, a county with a population of less than 100,000. The figure is amazing in that it does not include the seizures of other law enforcement agencies, or those of other drugs like heroine and cocaine (Schiller 1997).

Just how much drug money fertilizes the economy remains a mystery, its traces are everywhere, however. One sees it on the hardened, somewhat anxious men and women dripping in gold and gems. One sees it in the sprawling non-working ranches,

garish mansions in both exclusive enclaves and modest barrios, and in the estates of the area’s top criminal lawyers. The countryside yields more troubling signs. At least once a week, the news reports the discovery of a corpse or three in a roadside ditch. Almost always, the victims are men in their twenties--soldiers of the underground.

While huge sums of capital, goods, and contrab and pass through the Valley and

South Texas, much of it remains very poor.8 The 1990 census found that between forty and sixy percent of the population in Hidalgo and Cameron Counties lived in poverty

(1992:319d). A recent report produced by the Texas State Comptroller’s Office gives us a particularly troubling picture of the situation. For the purpose of illustration,

Comptroller John S harp took the southern third of Texas, and hypothetically treated it as the 51st state in the union. Let’s call it ‘Tejas’. This ‘state’ is roughly the size of Florida, and has a majority Mexican American population. In comparison to other states in the

U.S., Tejas ranks dead last in per-capita income. It has the largest percentage of people without a high school diploma (37.3% in 1990). Tejas also leads the nation in the number of births, and has high rates of disease, including some found only in the ‘Third World’.

While the American mainstream debates a patient’s right to choose specialists or manage prescription drug costs, Southern Texas struggles to establish rudimentary health care. In 1998 there were 14 physicians and 33 hospital beds per 100,000, while in the rest of Texas there enjoyed 161 physicians and 403 beds. (Sharp 1998:197, 9)

The Vicissitudes of Class on the Transfrontier

The U.S.-Mexican border is the most populated geopolitical border in the world, and the population continues to grow rapidly. According to geographer Lawrence

Herzog, cities like McAllen, Texas-Reynosa, Tamaulipas and Brownsville, Texas-

Matamoros, Tam aulipas are economically and culturally inter-dependent "transfrontier metropolises." These are new forms of global cities, split by geopolitics, but bound by shared resources, circulating labor, capital, and culture. Looking at the American cities of McAllen and Brownsville through this transnational lens, we see that these U.S. cities are at the tip of a large urban iceberg. Where the American cities of McAllen and

Brownsville had populations of 103,000 and 132,000 in the 1990s, the transfrontier city of

Reynosa-McAllen had a population of 800,000 and Matamoros-Brownsville 700,000

(Herzog 1997:17).

Even though average income per capita in the Valley is about half that of the U.S. average, within the transnational/transfrontier geography Herzog describes, cities like

McAllen and Brownsville are still among the wealthiest areas on the border--simply because of the disjuncture between First and Third World wealth. Within this situation, this borderlands dynamic, class, power, and privilege are radically fluid and contingent.

For example, a Mexican American, lower-middle class family can drive a few miles south into Mexico and be ‘gente de dinero’ (people with money), simply because they have some disposable income and a late-model car. As the same family drives north out

of South Texas, however, the middling class status melts away with every mile. Where they are monied in Mexico, and average (neither the richest nor poorest) in the Valley, in the north (starting in San Antonio) they quickly become lower-income, minor players.

Their car suddenly seems a bit shabby, the real estate out of reach. Yet, because of the history of race and education in this country and concessions and repairs put into policy, the children of this hypothetical family may leapfrog past some of the wealthier offspring of the mostly-white suburbs of the north, when it comes to things like college admissions. With affirmative action and "top ten percent" programs (not to mention good teaching and talent) many students from the Valley are gaining admissions to, and succeeding in, the nation’s most elite universities. The point is that for the skilled blue collar and middling classes, power, status, and privilege often changes quickly as they traffic through different spheres or as they bridge the First and Third Worlds. Unskilled workers and recent immigrants in the borderlands face a much more challenging situation--good jobs are scarce, social services are deficient, and regional higher education is underfunded.9 Those on the southern edge of the borderline are stuck in the undertow churned by the confluence of big capital and desperate labor.

Naturally, the proximity to Mexico, an abundance Spanish-language media, and ceaseless transmigration makes South Texas a markedly Mexican region. Negotiating this culture is often difficult for non-native Anglo and Mexican Americans. One informant, a Mexican-American customs broker, explained that he had a difficult time

keeping non-native recruits. "When they first arrive everything is exotic and different, so they’re interested. They like being able to afford a big house and a maid. But in three years they’re gone--back to Dallas, Illinois, or wherever. And its not that we don’t have stuff--all the chains are here now. It is just too different here," the informant chuckled,

"it’s too Mexican for them."

This is not to say that American culture is lacking. Mass media, seasonal migrant labor, school curriculum, travels in-country for business and higher education, and the annual in-migration of hundreds of thousands of midwestern retirees ("Winter Texans") inject the culture of the U.S. north. Instead, both Mexican and American coexist and mutate, and high school football is one the most interesting cultural forms where this happens.

What I have tried to highlight in this introduction are the turbulence generated by the asymmetries of wealth and power on the U.S.-Mexico border, the effects of

Anglo-American economic and political domination, and that curious mixing of cultural products which borders effect. As Gloria Anzaldua noted in Borderlands/La Frontera , border dwellers live with cultural blending, ambiguity, and plurality; they juggle numerous cultural codes. What I add to Anzaldua’s observations and meditations, and which I think is well-illustrated in John Sayles’s film, Lone Star, is that power, class, and idea of national belonging are also quite fluid and contingent. This is not to advocate a willy-nilly relativism, but rather to offer a corrective or caveat to typologies and/or

politics which position the Mexican American as automatically marginal or other.10

(Anzaldua 1987; Sayles 1996)

* * *

This dissertation is organized in three parts. This section, Part I, describes the project and gives an overview of the ethnographic setting.

The chapters in Part II deal with the development and changes of sports, social and scholastic history. We begin by looking at the precursors to contemporary sportive practice and spectatorship in Texas; equestrian and vaquero games, festivals, and baseball, amateur and semi-pro. I document early sportive practice and discuss how popular forms like baseball and football served as early zones of contact for Anglos and

Mexicans in the era of segregation (before the late 1960-70s). What symbolic capital did these sports hold in South Texas society, and what impact would integration have on these symbols? How did participation (or exclusion) socialize students, and what new cultural forms, identities, and affiliations got cooked up in the drudgery of practice and excitement of the game?

Part III also focuses on performance, verbal arts, and folklore. The first chapter in this section takes us to a football game. It presents a ‘typical’ football Friday from start to finish. Because the football game consists of many dispersed and simultaneous performances, the chapter is structured as a sort of montage. The game I describe is a composite drawn from the many games and peripheral events I witnessed.

The writing in this chapter is the most descriptive and poetic in the dissertation; it is influenced by postmodern ethnography. Two of the more experimental modes that

I use are evocation and composite voices. The comments and views of my informants are not always marked off from that of narrator. Rather than consistently acknowledge discrete informants and their comments, the narrator simply evokes their observation.

This is a workaday mode employed by fiction writers, essayists, journalists, and historians, but rarely by social scientists.

Prominent ethnographers like Keith Basso, Kathleen Stewart, Michael Taussig have employed this technique brilliantly. It allows for the inclusion of many voices and positions, not to mention a more seamless read. Of course, Américo Paredes ventured down this road as early as the 1950s. Paredes style employs, "multiple voices, inversions, humor, and irony," José Limón writes; it was an alternative model to "linear, hierarchical discourse" (1992: 76). There are problems and pitfalls, certainly, but the more objectivist position is also problematic. In the Appendix entitled "On Doing

Ethnography," I address these issues.

Part III also provides description and analysis of Valley football’s folklore and metaculture. In Chapter Five, for example, we tune the radio dial to the Spanish- language radio program, Football Scoreboard. The top-rated show in its time slot on both the AM and FM bands, Football Scoreboard serves as a forum where callers banter over wins, losses, and the rising and falling fortunes of their teams. Like other sports

talk radio, Football Scoreboard deals with scores, performance, statistics, and coaching.

But is also a forum that enables and encourages the performance of traditional tejano and mexicano verbal arts, music and song. Fans engage in verbal duels (periquiando), a sort of

‘playing the dozens’ on a mass scale. They also recite verse, make dedications, perform songs, and yell silly cheers like “Chile, tomate y cebollas, nadie le gana a La Joya.” (Chiles, tomato, and onion, no one beats La Joya.) Surprisingly, Mexican American women participate in large numbers. In fact, they make up more than half of the listening audience--an anomaly in sports-oriented media.

In the section's final chapter, I describe and analyze the new folk subgenre of the

South Texas football corrido. In these Spanish-language narrative ballads, people sing the praises of team prowess and town football tradition.

The corridos have a variety of inflections. Some are mock-heroic songs that boast of a team’s prowess while playfully deriding opponents and rivals. In this way they echo the humor and swagger of classic Tejano corridos like "Jacinto Treviño." Other songs are ethical in nature; they speak to values such as hard work, youthful obedience, and willful participation, win or lose, in the symbolic life of the town. Sometimes earnest, sometimes ironical, and always big-hearted, these songs hold as their protagonists coaches, players, and mascots like La Máquina Amarilla (The Yellow Machine). Symbols like La Máquina, a collection of diverse (and fallible) parts assembled, emerge as inspiring symbols for struggle, desire, and determination.

Finally, the appendices provide radio program transcripts, song lyrics, along with a short essay on theoretical and methodological approaches and issues.

A Note on Terminology

Anyone writing about people of Mexican descent in the United States struggles with terminology. How do you represent heritage and difference while also addressing the broader demographic?

The first thing the reader will notice is that I use the term term Chicano and

Chicana sparingly. This is because the terms are rarely used in South Texas, the university campus being an exception. One does hear Mexicano/a, Hispanic, American,

Mexican American, Latino/a, raza, and increasingly Tejano/a. Though non-intellectuals do not tend to ponder and scrutinize the origins and potential meanings of each term and subjectivity, it can be said that each has a rough ideological locus -- with Hispanic usually signifying a more conservative politics and Chicano/a positioned as left-of- center. The former is more open and even embracing of mainstream American culture; the latter is more skeptical if not resistant. The former sometimes favors the European elements in mestizaje and the latter finds affinities in the indigenous. Of course, there are permutations, shared ground, and identity contingent on situation.

The term ‘Hispanic’, as I hear it used in the Valley, indexes a somewhat conservative and quasi-assimilationist politics, but it is also (and sometimes only) an invocation of a ‘modern’ and pan-Latino identity. It is slick, new, and, of course, English

rather Spanish--more like a new hat than a politics. ‘Tejano’ may refer to heritage or ties to Mexican Texas, but most often people use it to signify vernacular ‘style’ or regional flair: “But we’re gonna throw a good wedding,” a proud Tejana mother announced,

“we’re gonna do it Tejano style.” (She went on to discuss all the different parties, music, and food she had planned.)

It is important to note that while the majority of South Texans are Mexican

American, many South Texas Anglos are also culturally Tejano. (Many are descendants of 19th-century bicultural marriages.) They inter-marry, they eat and prepare Texas-

Mexican food, they know and enjoy Tejano and Mexican music, and they work, live, and play alongside Mexican Americans. These Texas Anglos are bilingual, and speak the distinctive Texas-Mexican English dialect.11

The term ‘American’ is a floating signifier as well. Folks may insist on

‘American’, for example, not to passively assimilate or shed Mexicanness as an older

Chicano nationalist position might have interpreted it, but rather to unabashedly claim, as Paul Gilroy discussed in the context of black/white cultural politics in Great Britain, a rightful place in the nation (Gilroy 1987). During the tenure of my research, an illustration of this type of identification occurred when the town of Edinburg won its second ‘All-America City’ designation. Sponsored by the National Civic League, the

All-America City award dubs itself “the nation’s oldest and most renowned community recognition award”(1998). Like the other thirty finalists invited to Washington, D.C., the

city boosters presented their ingenuity in community-building and problem-solving, but the clincher for Edinburg was the pachangita (little shindig) they threw, replete with folk music and a spread of border Mexican food (Macal 1997). This is a claim to Americanism through an affirmation and performance of Texas-Mexican culture. It is what Stuart

Hall has called the “logic of coupling,” a position that allows for the possibility to be both American and Mexican (Hall 1992:29).

In this writing I have made effort to use the most appropriate term by considering the identity of the informant and/or the politics of the historical moment.

My default term is the unpoetic, but functional, Mexican-American.

Part I: History

Chapter One: Early Sport in South Texas

The frontier repertoire of leisure and festival was diverse, consisting of dances, plays, cockfights, gambling, equestrian and taurine games. Vast spaces and an abundance of mustangs put the horse at the keystone of both work and play; it is “the

Mexican’s chief passion,” the French cleric and traveler Emmanuel Domenech wrote of the Lower Rio Grande Valley’s horse. (Dobie 1952:99-106, 1858 #567:250)

These frontier games, vestiges of which survive in American rodeo and Mexican charrería , offer good launching points for discussion on modern sports in Texas and

Mexican America. To begin here is not to say that these agrarian recreations beget modern Texas football. The two sports have very different foundations and trajectories.1

The former are the practices of a relatively isolated Spanish-Mexican-American agrarian society. On the other hand, football and other modern team sports have an Anglo neo- colonialist/imperialist provenance. These are products of U.S. military installations,

Anglo urban settlements, large-scale commercial agricultural developments, public schools, missions and settlement houses, and more obliquely, modernity itself. But in order to understand how Tejanos perceived and engaged European-American team sports and their attendant Anglo/Protestant ideologies of corporeal discipline, modesty, fair play, patriotism, and programmatic hygiene, among other things, a look at rodeo and equestrian games is useful. The Texas-Mexican borderlands had a well-established

sportive tradition that ranged from casual and impromptu contests to races and contests that were markedly ritualized and tied to religious holidays. Though radically different in origin and form, Tejano agrarian and modern American sportive practice share many of the same codes and values--especially regarding the fashioning and performance of masculinity through risk and violence. As Teddy Roosevelt, Frederic Remington, and turn-of-the-century popular culture recognized/imagined them, the vaquero, “the original cowboy,” and the collegiate football player faced congruous physical tests, and thus embodied many of the same masculine virtues. In fact, the modern game of football, as Chapter Four of this work shows, provided a sort of surrogate regimen or physical test for Anglo-Saxon males who came of age in a softer, more mature and prosperous, post-frontier America.

This chapter gives a history of early Texas-Mexican sportive practice. Drawing on traveler’s accounts, corridos, and regional press, it details the types of sportive activities and their uses in everyday and festival setting. It also addresses how shared or overlapping sportive practices enabled playful, fruitful intercultural encounters between

Anglos and Mexicans, even as these societies waged political and economic ‘wars of position’, not to mention outright armed struggle. The balance of the chapter discusses the political and economic contexts enabling the shift from traditional or “folk” sports to the modern practices and institutions seen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Early Sport in Tejas

Vaquero/ranchero ‘sports’ in 18th and 19th-century Texas were blunt, fierce contests between men and the animals they worked. Like archery or fox hunting, the vaquero games were originally and primarily ‘field sports’--improvisatory games based on utilitarian skills. In this context one ‘trained’ through work and hours in the saddle, and one competed or performed when a lull in the work schedule allowed.

Typical of agrarian societies, the lines between work and play, laborer and athlete, were faint if not irrelevant. We glimpse this in the following stanzas from the

1860s corrido “Kiansis.” This ballad chronicles incidents and adventures on a cattle drive from South Texas to Kansas. In the vignette we see a corrida (team) of vaqueros encounter novice Anglo cowboys struggling with a herd. The vaqueros offer a hand and make quick work of corralling the cattle. In recounting this impromptu rodeo, the lyrics praise the vaqueros’ adept cowboying, while sneering at the cowboy ‘other’ gawking in amazement.

Quinientos novillos eran, Five hundred steers there were, todos grandes y livianos, all big and quick; y entre trienta americanos and not even thirty American cowboys no los podían embalar could keep them bunched together.

Llegan cinco mexicanos, Then five Mexicans arrive, todos bien enchivarrados, all of them wearing good chaps; y en menos de un cuarto de hora and in less than a quarter-hour, los tenían encerrados. they had the steers penned up.

Esos cinco mexicanos Those five Mexicans al momento los echaron, bagged those steers in a jiffy, 35

y los trienta americanos and the thirty Americans se quedaron azorados. were thrown into a dither.

Another surviving variant of “Kiansis” includes an episode of vaqueros swimming skillfully in a fast river:

Llegamos al Río Salado We got to the Salado River y nos tiramos a nado and we dove in for a swim; decía un Americano: an American was saying, --esos hombres ya se ahogaron.-- “Those men are as good as drowned.”

Pues qué pensaría ese hombre Well what was the man thinking, que venimos a esp’rimentar that we are but learning; si somos del Río Grande why, we are from the Rio Grande, de los buenos pa' nadar. good swimmers all.2

(Paredes, 1995 #17:53-55; my translations)

In the images and poetics of action in media res (think of the vaquero and ranchero paintings of James Walker and Theodore Gentilz here), we see the vaqueros rendered as skilled workers, as venturesome risk -takers, and as good-humored competitors--all this set in contradistinction to the band of cowboys. Take, for example, the smug comment on the vaqueros’ superior outfits, “todos bien enchivarrados.” Within these aestheticized, agonistic contexts and poetics, the vaquero prefigures what will later become, as violence between Texas-Mexicans and new American settlers mounts, the classic corrido protagonist--what José Limón describes as an “eroticized figure of strong, attractive masculinity confronting other men with the phallic power of his pistol in his hand”

(1998:105).

Though these vaqueros make sport of Anglo greenhorns, they are not athletes in any formalized sense. What we glimpse are workers caught in impromptu contest/play.

Sport here is simple and rudimentary. Applying Gregory Bateson’s classic model, one imagines that some contextual cue or metacommunicative message (which the lean corrido text does not make us privy to) has signaled: this is play; this is contest, and hence the mundane--a dusty herd, a muddy river--is transformed into object and site of contest and play. (1972:177-93)

"El Toro Moro," a corrido set on the King Ranch, has a similar poetics. This corrido celebrates a ladino's (outlaw bull) seven-year evasion of the ranch's best cowboys.

The ballad chronicles the day the vaqueros stumble upon, and finally catch the Toro

Moro. Not unlike the modern narrated sporting match, the contestants are all named

(including the horses), their physical missteps and maneuvers are detailed, and their brags and excuses offer comedic bits while serving to ratchet the narrative up to a climax. Towards the end of the corrido the narrator marks the close of the Batesonian play 'frame' with the words "el juego está cerrado," the game is now closed. The ballad ends with a small lament for the formidable opponent; he is no longer the notorious

Toro Moro, but the Torito Moro. (Goodwyn 1931:60-62)

* * *

Where on the range sportive practice was largely improvised, religious and patriotic holidays, roundups, herraderos (brandings), and large family celebrations

occasioned relatively organized, structured, and ritualized equestrian and taurine contests. While ministering along the Lower Rio Grande in the 1850s, the Abbé

Domenech described a typical assembly and setting.

A little before sunset I arrived in my way to Brownsville at the Rancho de la Palma, where were assembled together numbers of horsemen, some in gala dress, others in rags and squalor. This rancho you might almost call a little town; its population amount to a thousand souls. That day, not fewer than three thousand souls met there to celebrate the feast of Santo Iago. Palma had no grand square like the other towns and ranchos of these regions, but it is intersected by a wide and very long street in which the races and dances were held...The majority of the rancheros were superbly mounted. Their saddles and bridles were mounted with silver, and two of the bridles themselves were of solid silver. After the races the horsemen walked about in large groups, arm in arm, singing to the accompaniment of the mandoline and the accordion, while some amused themselves by taking a woman en croupe, and setting off at full gallop to the end of the street, and returning only to change their burthen.” (1858:288)

Of frontier sports the match race was the most common, surviving to this day in rural areas, ballads, and country-road drag races, I suppose. For the most part, match races were impromptu, often foolhardy, sprints with nothing more than bragging rights and a few bits at stake. During the U.S.-Mexican War, the Texas Ranger Samuel Reid, Jr. described how Mexican horsemen in the old Rio Grande city of Reynosa held matches where “rival parties” of native “madmen” charged and wrestled each other on the city streets (with the enthusiastic consent of citizens). Other races were more formally organized. They included brass bands, prizes, and judges. A Saint Patrick’s Day celebration in Brownsville & Matamoros listed the following contests and

entertainments on its program: a mule race, burro race, cart race, foot races, a sack race, wheelbarrow race, barrilero races (water vendor using a rolling barrel with a tump line), and short and long distance horse races, official and not. (Reid 1847:58; 1870; Gonzalez

1930:53-56; Tijerina 1998:104)

While rodeo and taurine contests were a predominantly Mexican practice

(initially), equestrian games and races where shared/tolerated by all--especially in the festival setting. A newspaper review of the Brownsville-Matamoros St. Patrick’s Day celebration cited above, for example, described contestants “of every shade and hue, from the Caucasian to the African.”(Maltby 1870)

John C. Duval, the so-called “Father of Texas letters,” provides us with an early and vivid picture of this type of mixed-race sportive festival. In an episode entitled

“Riding Contest in San Antonio,” Duval describes an 1840s exposition and tournament where Comanches, Anglos, and Mexicans competed in several events.

The day begins with a tailgate party of sorts where citizens from San Antonio and “strangers” in from the country milled around the city center for hours, drinking

“scorch gullet” mescal, brandishing pistols and knives, and tempting fate by riding horses into cantinas and stores. As the hour arrived, the horseplay dissipated and “the whole population of the city...all the strangers in the place and all the citizens with their families crammed into all kinds of vehicles” hurried to a plain outside the city where the

event was to take place. “It was indeed a strange and novel scene that presented itself to our view,” Duval writes.

Drawn up in a line on one side of the arena and sitting like statues upon their horses were the Comanche warriors, decked out in their savage finery of paints, feathers, and beads, and looking with Indian stoicism upon all that was going on around them. Opposite to them, drawn up in a single file also, were their old enemies upon many a bloody field, the Texas Rangers, and few Mexican rancheros, dressed in their steeple-crown, broad-brim sombreros, showy scarfs, and slashed trowsers, holding gracefully in check the fiery mustangs on which they were mounted. After some preliminaries, the space selected for the riding was cleared of all non-contestants and the show began. A Mexican lad mounted on a paint (piebald) pony, with a spear in his hand, cantered off a hundred yards and laid the spear flat on the ground. Immediately a Comanche brave started forth from their line, and plunging his spurs into his horse’s flanks dashed off in a direction opposite to that where the spear was lying, for a hundred yards or so; then wheeling suddenly he came rushing back at full speed, and as he passed the spot where the spear had been placed, without checking his horse for an instant, he swerved from his saddle, seized the spear, and rising gracefully in his seat, continued his headlong course for some distance beyond, wheeled again and galloped back (dropping the spear as he returned at the same spot from which he had taken it) and resumed his place in the ranks. The same feat was then performed by a dozen or so each of the Rangers, rancheros, and Indians, which was about the number of contestants for the prizes. A glove was then substituted in place of the spear, and in like manner it was picked up from the ground by the riders, whilst going at full speed, and without checking their horses for an instant, with one exception, caused by the stumbling of the horse just before he reached the spot where the glove was lying. A board with a bull’s eye marked upon it was then set up at the point where the spear and glove had been placed. A warrior with his bow in his hand and three or four arrows from his quiver charged full speed towards the mark and in the little time he was passing it planted two arrows on the board. The Rangers and rancheros then took their turn, using their pistols instead of bows, and all of them struck the board as they passed it and several the bull’s eye. A good many extraordinary feats 40

were performed, such as hanging by one leg to the horn of the saddle in such a way that the rider could not be seen by those he was supposed to be charging and whilst in that position discharging pistols or shooting arrows at an imaginary foe under the horse’s neck; jumping from the horse when at a gallop, running a few steps by his side, and springing into the saddle again without checking him for a moment; passing under the horse’s neck and coming up into the saddle again from the opposite side, etc.--all performed while the horse was running. No feats of horsemanship we had ever seen exhibited by the most famous “knights of the ring” could compare with them.... (1966:77-79)

To close the tournament, contestants went on to compete in bronco busting, a novelty to most Americans and Europeans. At the end of the day, judges awarded prizes of Bowie knives, mounted pistols, and blankets to the top contestants.

Duval’s eye is keen, the account rich and detailed. That it is pregnant with the possibility of a multiracial Texas—citizens living in a climate of relative respect, fair play, and mutual admiration – makes it fascinating.

This tournament of others did not yield lasting positive social change. It was but an interruption. Come Monday, it was business as usual. The U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845 greased the wheels for mass Anglo settlement, capital investment, military encampment, and eventual dominance in virtually every sphere of public life. The

Indian was all but decimated. The Nueces Strip, the disputed bottom portion of Texas lying between the Nueces River and Rio Grande, would soon lie firmly in American hands. Racial intermingling at fandangos, festivals, ferias, and rodeos would decline if not cease in all but the most Mexican cities of Texas and large, insular ranches.

It would take another century for the region to see racial mixing on any significant and sanctioned scale. And the arena of sport, perhaps because it was perceived to be, and oftentimes is, transcendent of politics, would become a rare but persistent medium and space for intercultural contact and exchange. What the historian

Deena Gonzalez wrote of gambling on the Southwestern frontier applies to sport: “men who could not speak Spanish and people who did not understand English learned a new language...[that] did not depend on any verbal communication.” (Gonzalez 1993:83)

The games and sports

Along with horse racing, bronco and bull riding, vaqueros, rancheros, and mesteñeros (mustangers) competed in games like el juego de la vara (the rod game), coleadero (bull-tailing), and the carreras de gallo (rooster races). These events were brutal and life-threatening to both contestant and animal. In el juego de la vara, for example, mounted riders would gather in a circle, each with arm extended behind his back. A rider holding a rod or switch would then circle the group, place the rod in a contestant’s hand, and race off. The recipient responded by giving chase and attempting to catch and whack the fellow off his horse before he reached a designated goal. In another game, el paso de la muerte (‘the brush with death”), the horseman leapt from his speeding horse onto a bronco which he then attempted to ride. (de Leon 1982: 143)

The game of coleadero demanded more skill than hide. Of popular productions observed by the anthropologist Edward Tylor during his tenure in Mexico, the coleadero

was among the most intriguing. A curious use of the second-person point of view in

Tylor’s description effectively throws the reader onto the saddle:

The coleador rides after the bull, who has an idea that something is going to happen, and gallops off as fast as he can go, throwing out his hind legs in his awkward bullish fashion. Now, suppose you are the coleador, sitting in your peaked Mexican saddle, that rises behind and before, and keeps you in your seat without an effort on your part. You gallop after the bull, and when you come up with him, you pull as hard as you can to keep your horse back; for, if he is used to sport, as almost all Mexican horses are, he is wild to get past, not noticing that his rider has got no hold of the toro. Well you are just behind the bull, a little to the left of him, and out of the way of his hind legs, which will trip your horse up if you don’t take care; you take your right foot out of the stirrup, catch hold of the end of the bull’s tail (which is very long), throw your leg over it, and so twist the end of the tail round your leg below the knee. You have either got the bridle between your teeth or have let it go altogether, and with your left hand you give your horse a crack with the whip; he goes forward with a bound, and the bull, losing his balance by the sudden jerk behind, rolls over on the ground, and gets up, looking very uncomfortable. The faster the bull gallops, the easier it is to throw him over; and two boys of twelve or fourteen years of age coleared a couple of young bulls in the arena, in great style, pitching them over in all directions. The farmers and land proprietors are immensely fond of both [also bull-roping] these sports, which the bulls--by the way--seem to dislike most thoroughly.... (1861:72)

Las carreras de gallo were another popular entertainment. A sort of rugby-on- horseback, “rooster races” were usually played during the festival of the Día de San Juan and the Día de Santiago, the latter being the patron saint of Spain and all things equestrian.3 To play, a horseman snatched a live rooster from a post or the ground and then raced toward a goal. As the horseman raced along (with combative rooster in arm), other contestants charged and pummeled horse and rider in their attempts to take the 43

bird and run it to the goal line several hundred yards or even a couple of miles away. In

1930 folklorist Jovita Gonzalez described a variation of gallo where the object was to remove a colored ribbon from the rooster while trying to evade the other contestants

(Gonzalez 1930:54). Theodore Gentilz’s painting “Corrida de la Sandía” (“The

Watermelon Run”) depicts a more humane variation. In la sandía contestants in 19th- century San Antonio substitute a watermelon for the rooster.

Because of its similarity to the eastern game of “gander pulling,” Anglo sheepherders, muleteers, and dragoons were also known to run roosters on occasion.

Samuel Reid, a Texas Ranger, tells of the Rangers accepting a challenge from Mexican men to play corrida s in the streets of Reynosa--even as the U.S .-Mexican war raged on.

The men ran roosters all day, the story goes, until the alcalde intervened on behalf of the last surviving fowl. 4 (Reid 1847; Carrillo 1961:53-54; Anderson 1998)

The winner of the corrida got a chicken for his pot, but in this and other equestrian games and contests, what was really at stake was one's performance, how one displayed toughness, daring, agility, and equitation. Success and virtuosity brought the individual recognition and status--relative, of course, to the scale of contest and quality of field. But because collective identity weighed heavily on individual identity in rancho society, a contestant/performer’s status, distinction, or disgrace for that matter, reflected on the home ranchos from which one hailed, not to mention the patrones to whom one answered (Sands 1993:49; Alonzo 1998). One must remember that

competitors in the symbolic economy of game and sport were also competitors in more palpably real economies--material, political, and social; inter and intracultural. Because the skills and implements of work, sport, and leisure in this context were one and the same, success and prowess in the arena of play had potential metaphorical import. Sure, the galloping subject might ride with a removed abandon, a paidia or ‘pure, free play’, but he also had more sober rides--cognizant of his status as a cipher and meaning- making subject. The “Kiansas” and "Toro Moro" corridos, Duval and Reed’s memoirs, and the later borderlands ballads of intercultural conflict give ample evidence supporting this claim. The poetics in the corridos voice a raced consciousness and acute topophilia; physical prowess (including that of the horse) not only amplifies individual masculinity, but also one’s people and place (eliding, as sport tends to do, dissent and difference within the group, the we.) Put another way, the frontier subject played, to paraphrase Bakhtin, with a sidelong glance.5

* * *

Mexican equestrian and taurine games were almost exclusively male domains and practices. Oral histories and testimonios do document women riding horses and working cattle in Mexico and the Southwest, but evidence of their taking part in equestrian or taurine competition or performance is scant. The Abbé Domenech made one of the more interesting observations on this subject in the 1850s when he witnessed female bullfighters at a corrida de toros. “Among the amateur taureadors are found even

women, who know how to bring down the bull with dexterity, grace, and boldness,” he wrote. “I saw three of them at Matamoros, whom no small number of bulls valiantly prostrated had rendered almost celebrities.” That the Matamoros toreras were so skilled indicates a program of training, but such performances were anomalous touring novelties. Things changed in the coming decades. By the turn of the century rejoneadoras (mounted bullfighters) and cuadrillas (auxiliary teams consisting of two picadoras and three bandilleras) were common in Mexico, and the 20th century would see a small but steady stream of toreras. The fact that bullfighting was outlawed in 1891 in the U.S. would have kept these sporting women out of the view of most Americans, save for border cities like Matamoros where bullfighting flourished. (Domenech 1858:251;

Martin 1992; Feiner 1995:99; Sanchez 1995:193-94; Le Compte 1998)

Mexican women were no strangers to gaming, however.6 The game of chuza, a sort of roulette, was popular, as was keno. No other game trumped the game of monte.

Countless travelers through the Southwest and Mexico comment (usually with Victorian piety) on the game’s popularity. (Harby 1890; Gregg 1954 (1854))

Gambling’s ubiquity on the frontier provided opportunity for the entrepeneurially-minded and fearless. Ferdinand von Roemer, a German geologist and explorer, describes a dancing and gambling parlor in San Antonio where a mexicana monte banker presided over “piles” and “heaps” of money (1967 (1852):122). And there’s the case of Doña Gertrudis Barcelo--the notorious “La Tules” of New Mexico. La

Tules was among the shrewdest and wealthiest players in the West. In his sweeping frontier account, Commerce of the Prairies (1854), Josiah Gregg recounts Barcelo’s arrival, struggles, and ascent in Santa Fe society:

[S]he there became a constant attendant on one of those pandemoniums where the favorite game of monte was dealt pro bono publico. Fortune, at first, did not seem inclined to smile upon her efforts, and for some years she spent her days in lowliness and misery. At last her luck turned, as gamblers would say, and on one occasion she left the bank with a spoil of several hundred dollars! This enabled her to open a bank of her own, and being favored by a continuous run of good fortune, she gradually rose higher and higher in scale of affluence, until she found herself in possession of a very handsome fortune. In 1843, she sent to the United States some ten thousand dollars to be invested in goods. She still continues her favorite ‘amusement,’ being now considered the most expert ‘monte dealer’ in all Santa Fé. She is openly received in the first circles of society: I doubt, in truth, whether there is to be found in the city a lady of more fashionable reputation than this Tules.... (Gregg 1954 (1854):168-69)

Gaming among Mexican women was a commonplace, but few women dealt in the stakes that had made La Tules. According to Deena Gonzalez, for a woman to gamble professionally cut against the rigid codes dictating women’s behavior. La Tule's rise brought power and independence and with it scrutiny and resentment. Her harshest critics were not men, but other Spanish-Mexican women. (Gonzalez 1993)

Sport in the Modern Context

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw South Texas undergo striking social, political, and cultural change. Drought and the collapse of the wool and cattle markets in the 1880s and 90s, together with the advent and implementation of technologies like

the barbed-wire fence, mechanized irrigation, and the refrigerated rail car, led to the demise of the old ranching economy and rise of large-scale ranching and commercial agriculture. Under the new order the work of the teamster, vaquero, and cowboy became virtually obsolete. Short drives to stockyards and rail terminals replaced the long cattle drive, and motor vehicles hobbled the horse trade, a core industry for Tejanos.

Traditional labor systems where worker and employer were tied by kinship, rights, debt or other obligations (the patrón system) came to be replaced by the wage and contract labor system typical of industrial capitalism.7 This is not to say that the old paternalistic system was thoroughly dismantled. Many of the old alignments and movidas (power plays) persisted and persist today; “baronial beef empires gave way to rem arkably similar baronial cotton and vegetable empires,”wrote the noted Texas historian T.R.

Fehrenbach. (1968:666; Montejano 1987:103-128)

At the crossroads and along the railroads Anglo “homesuckers”(thus labeled for their voracious appetite for land and gullibility when dealing with land companies), built promising, often handsome towns. Steady work, superior schools in many cases, and relatively attractive wages drew Tejano ranch families. They were joined by large waves of Mexican immigrants and refugees during in this period; between 1900 and

1930 the area’s population quadrupled, going from 79,934 in 1900 to 322,845. Like the old Tejas population and the new Anglo agriculturists, the immigrant injected his/her cultural mores. Most relevant to our discussion on recreation and community is what

Emilio Zamora calls an "ethic of mutuality." This ethic stressed fraternalism, cooperation, and altruism, and was articulated most tangibly in the activities mutual aid societies. Though the societies' core mission was the providing of basic social services, many also promoted sports as part of its cultural and recreational programs.

(Montejano 1987:104,109; Zamora 1992:199,206)

* * *

A look at the region’s toponymy helps shed light on the changes in land tenure and power in this period. In a U.S. Army reconnaissance map charted by Lieutenant H.

L. Ripley’s in 1893, for example, we see interesting clues to the social and spatial layout of the southernmost part of Texas (the region between the Nueces and Rio Grande).

Along with the old established cities of Laredo, Brownsville, Hidalgo/Edinburg, Rio

Grande City, San Diego, and Corpus Christi, the map plots some 370 of the larger ranches/villages in the area. Of these ranches more than 350 have Spanish and family- based names (e.g. Ramireño for Ramirez, Salineño for Salinas, or Santa Elena or Santa

Gertrudis for owner or ancestor named Elena or Gertrudis). Typically, such a nomenclature in the 19th century indicated either current or very recent Tejano ownership. In this late phase of the Tejano rancho period, the lay of the land is not unlike an old wrinkled palm; it is a web of hundreds of small roads cut through with a few thoroughfares and railroads. In contrast to the modern rectilinear plat, the spatial

logic is ‘organic’--for lack of a better word--few straight lines, no right angles. (Ripley

1892; Limón 1994:24)

The Ripley map is useful for comparing the rancho with the modern, commercial agriculture period. The constellation of Tejano ranches and villages become progressively absent in 20th century cartography. They are replaced by settlements with names like Lyford, Donna, Pharr, Edcouch, Mission, Alton, Robstown, and Alice. By the time the Depression hit the Valley in 1932, the majority of the family ranchos had all but disappeared; of the 350 Spanish-named ranches on the Ripley map only a handful remained. The mass erasure of place names, of course, reflects both a real and symbolic territorial and political dispossession.8 The ancient ranch of Majadas, for example, became the new town of Raymondville, named after developer E. B. Raymond. The village of Panchita became Edcouch, after banker and developer Edward Couch. The vast Rancho Capisallo, a watering hole “for itinerant bands of Mexican smugglers, rustlers and bandidos who pillaged and thrived on the livestock and property of

Texans,” as one local historian put it, became the townsite of Mercedes, a town invented and named in a St. Louis, Missouri real estate office (McAllen 1991:81). And so it went.

As Anglo towns and agribusiness grew in size and influence, myriad old ranch communities were relegated to the fog of collective memory and the arcana of courthouse records.

In the boom -bust cycles of the day, place names, and sometimes townsites themselves, became mercurial. Business deals, drought, or political shenanigans caused whole towns to dissolve or simply pick up and move to greener pastures. Take, for example, the town of Edinburg, which is the Hidalgo County seat and primary site of fieldwork for this ethnography. It had once been situated on the Rio Grande, twelve miles south of its current spot. In a shady overnight maneuver a group of county officials, seeing a chance to profit from their landholdings to the north, boldly moved the seat to land adjacent to their interests. Edinburg has been called La Habitación (1700’s),

San Luisito (1800’s), Hidalgo, and Edinburgh and Hidalgo concurrently. In the 1900s

Edinburg became Chapin for a few years, but when old Judge Chapin murdered a man in a saloon, it reverted back to Edinburg again.

We also have situations where new projects fail to take hold and the native gets re-voiced. During the first agribusiness boom, the hamlet of Santa Cruz became the poetic Dreamland, for example; the Depression brought a rude awakening and old Santa

Cruz reasserted her claim.

To really confuse matters, we have the curious situation where Anglos adopt folk toponymical tradition and give Spanish names to their towns. For example, the town of

San Benito had originally been called Díaz. It sat on what had been the Concepción de

Carricitos land grant. Anglo developers then changed the name to Bessie, after a railroader’s daughter. Homely Bessie became the The Resaca [canal]City and later Sam

Robertson’s Town. In 1907 the town got its current name of San Benito in honor of the

“pioneer” Benjamin Hicks. Upriver, the town of San Juan (home to the Catholic basilica and shrine of the Virgen de San Juan del Valle) was named not for Juan el Bautista, but for John Closner, a shrewd developer and investor. (Chatelle 1948:29; McAllen 1991:109)

This wholesale change in Tejas’s toponymy does not reflect merely an abstract and inevitable process of “Americanization” or “development.” Yi-fu Tuan, the cultural geographer, writes that “normally, only a sociopolitical revolution would bring about a change of name in a city or a nation.” Along a similar line, Pierre Bourdieu asserts that to rename a place is to claim power; it is an act of “symbolic violence.” Indeed, late 19th and early-20th century South Texas experienced nothing less than a wholesale sociopolitical revolution. (Tuan 1991:688; Bourdieu 1993:242)

* * *

On the whole the commercial agriculture tended to offer better and more regular wages than ranch work; and the piece-work system rewarded the quick and strong.

Furthermore, there were no paternalistic ranch bosses to whom one had to answer for the whole of one’s life. If one could save enough to buy a second-hand automobile, the whole of (agrarian) America opened up—which is what indeed happened. This migration, and the push -pull factors of repressive labor practices and economic opportunity, corresponds with the migration of African -Americans and Appalachian whites to industrial centers in the north and midwest.

The early 20th century corrido, “Manuel Rodriguez,” comments on the lure of the new agriculture to the ranch worker. These two stanzas find Manuel dusting himself off after being thrown from a bronco.

Decía Manuel Rodriguez con el sombrero en la frente no dolió tanto el porazo pero me vió toda esta gente ... Decía Manuel Rodriguez sacudiéndose el talón ya me voy para Mercedes a las piscas de algodón.

Manuel Rodriguez said with his hat askew on his forehead not that being thrown hurt all that bad its just that everyone saw me take it. ... Manuel Rodriguez said as he dusted off his heel I am leaving for Mercedes to go pick cotton in the fields.9

A multitude of Mexican immigrants joined the Manuel Rodriguezes in the towns, plantations, and fields. Close to a half-million Mexicans immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s, for example, with Texas drawing the largest pool. These hands cleared, planted, and harvested huge portions of land and dug miles of irrigation ditches and canals. When Mexican labor settled and propagated, and when the stock market collapse and the Dust Bowl devastated middle America, Mexican labor became “the

Mexican Problem.” This nativist, at times eugenics-scienced backlash was fanned primarily by those Anglos who did not benefit directly from the Mexican. Statesmen, businessmen, journalists, clergy, educators, and intellectuals in the U.S. and Mexico discoursed on the problem for years. What to do with these people? What to do without them? What are their rights? Where in the White-Negro racial hierarchy do they fall?

Where do their national loyalties lie? Do their numbers and fertility pose a threat to the

Anglo-Saxon--and thus to the heart of America itself? The federal government repatriated over 400,000 Mexicans in this period. While some returned voluntarily, the bulk were pushed out. (Bogardus 1934; Grebler, Moore et al. 1970:64-5; Hoffman

1972:398-399).

Middling and elite Tejanos found themselves pulled into the Mexican problem, more often with reluctance and resentment. They were translators, apologists, defenders, mediators, and at times also proponents of and agents for repatriation. The burning issue for them was discrimination, or, indiscriminate discrimination. Sometimes they spoke on behalf of all Mexicans, be they natives of Guanajuato or Houston, proud

American war veterans or seditionists; other times they underscored distinction and difference. When would the Anglo parvenu, this Babbit, see them as equals? Could they not distinguish between the gente decente and the unwashed?

In an essay provocatively entitled “America Invades the Border Towns,” Jovita

Gonzalez sums up their frustrations:

Both classes, the middle class and the landowners, are thoroughly disgusted with the situation; the former aspires to a social equality it feels it must have; the second simply demands what it always has had. Both oppose the discrimination that is shown in public places. Both resent the fact that in some of the Valley towns Mexicans are not admitted at cafés, picture shows, hotels and bathing beaches. The Americans contend that they have been forced to use segregation because of the hundreds of day laborers that would swarm into these places if Mexicans were permitted. The Mexicans on the other hand argue that the laborers are used to segregation in their own country and would not attempt to attend places that the better element frequents. They claim that it would be equally as unfair for Europeans to classify an Anglo-American with an American Negro, as it is to consider a Spanish-Mexican the social equal of an Indian laborer. (1930:475-6)

* * *

The dislocations, migrations, capital, and culture flows highlighted here buffeted and changed sport and leisure as they did the whole of culture and society. By the late

19th century, for exam ple, fencing and capitalistic ranching had made roundups and brandings mundane work--rather than mundane work capped with days-long reunions, dances, and festivals of harvest.

Morally controversial amusements like gambling and cock and bull fighting became further marginalized and eventually criminalized. In addition, the match race went the way of the horse. All in all, traditional agrarian and equestrian games had all but disappeared as everyday social practice by the Depression.

Modernity has its limits. Certain folk practices would survive in various pockets.

Urban ceremonies, celebrations, heritage festivals, fiestas patrias, and parades would occasion the revival and performance of certain equestrian and rodeo games. Also, the

1920s and 30s would see the formation of associations dedicated to preservation of charrería . The ranch, horse, and vaquero would also persist in song, everyday arts (e.g. café and cantina murals, commercial art, tooled leather, metalwork), cuisine, and most vividly in the films that played the Spanish-language movie houses of Greater Mexico.10

But though vaquero and equestrian sportive practices found a second life in representations and heritage performances, as everyday practice they were either lost, in abeyance, or, if performed, progressively displaced--in practice, in space, in symbolic capital—by the sports and physical dispositions of modernity. The modern team sports that had swept through the West, that imbricated military, educational, industrial, and countless religious projects, were now the dominant agonistic form.

What exactly distinguishes modern sport from earlier and folk practices? Allen

Guttmann's From Ritual to Record offers the classic scheme. According to Guttmann, modern sports are non-utilitarian contests characterized by “secularism, equality of opportunity to compete and in the conditions of competition, specialization of roles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization, quantification, and the quest for records”

(1978:16). Guttmann draws most directly from Max Weber’s conceptualizations of modernity, capitalism, and European-American Protestantism. As industrial capitalism and its logic of technological rationality dominates the West, Guttmann argues, sport comes to reflect (and reinforce) science and capitalism’s laws of rigorous accounting, rational organization, and the separation of work and leisure. Modern sport is the product of an incremental “empirical, experimental, mathematical Weltanschauung”in

the West. Secularized, rationalized, bureaucratized, quantified--sports go from ‘ritual to record’ as industrial capitalism and its logic of technological rationality ascends and dominates. (Guttmann 1978:85).11

Modern rationalist logic not only structures sportive practice with rules, safety and efficiency measures, Fordist specialized "positions"; it also ties specific performances to broader social networks. Standardization and quantification enable simultaneous, multi-sited contests, and performances and results to be compared across time and space. The system and logic allow for a game “rushing” record by a halfback in Austin,

Texas in the year 2000, for example, to be compared with a run temporally and spatially far removed--a game twenty years from now on a Saturday afternoon in Provo, Utah, let’s say. These comparisons and decisions are possible, of course, because all games in the organization share the same temporal and regulatory parameters, and the fields/courts are, for all intents and purposes, identical. To play modern sports, then, is also to enter and contribute to a vast metrical-spatial-temporal matrix.

One can list many exceptions and qualifications to Guttmann’s model. Not all facets of ritual give way to rationalized practice and logic as societies enter modernity, for example. Much in modern sport and spectatorship remains ‘irrational’(e.g. luck, violence, hexes, ticket prices, salaries). Furthermore, while ‘premodern’ sports such as those in the 19th-century Tejano festival and range exhibited qualities of the carnivalesque, they were not devoid of order and rationality, nor are modern sports without elements of the carnivalesque. Scholarship on European soccer and hooliganism certainly gives ample evidence of the latter, as does the American

phenomenon of riots following university football games. Nor are modern sports purely and consistently secular; this is especially true in football where a good portion of the coaching ranks hail from the Bible Belt. Here, appeals to God for discipline, good fortune, and protection are as common as supplications to the goddess Nike for sponsorship. Furthermore, the idea that equality of opportunity is a structural part of modern sport also has no shortage of examples to the contrary.

Nevertheless, Allen Guttman correctly identifies a major structural shift in the performance and consumption of sport, a shift that correlates with the broader growth and dominance of modern industrial life. Furthermore, Guttmann's scheme dovetails well with the schema put forth by David Montejano and Emilio Zamora in their seminal work on South Texas labor during this period. (Montejano 1987; Zamora 1993)

The next chapter details the transition from agrarian to modern sports in the region. It highlights the key social and political developments that effected the decline of the agrarian and rise of the modern, that relocated sport from Mexican pastures and plazas to American diamonds and stadiums.

Chapter Two: Modern Sport in the New South Texas

Modernity has never been an inevitable process sweeping uniformly across the globe. As Charles Taylor, Dilip Gaonkar, and other proponents of the “alternative modernities” thesis have argued, societies do not enter and/or experience modernity in identical ways. The modernization process may see institutions converge and practices grow seemingly universal, but the friction in convergence, the sheer diversity of human practice, not to mention the vicissitudes of power and being, produce divergence and difference even as they stamp sameness. To speak of the ‘rise of modern sports’ (and modernity in general) requires a consideration of human and material particularities; the effects of power; the struggles, contestations, and compromises; the how. (Gruneau

1993:87-97; Jarvie and Maguire 1994:113-117; Taylor 1999; Gaonkar 2001; Taylor 2002)

These dialectics have been a driving force behind much scholarship on ethnic, minority, and working-class sport. In an essay on his grandfather, Vine Deloria, Sr., a prep and college football star in the early 20th century, for example, Philip Deloria describes ‘Indian school’ and league football as functioning, in part, as a “refigured warrior tradition.” Shortly after their introduction, the sports of football, baseball, and basketball meshed with extant Indian warrior/sporting practices and reservation life in the Middle West and Northeast. Writing on baseball and American sport in Jewish enclaves, historian Peter Levine describes a similar process. For Jewish immigrants, sports like baseball served as a “middle ground,” an experience that “involved the

adaptation of traditional practice to new American settings and the transformation of

American experiences into ethnic ways.” And in ‘No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care’, a rich ethnohistory by Garry Robson, the author details the ways the Millwall club’s London

East End fans perform traditional forms of masculinity, fraternity, and verbal arts (“all the old Cockney things”) in the face of rapid social change--ie. the gross commercialization of European soccer, and the political backlash to hooliganism and working-class blokes in general. These are but a few examples. (Levine 1992:7; Vennum

1994; Deloria 1996:325-6; Robson 2000).

What about Mexican America? In Europe and the eastern United States sport expanded slowly and steadily as educational, military, industrial, and charitable institutions employed it to realize hygienic, moral, Christian, nationalistic, industrial, and vocational aims and reforms. In South Texas modern sport grew quickly, developing in a context of social displacement and intercultural conflict. It stepped off trains, it sprang out of Army camps, and school yards. In some cases sport and its institutions were off limits to Mexicans; in others, Anglos employed it to bridge difference, reform, or Americanize. Mexican American and expatriate organizations also used sport to socialize and bond amongst themselves, and themselves alone.

Anglo-American sport’s incremental growth and institutional origins have left the scholar ample resources with which to work. A dearth of materials on Mexican

Americans leaves us with many more questions than answers. How did ludic practice change as the Tejano moved from a primarily agrarian, quasi-feudal world to the wage- labor systems (in cities and in the multi-state migrant circuit) of American capitalism?

What became of the old Catholic holy and saints days under the hegemony of the

Protestant and secular calendars? Where on the migrant road or in the segregated city did one carve out a space to gather and play? And what roles did sport play in the world of the immigrant? How did he/she engage, reject, or re-fashion modern sport within the broader dialectics of cultural orientation?

There are also questions concerning culture and the body. How did views on bodies and practice--how one displays manliness, femininity, grace, virility, social distinction and/or belonging in the agonistic/ludic contexts--translate in the midst of abrupt social and political change? And what about embodied practice and body memory--that tough-to-articulate feel and memory of feel generated by the sportive, agonistic, or collectively-made act? If we value Bourdieu’s proposition that societies ascribe meaning to bodies and corporeal practice slowly, ceaselessly, and (unlike the cultural critic or social scientist) with little reflection on, or concern for, cause or rationale, by extension we can surmise that the dismantling of such dispositions and meanings can be neither quick nor ever complete. This is to say that migration, imperialism, and modernity effected radical change in Tejano society, but these forces and developments did not automatically dissolve culture and habitus. But what happened? And how?

Ephemeral and mute, the nature of corporeal practice insures that these questions will forever frustrate; still, baseball and recreational programs initiated by groups like the YMCA and the Knights of Columbus offer leads and traces.

While fundamentally tripartite (Anglo, Negro, Mexican), Texas baseball occasioned the blurring of class and racial boundaries. It connected diverse and far- flung sodalities, nation with subnation, boss with worker, with relative ease and frequency. For Mexican Americans, baseball was a vehicle that introduced and normalized modern, American-style team and league sport in virtually every corner of the region. Decades before, the work, dress, and sportive practices of the rancho

Mexicanized countless Anglo settlers, rural and urban alike; baseball proved a similar cultural force. It drew the Mexican into modern western sport and all its conventions, communities, and master metaphors--even as it honed ethnic contradistinction, as it asserted Mexican legitimacy and presence.

Mexican American sport also traces its roots to recreation and athletic programs launched by charity and fraternal organizations like the YMCA, YWCA, American

Legion, and Knights of Columbus. Many of these social organizations and charities sponsored baseball teams themselves. But the programs these groups ran were different in that they were aimed primarily at youth and were steered by well-honed, institutionally-based ideologies. "Earlier preoccupations with national degeneration," the historian Leo Braudy writes, came now to be addressed with pragmatic schemes of

"moral, physical, and intellectual training." (Braudy 2003:364)

This chapter describes the growth and impact of early modern sport in South

Texas. The purpose here is not to give a comprehensive history, but rather to trace key

developments in sport, leisure, and cultural politics in this period of rapid growth and urbanization.

Baseball

Modern team sports arrived and grew in South Texas through conventional social networks and crossroads, i.e., migration, settlement, and growth. But they were also byproducts of a long and sustained military presence. In other words, sports like baseball and football were not just novelties unpacked by newcomers. They were also soldiers' games that seeped out into the broader populus.

Brownsville’s Daily Ranchero newspaper lists games at Fort Brown in the 1870s, but the game of baseball may go back to the 1840s. None other than Abner Doubleday himself did a tour of duty in South Texas and Northern Mexico during the Mexican War, and he served as General Commander of Fort Brown in the 1870s. Whether Doubleday had a hand in the development of the border game (and baseball for that matter) is a matter of speculation, but baseball’s military origins are well founded. Initially intramural, Army baseball eventually engaged civilian tea ms. Officers were not beyond recruiting civilian talent, including Mexican Americans, to help win a game. Border baseball's provenance is not unlike that of English cricket in the Commonwealth. It is a situation where what begins as an embodiment and performance of colonial values and imperial masculinity sparks mimicry, hybridity, and indigenization among colonial subjects, and also, where agonistic fervor could undercut racial hierarchies temporarily or contingently. (Anonymous 1870; Appadurai 1996; Chance 1998; Klein 1997:37)

The opening of the Tex Mex and Great Northern railroads in 1881 and 1883 joined the isolated lower border region with metropolitan centers north and south. This linkage accelerated all manner of cultural exchange, including the crusades for physical and moral vigor via athletics that had swept through American institutions by way of

Germany and England. It is in this period that the U.S. Army implemented sports into the training regimen in a programmatic fashion. In response to the War Department's dictate to step up athletics in military training, baseball took on an even greater role during World War I. Physical conditioning was not the only benefit sought. Team play also forged filial bonds among troops; recall the old adage, "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." With the assistance of seasoned sports advocates like the Catholic fraternal order of the Knights of Columbus and the YMCA, the Army set up vigorous baseball programs throughout South Texas, especially in the military hub of

San Antonio.(Seymour 1990:328-335; Klein 1997)

Civilian league play in the lower Valley did not reach full swing until 1910, when the Brownies of Brownsville joined the Southwest Texas Class D League. The fighting and chaos from the Mexican Revolution all but eliminated league play in Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo, but their American cities "picked up the slack" by hosting Mexican players, the historian Alan Klein notes. Thereafter, several leagues like the Rio Grande

League, Valley Semi-Pro League, and Gulf Coast League, came and went in the Valley, but it was the Mexican league teams of the border cities of Laredo/Nuevo Laredo and

Reynosa that enjoyed the most successful and sustained play. The Mexican professional

leagues were home to some of the continent’s top talent, including athletes recruited from the Caribbean, U.S. major and Negro leagues. (Osborn 1942; Klein 1997:40)

The heart of American baseball did not lie in the major leagues and its hallowed fields--heretical as it may sound--but rather in small and medium-sized cities; it was here that the majority of the nation experienced the game. (Crepeau 1980:56; Seymour

1990)

In South Texas the game peaked between the 1930s and 1950s. A review of regional newspapers finds that virtually all of the larger towns and military installations fielded teams. Among the most active were: the Brownsville Tigers, McAllen Aztecs,

San Benito Aztecs, McAllen Palms, Harlingen Sportsmen, Brownsville Charros, Rio

Grande City Merchants, Donna Cardinals, Las Perlas of Brownsville, McAllen Busy

Corners, Corpus Christi Aces, Laredo Apaches, Robstown Blacklanders, Los Estradas de

Corpus Christi, Joe Davis Ginners of Edinburg, the Thirty-thirties (“los Trienta-trienta”) of Mission, and the Tecolotes of Laredo. Veterans', mutual aid, industrial, and church- affliliated organizations and lodges like the League of United Latin American Citizens

(LULAC), American Legion, Mo-Pac, Kiwanis, Rotary, and Caballeros de Colón

(Knights of Columbus), as well as lodges like the Leñeros (The Woodmen of the World) also sponsored teams and events.

As the gumbo of names suggests, the game mixed Anglo, Mexican, Mexican-

American, amateur, professional, semi-pro, and industrial teams. While primarily a regional affair, it was not without transnational reach. The border cities of Laredo and

Nuevo Laredo shared and continue to share a team, the "Tecos," the owls. Some teams

played nines from as far away as Louisiana and Mexico City, all-stars like the celebrated

La Junta barnstormed though out the American heartland, where nearly every community, including Mexican-American enclaves, fielded a baseball team.1 Mexican and American major league teams also passed through the borderlands for exhibition games or winter training camps. And university coaches like Texas’s Billie Disch were known to send their players south in the summer to season them with the rigors of borderlands ball. (Osborn 1942; Klein 1997; Santillán 2000; Chicoine 2002)

All classes played baseball, but the energies of the working cla ss drove the sport.

While not as broad and sedimented a tradition as the Tejano dance and its music, the baseball outing nevertheless played an important role in the social life of the male (Peña

1985:37-39). It offered cheap amusements, a break from drudgery, and a space to display one’s talents. Like the "extreme" posture of the pachuco, as Octavio Paz notoriously called it, and the subversive dandyism of the zoot suiter in urban boroughs, the modern athlete's stance, albeit utterly conventional in comparison to the subcultural forms mentioned, was an antidote to the grind of working class life. Imagine donning a crisp uniform and stepping up to the batter's box after days of picking cotton or clearing brush—after a week of being writ anonymous. On the diamond the workaday might come untethered. A man could be reconstituted--"could be a contender," as Terry

Malloy (Marlon Brando) says in On the Waterfront.

Though hardly as raucous as the equestrian games, round-ups, and fandangos of the rancho era (or contemporary rioting collegians for that matter), many a baseball game could still precipitate what Mikhail Bakhtin called “the carnivalesque.” People

drank, gambled, vented, and heckled from rough bleachers, truck beds, and car hoods.

Sparking the fire might be a delightful inversion: worker whipping on management, displaced Tejano striking out Yankee soldier; immigrant outgaming smug Mexican

American or jaitón (“high-toned”) Mexican expatriate. The atmosphere was not unlike that of the carpas, the Vaudeville-style tent shows that roamed Greater Mexico. Here, on a good night, fan banter and high jinks were as much of an attraction—a game – as the stage performance. This milieu made baseball one of the "few familiar rituals" to be found in their new American life, notes the historian Eric Avila. (Bakhtin 1968 (1965);

Lerma 1996; Haney 1997; Avila 2003)

Women and the Hurdles of Conservatism

Organizations like the Catholic Council of Women and YWCA also sponsored young women’s baseball teams. On the whole, however, support for women’s competitive sport in the 1920s was meager. Low female enrollment and advancement in the schools also stymied participation. Physical education regimens were passive in nature. Instead of competitive, "masculinizing" games, coaches promoted ‘play days’ with benign recreational physical activities like ball throws, potato sack races, dance, and calisthenics for females. In these activities coaches de-emphasized winning, an attribute cultivated vigorously in males, of course. To nip competitive impulses in the bud coaches allowed only provisional teams.2 (Gonzalez 1930; Bedicheck 1956; Romo

1983; Pérez 1999)

American women's sport was restrictive, but by the early 20th century it had shed much of its Victorianism. Young brown women on the other hand faced a trickier

steeplechase. Tejano and mexicano societies held especially conservative views on dress, dating, and gender roles in general. Family members could be stiflingly protective of young women. In 1930, Jovita Gonzalez, the folklorist and writer, commented on the strictures placed upon young tejanas and the perceived threat posed by American culture.

[The families are] very conservative, have kept the Spanish traditions in regard to the position of woman and look down upon American customs as free, loose, and immoral. Girls are not allowed the companionship of boys, and just seeing American boys and girls together is considered contaminating to the Mexican youth. According to their ethics, woman was made for the home, her duty in life is to create a home and bring children to the world. In the freedom which American girls enjoy, Mexican parents see the beginning of all social evils. Sports are discouraged as tending to make women masculine. (1930: 476)

Mexican exiles and immigrants held even stricter views than their quasi- assimilated American cousins. Perceptions stemmed, in part, from Mexico's lack of familiarity with modern team and institutional sports. Even though the Porfirio Díaz regime (1876-1911) promoted British and American sports as part of its national modernization program, growth was modest. With the exception of baseball, team sports and spectatorship were not widespread entertainments. A handful of male elites, foreigners, college students, and middling employees of the railroads and other large industrial entities made up the sportive body. Not until the late 1930s, when the federal government began funding public athletic facilities and programs, did the average

Mexican gain access to modern sports facilities and leagues. As in the U.S., promotion of women's sport lagged behind men's. (Hayner 1953; Prieto 1994)

There was also a concern that modern team sports (and American culture in general) augured the loss of Mexicans to America. In newspapers like La Prensa, La

Opinión, and El Cronista del Valle, expatriate and exiled leaders and intellectuals of a conservative, Huertista stripe aggressively pushed for the preservation of Mexican culture and values. “El Mexico de afuera” (“the Mexico outside of Mexico”) was to be a cultural and political ark. It would return to Mexico and restore order, old-time religion, and cultural patrimony when the revolutionary nonsense settled. In the interim, however, this Mexico Lindo had to weather the straits of America. This wave of patrimonial conservatism was especially hard on women. Nicolás Kanellos, the publisher and literary historian, writes:

The large outpouring of Mexican immigrants into the United States occurred during [a] period of liberalization of gender roles in the United States; women's rights were expanding, as was a woman's acceptable sphere of public action. In the midst of this liberalization, some of the most inflexible segments of Mexican society were introduced into the United States as political and religious refugees. The economic refugees from the provinces also represented traditional Mexican values. The first reaction of both economic and political refugees to American's liberalization of gender roles was not to embrace it but to exert greater control over their women. Mexican men perceived the potential for a comparatively advantageous position for Mexican women in the social hierarchy in the United States: Not only were there fewer Mexican women available in exile, but there was competition from Anglo- American males, who practiced more liberal treatment of women. (2000:11)

As boss of the domestic sphere, the Mexican woman stood at the front line of cultural survival—so the line went. She was charged with maintaining language,

Catholic and Mexican ways, and with keeping American intrusions at bay. The corrido

"El Enganchado" articulates the malaise of the American with jaundiced humor:

Many Mexicans don't care to speak the language their mothers taught them and go about saying they are Spanish and deny their country's flags.

Some are darker than chapote [tar] but they pretend to be Saxon; they go about powdered to the back of the neck and wear skirts for trousers.3

The girls go about almost naked and call la tienda "estor" they go around with dirt-streaked legs but with those stockings of chiffon.

Even my old woman has changed on me— She wears a bob -tailed dress of silk, goes about painted like a piñata and goes at night to the dancing hall.

And my kids speak perfect English and have no use for our Spanish they call me "fader" and don't work and are crazy about the Charleston. (McWilliams 1968 (1948):225-26)

It was not just the generalized culture that incited vigilance. Aggressive

Americanization programs also exacerbated anxieties over the reach of things American.

Through teaching American-style hygiene, diet, and domestic skills along with language and culture, programs explicitly sought to supplant Mexican values (while, conveniently, addressing "the servant problem" in domestic America). Like the

Mexicanists, Progressive reformers targeted women, specifically mothers. Were they not the primary moral teachers, the keepers of the hearth? The Mexican American mother's role in the creation of the new industrial order "would be to transform her own 70

home into an efficient, productive family unit," George Sanchez writes, "while producing law-abiding, loyal American citizens eager to do their duty for the capitalist expansion of the Southwest." (1994:261)

Modern sport could not thrive under the mantilla of Mexican conservatism or the self-serving designs of American Progressivism, not to mention the exigencies of da ily survival. Feminine resistance and the allure of American and defiantly modern things like bobbed hair and the Charleston also ate away at the riprap of Mexican conservatism, nonetheless. Houston, Kingsville, and Corpus Christi, for example, fielded several female athletic and baseball teams beginning in the 1930s. Club

Chapultepec's team, sponsored by the YWCA, competed in Houston. The Kingsville

Record lists the activities of groups like the Royal Social Club; the Aztec Athletic Club’s

“Aztec Girls”; the Delta Social Club and their team “The Delta Bratz”; and the Mo-Pac

Athletic Girls Club, a club sponsored by the “Latin American” employees of the

Missouri Pacific Railroad. In the 1940s and 1950s a handful of Latinas also played in the

All-American Girls Baseball League (the pro league celebrated in the film A League of their Own).

In the context of the social club, baseball was but one activity in a calendar filled with theme parties, picnics, plays, recitals, orations, and dances--always dances. A submission printed in the Kingsville Record’s “Latin American” social page gives us a sense for how team sports, this nascent thing, meshed with more traditional practices.

Sunday the girls motored to Corpus to play baseball against the Royal Sports at Kleberg Park. They played a double-header and defeated the

Corpus team both games--the scores being 10-3 and 11-5 in the Mopac girls favor. Notwithstanding the hot sun, both teams displayed plenty of sportsmanship spirit. Everybody played exceptionally well in front of the 600 spectators at the park, many of whom were from Kingsville...The MoPac Girls Club sponsored a well attended and beautiful dance Sunday night at the remodeled “Solis Hall.” Everybody enjoyed this event that resembled an Evening Dress Style Show, ten or twelve sun-burned faces was [sic] the only sign of the hard games played in the afternoon in Corpus. About seventy couples joined in the march. (1936:7)

It is but a glimpse, but sketched here are young women forging new identities as athletes and competitors, while also, the poetics suggest, preserving or acceding to older codes dictating feminine grace, beauty, and the ideal of heterosexual coupling. In her work on young women's recreational clubs in 1930s Houston, Emma Perez observed a similar telos. Upon marriage, members tended to cease participating in recreational activities or cease membership altogether; older codes of propriety reasserted themselves. The indulgences afforded to and won by the muchacha moderna did not necessarily carry over to the role of señora. (Pérez 1999:86)

From the Folk to the Modern Diamond

Like the San Antonio “riding contest” described by John C. Duval earlier on,

South Texas town baseball brought together diverse peoples. Spectators saw Anglos and

Mexicans (and also Czechs, Poles, Germans, and with much less frequency, African-

Americans) compete against each other and play together as teammates. Considering the divisions and raced animosity that plagued South Texas, these contests made for curious exchanges and concatenations. With few surviving baseball pioneers to interview and negligible press coverage extant, the picture must remain blurry. What happened, exactly, when American soldiers at Laredo’s Fort McIntosh played Mexican-

American civilian nines; when the Missouri-Pacific Railroad’s “Latin American” club played its Anglo or Negro team; or when Mo-Pac’s “Latin American girl’s team” played the Anglo club? And what kind of emotions did cheering on that other, who had found him or herself playing on ‘our team’, effect? How far from the diamond did geniality or

‘sportsmanship’ reach?4

Lax rules, flexible schedules, and ma keshift rosters on top of modest travel, lodging, and compensation arrangements made early South Texas baseball a cultural production that straddled both the folk and professional/bureaucratic realms. The athlete might be a card-carrying member of an orga nization or on retainer with a semi- pro or industrial team, but he also had relative autonomy and he participated as work and family obligations allowed. Not unlike the musician or balladeer who worked the fields during the week and performed on weekends, the athlete might hitchhike to a gig, pass the hat to make ends meet, and sleep outdoors. In this sense, the modern Tejano baseballer walked well-worn paths. He drew on a residual folk ethic wherein one could depend on the kindness of strangers and distant kin, even as he donned the hat of this modern thing baseball. (Lerma 1995)

South Texas town and semi-pro baseball waned in the 1950s, and by the 1960s was all but gone. Several factors contributed to its demise. Leagues like the Valley

Baseball League were never able to get uniform facilities--things like lights for night games. Gambling and corruption also tainted the game. Joe Rodriguez, a player from the 1950s, recalled games where individual players would bet upwards of $1,000, for

example. Regional newspapers of the 1940s and 50s also report mounting citizen complaints concerning late-night noise. (1949; Rodriguez 1998)

The UIL's decision of 1946 to include baseball in state high school competition also hurt town baseball. This development meant that the top high school students who dabbled in semi-pro play risked losing eligibility. Widespread abuses and corruption in high school and college athletics had forced the League to retrench, to draw a sharp line between amateur and professional play. The official view, as director Roy Bedicheck exhorted repeatedly, was that there was no ground for compromise--a player was either a professional or an amateur, not both. UIL regulation helped realize a fair, standardized system for schoolboy baseball competition, but this codified manifestation of what Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning dubbed the "civilizing process" also, inadvertently and ironically, given Bedicheck's penchant for the pastoral, contributed to the erosion of baseball in its folk/organic or marginally-regulated form. (1956:378; 1947)

New technologies like television and air-conditioning further contributed to the decline. "Who was going to go out into the hot sun to watch baseball," observed Joe

Rodriguez, "when they could turn on the television in their living room, or go to the bar or pool hall and watch the majors? Leagues were already struggling, and as soon as we got television the local game went. It's a shame too, because there was a lot of talent here." (1998)

The fallowing of the Valley's diamonds corresponds with nationwide trends in semi-pro and minor league baseball. The 'electronic free ticket' of televised baseball caused severe declines in minor league attendance; it dropped from 42 million in 1949 to

a mere 15 million in 1957. College football saw a similar drop in attendance. College officials had to introduce a 'one-tv-appearance rule' to get fans back into the stadiums.

(Gorn 1993:238)

While local and amateur sports suffered, broadcast sports enabled participation in a new and expansive public sphere. The growth of mediated sports and the routinization of this brand of spectatorship shrunk gaps between centers and peripheries, between diverse peoples, in ways only hinted at by early 20th century town baseball. Affective bonds newly cultivated between fan and national team, for example, joined him and her with other publics, with the sports small talk of greater America.

They joined and made what Benedict Anderson called in the context of print media,

"imagined communities." This, in turn, introduced a new optic to local, lived experience. It introduced a new reflexivity, a richer allusive canon.

Youth Programs and Sport

Town and amateur baseball drew athletes and spectators of all ages.

Urbanization and the growth of the Social Gospel Movement, a Protestant-socialist reform movement that tackled problems associated with industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism, brought new sports and recreation opportunities; these were aimed primarily at youth.

Where baseball culture had evolved more or less organically, reform movement athletics and pseudo-military entities like the Boy Scouts were programmatic.

Settlement houses, mutual aid societies, churches, lodges, unions, religious, and

industrial organizations all created and pushed youth programs, hatched and tweaked in the East and Midwest.

Moral, civic, and patriotic duty fueled the torches of charity and reform,; apprehension stoked it. To be complacent was to risk losing the youth and their future loyalties to competing religious factions, and, God-forbid, truly antipodal doctrines like communism.

Of groups with a presence in South Texas, the YMCA and Knights of Columbus had the earliest and most active programs--stimulated by cooperation with the U.S.

Army. A period of intense militarization and political instability, the Mexican

Revolution and World War I, together with ongoing Mexican American insurrection in

South Texas, drew 400,000 soldiers and militia to the border (California to Texas). In the

Lower Rio Grande Valley they made up a quarter of the population. To serve these men the YMCA built rudimentary buildings (“huts”) that offered religious services, media, stationary, games, and sports gear--attractive leisure alternatives, the military and

YMCA hoped, to the frontier scourges of cheap alcohol, gambling, and brothels. Shared culture, language, and political interests made for sanguine relations between Texas-

Anglos, the military, and the YMCA; the Mexican American, accommodating or not, was all but out of the picture. (Samponaro 1992:100-03; Ayers 1992:416-19)

Inspired by the success of the “Catholic YMCA” during World War I and its work in developing urban playgrounds, the Knights of Columbus launched their youth initiative in 1923. This was a regional articulation of a widespread focus on the boy.

Modeled after the Scottish Rite Mason’s junior branch, the Knights’ “Boy Guidance

Movement,”sought to teach the teen-aged Catholic males, whom they dubbed

“Columbian Squires,” self-reliance, and initiative, as well as loyalty to God, church and country. At its peak in the early 1930s, the movement ran almost 200 “Boyology

Institutes” in the U.S.; Notre Dame even offered a two-year graduate program on the subject. The Caballeros de Colón, the “Latin -American” Knights, also sponsored

Columbian Squires “circles.” (Castañeda 1958; Kauffman 1982; Lerma 1995)

That sports could instill discipline and invigorate Christian manhood was a notion that had circulated in British and American schools and organizations for decades. But not just any sport would do. Reformers pushed modern American team sports like basketball, baseball, and football, while discouraging recreations such as billiards, and boxing (established and popular activities in the Hispanic Southwest). A survey conducted by an interdenominational organization for missionaries working in

Mexican American communities, for example, categorized “good” recreations as consisting of parks and playgrounds, while pool and dance halls were “bad.” The survey results proved the situation in Mexican America dire; of brown recreations nearly half fell into the “bad” category. Given the climate of chauvinism and repression, it would not be too cynical to say that the Mexican’s preferred recreations were bad simply because they did not mirror the received wisdom of the American eastern establishment. But ethnocentric presumptions aside, one imagines that many Mexican

American parents would have agreed with the survey’s assessment; in spite of the

efforts of mutual aid societies and churches, there was indeed a paucity of safe and accessible facilities and programs. (Romo 1983; Muñoz 1989; Sanchez 1993; Bogardus

1934:59; McClean 1930:16; Lewis 1916:174; McCombs 1925:85; YMCA 1919:23-24)

It wasn’t just that the Mexican’s chosen recreations were wrong, also vexing were his attitudes and practices concerning hygiene, time management, and general effort or lack thereof. For example, Vernon McCombs, a missionary leader, described Mexican sport as passive, frivolous, and spectatorial. “Much of Mexican play is of the ‘bleacher’ sort,” he wrote. “As a nation they have for generations watched cock-fights and los toros

(bullfights), and sat around playing the guitar or ba ntering each other with quips and superficial jokes and, in maturer years, playing cards.” Along a similar line, a YMCA worker’s handbook described the Mexican as touching the “lowest stratum of poverty, ignorance, disease, shiftlessness, and superstition. Their needs can only be measured by their physical, intellectual, and moral status...Thrift, economic foresight, high standards of morality, are seldom found among Mexican peons. Hilarity, thoughtlessness, geniality, satisfaction with conditions, and fatalism, are conspicuous characteristics.”(McCombs 1925:85; YMCA 1919:23-24)

There was nothing novel about imputing defectiveness on Mexicans, of course.

Countless stereotypes circulated and social workers were not immune. All the clucking notwithstanding, there arose no unanimity as to what the Mexican American youth's fundamental 'wrongness' was. Some workers and leaders observed that when the

Mexican boy played, he was not passive and shiftless, but aggressive, rather. His flaw

was neither fatalism nor mañana-ism; no, the muchacho was an opportunist. “Both the

Mexican’s wish to be a leader and the migratory conditions of labor are hindrances to the growth of team games,” observed Emory Bogardus, a sociologist. “The statement that every Mexican would like to be a general is of course a gross exaggeration, but it gives expression to a weakness that occasionally crops out when teamwork is attempted.” On the other hand, Roy Dickerson, a YMCA director in Tucson, described the Mexican boys with whom he worked as exhibiting an “unusual eagerness and desire for self-development--almost any opportunity that promises helpfulness is eagerly seized upon.” The Tucson boys, he said, were hardly maladjusted; they were sterling pupils rather than little bronze generals. If they were to be faulted it would be for solicitous docility. “There is a great deal of respect for authority and achievement which makes Mexican boys as a whole better disciplined and more readily controlled than the

American boy.”5 (1919:296; 1934:59)

Mexican American youth were categorically vulnerable subjects: tongue-tied linguistically, too eager and immature to sniff out ideological manipulation cloaked as recreation. The children’s “attitude toward the strange soldiers who have invaded the border is one of intense curiosity combined with a large amount of liking,” wrote the journalist Tracy Lewis in 1916. “They are too young yet to know how their parents hate the gringoes, or why.” (Lewis 1916:174)

However, it would be a mistake to read these youth as devoid of agency and creativity. To participate in recreation and Americanization programs was to grapple with the different and novel with naïveté, to be sure, but also with countervailing

creativity and self-interest. To "say yes to speaking English, to say yes to an American education, to say yes to participation in organizations such as the YWCA" was not, necessarily, to get absorbed and assimilated, Emma Perez writes. Rather it was to work with what was available; it was, taking a page from de Certeau, to engage the institutional and programmatic with "interstitial moves for survival." (Pérez 1999:81)

The youth also engaged social problems and identity questions through conventional rather than interstitial means. The Los Angeles YMCA, for example, fostered an important activist youth group called the Mexican American Movement.

This group and their newspaper, The Mexican Voice (1938-50), grew to examine pressing political, social, and cultural issues in ways not typically articulated by youth, Mexican or American, and especially not the notoriously racist, rabble-rousing of the Hearst newspapers of California. (Sanchez 1993:255-264)

We see another example in the Club Chapultepec, a Mexican American women's club sponsored by the YWCA of Houston. From the time of its founding in 1929, the

Chapultepec women participated in the Y's recreation programs. In the summer of 1937 club members penned a communiqué listing abuses and injustices encountered by

Mexican and Mexican Americans in Houston's schools, courts, recreational facilities, and work places. The tone of the letter is constructive, and compared to the manifestos of the later Chicano Movement, textbook diplomatic. But negative reaction from the public and certain YWCA officials quickly led to censure. Officials fired the worker who had

sent the letter to be published at the association's Negro newsletter. Another worker, a

Mexican American who helped draft the letter, came under FBI investigation and was watched for years. The censure took its toll; the Chapultepec Club dissolved shortly after the incident. (Kreneck 1981; Pérez 1999:88)

Groups like the YMCA are sitting ducks—easily criticized for blindly championing American democracy, capitalism, and masculinity as delineated by the

Protestant Anglo, for assuming, as the critic and historian Robert Higgs put it, “that the great unwashed did not know how to play.” But the YMCA and YWCA come under scrutiny only here because they were commissioned--they were there—in contrast to the ignoble indifference exhibited by so many other progressive causes. In a sea of poverty and alienation, these groups met a great social need--providing activities that exercised the body, and spaces that kindled creativity and facilitated fruitful encounters with other Americans. The historian Carlos Muñoz correctly states that the YMCA took a position that was in “contradiction to the widespread racist attitudes towards Mexican and Mexican Americans,” and for that they are to be lauded.6 (McWilliams 1968

(1948):240-41; Romo 1983:145-46; Muñoz 1989:43; Higgs 1995:198)

Conclusion

A successful transition into modernity involves a people “finding resources in their traditional culture which, modified and transposed, will enable them to take on the new practices," Charles Taylor writes (1999:162). South Texas’s transition to modernity

could hardly be deemed smooth or successful. In the area of sports and recreation, however, Mexican Americans did find resources onto which traditional forms of leisure, contest, place-making, and displays of gender vigor and virtue could be grafted or reinvented. Where baseball evolved more or less organically within informal and extant social networks and military-civilian contact zones, well-honed ideologies steered the athletic programs initiated by charity and reform organizations. But here, too, Mexican youth found a space to recreate and explore.

I have argued that early modern sports and programs do not simply mark steps in a unilineal process of Americanization or an epochal shift from the folk to the modern. These sportive practices also trace modes of resistance and decolonization— how remnants of Mexican American traditional culture find new life and definition in the sports and recreations of the new order. Of course, decolonization finds more explicit articulation in media, texts, and verbal arts--the inscriptions made by corporeal regimens being so difficult to delineate, and written reflexivity in the field of sports so rare. But as Arjun Appadurai argued in the context of Indian cricket, spectator sports and the agonistic body have the potential to make unique contributions to community by lending "passion and purpose" in ways conventional media cannot. (Appadurai 1996)

To be decolonially-inflected did not make modern team and spectator sports automatically oppositional; they were also marked by cooperation and experimentation.

Mexican, Mexican-American, and American boxing aficionados, for example, arranged

match upon match in the early 20th century. The U.S. Army even recruited Mexican

American civilian players for the sake of the win. And though enterprises like the

YMCA, YWCA, and Knights of Columbus pushed a rather conservative nationalist agenda, they also invited, in fits and starts, Mexican Americans into the fold. Thus, the adoption of new cultural forms "did not of itself undermine Mexican identity," the historian Vicki Ruiz has said of the Mexican-American popular culture of this era (Ruiz

1993) Instead, it was a process of blending old and new--each taste, each engagement serving to replot, however minutely, the horizon of expectations and choices.

With the rise of the modern public high school, South Texas sportive culture reached yet another plateau. It was within this scholastic space that the equipment and rule-intensive game of football grew into a robust popular culture and fixture of small- town life. Because the majority of schools in South Texas were segregated, and because few Mexican Americans advanced to the high school or college levels, the football cultural production remained almost exclusively Anglo for decades. Segregated sports and organizations were nothing new, of course. But as Douglas Foley and co-authors write in the ethnography From Peones to Politicos, high school football occupied a special place in the economy of symbols and status. Foley:

Athletics and band programs were important ways that the schools taught individualism, competition, Anglo cultural superiority, and the subordinate role of the mexicano. In the early days, those few mexicanos who were in the higher grades never participated in leadership positions or in extra-curricular activities. They were never elected to class offices or asked to join teams…When mexicanos came to watch their town play 83

other towns, they watched the Anglo children uphold their community honor and exemplify the local and national culture; they watched because they were the workers and followers and because the Anglos were the owners and leaders.7 (Foley, Mota et al. 1988:37-38)

Beginning in the 1930s Mexican Americans began to make incursions into high school athletics. The South Texas gridiron would emerge as an important, wildly popular, and contested site. It would see Anglos and Mexicans play and compete in ways that challenged, sometimes overtly, but more often through simple presence and performance, established social orders even as they forged new bonds and intimacies.

Chapter Three: Friday Night Rights, the High School Game and the Struggle for Equality

Quiero felicitar a los muchachos. Que jugaron un juego tremendo. Y quiero mandarle un saludo a mi madre, que es Coyota! Today, she celebrated her 71st reunion here in La Joya.

I’d like to congratulate the boys. They played a tremendous game. And a greeting to my mother who is a Coyote! Today, she celebrated her 71st reunion here in La Joya.

--Caller to radio program, 2000

Between the 1930s and 1960s, town football became a highly- visible arena where an Anglo-American quasi-colonialist sociology was constructed, performed, and also dismantled. The situation in South Texas was not unlike that of the

British colonies, where cricket was both an important instrument for the socialization and edification of the English and also a cultural production that served to transmit the

Victorian ideals of manliness, stamina, and vigor to native groups commonly viewed as lazy, crude, undisciplined, or effete. (James 1993 (1963))

This chapter gives a short history of high school football and race relations in

South Texas. I begin with a discussion of the early game and the role and vision of the

University Interscholastic League (UIL) and Roy Bedicheck, its early director, in shaping the game, ethos, and popular culture. The second half of the chapter focuses on the player and coach Everardo “E.C.” Lerma. One of the first Mexican Americans to play

and coach in Texas, Lerma was a key figure in the dismantling of segregated scholastic athletics. Lerma’s career gives us a glimpse of the world of scholastic athletics in the

1930s and 1940s, its ideals and hypocrisies, and the struggles by Mexican American and

Anglo progressives to open the coveted game and spectacle to all.

The Mania for American Football

Football stirred up huge clouds of discursive dust in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The rhetoric and metaphors of the game percolated through writings, speeches, and illustrations in everything from politics, business, higher education, and management, to social engineering, and most saliently discourse on the (re)making of righteous young men.

In print culture, sensationalistic stories about brutality, violence, and fatalities in publications like the National Police Gazette and Harper’s Weekly spurred interest and controversy nationwide. Hypermasculine celebrities like artist Frederic Remington and

Theodore Roosevelt celebrated the game, and painted the gridiron heroics of Ivy

Leaguers as the very symbol of American imperial masculinity. Roosevelt, for example, recruited western cowboys and college football players for his celebrated Rough Riders.

While at Yale, Remington is said to have dipped his jersey in slaughterhouse blood to make it “more business-like.” (Lears 1981:108; Oriard 1993:191; Bederman 1995)

From the late 1880s through the 1920s, a stream of articles and books chronicle the fun and pageantry of the football weekend and the exploits of real-life stars like Red

Grange, Jim Thorpe, and Coach Knute Rockne. Fictional characters like Walter Camp’s

Jack Hall and Gilbert Patten’s Frank Merriwell entertained young readers and modeled the virtues of puck, teamwork, and fair play.1 Even the gritty and ubiquitous dime novel dropped its ‘mechanic’ and frontiersman protagonists and replaced them with detectives and college athletes; the new settings and themes focused on “sports, schools, and empire,” writes Michael Denning. One should not underestimate the influence of these symbols and narratives of youth, masculinity, and nation. The Frank Merriwell books alone sold in the hundreds of millions, and episodes ran in serialized form in the

Tip Top Weekly for seventeen years. The majority of Americans came to know football first as narratives and symbols and only later as actual practice. (Denning 1987:205;

Smith 1988:81-85; Oriard 1993:192; Higgs 1995:154-56)

“Touch-down Extraordinario,” a satirical essay from the 1920s, provides a rare and early glimpse of American football as interpreted by the Mexican. Penned by Jorge

Ulica2, “Touch-down” is a picaresque crónica (sketch/dispatch) that describes a Mexican pelado's (yokel/little tramp) encounter with American college football. The crónica is structured as a string of observations, dialogues, puns, and mistranslations. The humor is not unlike that of Cantinflas, popular culture’s most famous pelado. (Ulica 1982)

The adventure begins when the pelado sets out to watch a game between what appears to be UCLA and Stanford. When he is refused entry at the gate, the pelado learns from a policeman that the ticket he’d purchased for one dollar is in fact a

worthless promotional flyer. Taking pity on the dupe, a wealthy Anglo

“philanthropist,” who happens to be a widow, invites the fellow to accompany her— prime seats, her treat.

Though baffled by the game’s complex rules, the pelado finds himself rooting for the Bruins, nonetheless. Why the Bears? Stanford’s colors are dreary; UCLA’s festive.

Towards the end of the game the widow, suddenly in tears, reveals that it was at a

Stanford-UCLA game where she’d lost her husband years before; a football injury had taken him. The story’s climax comes when the “thick” and “gigantic” widow suddenly gives the pelado, who has been jumping and cheering madly, a hard kick in the rear.

What had he done, he asks? He was merely participating! But the widow would have none of it. Her men rooted for the Cardinals and no one else.

"Touch-down Extraordinario's" denouement chillingly reveals that it was not a gridiron blow that had killed the husband, but rather the widow’s powerful leg. We also learn that each Stanford-UCLA game brought the widow out of her lair for her annual “votive rite”—the killing of numbskull, football-loving males.

Like Thorstein Veblen and other North American critics of the day, Ulica marvels at the college game’s pomp and ritual, while also lambasting the culture’s violence, disorder, tribalism, and excesses. In Ulica it is not so much the game or fan that are in the crosshairs but rather the Mexican who is seduced by such Babylonian vulgarities.

Ulica drives his point home by portraying the pelado as a naïve, diminutive interloper, and the Americans as well-heeled, but shallow brutes.

* * *

Hampered by bad roads, vast distances between settlements, and poorly-funded or nonexistent public education, the football craze did not strike Texas until well after it had swept through the East, South, and Middle West. John F. Rooney, a cultural geographer, ventures that the football boom in Texas was tied to the early 20th century oil boom. He posits that transplanted oilers from the football mecca of western

Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia, and eastern Ohio brought their enthusiasm for the game to Texas and Oklahoma. In the case of South Texas, the game's origins are also tied to northern and midwestern agriculturists who settled in the region in the early 20th century, and as in the case of baseball, the presence of the U.S. Army. (Rooney 1974:139)

The Dallas Foot Ball Club was the first group to play regularly, beginning in the

1880s. In December of 1893, the San Antonio Express newspaper mentions South Texans trying the new game of “rugby football,” and by the turn of the century, high school football teams had sprung up in San Antonio and Corpus Christi. High school football did not make it to the border until December of 1909. The game gained momentum in the 1910s, but until the formation and intervention of the University Interscholastic

League (UIL) in the 1920s, it remained dangerous and unregulated. It was not uncommon to find hardened men in their twenties playing boys ten years younger.

Moreover, games were often played at rudimentary stadiums run by local boosters and impresarios, who made a business of gate receipts. The game’s violence, injuries, and unscrupulous parasites earned the game few supporters among educators. ("rugby";

Osborn 1942; Kidd 1971:41-43; Creighton 1975; MacMurray 1985:3)

School yearbooks and photos taken by Brownsville photographer Robert Runyon between 1912 and 1920 give us a sense for the early Valley game. In the towns that had sprung up along the new rail lines, the games were spartan affairs. Carved out of mesquite and cactus thickets, the fields were fields, literally—dusty clearings with patches of coastal grass, burrs, and a sprinkling of squinting spectators on the sidelines.

In this outback the boys look more like aviators dropped from the sky than proper athletes. In fact, much of what passed for a uniform was merely discarded gear from the military installations operating in the region. Larger towns like Brownsville, Harlingen, and McAllen drew respectable crowds and enjoyed more refined facilities, but up through the 1930s only a few cities enjoyed proper seating, lights, press boxes, scoreboards, and field houses. (Runyon; Kidd 1971:14)

The game of football itself was novel, but, as the previous chapter shows, physical, violent male sport had long been an established part of both Anglo and Tejano cultures. The violence (or carnivalesque license) that marked early football was, in many ways, a carryover of the agonistic and initiation rites that so defined 19th century male culture in Texas—it was the rooster race with pads and a rule book. The game's rituals

and ceremonies also had analogues. Pageants, parades, and agricultural fairs were very popular in the region. Non-elite Mexican Americans were relegated to mere spectators at Anglo events, but, of course, they held their own celebrations and performances.

Spanish-language periodicals abound with announcements of the coronation of young women as "reinas" of fairs, clubs, schools, and school grades, for example. Mexican

Americans also performed in marching and company brass bands. To stroll San

Antonio’s near West Side, the social and cultural mecca of Mexican South Texas, was to hear “the ever present music of the military band,” a sociologist noted in 1931.

(Handman 1931: 161)

Roy Bedicheck and the UIL

The influx of northerners and the circulation of print media introduced the game to Texas, but it was school reform during the Texas Progressive Movement (1898-1910) that institutionalized and planted it firmly in local civic life. Reforms and governmental intervention led to a boom in road and school building, and school consolidations.

Under Governor Thomas Campbell, a progressive Democrat, a more aggressive system of taxation pumped millions of new monies into state coffers. Public education in pre- war Texas was still rudimentary, but these developments together with revenues from oil facilitated the growth of more expensive school activities like football teams and marching bands. (Barker, Potts et al. 1918:276-315; Foley, Mota, et al. 1988:36; Cashion

1998:54)

The formation of the University Interscholastic League (UIL) in 1911 was instrumental in the growth and institutionalization of scholastic sports. Though not officially tied to the Progressive Movement in Texas, in the spirit of reform the UIL organized and standardized scholastic competition in the state. The UIL’s drawing of districts and eligibility rules, and its ethos of ‘educational competition’ gave Texas its own distinct articulation of the sport.

John Avery Lomax, the folklorist, created the league in 1911 as an extension program at the University of Texas. Its immediate goals were to draft eligibility restrictions. This meant disbanding the town football free-for-all. The league also organized intermediate and high school competitions by creating districts, grouping schools according to size, and sponsoring tournaments and meets. Initially, the UIL sponsored competitions in track and field, debate, and rhetoric—a decidedly neo- classical repertoire. But the League quickly grew to include a wide range of activities, everything from football to math and poetry interpretation. Virtually every public school in the state joined.

Under the guidance and vision of Roy Bedicheck, a home-spun intellectual, naturalist, and student of Lomax’s, the UIL grew into an important and emulated institution. A man who had worked countless odd jobs and tramped across North

America and Europe for fifteen years before settling in Austin, Bedicheck was of the conviction that the classroom was but one arm of pedagogy. In the experimentalist

spirit of John Dewey and Henry George, the latter of whom Bedicheck declared the

“greatest philosopher America has produced,” Bedicheck saw participation in recreation and competition as key instruments, or what we might now call “technologies,” for developing critical thinking skills and instilling moral and civic virtue and responsibility. Like Dewey, Bedicheck felt that education should be oriented towards the future; it should develop the habits of mind and confidence to assess complex problems and meet the challenges of this mercurial new thing-- modernity. Set within a structured and supervised program of competition, the pupil learned not only the fundamental workings of citizenship, democracy, fair play, and sportsmanship, but more importantly, through practice and experience he or she would come to embody these traits. Competition, be it in debate, athletics, or the arts, offered both “practice in democracy” and “emotional conditioning”—the very experience needed to thrive in a rapidly changing competitive world. Whether one won, lost, placed or not, was irrelevant; what mattered were process, experience, and reflection. “I believe it the duty of the public school in a competitive society such as ours to offer every child the opportunity of winning and losing, either personally or vicariously, or both, time and again, hundreds of times during his scholastic career,” he exclaimed. (Bedicheck 1958;

Bedicheck 1956:69-79)

Bedicheck the progressive and pragmatist was also Bedicheck the classicist. The son of learned, rural school teachers, Bedicheck had cut his teeth on Plutarch and the

great books. Much like Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics movement, for Bedicheck the Hellenic and the Olympian served as beacons of inspiration and instruction, models of purity. Where the coaching and business ranks quoted Walter Camp, Teddy Roosevelt, and Social Darwinist cliches, Bedicheck invoked

Pindar. (Bedicheck 1945; Bedicheck Papers; Owens 1969:69-79)

* * *

Though football had become the most popular program in the UIL--tiny schools even forming ‘six-man’ teams in order to compete, Bedicheck never quite embraced it.

In fact, the game was a source of perpetual frustration; Texas ‘schoolboy’ football was an overpowering thick-necked adolescent and he the bookish, middle-aged father whose job was to enforce rules. While the UIL’s problems paled in comparison to the corruption and commercialism that had compromised much of the major college game, football was easily the most problem -wracked area in the league. Unlike the league’s debaters, thespians and their coaches, footballers constantly threatened to secede when rules were enforced or tightened. And contrary to the popular myth painting Texas high school football as the picture of good old-fashioned, clean-cut values, Bedicheck and many a teacher-on-stadium -duty waged a decades-long battle with the adult brawlers and drinkers who defiled the sanctity of this “open-air classroom,” season upon season.

Gambling and bribery also plagued the project. “Both professional and small- time gamblers are moving in on high-school football, and no protests seem to be heard,”

Bedicheck wrote in frustration. “[G]ambling on the outcome of a football game is becoming as common as eating peanuts…Stadiums were never designed as branch offices of bookie shops.” Corruption sullied even that preternaturally wholesome symbol of town and alma mater--the marching band. Administrators and directors were said to line their pockets with kickbacks from the sale or rental of uniforms, sheet music, and instruments. Sales executives from large music firms openly bribed judges at state competitions. (Bedicheck 1946; Kidd 1971:22)

Brutality on the field. Raucous fan behavior. Sleazy dealings. Even through this

Cabeza de Vacan morass, Bedicheck felt that football could improve Texan boys. Of course, the discourse of football as fortifying agent had circulated on English and

American campuses for years. Yankee educators and reformers of a previous generation had sought to invigorate a supposedly feminized, ‘overcivilized’, WASP male through strenuous tests like football. In the urban colleges of the north, a cold, wet game and a little blood had given the young man a needed sh ot in the arm. It was a test, a slap, an infusion of the pluck and vigor that had built and steeled their nation, that had established white Anglo-Saxon prosperity and dominance. Educators and reformers saw strenuous sports like football as functioning as a sort of artificial frontier. Where the western frontier—dangerous, wild, “the meeting between savagery and civilization,” as

Frederick Jackson Turner called it—had produced a restless, nervous energy, strength and exuberance, and a common national experience, for the post-frontier WASP male, urbanization, material success, and ‘brain work’ had emasculated him. Success had made him soft, literally, and the waves of immigrant laborers, Jews, and Catholics threatened to muscle the lad from the helm. Manly, strenuous sports like football were antidotes; they injected a ‘careful primitivism’, a sort of compensation. The historian T.J.

Jackson Lears writes that the notion that sports regenerate and toughen “the leaders of tomorrow, by now a television cliché, originated in the fin-de-siécle worship of force.”

(Drinnon 1980:460; Lears 1981:108; Oriard 1993:191; Bederman 1995)

The backwater Texan could hardly be called overcivilized, however. With the

Mexican Revolution to the south, protracted Tejano resistance in the borderlands, and the chaos of the Oil Boom, much of early 20th-century Texas retained that restless and nervous energy of the frontier. Mobs still lynched, trains still got ambushed and derailed, bandits, posses, rebels, smugglers, wildcatters, and lawmen still shot it out in saloons, on courthouse steps, and sun-drenched middles-of-nowhere. The pistons of frontier democracy still fired and misfired. What the Texan needed was some taming.

He needed a controlled outlet for his aggression and energy. Something like (reformed) football could teach the Texan boy how to cooperate, how to win and lose honorably; it could give the rustic boy structure, polish, and a public role without making him soft and sweet. Where the Yankee bourgeoisie had em ployed strenuous competition to

toughen, Bedicheck and the UIL saw in it a tonic to sublimate “the fighting instinct.”

(Bedicheck Papers)

An anecdote Bedicheck told while delivering a speech to parents and teachers illustrates his aim for sport in pedagogy and reform. The story goes that a group of teenage boys from Longview, Texas had broken into a department store on a Saturday night. Quite ingeniously, the thieves had climbed onto the roof, pried open a skylight and shimmied down on a rope. The boys then helped themselves to some $300 worth of merchandise.

Bedicheck explained that these were not bad kids, they were “from the best families” of the city, after all. No, they were bored kids. They simply lacked outlets for their physical and mental energies, their creative faculties. “Did the superintendent assemble a group of sleuths to ferret out the miscreants and a group of ex-prize fighters to administer the punishment?” he asked the assembly.

Fortunately, he was wiser than that. What he did was to go out in search of the best athletic coach he could find. It was not long before the yen for adventure was finding satisfaction on the athletic field, and athletic achievements turned from porch-climbing to pole-vaulting, and the great sport of outwitting the peace officers was turned into outwitting the opposing team on the football field.

Bedicheck was too astute to see things in black and white, but when pitching his programs to the masses, he simplified the message. One either allowed “the competitive impulse to vent itself in a way that is subversive to school discipline,” or one directed

that “competitive spirit” toward more orderly and constructive ends. Longview, said

Bedicheck, had gotten it right. (1956:24)

* * *

While Yankee reformers had sought to reinvigorate WASP masculinity, and

Bedicheck’s UIL to channel youthful energies toward constructive ends, they both shared the conviction that organized competition provided a useful apparatus for teaching democratic principles and for equipping youth for the challenges of modernity.

The most glaring problem with these projects was that many women and minorities were marginalized within, if not outright omitted from, the enterprise. In Texas, for example, the UIL would not sponsor women’s athletics competition, with the exception of tennis, until 1949. Mexican and African Americans fared no better. African American schools were not welcome in the League; to comply with Plessy v. Ferguson, the UIL formed the Prairie View League in 1920 to accommodate them. Mexican Americans were not specifically excluded from UIL activities; still, one had to be an active student to compete. Attrition and cold receptions at many schools kept all but a few brown students out.

A combination of extreme poverty, Jim Crow laws, anemic political muscle, and an agribusiness economy that ran on cheap, uneducated labor, meant that few Mexicans ever advanced to the secondary public school level in South Texas. In 1928 University of

Texas professor Herschel T. Manuel found that 40% of Mexican-American school-aged

children were without educational facilities or instruction. (Nine percent of Anglo children were not served.) Of the region’s schools, nine out of ten schools were segregated (1930), and fewer than 4% of brown children made it to the junior or high school level where football was played. (Manuel 1930:103; Taylor 1934:194)

Texas’ method for apportioning school funds certainly exacerbated the gross inequality. Austin allotted money on a per capita basis, whether the school-aged child attended school or not. This system led to many abuses. Administrators diligently rounded up and counted Mexican children, but then failed to serve and retain them. In the most egregious cases, they even encouraged seasonal attrition to supply labor for local farms. Essentially, administrators garnished funds from brown students to the benefit of Anglo students. (San Miguel 1987: 53-54)

The situation was a bit less grave in older Tejano cities like Brownsville, Rio

Grande City, Roma, Laredo, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi, the home base of the increasingly influential League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the civil rights organization that was founded in 1929. In these locales middling and elite

Tejanos and Mexican expatriates wielded some power. According to Brooks Conover, a coach at Brownsville High School in the 1930s, students from these families, “mixed freely with Anglos.” They “demanded certain privileges,” Jovita Gonzalez wrote in

1930. (Gonzalez 1930:108; Cashion 1998:101)

Indeed, of the handful of the Spanish-surnamed students who appear in Valley high school yearbooks and team rosters from the 1910s through the 1930s, virtually all have the surnames of the old Tejano and Tejano-Anglo ranching and merchant families and original grantees. Their physical appearance and complexion were also more typically European than Indian.

Of course, in the eyes of the U.S. Census Bureau, all Mexicans were Caucasian.

But Washington’s taxonomies wilted down in South Texas. Mexicans and Mexican

Americans were Caucasian "only in some legal, pseudo-scientific, and ethnographic sense," writes the historian Neil Foley. Instead, they traversed an “ethnoracial middle ground between Anglo Americans and African Americans”; they may have been white enough to escape some depredations, yet not white enough to claim equality with

Anglos (Foley 1997:41). The poetics in a passage from a School History of Texas, a long- lived, standard textbook, are revealing. Here, historian Eugene Barker and co-authors describe the state’s “thoroughly cosmopolitan” population.

About four-fifths of the people are white, and most of these are made up of native Texans or immigrants from other states of the Union. There are, however, a good many foreign immigrants, and of these the Mexicans, scattered through the Rio Grande region from El Paso to San Antonio and Brownsville, are the most numerous. Less numerous, but far more important than the Mexicans, are the Germans…. (Barker, Potts et al. 1918:277)

100

Mexican Americans countered subordination in many ways. They formed mutual aid and political organizations, but they also challenged the status quo in less visible areas like popular culture and sports.

Tackling Jim Crow in South Texas

It was simple enough. Everardo Lerma wanted to play high school football. The year was 1932, the place Kingsville, Texas, a small city on the fringe of the duchy that is the King Ranch. Young Lerma had watched the practices from the fence and had attended games at Henrietta King High. In the papers and on the radio he followed

Notre Dame, SMU, TCU, and Texas. And with a big frame, hardened by cotton picking and baseball, he had a hunch the game would suit him well.

Getting on the team roster was not difficult; coach issued him equipment and told him to report after school. On the practice field, however, Lerma quickly discovered that he was not welcome. “Nobody would talk to me…rarely a conversation. When they did talk to me, it was to insult. So I would just do what he told me to do. To the players I was like a ghost, or the brunt of jokes.” (Lerma 1995)

Ostracized, frustrated, Lerma would quit, and further frustrated he would rejoin.

His playing was good, but all things considered, freshman season was a disaster. Lerma returned again the following fall. This time he had a little help. While working in the labores, the cotton fields, he had convinced his good friend Gerald Alvarez to come out

101

for the team. “It wasn’t a plot or anything, I simply wanted somebody to talk to out there.” (Lerma 1995)

Out on the practice field Lerma got a pleasant surprise. Coach had done some thinking over the summer. He would start Lerma on both offense and defense. “Even as a sophomore, I was one of the biggest guys. He knew he needed me, if we wanted to stand a chance.”(Lerma 1995)

Lerma didn’t disappoint, he was a formidable defender and capable receiver.

His exploits could not be overlooked. Hugh Boyd, a local sportswriter announced:

“Llerma [sic], big end of the Brahma team, made himself a name in the Sinton game.

Time after time he piled the Sinton attack in a big heap on top of himself.” In another article Boyd declared Lerma one of the “best high school ends this town has seen in several years. His defensive play is brilliant, and his offensive plays stacks up with the best in South Texas.”(Boyd 1933; Boyd 1933)

According to Lerma, his athletic prowess helped whittle away some of the animosity. The world out there hadn’t changed, but it seemed that with every yard gained and tackle nailed, he garnered respect from some of his teammates. By season’s end he had even made a few life-long friends.3

* * *

In 1934 Texas Christian University in Fort Worth offered Lerma a full athletic scholarship. The scholarship was quite an honor for Lerma and King High--TCU being

102

a powerhouse that would win the Cotton Bowl in 1937 and the national title in 1938.

Lerma declined. Instead, he decided to play with the Javelinas of the newly-built

College of Arts and Industries of Kingsville (now Texas A&M-Kingsville). The decision was difficult, but because he had been orphaned, he felt some obligation to remain close to home. By staying in Kingsville he could watch over his younger siblings and tend to their needs with earnings from part-time work. Responsibility and altruism aside, the sense I got from speaking to Lerma in interviews was that his work in South Texas’s arenas of masculinity was far from complete at this juncture in his life. Did he have a

‘chip on his shoulder’? Did he have something to prove the South Texas Anglo fraternity? Absolutely. (Lerma 1996)

A small group of Mexican Americans attended A & I, but the racial climate on campus was no better than at King High. Prejudice and indifference followed like a pair of loyal dogs. As a freshman Lerma had to prove himself worthy of promotion to the varsity, and more importantly, deserving of a scholarship. According to L.E. Ramey, a teammate, much of the ire directed at Lerma stemmed from bitterness and resentment concerning scholarships. It being the Depression, scholarships were especially dear; many Anglos could not stand the idea that "a brown -skinned Mexican" would take a scholarship, talented as he may be, from a "real" American. This being the case, Lerma endured repeated abuse. He was thrown into the pool, his teammates knowing he could not swim. He took cheap shots and late hits on the field. And he had to tolerate

103

venomous remarks like “kill that Mexican!” not from opponents or hecklers, but from certain members of his team. (Lerma 1995; Iber 2002:626)

Through much of his athletic career, Lerma’s coaches were largely indifferent and intransigent. Sometimes a coach would push a player to apologize, or he’d have

Lerma and the offending teammate don boxing gloves and work things out in blunt, manly fashion. But, for the most part, his coaches and teachers propped up the sociopolitical status quo—one that saw Mexicans as passive, inferior interlopers.

One must remember that in the Anglo-American imagination the Mexican was an embodiment of laziness, docility, inferior genetics, and dirtiness; and there was no shortage of eugenicists to lend a pseudo-scientific authority to these views.4 Citing

Spencer, Haeckel, Huxley, and Mill for authority, a eugenicist writing in the Saturday

Evening Post described the Mexican as “a white elephant” doomed to extinction because of miscegenation. In more learned circles such as the University of Texas, historian

Walter Prescott Webb described Mexicans as cowardly in battle and genetically polluted. Unlike the Plains Indian and the “pure American stock,” the Mexican had blood like “ditch water.” In researching the now-classic North from Mexico: the Spanish- speaking People of the United States (1948), Carey McWilliams wrote of encountering:

A mountainous collection of masters' theses [that] "proved" conclusively that Spanish-speaking children were "retarded" because, on the basis of various so-called intelligence tests, they did not measure up to the intellectual caliber of Anglo-American students. Most of this theorizing was heavily weighted with gratuitous assumptions about Mexicans and

104

Indians. Paradoxically, the more sympathetic the writer, the greater seems to have been the implied condescension. (206-07)

As late as the 1960s the mainstream press described Texas-Mexicans as “slow-burning” and “apathetic…excelling only in joblessness, illiteracy, substandard housing and mortality rates for infantile diarrhea and TB.” Paul Taylor’s ethnography, An American-

Mexican Frontier, Nueces County, Texas (1934), details the racist views and policies in the region where Lerma resided. Schools offered no refuge, and administrators few concessions. (Roberts 1928:41; Taylor 1934; Webb 1935:125-26; Morgan 1963)

A poem published in 1936 in the local newspaper, the Kingsville Record, illustrates the smug voice of white supremacy in 1930s South Texas. In a posture akin to what the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo dubbed “imperialist nostalgia” (lament and desire for that which one has helped destroy), we see the poet praise the uber-masculinity and pioneer mettle of the Mexican -of-old, while pronouncing his modern incarnation, emasculated, servile, finished.5 (Rosaldo 1989:68-87)

Pancho Dreams of Other Days

Pancho dreams of other days, Before the great migration— Before the gringo came down here With all his ostentation.

For him the present’s fraught with care, The future’s quite uncertain; He’s played his part on life’s great stage, And now awaits the curtain.

He broods o’er virile days of yore— 105

His mind goes back just five decades— Nor man nor beast did Pancho fear, Nor spectral form from Heaven or Hades.

Nor Arab sheik on desert-mare Nor hunted boar when gall’d with pain Nor bounding roe, nor startled hare A fleeter pace could e’er maintain.

Than Pancho’s mount—a noble beast, With tendons tough and joints like steel, Inured to hardship, hunger, thirst, But trained to sense his master’s weal.

Ah! Those were days when, long ago— E’en failing mem’ry still doth cling In baile gay or serenade The youthful Pancho had his fling!

Now he dreams of other days, Before the great migration, And listens for the master’s call With perfect resignation. (Ashton 1936)

Institutionalized, normalized, the subordination of common Mexicans blinded even well-intentioned educators to the severity of discrimination. While coaching at

McAllen High School in the 1930s, Chatter Allen found himself baffled by the lack of enthusiasm among Mexican Americans for football. Was it something cultural? Was there something about football that the Mexican mind did not find conceptually interesting—they were mad about baseball after all? Finally, it clicked. In the stands and on the field, brown athletes faced a racist, vocal crowd. What attraction did that hold? (Cashion 1998:101)

106

Despite the objections, hassles, anxieties, the racist salvos, mexicanos made teams.

To be on the team was one thing, though; to play was another. Now, nepotism has always plagued high school coaching; too often, the wealthy and connected influence whether they wish to or not. Before the school reforms of the 1960s and 70s, whiteness also bestowed certain privileges. A fellow who played at Mercedes High in the 1940s summarized the attitude, “Who in the hell was going to play a Mexican when they had an Anglo? That was an absurd idea. Anglos came first; that’s just the way it was.” A player from the 1950s told of sidelined players staging a small act of resistance to the de facto policy. “Well, we decided to pull out comic books and read them on the bench.

Hey, you ignore us, you don’t play us, we’ll do something else. Well, coach blew up when he saw this. ‘What the hell are you doing!’ We didn’t want to quit. We just wanted to make a point.” Skin color and surnames com plicated prejudice. Lydia

Campbell Lerma, the first Mexican American elected to the drill team at Corpus Christi

High School in the 1930s, explained the advantage of being a Campbell rather than a

Dominguez or Martinez, let’s say. “They knew I was Hispanic. I was dark from working out in the fields! But my name was Campbell. Somehow, that softened things.”

(Lerma 1996; Hinojosa 1999)

National and state organizations and leaders did little to ameliorate the situation.

The UIL certainly disappointed. Granted, most of the League's business involved technical matters, rules and procedures. But under Bedicheck, the League had done

107

much more; it discoursed on intellectual problems and relevant social issues: What is the role of athletics and extracurriculars in the war effort? Can experience in sports save a soldier's life? Do extracurriculars teach democratic values and citizenship, and, if so, how? What else could they teach; could they teach or reinforce the negative? When would women get a fair shake in school programs and society in general? Do sports masculinize women? What could modern Americans learn from the "civilized" Greeks, the austere Spartans, or the "decadent" Romans? How could the League balance modernity's rationalism with the timeless and universal jouissance of play? How could the League keep the crass commercialization that had cheapened big college athletics out of the high school? The issue of race and equality—the overarching issue in Texas, could or would not be broached by coaches, directors, and team sponsors—in official forums, at least.

There was a glimmer of hope in 1947. Inspired by Branch Rickey's signing of

Jackie Robinson, and its relative success, Bedicheck suggested that student competition could serve as a mitigating force for softening racism. But Roy Bedicheck was no Branch

Rickey; he passed up the chance to steer a new course. He retired and retreated instead to Walter Prescott Webb's Friday Mountain Ranch outside of Austin. American letters gained his important book Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, a latter-day Walden with a drawl. Texas sports, education, and youth culture lost out, however. The Brown v.

Topeka Board of Education decision in 1954, modern American education's biggest

108

watershed, registered with a mere blip in the post-Bedicheck UIL. All the State

Executive Committee could muster in the Leaguer, its newsletter, was the announcement

(run alongside a photo of student thespians in black face) of yet another rule change:

White public schools which admitted Negro students would remain eligible for membership in the League. Negro schools together with schools "for defectives and correctives" remained ineligible. Not until 1964 would the UIL remove the phrase

"white public schools" from its charter and membership requirements. Moreover, Jim

Crow's UIL, the all-black Prairie View Interscholastic League, would not be dissolved until late in the decade. (Bedicheck 1947; 1955; U.I.L. 1985)

* * *

What kept Everardo Lerma going in those difficult, lonely days in Kingsville?

There was, of course, the chronic irritant--the thorn of Anglo-Texan male hegemony glorified and magnified in the manly sport of football; and there was the corporeal element--a deep-seated love of the physical pleasures of sportive tests and competition.

"I cried many times, not because of the blows, but because of the discrimination. It was very hard to take, but I just loved playing sports. I loved baseball. I loved football. To me there was nothing better. I was an athlete." (Lerma 1996)

Lerma also possessed all the attributes that make a good player: strength, mass, and speed. His talent was the envy of many his teammates; his tackles were dreaded.

With a passion for the game and superior athleticism, playing football—in the technical

109

and mechanical sense of moving the ball and stopping bodies--rewarded and sustained

Lerma. It was an antidote to, an interruption of, the ideological, verbal, and structural oppression that so suffused his world. To execute a play in football was struggle and brawl, but was also escape and dance.

During one of our interviews Lerma's wife, Lydia, reminded him that all the attention he received within the Mexican American community also helped mitigate the negative. "I first saw him at a dance. The girls sat on one side of the hall and the boys on the other, with the grown-ups watching us like hawks. All the girls were just taken by him. He was this tall, handsome, college man—shy and a little cocky at the same time. None of us girls had ever met a college athlete." But there was more to it than popularity. Lerma knew that his successes and failures affected how local Anglos viewed Mexicans and how Mexicans viewed themselves. It was more than a mere awareness or knowledge; it was a burden.(Lerma 1996)

Racism could be tackled; people could change. He had seen it in some of his teammates, and in his coach at university, Alvaro "Bud" McCallum. When the sobbing player told McCallum that this time he had had enough, that he refused to put up with more abuse, that he would leave the team, coach promised that he would stand up for him. Bud McCallum stuck to his word. From then on he tried to temper hostilities and punish those who crossed the line. He did not exactly embrace Lerma, and no one man could clear Texas's vast, sedimented minefield of prejudice, but he did push for

110

tolerance. In football-crazed Kleberg County, young McCallum's stance was notable.

After all, McCallum's teams had won Texas Intercollegiate Athletic Association championships in 1933 and 1934, and taken or shared Alamo Conference titles or shares in 1936 and 1937. He wasn't landed or rich, but he was well-known, handsome, and visible—an "alpha male" to the sporting men of Kingsville. (Lerma 1996)

It had also become clear to Lerma that mexicanos, especially kids, were watching him. If he succeeded he might encourage them to claim their rightful place on the playing fields, classrooms, marching bands and drill teams—the mainstream of South

Texas everyday culture.

Already, he was witnessing change and optimism. Over at Stephen F. Austin,

Kingsville's Mexican elementary and junior high, the nascent football program was growing quickly. Austin now fielded two teams: the Pioneers and the Billygoats; and the school's PTA was in the process of raising funds for band instruments. These young athletes met surprising success. Just three years after Lerm a graduated, the Brahmas opened the season with four Mexican Americans in the starting eleven, one at the

"golden boy" position of quarterback.(Anonymous 1936)

If Lerma had doubts about his role as trailblazer and symbol, they were dispelled in the spring of his sophomore year. In a suspiciously sadistic scheme, coaches elected

Lerma to fight for the heavyweight title of the college. His opponent, "Wild Bill" Farish, was a big and capable boxer. Having tangled repeatedly on the football field, Wild Bill

111

and Lerma knew each other all too well. It wasn't Joe Lewis vs. Max Schmeling, but in the cotton and ranchlands of Kleberg County, the match was big deal enough. Race mattered. Predictably, the majority of spectators divided themselves along racial lines.

Anglos called for the merciless pummeling of the Mexican, and mexicanos relished their chamaco's (lad) counter-hegemonic jabs. For Lerma, the fight was a long, loud, brutal hell. "Nobody thought that I had a chance, but I gave him a very good fight." Of the match a journalist wrote: "It looked as if Lerma had piled up enough lead to have won the match, but the judges couldn't agree. The writer's scorepad gives Lerma the edge, but it was close." Quite wisely, referee Willie Jones called the bout a draw.6

(Anonymous 1936; Lerma 1996)

Lerma's junior and senior years brought more challenges, respect, and even glory. Ironically, the peak moment in his athletic career came not on a Texas gridiron or in some storybook goal-line stand—it wasn't an athletic feat at all.

In 1937 Lerma found himself hailed as a celebrity during a routine pregame stretch on the occasion of A&I playing the National University of Mexico. Durin g the week Mexico City's sportswriters had reported on the player's prowess, size, and statistics. Impressive, certainly, but what really distinguished him in their eyes was his

Mexicanness. An American reporter recounts Lerma's reception:

Right after noon the squad commenced preparation for the game and went out to the field to find that a big crowd had assembled to enjoy a preliminary game. E. Lerma, Javelina utility man and captain for the day, was mobbed by fans wanting his autograph. He could escape from one 112

crowd only to be surrounded by another. Other players were in for the same treatment but Lerma was the favorite. After the football game the Javelinas visited several night clubs in Mexico City—all except for Lerma. He was the special guest at a Mexican fiesta. (Anonymous 1937)

What a difference a border makes. Lerma had had his shining moments in Texas, but it was in Mexico City that he first experienced loud, seemingly unqualified praise and support.

It was here—facing a squad of brown players on the field, hearing songs, cheers, and curses in Spanish, talking game for hours—that he glimpsed what could have been had things been played better back home. It was here that he glimpsed what he, as a coach and administrator, would help realize in South Texas—a simple, but lovely thing—friendly,vigorous competition unencumbered by the hackles of prejudice and ignorance.

The Eagles of Benavides

In the fall of 1938 the newly-minted college graduate got a job as an assistant coach in Benavides, Texas, a small town in the heart of the South Texas brush country.

With Lerma at Benavides, Texas now had three Mexican American coaches in the public schools. The greenhorn joined Nemo "El Viejo" ("Old Man") Herrera of San Antonio

Lanier and Lino "Gramps" Perez of Rio Grande City. Gramps was more phys-ed teacher than coach, and El Viejo was known for his basketball teams, winning the state title three times at San Antonio Lanier and El Paso Bowie. E.C. Lerma would make his name on the gridiron. 113

Work went well. He had a regular paycheck, a new wife, and enthusiastic, promising students. In 1940 the head coach position opened up, and Lerma found himself on the short list. Once again, he had to run the gauntlet of Anglo-controlled public education; this time he faced the chain-smoking Benavides School Board and one

Hilda Parr, sister-in-law of local political boss George Parr. Like every South Texan,

Lerma knew of the Parrs' wealth, power, and shenanigans. (Recall the infamous "found missing ballot box" in Lyndon Johnson's senatorial election?) The Parrs were the

Tweeds, the Longs, of the South Texas brush country. And George, the "S econd Duke of

Duval County," or "La Tlacuacha" (possum), as the Tejanos called him, had his paw in everything. The Parr machine controlled every public sector job. But Lerma, a straight- arrow outsider, owed no one anything and had no favors due. (Lynch 1976; Lerma

1996)

There was also the issue of race. "There was no precedent. They just couldn't believe that a Mexican could do as good a job as an Anglo. They didn't tell me that, but it was written across their foreheads. They were in a bind though. They needed a coach and there I was." 7 (Lerma 1995; May 1997) After his promotion to head coach, Lerma soon proved doubters wrong. The Eagles of Benavides improved dramatically. In 1942, his second year as head, the Eagles went 7-0-1, and took the district championship for the first time. It was the biggest thing to hit Benavides since the Tex-Mex Railroad had put it on the map. With uncommon expeditiousness, the Parr school board built coach a

114

modern stadium, grass and all. The 1943 season saw the Eagles go undefeated yet again.

This time they won the regional title (small schools like Benavides did not have a state title playoff until later).

According to Lydia Lerma, the championship years boosted and roused

Benavides. The football season became the highlight of the year. "They would have pep rallies…and parade around town. The enthusiasm was fantastic. Little old ladies would sit in the stands…with rosary beads…praying for Benavides." (May 1997)

Everybody loves a winner, but something else was at work. In the shadows of a declining ranch economy, the young and attractive Lermas engendered optimism, pride.

The war in Europe and the Pacific had also thrown youth into a different light--more appreciated, their play and contests semiotically richer, weightier, their stout bodies frangible. The struggles on the field echoed national purpose.

Lerma's strict, paternalistic, coaching style also dovetailed with the South Texas ranch country ethic. To the approval of adults ("I had spies everywhere."), Lerma was known to take a ride around town on weeknights in search of athletes out and about past the ten o'clock curfew. His practices were long and arduous, and he closely monitored academic performance. In short, he was one of them. "Balo" drank a little beer, knew how to tell a joke, went to church, and worked just about every day.

"We had to set positive examples with our behavior and that of our own children," Lydia Lerma said.

115

Oh, to be the coach's wife was a lot of work. She had an image to uphold. She had to be a lady. She had to be charming, whether talking to wealthy ranchers or the humblest people. At the annual coach's conventions the women held shows and workshops on how to entertain and dress. We learned the rules of football and how to deal with parents and the public. We were under a microscope, but we were very respected.(Lerma 1996)

The Lermas' recipe worked. They were on everyone's guest lists for weddings, quinceaneras (girl's fifteen birthday celebrations), and first communions. Along with showing gratitude with the usual ranch country gifts of tamales, cabrito (roasted kid goat), and bundles of fresh beef, game, and jerky, folks in tiny Benavides pooled together and bought them a new sedan when their old car failed. Benavides never forgot them. Upon learning of Lerma's upcoming retirement in the 1980s, for example, former athletes raised enough funds to send the Lermas on a six-week long, all- expenses-paid trip to Europe. In one last tribute, Benavides named the stadium after

Mr. Lerma. (Lerma 1995)

After his stint at Benavides, Lerma rounded out his coaching career in the old border town of Rio Grande City, where he arrived in 1955. In Starr County and at Rio

Grande City High, Lerma found a poor and working-class community with deep roots and a long tradition of integrated schooling--the legacy of Don Manuel Guerra, a prominent rancher and indomitable political boss. An anomaly in modern Texas, Starr

County had an established Mexican American teacher population that included Roque

Guerra, Jr., a veteran band director. For 25 years thereafter, Lerma worked as a coach,

116

principal, and superintendent of schools in South Texas cities. Up to his death in 1998,

Lerma remained active in regional athletics and coaching; he was inducted into several regional halls of fame.

* * *

Coach Lerma's success with the Eagles of Benavides is impressive. In fifteen years he snatched thirteen titles. But coaches are more than records. Here is a parent, educator, community leader, and a tough-minded bull of a man who simply refused to acquiesce to Anglo male controls. A leader in the South Texas schools, active in the

League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Knights of Columbus, and the

KOC's Columbian Squires, Lerma was an exemplar of what historian Mario Garcia called

"the Mexican American generation." This group came of political age between the Great

Depression and the 1950s. This generation served in the military in disproportionate numbers, and had educational reforms as their chief and perpetual cause. A sort of

"double consciousness" was at the core of their politics. They sought to maintain loyalty and respect for things Mexican while simultaneously asserting their rights as Americans and loyalties to the U.S. (Garcia 1989)

In Américo Paredes's "Folk Medicine and the Intercultural Jest," a brilliant essay that mines jok es about folk healing (curanderismo) for clues on Mexican American identity in the face of rapid social change, he describes the men of Lerma's social group as seemingly:

completely acculturated, having adapted to American culture and functioning in it in a very successful way. At the same time, when they are away from the courtroom, the school, the office, or the

117

clinic and congregated in a group of their own, they think of themselves as mexicanos. Not only will they speak Spanish among themselves, but it is quite obvious that they place a high value on many aspects of Mexican culture and are proud of the duality of their background. They do in a sense live double lives, functioning as Americans in the affairs of the community at large and as Mexicans within their own closed circle. (Paredes 1993 (1968):58)

Of course, much of the Chicano generation saw acculturation as a slippery slope resulting not in the hybridity or mestizaje touted today, but in assimilation.

Acculturation undermined the struggle for self-determination and cultural survival.

But the 'Mexican American' position also interpellated American discourses that drew

Mexicans in the U.S., no matter how established or patriotic, as outsiders. I generalize here, but in essence, theirs was a politics of negotiation. They consented to certain

Anglo controls and rationalizations, and in the process internalized various strains of white supremacist logic, capitalist blind faith, and myopic patriotism. We saw (and see) these articulated in the Anglicization of names and naming, for example; brooding and vexation on the subject of new immigrants; and ambivalent if not outright racist views on skin color and beauty. Juan Gómez Quiñones, one of the most influential intellectuals and polemicists of the Chicano Movement, later conceded that differences between Chicano youth movement and "the middle-class element" were based on

"tactics" rather than "issues." (1990:175)

All that said, Mexican Americans like Lerma, the big wheel politicos and the smaller gears both, doggedly forced compromises and concessions. The historian Jorge 118

Iber writes, "The athletic (and later coaching) career of E.C. Lerma presented a dilemma for Texans who believed in the athletic and intellectual inferiority of Mexican

Americans. Clearly, here was an individual who did not fit the perception of a typical

"greaser." If a Spanish-surnamed individual helped the local team win, perhaps he could be accepted as an equal." (Iber 2002:628)

The 1940s and 50s saw increased racial contact and a slow and steady dismantling of segregation in sports, schools, and the broader society—often, in that order. Lerma and his Eagles and Rattlers were trigger points, bellwethers of the changes afoot in this football-obsessed province of Mexican America.

Conclusion

Writing in the early 1990s the historian George Sanchez lamented the fact that historians had largely ignored adolescents and young adults in American society. "This is especially true for Mexican American youth," he emphasized," more attention has been paid to Chicano intellectual history and political history for the post-World War II era.” More recently, the historian Jorge Iber observed that the subject of sports in

Mexican American studies was "profitable" but "largely untapped." Political and intellectual history is more central than ever in the field, but scholarship on brown youth has seen modest gains. With the contributions of scholars like Douglas Foley, Mary Lou

LeCompte, Kathleen Sands, Sam Regalado, Mario Longoria, Iber, and others this branch of sports history is beginning to take shape. (Sanchez 1993:256; Iber 2002:620)

119

This chapter contributes to both these areas and projects. It describes the maturation of modern institutional sports in South Texas, the struggles and victories. It shows how Anglo colonization and Western modernity in general changed sports and leisure. It sketches how an embattled, largely rural populus, pushed to the margins by

Anglo-American power and capital, takes the popular sports of the new order and uses it for expression and recreation. It shows how institutional sports acculturated and disciplined, and also how they opened spaces for expression, resistance and repair.

Being integrated with ethnography, this history is by necessity highly localized; it cuts but one swath through a broad field. However, much of what transpired in South

Texas mirrors the experience of other borderlands and ethnic American communities, other Bedichecks and Lermas. There are parallels, for example, with ethnic Catholic and

Native American teams in the Midwest and their encounters and contests with white

Protestant bodies. As Gerald Gems and Michael Oriard have chronicled, schools like

Notre Dame, Carlisle, and the bigger parochial high schools enjoyed broad and intense fan support. Contests between WASP institutions like Yale, Harvard, and Chicago against Catholic Notre Dame and Carlisle, the Indian school coached by Pop Warner and led by Jim Thorpe, agitated and exposed ethnic, class, and religious tensions; victories confirmed and losses checked white supremacist ascriptions previously given to the game by Ivy elites and their press. If the WASP male was the pinnacle of

American masculinity, what did it mean to lose to the Indian or Catholic (Notre Dame

120

lost only 3 of 99 games in the 1920s)? Losses did not dismantle claims to WASP male superiority trumpeted by men like Teddy Roosevelt, Walter Camp, and Frederick

Remington, but they certainly undermined them. (Roosevelt 1902; Camp 1910; Gems

1996; Oriard:495)

Finally, a localized focus brings to light individuals like Roy Bedicheck and E.C.

Lerma. In them we see how common people working in mundane environments protected and also cleared the thorny brush of institutionalized racism in Mexican

America.

121

Chapter Four: The Golden Age of Football and the Break of Segregation

In the postwar years Mexican Americans enjoyed greater presence and power in the high schools. Thanks to the efforts of groups like LULAC and the G.I. Forum, which pressed for desegregation in and outside the courts, more brown students made it into and through the schools. These were relative gains. As Arthur Rubel notes in his ethnography of a Valley city, only one in four brown students advanced beyond the 6th grade. Aided by programs like the GI Bill, more Mexican Americans also entered the teaching and coaching ranks.1 (Rubel 1966:23)

A look into the Espejo, the McAllen High School yearbook of 1952, gives us a glimpse of the racial dynamics at mid-century. Teams and squads are racially mixed, with more Anglos than Mexicans participating; other yearbooks exhibit the same pattern. (The ratio of Mexicans to Anglos in the general population was four to one.) A photo captioned “The Twelfth Man” shows a crowd of student spectators engrossed with the game. Half the group is Anglo, the other half Mexican. The picture is telling.

Students stand together but apart: Anglos in the first few rows, Mexicans immediately behind. They share the same hairstyles and dress, and their eyes fix on the same drama unfolding. They are close enough to touch; at the same time they keep a distance.

However tentative, such contact was a positive and timely development. The legacy and practice of segregation was still quite real, however. Entertainments and

122

extracurricular activities saw mixing, but the practice of tracking Anglo and Mexican students into different curricula continued in many schools with Mexican Americans ending up in remedial and vocational courses. Moreover, certain "public" facilities (e.g. swimming pools, theaters) remained segregated. The historian Guadulupe San Miguel calls this the "era of subterfuge," for the rash, but legal measures deployed by so many school administrations in the service of segregation. 2 (1987:134)

“The neighborhoods here were literally divided by the railroad tracks,” noted an athlete who played in the early 1960s in Hidalgo County.

When I was a kid the Anglos lived inside the two north-south tracks that were a mile or so apart, and the Mexicans and a handful of blacks lived outside. But by high school things had started changing, and the athletes were some of the first [to mix]. We gave each other rides. We ate at each other’s houses sometimes. We piled into cars and went to the drive-in together. The guys learned some Spanish and slang, and some of us dated bolillas--en escondidas [‘white-bread girls’--behind peoples’ backs]...There were plenty of chingazos [fights], but at the same time some of us were hanging out.3 (Herrera 1997)

Class mattered. Middling Mexican Americans penetrated the cultural production’s social network much more easily than poor and working class students.

According to one informant, “the kids who played football or who participated in band and cheerleading were middle class--for the Valley...Their parents were the ones who were working at banks, who worked for attorneys...not well-to-do, but they knew how to get things.” 4 More often than not, poor students and those with limited English, not a

123

small demographic in South Texas, found themselves at the margins of scholastic youth culture.

You were left out. Friendship came at games and practices, but after that it never materialized. Parties, socializing--I knew they were happening, but the kids, even within the football team...the kids that were invited were the ones in the middle class. If you were not part of that group you were never told about these things. They did it behind the scenes. I knew they were happening, but those of us in the working class were--I guess we were avoided. (Tamayo 1996)

The working class found ways to infringe on the games of the middling Anglo-

Tejano set. The exigencies of poverty, however, deterred the poorest students from participating or participating fully. Members of a ‘family wage economy’ where all but the youngest were expected to contribute, these students simply did not have the time to attend practices and rehearsals. Many of them were migrant farm workers, who for up to six months of the year traveled as far away as the Canadian border. The absentee missed out on rudimentary instruction, much less the frothier elements of the school experience. Others had the time and desire, but not the means. A fellow who attended

Edinburg High School in the early 1960s mentioned that the inability to purchase student health insurance had kept him and some of his friends out of athletics. “Coach let us go as long as he possibly could,” he told me--clearly still wounded, “but I just couldn’t come up with the twelve bucks or whatever it was. Coach said, 'I’m really sorry, but I just can’t let you go on.'” (Herrera 1997)

124

A New Age for Women

Women’s athletics also gained a foothold and currency around this time. Where

Texas-Anglo women had been relatively active in team sports; participation by Mexican

Americans had been modest. This began to change in the postwar era. Latinas

(primarily of Cuban descent) barnstormed across America as athletes in the All

American Girls Professional Baseball League (1946-56), for example (Longoria 2002). In the 1950s women also began riding in charreadas or Mexican-style rodeo; they performed in escaramuzas, an event involving precision team-riding. A new advocacy for competitive women’s athletics by the UIL, the growing presence of Mexican American females in the high schools, together with more liberal views on propriety and corporeal practice and expression, all contributed to the changes. The biggest surge came after

1972 when the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments opened doors for all

American women. Title IX barred gender discrimination in federally funded school programs and it required schools to establish parity in funding for male and female athletes (creating a perpetual sore point among for many males). Title IX had a profound im pact. In 1972, for example, fewer than 5% of all high school athletes were female. A decade later, that number had increased to 33%, and by the late 1990s it was

40%. (Kadzielski 1982:95; Besnette 1999; Nájera-Ramírez 2002:212)

A commonplace in Mexican America, female sportive practice is now so mundane a thing that it escapes comment and reflection. This is a curious point,

125

considering that so much discourse and cultural production by and about Chicanas has focused on the body.

In the 1970s, however, the image of the sporting female was still inchoate and writ with promise. The artist Yolanda M. Lopez’s images of muscular Chicanas dressed in martial arts suits, running shorts, and sneakers come to mind.

Sport in Lopez's work sits in contrapuntal tension with the iconic Virgen de

Guadalupe, “the mother of all Mexicans,” and images of older Chicana mothers and working women. Lopez's athletes show a more liberated or at the very least, differential

Chicana body. Of the painting "The Runner" from the A Donde Va Chicana? (“Where Are

You Going Chicana?”) Series, Lopez said: “The metaphor [of the runner] extends from the symbolic fortitude of women to the literal image of the Chicana’s struggle in a formidable institution...Endurance is one of our greatest survival tools” (LaDuke

1994:120). The critic Angie Chabram-Dernersesian describes a runner in the Guadalupe

Series as moving away from traditional, even stagnant images of maternity and feminine stasis (signified in this case by the Virgen Guadalupe) toward a new frame, a "third image of the Chicana, yet to be constructed within another textual border. " (1993:43)

The late twentieth century saw a progressive acceleration of female sportive practice. Of course, in the context of high school football, women remain at the margins.

Within and without South Texas, however, cheerleading has become much more athletic, even acrobatic, in form. Incidentally, the 1990s also saw a rise in male

126

cheerleaders in the Valley. (The Valley lagged well behind the rest of the U.S. in this area.) This, too, signaled the normalizing of more liberal views on gender.

Integration and its Successes

Texas high school football's "golden age" came in the decades of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Most consider this the peak of the game for several reasons: Attendance was very high. Performance-enhancing drugs had not yet penetrated the schools. And, the high school had matured into a central social institution. It became the institutional base of a broader, and new, youth culture. More than ever, what happened socially in the high school mattered; it had weight, capital. In New Jersey Dreaming, an ethnography on class mobility in a late 1950s high school, Sherry Ortner describes the impact of this new development.

The emergence in the fifties of a distinctive (if very diverse) youth culture, both from the point of view of adults and from the self- perceptions of young people themselves, no doubt added fuel to the high emotional charge of the high school experience…As both cause and effect, the emerging youth culture further intensified the construction of the high school as a relatively autonomous social space. The emphasis shifted, to some extent, away from the high school's educational functions, and away from its functions of preparing young people for adult life, and toward treating it as a kind of social world unto itself. (2003:93)

The most important hallmark of the "golden age" was the single-high school city.

Because few smaller cities had multiple high schools, the linkage between the identity of the team and town was sharply drawn. Athletes and fans thus considered the contests to be not between schools but between towns, more specifically one's collective 127

masculinity against the other. Set in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively, Larry McMurtry's

The Last Picture Show and Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused are the most sophisticated investigations of these conflicts.

For reasons not exactly clear, South Texas's racially-mixed teams from this period fared exceptionally well. Edinburg’s unbeaten, state-quarter-finalist team of 1955 was half-Mexican and half-Anglo. Anglos, African Americans, and Mexican Americans composed the Corpus Christi Miller Buccaneers team of 1960. Miller was the first truly integrated team in Texas to win the big one , the state 4A5 title; Miller returned to state final again in 1963 (Button 1997). The Donna Redskins, a team that won the state 3A title in 1961 against great odds, was also balanced. “We had seven Anglos, seven

Mexicans,” co-captain Richard Avila emphasized to me in a conversation, as if pointing to some ideal symmetry, a cusp. Charlie Williams’s Bears from Pharr-San Juan-Alamo, also racially mixed, advanced to the state 3-A final in 1962 and 1963. The Brownsville

Eagles also fared well. Then there were the legendary Brackenridge teams of 1962 and

1963. These state champions were primarily African American and Mexican American students from San Antonio’s working-class West and South Side neighborhoods. “La

Brack” was anchored by quarterback Victor Castillo and Warren McVea. One of the century’s greatest running backs, McVea would go on to the University of Houston where his dazzling runs (ignited by Coach Bill Yeoman’s radical "Veer Triple-option" offense) helped knock the legs out of white-only football in Dixie.6

128

South Texas was seeing positive social change, and the high school sports arena was one of the more vital, visible spaces where new connections and an ameliorative everyday politics were hatched and played. Players made new friendships, bonds, and

‘connections’, and they glimpsed other realities, other subjectivities. For example, one informant told of confronting a harsh racism when traveling out of South Texas for playoff games in the early 1960s. “West Texas and way up in north Texas was the worst.

They called us dirty Mexicans, the n-word, and so on” (Cortez 1998). Naturally, the comments angered Mexicans like himself. But it surprised him that the insults incensed some of his Anglo teammates. Of the 1960 Miller Buccaneers a fan and educator said, "I knew those guys and they stood together. If you insulted one of them [with racial prejudice], you insulted them all" (Aranda 2003). Another athlete who played college baseball in the Valley in the 1950s told of how sports helped unveil his own racial privilege. He recalled feeling both lucky and ashamed when he saw his black teammate treated poorly in or barred altogether from hotels and restaurants. The discrimination came not only from Anglos, but also from Mexican Americans like himself (Betancourt

1998).

Anglo Progressives

A 1964 issue of Texas Coach magazine finds Coach Charlie Qualls underscoring competitive sports' inherent democratic qualities. In order for one to achieve success

129

and victory (for job security as much as ego or ideological conviction), a coach could not afford to discriminate, he writes.

Just think, there is no distinction made because of color, religion or politics. Everyone has an equal chance because the coach is trying to find the eleven best football players, or the five best basketball players, or the fastest sprinter, etc. He is not influenced by whether the boy’s dad is a doctor, lawyer, garbage collector or the town bum. It makes no difference whatsoever how much money or what influence the family has in the community or what brothers, dads, or uncles did on the athletic field yesterday. Whether a boy makes the team or not depends entirely upon him--and how much effort he is willing to put forth. If he is willing to work harder than anyone else, he can earn himself a spot on the team. Now--what can be more democratic than this? (1964:24)

Coach Qualls’s calculus was not exactly new or original. No, it was a shibboleth the coaching establishment rehashed year upon year in the trade literature, at clinics, school board meetings, ‘businessman prayer breakfasts’, barber shops, and wherever else coach hung his polyester hat. But by 1964 the fog was burning off; the ideal was starting to become manifest, broadly, in real practice. The selection of talent was becoming more class and colorblind. More and more teams, in central and southern

Texas anyhow, resembled the actual population of the towns and schools they represented. This was not a trivial development or a broad and warm Spielbergian coming together of separate-but-equals, but a genuine recasting of public culture in

Texas.

This could not have happened without the many Anglo coaches and educators who were mentors, friends, and role models to Mexican American students. Their

130

labors and service did not go unnoticed. In my conversations with Mexican American informants many of them recalled virtuous, progressive, if not always perfect, people who trained them. René Hinojosa, brother of writer Rolando Hinojosa, recalls being playfully challenged by his Anglo coach at Mercedes High School in the 1940s. “Enter and finish college, guy. When you do that, then you can run the show.”(1999) Hinojosa did go on to call the shots on the gridiron and school administration. Hinojosa was the second Mexican American football coach, after Lerma, to work in the Valley.

Another fellow, who played in the late 1950s, recounted how his coach took an earnest interest in his studies and career plans, and how that shaped his life in important ways.

He had all girls, so, I guess he took me in like a son. He knew my father, who worked as the janitor at the school. Coach would sometimes invite me to his house to eat dinner with the family. They had a nice little house. Through him I began to see sports as a way of creating a profession for myself, and that was important because up until then, I was not that interested in school. One day he asked me, 'What do you want to do with your life?' I told him, 'I want to be a coach like you.' It just came out of my mouth.

He helped me along. Hey, if it hadn’t been for sports I wouldn’t have gotten an education, because I wasn’t a very good student. I was in school because all my interest was in sports. I was able to finish and get my college education. That means a lot to me, because I’ve been able to provide an income for my family. (Falcón 1997)

Other South Texas institutions also began taking increasingly progressive, if unpopular, stances.

131

An incident from the 1950s is revealing--both of the obstinacies of white supremacy in South Texas and also of its eroding moorings. The incident involved a much-needed swimming pool and recreational facility that the McAllen YMCA intended to buy from an individual. Initially, the deal proceeded smoothly; the organization raised funds and contracts were drawn. Rumors began circulating that the pool would be open to Mexicans as well as Anglos. When the Y's secretary confirmed them to be true, a furor erupted in the Anglo community and many donors withdrew funding. The plan was dead in the water when the seller announced that he was canceling the sale.

He had been pushed into a moral quandary, he confessed. He had realized that "he had a responsibility to the community not to let the pool get into the hands of Mexicans."

(Simmons 1952:453-56)

Ultimately, the Y failed to break the grip of segregation, and the young Christian men of the Valley lost out on a pool and recreation center. The incident reaffirmed old truths. South Texas had no shortage of segregationists, and they were powerful. But the controversy also unearthed new knowledge and understanding: Some Anglos were willing to take unpopular positions in the name of equality and reform. Furthermore, certain not-so-morally-burdened Anglos had had to choose between the old order and the emerging new. With the threat of Mexican American rejoinders in the marketplace and polls, it became clear (incrementally, of course, together with other incidents and

132

contestations) that Anglo power could no longer countenance blatant discrimination without serious repercussions.

Edinburg's Pan American College had better success. In 1953 the border college did what no white college in Texas had done before. They signed an African American to the baseball and track teams (D. Joe Williams from neighboring McAllen). It is notable that the college's Anglo administration made the move before the Brown v.

Board of Education of Topeka decision really forced the issue of integration.

Of course, the Chicano Movement period of the late 1960s and early 1970s saw dynamic change. One of the more interesting incidents came when band director Pat

McNallen and Superintendent Joe Evans decided to change the Edinburg High School fight song to “Ay, Jalisco No te Rajes” (“Oh, Jalisco, Don’t Back Down”). “Jalisco” is one of the dearest and most patriotic songs in Greater Mexico. Though Mr. Evans and

McNallen were hardly Chicano nationalists, they made their decision at the height of the

Movement. It would be a good fit for the town, they felt; was not Edinburg majority

Mexican after all? An immediate success, “Jalisco” quickly became the best-known fight song in the Valley, and McNallen’s flashy, quick-stepping band, very much influenced by southern African-American ‘show’ bands (e.g. Southern U., Prairie View, Florida A &

M) and twice as large as rival bands, became the darling and envy of the region.

(Treviño 1999)

Juan, a fellow from Pharr, Texas, recalls hearing McNallen’s song in the 1970s.

133

We always wanted to hear the Edinburg fight song, even though we just hated Edinburg. We wanted to hear it because it was “Jalisco.” You know, you wanted to hear something different. You wanted to hear something from your own culture instead of “Davy Crockett” or something. Sure, you know, we live in America, but the Americans weren’t our forefathers…Edinburg played “Jalisco” loud and their fans would go crazy. It’s as if they weren’t embarrassed to be Mexican. That song had such momentum. I think it won 'em some football games. (Tamayo 1996)

Not all communities and school administrations were as open or venturesome as the men of Edinburg. The teachers and administrators of Crystal City (not far from

Lerma’s Benavides) come to mind. In March of 1970 Chicano students staged walkouts and school boycotts. They protested racism in the classroom and anti-Mexican bias in school extracurriculars. Though students had many grievances, the election by Anglo faculty of only one Chicana cheerleader to an otherwise all-Anglo squad triggered the rebellion.7 The United States Civil Rights Commission, which investigated racial tensions in the area, found that brown students had good cause to protest. Crystal City had a record of rampant discrimination, segregation, and tokenism when it came to awarding “popularity/social honors.” Even though Crystal City had a majority Mexican student population, brown students only received token representation as cheerleaders, twirlers, captains, and sweethearts. (Shockley 1974:165)

José Angel Gutierrez, the Chicano Movement leader and organizer from Crystal

City, describes the situation:

The school yearbook featured the Anglo kids. Chicanos did appear in yearbook photos, but mainly in those of the individual classes, whereas 134

the school clubs and student leadership--and hence, their photos--were predominantly white. There was no interethnic group mixing, much less dating; the prom and other social events were segregated and policed by teachers or chaperones to enforce this informal rule. The Anglo male kids made the varsity football, basketball and baseball teams, the first string, regardless of ability. Their fathers and mothers were involved with the respective adult booster clubs for these sports, and saw to it that they were chosen. Our parents were not made to feel welcome members in these booster clubs, except as paying patrons to their activities. Chicanos made the second string, to be sure, and sometimes the varsity squad if they were extremely talented. Anglo athletes got by with mediocrity, Chicanos had to achieve excellence.

The Anglo females became the cheerleaders, twirlers, and homecoming and tournament queens for the various sports, and the overall class and school favorites, such as most beautiful, most popular, most representative, and the like. Their selection was made for us by our teachers or by adult white “outside judges” from nearby communities. This happened in my high school beginning in 1959, to coincide with the switch in student population from majority Anglo to majority Mexican American. I always suspected that the Anglos from our town would trade their votes with those of Anglos from other towns, judging our contests and only voting for Anglo children. (Gutiérrez 1998:127)

The Crystal City Cheerleader revolt reached a fever pitch one night in the fall of

1970. Two incidents triggered it. The first resulted from a calculated move by Chicano leaders to have a football game’s play-by-play and public address done in English and

Spanish; the point, ostensibly, was to be more inclusive. Anglos did not receive the favor well, however. Secondly, when Elpidio Lizcano, a newly-hired Chicano band director, had the band spell “RAZA” (“the people/race”) and play “Jalisco” during a half-time show, the dam burst. Waves of Anglos walked out of the stadium in disgust, and come Monday their children were quitting the band. (The incident began a years-

135

long exodus of Anglos away from Crystal City to neighboring towns.) The Cheerleader

Revolt sent shock waves through South Texas and the broader Chicano Movement thanks to national media coverage in places like The New Yorker, the spin of Raza Unida partisans like José Angel Gutierrez, not to mention the impressive victories of Chicanos against the tenacious bulldog that was the Anglo establishment of South Texas’s “Winter

Garden” region.8 (Trillin 1971; Shockley 1974:165)

Something was rotten in Tejas, but the UIL remained defensive and unyielding.

Rather than open dialogue on the hot issues of race and gender equality in the sporting arena, Director Rhea Williams warned of disruptive “minority propaganda” and potential rioting at high school games. To the old guard, critics were “bad sports” set on ruining high school athletics--that “last bastion of decency.” Teachers and coaches must hold strong for “merchants of depraved and malignant ideologies” were courting students, another educator warned. (Williams 1970; Burns 1971)

Leaders at the University of Texas at Austin, home to the UIL's administrative offices and the state's most vaunted football program, were no small part of the problem.

Coach Darrell Royal commanded great respect and authority throughout the state. Of course, Royal was in the business of winning championships and bowls; he did not draft policy. But, the eyes of Texas were upon him. More than any other coach in the history of

Texas, he set the tone, and that tone was reticence, if not obstinacy when it came to reforming Texas sport. University of Texas football, for example, came conspicuously

136

late to desegregation. Houston had managed to put a man on the moon before Austin could bring itself to play a black man in Memorial Stadium (now Darrell Royal

Memorial Stadium)! According to Julius Whittier, UT's first black letterman, the reception black athletes received was not terrible; what they encountered was small- mindedness and indifference rather than overt prejudice. When black players asked

Coach Royal to hire a black coach to help allay racial tensions on the newly-integrated team, for example, Royal explained why he could not, “I’ve got to look at the other side.

I’d have a lot of white boys on the team coming to me saying they couldn’t play for a black coach. The family atmosphere of the team would be destroyed.”9 (Toback 1970:72;

Frei 2002:95-100)

Texas coaches and trustees hemmed and hawed on the issue of race well into the

1970s, but their defenses had too many holes. The amazing talents of All-American running backs Roosevelt Leaks and Earl Campbell finally made the subject moot.

Integration had pushed football to new levels of artistry and play; and fans in Dixie and

Texas, hidebound as they may have been, were not about to let it devolve. We all know the end of the story, of course. African-Americans would not only find a place in the state and nation’s college athletics, they would come to dominate them.10

* * *

Though there has been nothing on the scale of Crystal City lately, the high school football game still has occasional racial clashes. One of the more interesting cases came

137

in 1997 when the Yellow Jackets of Edcouch-Elsa (virtually all Mexican and working class) played the predominantly Anglo and middle class Wildcats of Calallen in the state playoffs. According to one informant, “un desmadre y medio” (“a melee and a half”) broke out in the stands when Calallen fans began tossing tortillas like frisbees (an increasingly common fan ‘tradition’). For raza, the tossing of tortillas, the staff of life, struck the wrong chord. Sure, it was wasteful, but more critically, it hinted at disrespect for things Mexican. (It may have been that tossing sandwich bread would have elicited the same response, but I doubt it.) Their suspicions were confirmed when an Anglo man from Calallen allegedly taunted: “what's the matter, are you afraid you won’t have enough tortillas for your beans?” It was then that the brawls started. Incidentally, the following season I overheard Valley fans refer to Calallen as “Cálenle,” a pun which translates to “let’s see you all try it.”

Flying tortillas notwithstanding, the atmosphere improved progressively in the last quarter of the century. Amicable encounters were much more common than clashes, and that was certainly the case in the 1990s when I conducted the fieldwork for this ethnography. White and brown spectators would sometimes mock the dances and quick steps of African-American marching bands, and one sensed a bit of anxiety when a school that was majority Mexican took the field against one that was majority Anglo or African-American. (More, I think, because of the noticably greater physical stature of the latter than because of culture or politics.) But the

138

Texas high school football game was in the late 1960s and 70s a model of civility, politeness, and also conservatism.

In urban areas the game waned beginning in the late 1970s. In suburban and small town

Texas it continues to thrive; the large middle-class suburbs have a monopoly on championships.

Deep South Texas never consistently achieved the success garnered by teams of the 1950s and

1960s. Nonetheless, the game is bigger than ever in many towns. It is an "all-American" spectacular at glance, and also a curious hybrid of Tejano, Mexican, and Anglo expressive forms and gender subjectivities.

139

Part II: Ethnography

Prologue In the mid-1990s I conducted fieldwork for this project. I talked to people from throughout South Texas, but I focused primarily on the Rio Grande Valley. I spoke to students, fans, coaches, and educators; I visited a variety of schools, and attended many games and practices. Much of my time was spent with Coach Robert Vela's teams at

Edcouch-Elsa and later at Edinburg High School.

Edcouch-Elsa is a medium -sized school (4A division) while Edinburg is large

(5A). Both are steeped in tradition, and have had strong fan backing for decades.

The Yellow Jackets of Edcouch-Elsa are a team in the old mold. It is based in a one high school town that is geographically discrete--this is to say that it is surrounded by open space (vast agricultural fields). In such places, and about half of the Rio Grande

Valley schools fit this category, town identity is closely tied to the fortunes of the football team and the quality of the marching band. School colors and mascots are common design motifs on the main drag, for example. The more successful towns tend to have sophisticated feeder systems in the junior highs. As early as the 6th grade, players begin their catechism in their town's version of football.

The Bobcats of Edinburg are of the new mold. They are the original school in a city that now has a total of three high schools, each with its own fan base. A rapidly growing university with its own sports teams (though no football) also competes for

140

fans' affections. Spatially, the city of Edinburg has melded with Pharr and McAllen to the south. Mascot-emblazoned water towers still stand guard, but boundaries are ill defined. In towns such as Edinburg, McAllen, Harlingen, Mission, and Brownsville, football competes with a growing variety of recreational activities and entertainment options. Their fans are more fickle and jaded.

What follows here is a walk through a typical football game in South Texas. It is a composite drawn from games I observed in the 1990s. On occasion I draw from my own experience and memories playing on the offensive line for Edinburg (which in the

1980s was a team in the old mold). The game described is "typical" in that it does not cover a big, important game; it does not have protagonists or underdogs to root for; and it is not set in a particularly volatile social or political moment (as in Crystal City in the early 1970s). It is just another Friday night game.

141

Chapter Five: Good Game

Rather than being one definite sort of thing...physical, spiritual, cultural, social--a given place takes on the qualities of its occupants, reflecting these qualities in its own constitution and description and expressing them in its occurrence as an event: places not only are, they happen. --Edward S. Casey

The true mystery of the world is in the visible not the invisible. --Oscar Wilde, Youth

Prep

It's 5:30. I'm standing on the orange rubber track circling the field. Above me a sprinkling of fans wait patiently in the bleachers. Home fans sit on the shady side, visitors in the sun. Most people at this early hour attend to some task or other. They check clipboards, mess with AV and emergency medical gear. They buff shoes, apply mascara, stack cups, prep food, direct traffic, synchronize watches.

It being early in the school year, the students stand fresh and optimistic. They’ve got new clothes, teachers, friends, crushes, privileges, challenges. A cool front has untethered summer; life is interesting again.

Just outside the stadium, band members mill about a flotilla of school buses.

They unload ladders, instruments, flags, mock rifles, and hefty carts with tympanies, xylophones, and bells. They laugh, shove, and kick up caliche dust. A couple of chubby

142

boys wearing masks of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky entertain with gropes and half-hearted slaps. From atop a bus roof a petite captain reprimands; the president and intern pick up gear and get to work.

* * *

In the fieldhouse the mood is sober. Players sit on benches and sprawl on the floor. A handful of boys weigh between 200 and 300 lbs, but a couple dozen are small.

“They have no business playing football--too, too little," a coach confides. "But they are tough," he adds, "and they have courage. They want to be part of something."

Some players check their equipment and munch on Powerbars. Others sit patiently as trainers tape ankles, and pad and bandage cuts and scrapes. Their

Walkmans seep music as they walk past; their cleats tip-tap on the cement floors. You see their nervous eyes, their muscled jaws. Some joke quietly. Others sit and speak softly as if speech itself spent precious energy. They make repeated trips to a spartan row of toilets without dividers. Like ranch hands or soldiers, they sit and chat unabashedly.

Girlfriends, sick grandparents, global and political crises, the SAT exams tomorrow morning, everything out there in the world begins to fall away. What matters now is managing anxiety, conjuring the mojo needed to perform like an unstoppable, forty-four-limbed machine. Dressed in smart sport shirts and pressed Dockers, coaches pace to and fro; they run their strung whistles through their hands like rosaries. Their heads are a jumble of data, scenarios, flashes of past errors. Though there are a hundred

143

reminders to communicate to their players, they exercise restraint. They step outside, lean on the hurricane fence, and speak the mundane. "Your wife buy that Nissan truck, coach?"

One coach tests an idea he picked up at the summer clinic in San Antonio. He reminds his group to "visualize" their performance. They are to play and replay the

“mental video” of their perfect blocks, pulls, traps, and screens. They are to step outside of themselves and analyze, fix, and tune their movements. “Do you see yourself moving bodies, making daylight, blasting open a lane for the running backs? The players close their eyes. "Do you see yourself? Imagine the rewards," he urges. "Can you see us crossing the goal line? How does that feel? What do you hear...How's dinner taste if you win? Howzabouts if we lose?"

Another group reviews a couple of posters tacked on the wall with athletic tape.

On it pictures of their opponents clipped from fan magazines and game programs are laid out like chessmen. Captions list each starter's height, weight, strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies. Freshman and junior high coaches have spent weeks

"scouting" the teams and compiling this and other intelligence--the dues they pay to learn the intricacies of the game and enter the varsity ranks.

One fellow is particularly nervous about his opponent. The caption below #77’s thug smile and thick neck reads, "Last year this Beefmaster [bull] shut us down. This year he is bigger and better. No weaknesses. Strategies: Double team as best we can.

Beat him to the snap! Aim low." Another fellow licks his chops. He’ll be opposite a

144

youngster with little experience, a replacement. His instructions are simple: "Mop the floor with this guy. Punish him."

A group of devout Christians gathers. They kneel below a large slogan that reads, "We BUST ours. We'll KICK yours!" "God, we thank you for your love, my brothers on this team, and our parents," one fellow begins. Taking turns, they ask the

Lord for protection from injury; ask Christ Jesus to help them shine, to allow them to play to the best of their ability. He knows how hard they have worked, that they really need a win right now, that they have worked toward this for so many years--and best of all--that their victories as Christians glorify Him, who is their strength. They ask God to watch over and protect the travelers criss-crossing the Valley tonight. May he put a protective bubble "like a force field on every car, every school bus, and trucks, too."

An earnest, skinny young man mentions “our bro” an injured teammate who is off in Houston consulting a specialist. He dedicates a verse they all know from their membership in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the largest and most popular club on campus. "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings of eagles; they shall run, and not be weary...Isaiah 40:31." The verse reminds them of a recently deceased coach whose words still echo in their heads, they say, whose eyes they can feel upon them. They squeeze each other's shoulders, give a group hug. Amen.1

145

Procession

Just outside the stadium, flags, rifles, and brass tip and sway to the sizzle and rat-tat-tat of snare and tom-tom drums. After a few minutes, the mass begins to twirl slowly; faces are serious, focused. The mass packs even tighter. Donning t-shirts emblazoned with the band’s show theme for the season, directors and parents watch from a distance--visibly proud of what they've wrought. The cyclone grows louder, the drumming more intense. Hooting. Chanting. Three whistles and a staccato call transform the jam into a marching band.

In the entry procession, a band may take up to a half hour to go from the staging areas outside the stadium to their seats inside. Typically, host bands will march on the running track past the visitors then file past home fans. Weslaco, La Joya, Edinburg,

Edinburg North, McAllen Memorial, Mission, and other large high schools field formidable outfits. With between two and three hundred musicians, these bands are larger (and sometimes more proficient) than those at many small universities. When these bands make their entrance, they might extend the length of the field. Like a Soviet march-past, they pull all stops, marching everyone: flag bearers, rifle corps, dance squads, baton twirlers, drum majors, mascots; they even have student security patrols who pace coolly on the margins. The precise marching and drumming, the poise, the sharp uniforms speak order, integrity, discipline, and but for the most jaded, power.

The procession is also a confection. From the vantage point of the bleachers the brightly-attired performers are miniaturized; they appear precious, toy-like. Here pass

146

sequined baton twirlers, erect musicians, dancers with evocative names like Steppers,

Pacesetters, Dancing Belles, and Sergeanettes. Costume and accouterments are pulled from a residual American and Texan imaginary: the rhinestone cowboy, the pin-up cowgirl, the Spanish colonial grandee with red cape, the Broadway chorus line, the rag band, the carhop, the cavalier, the Indian, and, of course, the cadet.2

That Valley drill teams appear so preternaturally "All-American” stems from the fact that the modern majorette was hatched right here. In 1930 Kay Waweehie Teer, a student and cheerleader at Edinburg High School, approached school principal C.A.

Davis with a concern and proposal. Ms. Teer felt that the school could use a ‘spirit group’ to accommodate female students who wished to participate, but who had not made the cheerleading squad. With the principal’s approval Teer created the

Sergeanettes. Though their name and uniforms were in the de rigeur military style, the

Sergeanettes distinguished themselves from other drum and bugle corps and pep squads; they danced, kicked, and, most innovatively, strutted. Often called “the Mother of the Drill Team,” Teer and her modest proposal inadvertently transformed the football game in the Valley, in Texas, and in short order, the rest of the country. By the 1950s virtually every high school marching band in the U.S. had a strutting, high-kicking

‘precision dance drill team’ in the style of Edinburg’s. The white-gloved, perma -smiling, dancing coquette came to endorse and peddle everything from milk shakes to presidential candidates.3 (Guerra 1998; Martin 2001)

147

Of the many fine processions I witnessed, McAllen’s Rowe High School band performed one of the most memorable. The Warriors entered through a large breezeway beneath the stadium. Inside the concrete tube the drumming and music echoed wildly, sounded a terrible racket, but the Warrior’s energy and presence were undeniably awesome. People lined up against the walls to watch; children covered their ears; startled pigeons spilled out of the rafters; vendors rested their nacho cheese ladles and craned their necks out of the stalls.

"Esa es la mía [that’s my girl]. Aii, I always get the goose bumps," a mother I had been talking to yelled in my ear. As the fanfare ended, she and other band mothers collected the plume cockades adorning the military-style hats. These, they would redistribute as the band assembled for its half-time show. One would think that these disciplined Warriors could tend to their cockades well enough, but because most schools have no shortage of parents seeking to help, band directors find ways to involve them.

Volunteers assist with small things like dress and refreshments, but they also take on challenging tasks such as chaperoning and raising funds for trips to competitions, national parades, or ventures abroad. To meet these goals, parents and students hold raffles and large barbecues where they hustle plates of brisket, chicken, potato salad, jalapeños, and pinto beans.4

* * *

High school bands have always emulated university bands and dance troupes the Broadway musical, but beginning in the 1980s they also began borrowing from the

148

quasi-professional bands that compete in Drum Corps International (DCI). DCI marching is difficult, precise, and athletic; playing technique is characterized by modulated volume--delicate passages are bracketed by sudden blasts of brass and drums. Early on, the style had a deconstructive, Ivesian quality. Mass imitation has now rendered it a cliché.

Though not as superbly drilled as the DCI outfits, large school bands put on technically-sophisticated shows featuring dynamic curvilinear marching, flag and rifle pyrotechnics, scores of dancers, and flashy but precise percussion sections. Where former bands played a program of Sousa marches, classic collegiate fight songs, pop hits, and scores from the westerns, programs now focus on a single, elaborately- choreographed seasonal theme. This season one band is doing the music of George

Gershwin, another features selections from Bizet’s Carmen. Other themes include:

"Music from the Movies," "Rituals," and music inspired by the Welsh poet Dylan

Thomas's “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”5

Marching styles and themes reflect the influence of DCI in particular and middlebrow culture in general. They also stem from musicians’ desires to move the band out of the shadow of big football. Sure, the band still serves up pep and fight songs, but musicians with whom I spoke stressed that they too have a competitive drive.

They work hard to put on a good show, to excel at competitions, and outshine rival bands at half-time. To be sure, the increased participation and leadership of women in the production has also effected the aesthetic change. For much of its life, the marching

149

band was a predominantly if not exclusively male production and expressive form.

Performances were characterized by patriotic marches and anthems, and rectilinear formations. (Davis 1986; Hazen and Hazen 1987)

Fans admire the innovation and enthusiasm, but old-schoolers have had a difficult time adjusting to the new styles and texts (some schools are more traditional than others). They find the music ponderous, the themes “boring,” the modernistic dance oblique, the bare-midriffed ‘fly-girl’ dancers “trashy.” What they miss is the gridiron program of old: the quasi-patriotic music, the “sexy but tasteful” majorettes, the blunt power marches and letter formations that speak school and town “spirit” rather than “some play no one’s ever heard of.” Though no one put it in these terms--the signifiers seem to have strayed too far from the signified.

Some bands have added Mexican and Tejano arrangements to the repertoire: “La

Adelita,” “Volver,” “El Son de La Negra,” “Guadalajara,” “No te rajes Jalisco,”

“Margarita.” (A few songs like the sultry “La Malagueña,” and mainstream hits “La

Bamba,” and “Guantanamera” have been part of Texas marching band repertoires for many years.) Typically, bands performed these pieces as novelty or 'pep' songs and not as part of a larger theme. With the ubiquity of this music in regional mass media and the growing popularity of 'folkloric' student troupes such as “ballet folklórico” and mariachi, bands will undoubtedly feature this music more fully and often. Whether judges at state band competitions will be receptive to a markedly ethnic program remains to be seen. After all, many fine African-American marching bands, famous for

150

their emotive marching, dancing, and swagger, never seem to advance to the finals.

Some bands are said to have a rather conservative UIL competition program, and another that is in the Southern African-American ‘show’ tradition (a style best exemplified by the bands of Southern, Grambling, Prairie View, and Florida A & M).

The Warm-up, the Fans

It’s not just about watching a game of football. The prelude is as enjoyable as the game itself. After the brutal South Texas summer, the cool dusks of football season are a delight. Stadium shadows creep across the field; lights arc on; crowds trickle in. The air smells of popcorn, tobacco, dust, grilling meat, aftershave, perfume, mowed grass. The echoes of team chatter fuse with the cheerleaders' punchy rhymes and intermingle with the jangle of bands tuning up. All the while pep and dance squads, giddy and lost in shakes and grooves, make colorful, ciliated swatches.

The players lope onto the field. They clap and ‘chatter’ loudly. With huge armored shoulders and thighs and a self-conscious swagger, their physiques are exaggerations of hegemonic maleness--albeit with ass patting and hand holding. (Arens

1981:5-6) The teams spread out in orderly rows along the gridiron--each claiming a side.

Captains, starters, and seniors take the positions up front near the center of the field.

They count together and punctuate each step of the stretch with a clap or chant. Limbs move in unison; uniforms are sharp and bright. (Valley schools may be among the poorest in the nation, but they outfit their athletes well.)

151

Coaches walk the grid. They speak with manly assertiveness and address players by surname. When called, they simply bark yes-sir...no-sir. Now that teams are majority if not exclusively Mexican American, coaches will often code-switch from

English to Spanish. “¿Tenemos ganas, gatitos? ¿Tenemos ánimo?” (“Have we got desire, my little cats? Do we have spirit/courage?”) In some speech situations the words flow naturally. At other moments, the coaches or team leaders, perhaps, code-switch deliberately--the shift to border Spanish summons fraternity, indexes masculinity as articulated and valued here in deep South Texas. The linguistic register of elders, region, and tradition, not to mention raza, it massages and urges in a way English alone cannot.6

After twenty minutes or so, players hop on their toes, whack their helmets and pads, and chatter loudly to make their presence known. Some players "talk trash" across to their opponents, but most simply strut and adhere to the schoolboy code of good sportsmanship. They show restraint--what they call “class.”

The stretch and warm-up are important parts of a team's preparation. The exercises prepare the body and tune the team's collective brain. The goal is to have the team mentally and physically primed for the first play and series of the game. "It's a matter of timing...like making love," one coach explain s. "Too much pump before the kickoff and the team might peak too soon. Not enough energy or focus and we can't deliver. When its time to play, we want the players tugging hard at the leash, rarin' to

152

go!" Some teams even don special uniforms for the stretch. In the 1990s the Coyotes of

La Joya wore a menacing, number-less black--socks and all.

* * *

High school football thrives because it squeezes a temporary order out of adolescent entropy. Everywhere one turns, troupes of students perform and work together, and with the exception of the stern-faced athletes, they move through their tasks with smiles, a kick in their step, alacrity--even great joy.

In Keeping Together in Time, a history of drill and dance with a broad historical sweep, William H. McNeil argues that something visceral and deep-seated is at play in group dance and drill. What he calls "muscular bonding" is a feeling of euphoria most individuals experience when moving rhythmically with a group for prolonged periods.

He posits that these practices contributed to the success of prehistoric hunters and, with the rise of city-states, armies. More relevant to our discussion, muscular bonding has played an important part in cementing community, especially in the context of the festival. Urbanization, globalization, modernity's championing of the individual, and the 'spectaclization' of drill by modern despots, have dissolved it. This dissolution,

McNeil writes, is not only aberrant from the historical norm, but also troublesome.

Human beings desperately need to belong to communities that give guidance and meaning to their lives; and moving rhythmically while giving voice together is the surest, most speedy, and efficacious way of creating and sustaining such communities that our species has ever hit upon. Words and ideas matter and are always invoked; but keeping together in time arouses warm emotions of collective solidarity and erases personal frustrations as words, by themselves, cannot do. Large 153

and complex human societies in all probability, cannot long maintain themselves without kinesthetic undergirding. Ideas and ideals are not enough. Feelings matter too, and feelings are inseparable from gestural and muscular expression. (1995:152)

While the appeal of group kinesthesia may have deep roots in human evolution, students also join the troupes for much more conscious and calculated reasons: they follow friends; they are drawn to people who are like them; they seek a bit of recognition. “Public education does not do a very good job of giving kids an identity,”

Coach Claude Bassett of McAllen Memorial told me one afternoon.

Activities like football help fill that need. A kid may not play a down, but just because he is out there, he is somebody. He has a role. If he can't play football he can do something else. If he doesn't have the courage to go out there and play, he can play a horn. Pretty soon, and this is the beauty of extracurricular education, everybody, if they want to, has the chance to be part of something special. Here in the Valley that’s Friday night football. “There's my daughter!” “There's mi'jo' [my son].” Parents are proud. Their kid is somebody! Have you ever seen a picture of an English class on the wall? (Bassett 1997)

Of course, football’s mass, orchestrated displays of metaparenting, obedience, and politeness lead more independent-minded students to sneer. Though they struggle to articulate it, using crude categories like “popularity,” “jocks," "cliques,” and

“lambiscones” (“brown-nosers,” literally “lickers,”), the young critics and skeptics voice suspicion if not outright contempt at how the spectacle, and all the resources that go to produce it, create and rein force social and gender hierarchies within the micro-economy that is the high school.

154

I met a group of students who expressed their disdain for football by treating it as a sort of quaint entertainment—something to while away the time while they awaited their flight to the college towns of the north. They viewed the game’s mass appeal and the drilled bodies vulgar and retrograde. This critique came from a position of social dominance and/or a desire to mark class distinction. A mix of Mexican Americans,

Mexican co-residents, and Anglos, the boisterous group confided that earlier in the evening they had been drinking at one of the tourist lounges in Reynosa (Mexico). This was a ritual they, as many as 20, indulged in every other football Friday. They would drink until the end of happy hour and totter into the stands "whenever." When asked if they ever got caught or reprimanded, one of them announced, "we are the good kids," and as such teachers and administrators offered a bit of license. According to one student whom I interviewed later, their capital came either from their family's high social class, participation in school clubs, and/or their own high academic achievement.

(Of course, many of the students participating in the Friday night activities also held the same high status.)

As Bourdieu’s extensive work on the body, class, and social practice has shown, different classes, and the factions within them, have distinct (though never fixed or universal) orientations toward the body. The middling and upper classes participate in sporting activities that are essentially “hygienic,” individualistic, profitable in the long term (in that one is “fit” or can “network”), and exclusive, that is, requiring some 155

measure of economic or cultural capital to participate. They treat the body as an "end in itself." The working classes on the other hand tend to congregate around team and spectator sports with an orientation towards the body that values strength and endurance. It is an "instrumental" relation to the body. What sorts of sports these relatively elite students participated in, I do not know. What was clear was that they did not value the strenuous sportive rites and drills that consumed so much of the community. (Bourdieu 1978:834; 1984)

Conspicuously missing from the playing field (but not from other activities) were

Valley Anglos. This not to say that they do not participate at all; some Anglo players remain. But, clearly, the Valley has seen a steady decline since the 1970s. At some games I attended there were none at all. The situation is curious because football thrives in majority Anglo communities elsewhere in the state; in fact, Anglo suburban schools dominate in the playoffs and band competitions. Nor has there been a mass exodus of

Anglos from the Valley; the proportion of Anglos to Mexicans, about 1 to 5, has not changed drastically.

Most people shrugged their shoulders when asked about the departure of

Anglos from the game. A retired teacher, whose father was Anglo and mother Tejana, offered up (with hushed circumspection) a theory. "I've thought about this and I wonder if a lot of Anglos have a problem getting excited about a bunch of Mexican kids

156

running around. Our town, our team, rah, rah, but then they look around and realize, 'it ain't us'--if you know what I mean."

Another group expressed disdain for the Friday night performances but from the opposite side of the social spectrum. Like the happy hour set, they also imbibed in alcohol and other drugs before the game; students called them the "'chucos" or "chukes"

(from pachucos); coaches called them "the lowlifes." They called themselves "raza" or

"vatos." This group almost always came from the lowest rungs of the working class. And people associated them with gangs, drug use and peddling—a stereotype to which to which they often lived up. One coach described them as "barrio kids who are getting into trouble, who are in gangs or are heading down the wrong path. La vida. [The life.]

We have had success with some of them, but it is not common." Coach added that some of the Lowlife "bad boy" energy would translate mightily to football. "Some of these guys would be 'headhunters'," an appellation reserved for the most aggressive defensive players.

My limited fieldwork and focus on performance gave me little contact with the lowlifes. Because they simply opted out of the high school popularity game, one had to really seek them out. These students were not exactly marginalized; more accurately, they rejected the hegemonic boundaries drawn by high social status students and the teachers and parents who lavished attention on them. In this sense the lowlifes are analogous to the "hoods" in Sherry Ortner's ethnography of a 1950's high school class, 157

and the "vatos" in Douglas Foley's ethnography of a South Texas high school. By not playing the popularity game, Ortner writes, low capital students like the hoods, vatos, and lowlifes "reversed the agency conferred by the power of high capital [vested in

"jocks," cheerleaders, etc.] and rejected the system that tried to reject them." (Foley 1990;

Ortner 2003:118-20)

Foley also found that the vatos were not so much marginalized as oppositional.

He found a competition of sorts between the jocks and vatos for the claim to superior manliness. While there was tension, both groups seemed to have an unspoken, qualified respect for the other. The vatos may have been anti-sports and certainly anti- authority, but they attended and even relished football games. They went to meet girls from neighboring towns, and to brawl. "As the players battled on the field, they battled on the sidelines. They were another kind of warrior that established North Town's community identity and territoriality through the sport of fighting over and chasing young women." To the vato sports were kid's stuff; drinking, brawling, challenging authority, and pursuing women were moves of real men. (1990:56)

In the course of my fieldwork I did meet one lowlife who had crossed over and joined the football team. We'll call him Chuy. Though he didn't play much, Chuy claimed to enjoy the sport, camaraderie, and travels. His being on the team had not hurt his standing among his peers. They teased him by barking his name at awkward moments during pep rallies, but Chuy felt that these acts were displays of pride, not 158

contempt. Chuy might have been a football player, but he could never fully cross the line over to jockhood, he explained. His mexicano manhood would simply not allow him to stoop to wearing a jockstrap. This article he referred to as a "calzón de puta" or "whore panties," (to the raucous delight of his more Americanized teammates) (Chuy 1996).

Whatever their critical differences or revulsions, Valley football’s dissenters are rarely able to boycott the spectacle altogether. In this rural and semi-urban scape, football is just too garish and ripe of a fruit to ignore. And isn’t differential and oppositional identity dependent on the presence of the other, after all?

* * *

The teams break from calisthenics and gather into specialized platoons of receivers, defensive line, offensive backfield, etc. As squads run through drills, fans get the opportunity to size up opponents. They seek out the star player they've read about in newspapers, fan magazines, and now websites. They peruse the program, check height, weight, and experience. They keep tabs of errors, catches, and dropped balls.

They imagine the matches to come: their pair of lanky receivers against our smaller but hard-hitting defenders, our nimble quarterback against their big but lethargic defensive linemen. Our veteran coaching staff--paunchy, wise, and conservative--against their younger, anxious, but successful crew. They script episodes, showdowns, happy endings, paybacks.

159

The varying styles of play add to the drama and intrigue. Some schools play a passing game, for example, others run a volatile 'run and gun' offense. A few others stick to a relatively conservative 'power football'. There are many permutations.

Each style of play demands certain preparations and talent. Dynamic offenses like the 'run and gun' require quickness and superb ball-handling skills, while 'power football' is built on heft and strength. Though risky, the pitches and quick and frequent passes of the 'run and gun' can quickly gobble up yards. In power ball the offense pounds at the opponent's core with relatively simple, blunt plays. If one keeps the ball moving and in possession eventually one will reach the goal, break a big run, or surprise defenders--drawn closer and closer to the line of scrimmage--with the long pass, the logic goes. In some cases, a school's style or philosophy of play remains entrenched for decades. For example, Edinburg and McAllen played a conservative running game for many years, while the Eagles of Mission have played the pass since the days of Tom

Landry, their most famous alumnus.

As with any cultural production performed with consistency over time, a town or coach's style of play becomes storied--part of the tracery of folklore, memory, and place. As the participant learns the calculus, the wrinkles and possibilities, and comes to understand how a particular coach, team, or athlete performs and finesses them, he or she gains competence (a common-sense knowledge) as a participant. She/he enters a readership and/or makes what Arjun Appadurai calls a “community of sentiment,” sharing memory, symbols, and pleasure (1996:8). The mess of arms, legs, pads, and

160

maneuvers is simultaneously: a game of chess writ large, an affective structure, a representation of community, and a folklore. Padre Nacho, a Catholic priest who follows the hapless Cardinals of La Villa, comments on this interplay and fusion: "[El futbol] se mete dentro de uno. Para sacarlo es dificil. ¿Pues, es una cosa muy bonita compartir con la comunidad, no ?" (Football “gets inside of one. Once stricken, it's difficult to shed it.

Well, sharing with the community is a lovely thing, is it not?")7 Thus, for the competent observer and participant, style of play is more than mere technique or strategy, it signifies within a broader a poetics and in this way contributes to the inscription and expression of place.

I encountered such communities of sentiment in my ethnographic fieldwork and in my own experience growing up on Garza Street in Edinburg. Drawn to an open car hood or any home improvement project of significance, the men on our block often gathered in the evenings to talk and joke and lend a hand. Together with stories about the military and ventures north to work as migrant farm laborers, as most of them had done in their youth, they talked about sports.

Like sports talk elsewhere, discussions focused on notable athletes and games, peaks and valleys, miracles and tragedies. A conversation might pit Muhammed Ali against Cuban heavyweight Teófilo Stevenson in a hypothetical Cold War supermatch, or more routinely, report on the fortunes of the local American Legion baseball team.

The Dallas Cowboys and Coach Tom Landry, who had played and coached just down the road in the town of Mission, were perennial topics. And with a couple of coaches, an

161

assistant principal, and several young athletes living on the block, there was plenty of talk about high school football. It ranged from the mundane to the lyrical and cinematic:

“The ball popped right out when Román, el gordito que vende insurance, stuck the guy right in the numbers. Le sacó el aire al vato. I catch it and look up--open field! Y en chingas como Earl Campbell. No me pudieron quechar.” In another era, I suppose, these

Tejanos would have talked about horses, cattle, cockfights, and the heroics chronicled in the corridos.8

Come April they assessed the spring training and scrimmage, and speculated on the starting roster. Towards the end of summer they made predictions and thumbed through team and district profiles in thick fan magazines like Bill Rhyne’s South Texas

Football and Dave Campbell’s Texas Football. In the fall, those who could not make ‘away games’ gathered on patios or around tailgates and listened to the game on AM radio.

Sometimes things would get sober. They’d talk about the frequent, almost ritualistic, brawls that broke out between Anglo and Mexican players in their day. One hour Anglo and Mexican comprised the proverbial, well-oiled machine, the next they were brawling toughs split by race and resentment. They talked about the frustration of being sidelined, while Anglo teammates took the limelight. They talked about being spurned by college recruiters who ignored nonwhite talent.

Inevitably, someone would recreate a scene where racism had reared its ugly head. Showered and sharply dressed, the team walks into this nice restaurant.

Management then tells coach that they cannot not the serve Mexican and/or black

162

athletes. They'd be glad to serve them something in the kitchen, however. Then coach, an Anglo good ol’ boy with a flat-top had let them have it, and the team would walk away as one.

Sports discourse on this Hank Hillian street of modest ranch houses and impeccable lawns offered a place or schema of sorts to teach about privilege and social advancement. It initiated talk about Anglo-Tejano relations, the friendships, loyalties, and disappointments. It provided a space wherein men like my father could encourage and praise hard work, manliness, and strength in a common idiom--clichéd and homiletic to be sure--but effective nonetheless.

It was not only that these parents shared a local rite or common experience with their children. There was also something in the sportive act itself that lent itself to teaching, remembering, and making sense of things. After all, however commodified and violent, sports like racing, football, and boxing remain richly symbolic representations--tangible models for, fairness, luck, and determination, and struggle.

I remember one of our fathers saying, “No había feria ni pa’ comprar una pelota, pero

‘amá nos hizo una beisbol de calcetines viejos y pegamento.” (“There wasn’t enough change for us to even buy a baseball, but mom made one out of old socks and glue.) And when one of their children complained about tough practices or rehearsals in the heat, one would inevitably say, “Mira, cabrón, el ‘workout’ de nosotros era con el pinche azadón!”(“Look here you goat, OUR workout was with the damned hoe!”) It was their version of the I-walked-five-miles-to-school narrative, I suppose. Even though they

163

chastened and joked, these parents who hailed from poor and working-class families and who now enjoyed the comforts of middle-class life (by Valley standards) got some pleasure from watching their children “work out” in the South Texas sun and weight rooms. It was not that the playing fields were proxies to cotton fields, nor that they truly believed that playing linebacker or high-kicking on the drill team would hatch the next

Henry or Sandra Cisneros, but it was a good-enough simulation of work that reaped social benefits. In some ways their view echoed those of the 19th century. Modernity and prosperity had softened the boy. Vigorous sport hardened him.

The Fans

Earlier, I discussed how lax urban planning and a fast-growing population have resulted in a haphazard pattern of residential development in the Valley. The pattern has brought sprawl, aesthetic degradation, and has exacerbated the growth of colonias, impoverished, unicorporated, residential developments that lack basic infrastructure and often lie in flood plains. However, laissez faire development has also had some unforeseen salutary effects, however. The area’s middle class and elite developments are not spatially-disengaged suburban ‘havens’ with separate public and educational facilities (to the fear and lament of some). The poor, rich, and middling, the Anglo,

Mexican American, and Mexican immigrant are never far from one another in the

Valley. And because private schooling options are few, schools are socio-economically and ethnically much more diverse than in other metropolitan areas. To look into the stands is to see this cross-section of Valley society--with the few qualifiers listed earlier.9

164

As is to be expected, students and participants’ parents make up a large percentage of the fan body. Though vocal, they are a transient pool--returning to their television sets as soon as their cohort graduates. Many fans have no immediate scholastic or familial ties, however. Some go out of boredom, routine. Others, like merchants, teachers, and clergy, attend out of obligation to their patrons and charges.

Some are drawn by technical interests in some genre or other of the spectacle. They assess, critique, and spew commentary--they know; they, too, wore the uniform. They go to remember.

Then there is the “hard core.” These are fans who hold an intense and particularized knowledge of team, game, and history. The core is also made up of those who have cultivated intense affective bonds with team and fans. All fans read and make the popular culture; hardcore fans, according to John Fiske, are simply “excessive” readers and “enunciators” (1992).

The hard core enjoys a certain status. You’ll find them congregated in the seats closest to the fifty-yard line; these they’ll hold for decades and will even bequeath to heirs. Each town has a few notables. Mercedes has Oscar “La Grandota” Gonzalez;

Nicki Rowe High has Víctor; La Joya has El Coyote Mayor. I grew up with “La Mamá de los Gatos” (“The Momma Cat") of Edinburg. In her prime years of the 1970s and

1980s, La Mamá’s husky, booming voice drove the fear of God into the coaches and players and rallied the crowd with her porras (gibes) and calls to battle. At the last

165

Edinburg High game I attended in the late 1990s, I saw an aged Mamá observing quietly from a wheelchair platform.

The fan can turn ugly. The coaches are “una bola de pendejos,” he’ll yell, (“a bunch of dumbasses,”) She’ll single out the player who messed things up, who’s slumped on the bench head in hands, and chastise. When victorious he’ll use the filial pronoun we; in defeat the team becomes they. For the most part, however, the fan shows restraint when things go wrong. She might even manage to say something in support, “No se agiten, defense. No se agiten!” (“Don’t get down on yourself, defense. Don’t get down!”)

While coaches and directors sometimes tire of the fan's gaze (I met a matronly fan who had drawn astrological charts for all the starters and coaches on her home team, for example), they tend to hold respect and fondness for these stalwarts. After all, they follow the team through fair and foul. They will assemble along the practice field fence on occasional afternoons and watch the progress. If duty calls, they’ll camp out for tickets during the playoffs or drive three or four hours north to buy from the opponent's box office. (One fellow makes a ten-hour roundtrip drive from Austin every other weekend to watch the Bears of PSJA High.) They will take time to phone in rants or send letters, food, flowers, and invitations. They might proffer small and seasonal jobs for student-athletes or cut coach a discount at the radiator repair shop or panadería. If their town and team are insulted, they'll talk back, even brawl. (I saw my own parents pick a fight once!) And, as we’ll see after the game, some footballers will even compose heroic ballads, corridos, for town, team, or coach.

166

* * *

In the distance vehicles continue to stream onto the pastures-cum-parking lots.

People crowd the gates and concessions. Moths, junebugs, and children flit everywhere.

As fans await the kickoff, they exchange pleasantries and gripes, share a

Thermos or flask, and discuss who is missing, ailing, gaining weight, and so on. Seeing the abundance of handshakes, abrazos (hugs, back patting), and loud greetings, I am reminded of an observation made by folklorist Florence Scott in the early 20th century.

Valley Mexicans are "the greatest handshakers in the world," she wrote, somewhat snidely. "Even though the same person is encountered several times the same day, the performance must necessarily all be gone through again." (1923:77)

With cellular phones now in vogue, rival fans will even chat and banter while seated on opposite sides of the stadium.

"¿Oye, compadre, el animalón ése? El seventy-seven. ¿De donde lo sacaron?" "Es de los ranchos el huerco. Macizo! Pura tortilla y frijól, el cabrón."

"Hey, bud, that number seventy-seven, that beast? Now where did y'all find him?" "That boy's from out in the boonies, the ranches. Solid! The brute was raised on good ol’ tortillas and beans."10

At the gates and under the stands sundry school groups peddle, usher, and patrol; it is a scene duplicated across football America. Toothy cheerleaders spring onto the field, chant a staccato greeting to visitors, then tumble away. A student government representative delivers a florid welcome to students, parents, and citizens of the planet.

Another student delivers a Christian prayer--the Constitution and Supreme Court of the

167

United States of America be damned. Student diplomats, representatives from student government and the largest school organizations, meet mid-field to greet one another, shake hands, and hug, perhaps. Hosts present their guests with a wooden key to the school or city, and/or cute tokens like a rubber dog bone or stuffed animal. Envoys will shuttle back and forth throughout the game. They will meet and greet students and perform upbeat cheers--a cheer rooting for the opponent, for example. A stark counterpoint to the maneuvers on the field itself, this junior diplomacy intends to generate good will, display graciousness, cultivate ‘leadership’, keep restless students occupied, and stymie potential violence (large student fights do break out on occasion).

* * *

Beneath the stands adults try to maneuver through darting children, packs of boys, clutches of girls, and young couples promenading.11 Children and adolescents wear the generalized clothing of global youth culture--a chain-store bought, hip-hop or preppy look--pick one, pocked with logos. Adults stick to fan garb and casual and western (“cowboy”) clothes, but a few women have broken from the pack. They’ve taken long knit shirts and decorated them with acrylic paints and baubles from the hobby superstore. One woman has painted a football helmet with her son’s name and number. Another has made a snarling cat with glass eyes. A wasp with a twinkling, erect stinger threatens from another woman’s belly. At the stadium two towns over a stout couple dons shirts that read Puro Bear! (“Bear to the core”) in fancy Old

English/cholo script.

168

Concessions do a brisk business. Volunteer parents, students, and teachers peddle hot dogs, peanuts, sodas, nachos, pickles, and that Tex-Mex delicacy, the "Frito

Pie." (Frito chips in the bag, smothered in chili and cheese).

The 1990s also saw corporate fast food and border Mexican folk foods like fajita tacos and barbacoa (beef skirt steak and beef head barbecue, respectively). While the penetration of the corporate is to be expected, the presence of folk fare--tortillas filled with fajitas and barbacoa--is a bit surprising. On the one hand, these offal meats are delicious and popular foods, but on the other they index poverty and degradation for older mexicanos. According to the folklorist Mario Montaño, these are foods that have been "stigmatized by the dominant culture and associated with a nutritionally inferior group of people who were considered gastronomically polluted." (1992:213)

The consumption of folk foods shows that the signification of offal meats (and

Mexican-American, working-class culture as a whole) is now more manifold than ever.

Fajitas, barbacoa, and menudo (a spicy stew of tripe, pig's feet, and hominy) still index

Mexicanness, and perhaps poverty and degradation in some sectors, but they also smack of ethnic vigor. Take the case of Santa Rosa, a rural town surrounded by sorghum and sugarcane fields. At Midnight Madness, a pre-season event where the community comes out to meet and assess the troops, menudo features prominently. The Warriors and their fans eat menudo, not because they can afford nothing else (hot dogs are just as cheap), but because, as the old Chicano saw goes, it is “the breakfast of champions.”12

169

110%: The Pep Talk

The rumble of drums and drone of the p.a. seep through the field house’s concrete walls. The room stews with anxiety and promise. Like ship's engines switched on below deck, the energy is suddenly palpable.

Coaches prime the starters. They look them in the eye; get up in their face. "I want you to hurt somebody!" The third stringers offer their own encouragement, "You the man! You the man!"

With furrowed brows and fierce gazes, they pace, adjust their gear, strike each other's shoulder pads with clenched fists. They speak with force and optimism. That the football game is a simulation of war, that players are proxy warriors has been said countless times. To look at their armor, the drugged gaze of determination, not to mention the sanctioned, controlled violence of the football venture itself, is to prove the cliché right.

Each team has its rituals, chants, dances, and songs. Some blast raucous anthemic music. For example, the Yellow Jackets of Edcouch-Elsa play AC-DC's "Back in Black" --the team colors being yellow and black. Others simply huff and puff short chants. The team then gathers in a tight circle, each player kneeling with hands and arms interlocked. Team leaders speak a few sentences, then the head coach speaks. The talk is straightforward and predictable:

A wise man once said, “the harder I work, the luckier I get.” Think about that. “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” I believe we have worked VERY hard. Huh, linemen? Think about the off-season, the two-a-days

170

in August when you thought you’d die. So, I've got a pretty good feeling about tonight. We have worked. BUT...

There are a lot of people who have come out to see you. You saw them out there, waving their little red towels. You've seen the stores and cars painted up. The racket from the pep rally is still echoing in our heads. I’m glad these folks have come out to see us. Great! But THEY can’t win OUR game. Filter out that noise. It’s time to play.

Most of you will never be stronger, faster, tougher than you are right now, right here, tonight. You will be smarter, wiser, richer--God-willing, but not stronger or younger. Think about what I’m saying, guys. You will remember these days for the rest of your life--FOREVER. It’s something very special you have right now. Strength, speed, ganas [will/desire], brotherhood, and the pride of knowing that nobody has handed you anything. Now, don't cheat yourself out of what you've worked for, and what you deserve. And don't cheat your brothers here by missing your assignments or feeling sorry for yourself. We are ready. We are ready. Now let's walk out there like champions. Like the team we know we are.13

If coach is blessed with a strong and proven squad, he urges the athletes to focus on execution and grab the lead immediately. With the weak team, coach is pragmatic.

He wears the face of the optimist, but he’s frank. The team needs to “hold them,”

“needs to stay in the game," he says soberly.

When there is a lot at stake, or when the team's "psych" is off, coach might dig into his bag of tricks. He'll mention an obnoxious phone call received from their shameless opponent. Or he might produce a letter from Mrs. G., “you know Mrs. G. guys,” the diehard, but bless-her-heart, quite sick fan who owns the bowling alley. She apologizes for not being able to attend the game, the letter says, but will listen on the radio. “She says, you fight them tough, dogs!”14

171

Richard Avila, a co-captain on the 1961 Donna Redskin state champion team, tells a story of a memorable motivational speech given by Coach B.J. La Prade. As he tells it, the Redskins were traveling north to play the Bulldogs of Sweeny (near Houston) in the playoffs. Sportswriters had called the game a gross mismatch, with perpetual powerhouse Sweeny picked to roll past Donna. According to Avila, Coach La Prade walked onto the train car and said, "Boys, I’ve just been handed this here telegram. It comes from Sweeny, Texas. Ol' La Prade took a breath and started reading. 'Meskins cannot play football. Stop. They're too small and weak. Stop. Meskins are just a bunch of chili-eating taco vendors. Stop. They CANNOT play football."

The little Zimmerman Telegram incensed both Mexican and Anglo Redskins alike. The team tore onto the field and beat a stunned Sweeny. "To this day," Avila mused, "I don't know if that telegram was real or not.” (1997)

Playing

A spray of shiny helmets rouses the 12,000+ fans. The players line up, hold their hands over their hearts, and mouth the “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When the band plays their alma mater, players hold hands and lift their arms. These rites are sober and somewhat sentimental. At high-stakes games and at the end of the season, one sees big, mean boys and grizzled men shed a tear for school and country.

The players make their way to opposite field goal posts, gather in a knot, then rip through large paper signs painted with slogans and cartoons of mascots battling, butchering, and wincing in pain. Bands blast fight songs and fans yell and collectively

172

perform the hand and arm gestures universal to modern sports spectatorship. On the sidelines the squad convenes yet again, and coach gives one last verbal crank. The starting squads take to the field; an official signals the initiation of play. The ball flips through the air, here, and in every other sky in Texas.

* * *

Athleticism in high school football is not stellar. While the best Texas squads are capable of trampling some college teams (as some did in the early unregulated years), the schoolboy game is halting and sloppy in comparison to the professional and quasi- pro university game. Sure, there are gifted athletes, and intermittent displays of virtuosity, but as Winningham and Reinert noted in the rich photo-documentary, Rites of

Fall: High School Football in Texas, "It's hard to tell brilliant improvisations from simple accidents; everything looks ad-libbed." (1979:140)

But looks are deceiving. An 'offensive drive' to the opponent's goal line--even the execution of a single play--is a complex undertaking involving many performers, and actions. For example, within a thirty-second window, coaches will discuss and choose a play (the ‘move’ the offense chooses to make), then communicate it to the players on the field, who will then set up and execute it. No other sport demands such minute specialization and ‘division of labor’.

Typically, the play originates in an exchange between the head coach and one or two offensive coaches who stand perched on a platform above the press box. (Some squads keep as many as five or six coaches or assistants above. It is not uncommon for

173

assistants to consult databases on laptop computers and to feed statistics to the play- caller.) Using a 'headset', a rig with an earphone and microphone, the coaches above discuss options with coaches below. They speak in a quick, clipped code. Depending on experience and competencies, either the head coach or offensive coordinator calls the play.

Each has his own approach, but most work more or less like veteran coach

Robert Alaniz of Edinburg North. Alaniz begins constructing and rehearsing his play- calling performance on Saturday, six days before the game. First, he reviews videotapes, notes, and diagrams that his scouts have collected and that other coaching staffs have traded. He spends the day studying and brainstorming, alone and with staff. He looks for soft spots, patterns, and propensities. What are their most effective formations? What sort of surprises might they pull? What are they expecting from us? On Sunday he repeats the ritual and begins drafting a suite of plays. (1998)

On Monday and Tuesday the team learns the new material and runs through the core repertoire. Using the junior varsity as tackling dummies, the squad repeats and tunes, repeats and tunes, until it can run the new plays without a hitch. On Wednesday night coach returns to the game films. As he watches, he practices making calls. “What would I throw at them here?” As the hours pass, strategies and visions pop in and out of his head. A song playing on the commute home might inspire a flash of bravado. A meal of fideo con pollo and a Seinfeld rerun might affirm a gut feeling--stick with what works. A meeting with the booster club might shed light on problems; an injury might

174

call for adjustments. But there is only so much prognostication one can do; in the end one just has to wait and see what the opponent throws.

By Friday coach is ready. “In the game situation, play-calling is second nature.

Three or four plays pop into my head. I quickly decide on one. I might then run it past an assistant, and then I call it. More often than not, it is an effective call.”

The play having been chosen, the head coach delivers it to a player who shuttles it in to the squad. The players stand in two rows, holding hands. The quarterback repeats the play. If time allows he adds special instructions and gives 'the call', the secret and variable one-two-three-hut cadence that will launch the move.

They approach the line as quickly as their level of exhaustion and morale allow .

As the offense prepares to launch the play, the defenders quickly adjust formations according to a calculus that accounts for the down (the number of attempts the team has left: four, three, two, or one); time left for play; yardage needed for the offense to win four new attempts (a ‘first down’), and the type of play most likely to be run (inside run, outside run, short pass, long pass, etc.). In the few seconds before the ball is snapped, the defense works to distract and confuse with shifting formations and threats of blitzes.

In this brief pause when both sides are lined up facing one another, each squad attempts to make the other 'jump' and receive a penalty. The defense does this by making abrupt movements, the offense by suddenly changing the tempo of the call. For example, after having lulled the defenders with a series of identical sing-songy calls that have launched the play on the fifth syllable, a play will suddenly launch on the sixth

175

syllable. When this ploy is successful, and it often is, Pavlov’s Dog jumps, makes contact, and thus receives a penalty.15

The excruciating repetition required to synchronize bodies and orchestrate plays and the grammar and logic of an offensive or defensive strategy--especially in single high school towns where coaches introduce 6th grade players to the logic of play they will employ in the far-off future of the varsity, leave a lasting but latent mark on the athlete. As William McNeil stated earlier, precision drills bond individuals together.

Those bonds, housed in nonverbal body memory, can be long-lived--complemented and shuffled through with more discernible and conventional sportive images, tropes, and narratives. In other words to engage in this highly choreographed corporeal experience is to be changed.

* * *

The play itself unfolds quick as a car wreck. One instant, players crouch anxiously--teeth knawing mouth guard, cleats dug into the turf, the next bodies surge, clash, wrestle, and roll. “An instant of pure potentiality,” the anthropologist Victor

Turner called it, “when everything trembles in the balance.” (1974: 75)

Only after the play has ended does the contestant begin to fully grasp what it was that transpired: He looks for the ball. He looks to the great rack of fans for a clue.

Gain, loss, penalties? More often than not, a play or series of plays does not yield points.

Because of this, squads and players convene, reconvene, and shuttle on and off the field constantly. In fact, in the forty-eight minutes of play, there are only some eight or ten

176

minutes of real, full-bore action. The rest of the time is spent plotting and recovering.

Football is “committee meetings, called huddles, separated by outbursts of violence,” the columnist George Will quipped famously; “it mirrors modern life.” (1976:72)

Half-time Pep Ta lks

The locker room echoes with clipped, enthusiastic comments and the clank of helmets and pads chucked off.

Not having played a down, half of the squad stands fresh and clean. If the offense can build up a better lead, these understudies will get their chance. The starters are covered in sweat, grass clippings, dirt, and streaks of blood. Steam rises off their shoulders.

Because the team is performing well, the coaches work gently with the players.

Like boys showing calves at the county livestock show, they smile and pat the players' shoulders and necks. The usually staid coaches now call their top performers “baby,”

"mister,” and “mi’jo” (“my son”).

They fill whiteboards with x's and o's, wedges, and sweeping arrows. A pair of coaches who have been working the platform atop the press box share their unique bird's-eyed insights. As they review snags, problems and draft solutions, the staff is careful not to create new ones. The ritual of 'chalk talk' deals with the rudiments of controlling the ball. It exposes problems and opportunities, offers patches and solutions, but most importantly, it insures players that management holds the formula for winning.

177

* * *

The losing team's locker room is not a pleasant place. The boys mumble and whine quietly, if they dare speak at all. They stare down into their cups of Powerade and wait. You smell distress. Everything is wrong.

The hive goes silent when coach steps into the room. He pauses, collects his thoughts, and unleashes what one player will later call “a royal ass-chewing.”

As he speaks, he locks in and stares too long. A branding iron of a vein burns on his temple. His speech is a hell ride with peaks and valleys. It wanes into raspy-voiced, preacherly appeals, and ends with a fusillade of blunt, magisterial demands. There is no crude language, no flying clipboards, no wringing of necks. That is, with rare exception, the stuff of Hollywood and legend.

Scratching his jowls, pacing here, there, pausing, coach peers into the future. He describes the eternal misery of the bus ride home after losing to “goddanged _____ of all teams!” And everyone will pay, he promises. Coaches will get phone calls from angry fans and parents. Be they at church, the WalMart, or the Whataburger, people will serve up complaints and volunteer advice--everyone's an expert! And on Monday morning, he seethes, “those guys who don’t have the COURAGE to wear these proud colors that I myself wore in 1961, 62, and 63 are gonna be making wisecracks in the hallways. You show them who fights for this school!"

The boys alternate between looking up respectfully and staring down at their shoelaces, the waxed concrete floor, the dirt under fingernail, the honeycomb weave in a

178

nylon jersey—anything but the chief’s eyes. With arms crossed, the assistants stand chomping on tobacco, sunflower seeds, gum; they’ll get their talking-to later.

Though miserable and sheepish, the boys seem to almost welcome coach’s exhortations. They know the team is rudderless. They want to win, they want their thousands of hours of preparation to pay off. Mom, dad, brother, grandma, girlfriend-- the whole world is watching! And what to do with this passionate broken man who stands before them?

Coach catches his breath and pauses. "Start spreading the news!," the public address squawks, echoes, and the brassy bars of "New York, New York" kick in.

"The coaches and I have met," he says. "Here's how we're gonna get this baby firing on all her cylinders." The team pulls closer.

Homecoming

The stands are an anthill, the locker room a foundry, but the field is sweetness and light. It’s Homecoming. The “court” arrives in Chrysler convertibles. As the nominees for king, queen, class dukes, duchesses, and other “ladies in waiting” glide by, the emcee calls out names and achievements:

“The Duke-elect of the junior class. Mr. Eric Padilla, son of Mr. and Mrs. Willy

Mac Padilla, is a member of the National Honor Society, the varsity basketball team...”

“Miss Tiffany Renee Flores, daughter of Judge Epi Flores and Ms. María Luisa

Lambert, is junior captain of the Dancin’ Belles, a debutante of the Alhambra....”

179

“Miss Bailey Johnston is junior editor of El Sol, a district champion high jumper....”

The band serenades with a muted “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

Honorees walk through a phalanx of flag and rifle corps and Junior-ROTC cadets. One fellow wears his grass-stained football uniform. The other males wear suits, the women slinky cocktail dresses. In a bold move one Javi, the Duke-elect of the

Freshman class, strides out wearing an aubergine tuxedo with tails, top hat, and cane.

As he approaches the ladies of the court, Duke Javi pauses, removes his hat, bows, and punctuates with a cane twirl. Needless to say, he is a hit.

A mish-mash of beauty pageants, debutante balls, and county fair queen contests, the ceremony is simultaneously fancy and modest: a wire pergola with plastic flowers decorates the stage, the women teeter on high heels, the men fidget, bugs perch on rhinestone scepters, and clipboarded, walkie-talkied teachers rush the stunningly attractive honorees along. The pageant takes all of nine minutes.

In the collegiate homecoming, alumni and students reflect on and renew ties to their school. The rite includes pilgrimages to the campus, football games, parties, mixers, and the coronation of the homecoming king and queen. While most colleges have dropped, de-emphasized, or inverted the coronation (at Rice University students elect pets, bearded Nobel Laureates, appliances, and male staff for homecoming queen, for example), high school students and teachers in the smaller towns and on this border still take the event somewhat seriously. Perhaps it is that the caustic, postmodern

180

irony/unease that so defined middle-class American youth culture in the 1990s (the whole Generation X fabulation) never quite took hold in the Valley. And because coronations are a commonplace at fairs, holiday celebrations, and civic clubs in Mexico, it may be that the large immigrant population finds a congruous rite, symbol, and marker of distinction in the Texas-style homecoming.

Like the college homecoming, the high school ritual draws alumni for class reunions and dances, but the event is primarily for the entertainment of students. For many of them, it is a rite of initiation into the high school experience and economy.

Many students date for the first time at homecoming, for example. Though not as expensive and commercialized as the prom, students do splurge on stretch limousines, elaborate “mum” corsages, special dinners, motel rooms, and alcohol.

The homecoming ritual recognizes and installs social popularity and normative beauty (though honorees are of a variety of skin color and phenotype.) The majority of students view the pageant with ambivalence. They will loudly declare their admiration and burning lust for certain attractive peers, but will lambaste others for uncertain, idiosyncratic reasons. They will declare that the coronation is “really lame” and “way stupid,” but agree that, yes, Robert Ray and Lourdes “really deserve” to be king and queen.

There is little visible protest, however.16 Sure, there is heckling, but at high school events there is always heckling. At the homecoming dance, a same-sex couple might create a stir on occasion. But, for the most part, dances hold true to the status quo,

181

and in the Valley and small-town Texas high school it is staunchly heterosexual. While conservative in matters of gender, it should be noted that dating between Anglos,

Mexican Americans, and Mexicans of the same class is now common and accepted. When there are objections, they tend to come from segments of the Anglo population that came of age before the socio-political reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s, unassimilated

Anglos newly arrived from the north, and Mexican elites who co-reside in the Valley or send their American-born children to U.S. schools as day students.

Good Game

The clock ticks down. Fans hoot and moan as the announcer calls out neighboring town scores. The rival two towns over has seen a hard-fought match. The score 21-20; the climax a blocked extra-point attempt in the last seconds. That loss puts the district title up for grabs.

Here, we saw an unexciting, lopsided contest. A night of obstacles and frustrations for the losing team, all they could muster were two field goals, six points.

The winning team waltzed. They managed 42 points, and everyone got a chance to play.

The victors talk about what’s next. There’s the homecoming dance, who’s going?

There’s a "kegger" over on Sugar Road; all-you-can-eat chicken wings at Foghorn’s; and

Mrs. Cavazos has made menudo, everyone’s invited, no drinking.

* * *

182

Ubiquitous, popular, predictable, quaint, at first glance Valley football might seem about as complex and dynamic as a snow globe. But while bureaucracy, standardization, and myriad rules limit invention, students and spectators do not and cannot blindly adhere to predetermined templates for meaning-making. A fan or participant’s goals, competencies, and expectations are ever-changing; a team’s prospects sink and rise; the social world ‘outside’ of the Friday night chronotope pushes and pulls, diffracts, imbues; and a sign/symbol’s currency and power (the sweet, perma-smiling majorette or the muscular, publicly-tested-through-athletics male body, or the ethnic make up of a team) waxes, wanes, or drifts. The point is that meaning, especially within large multi-sited and multi-genred productions like the one we have here, is indefinite, in solution. To underscore play and subjectivity, however, is not to say that certain values, identifications, or tropes are not salient or persistent in a given space, moment, or season. Fragmented and contradictory as conciousness may be, people--even these fabled/theorized borderlands postmoderns--make sense of things.

With this in mind the ethnograopher has sought to inscribe those cultural elements that are in high relief while also drawing attention to the minor and ephemeral, that stuff which is palpable but evasive, what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling.”17

It is to write a poetics of performance and culture--a sense of how sport and spectacle animates the local; how it means, but also half-means or just plain feels, as it is rehearsed, enacted, circulated, and remembered. (Bakhtin 1968 (1965); Turner 1974; Williams

1977:128-33; Stewart 1996:69-72)

183

Another aim is to illuminate the quotidian--that white noise, that broth that gives flavor to and draws flavor from those signs, memories, emotions, and performances that happen through it. We must remember that though we critics examine and understand culture with the ladder of theory and the benefit of hindsight, fans and actors are embedded in the field(s) of cultural production, and are, thus, distracted readers. They act/be, swim in the murk, without deep analysis or reflection. In the acute performance

(playing, dancing, marching), for example, actors enter what the psychologist Mihali

Csikszentmihalyi calls the “flow” state. In flow one does not stop to evaluate feedback.

One is aware of his/her actions, yet is so immersed in the experience as to be unaware of awareness itself. The actor is focused, conscious, but not self-conscious. (“Don’t think, just do it,” coaches bark in practice.) The spectator, on the hand, has more available epistemological ‘bandwidth’. She/he is free to graze on signs and texts, free to recline into memory, or ponder the workings of cultural things. And fans do do this. I have tried to represent these moments of reflection and microanalysis throughout this chapter. Still, many fans are distracted or indifferent meaning-makers. This is to say, after Bourdieu, that fans do what they do because, given the set of options, it is what makes sense, who knows and who cares why. (1982:38-48)

Of course, temporal and spatial distance (“nostalgia,” “perspective,”

“estrangement”) or disruption may reveal or amplify those dispositions and structures

(logical, ethical, and/or affective) that constitute(d) the quotidian, the habitus, or structures of feeling. Recall how the singer Selena’s murder in 1995 shocked into view,

184

into “mattering,” a Tejano/a imaginary, a community of sentiment, that up to that fateful day had lain cloaked under the candycoat of Tex-Mex pop--that other South

Texan popular giant. Recall, how America, the Chicano/a intelligentsia included, viewed, slack-jawed, the mourning Tejano masses and asked, “Who are these people?”

“What is this nerve we’ve struck?” Suddenly the trite had meaning. Which begs the question: would this popular and mundane text/feeling or onda remained concealed and ignored had a shot never been fired? Almost certainly.

In the case of this subject the fog never lifted to reveal some greater structure, some big answer, though several larger themes do course through. We see how the cultural production installs and reproduces social and gender hierarchies, for example.

We see how it displays and celebrates cultural citizenship, disciplined youth bodies, and institutional proxy and meta-parenting, even as it reveals emerging and potentially progressive formations and subjectivities. (The homecoming pageant may be vapid, outmoded, perhaps even oppressive, but what does it say that our queen is a dark- skinned daughter of immigrants?)

We also see how Mexican Americans perform and articulate a quintessentially

American and Texan popular culture in unique ways, but also, more interestingly-- considering the overemphasis on topographical difference in scholarship and the press, in familiar typical American fashion. In a National Geographic article on the Texas-Mexico border where Valley football culture features prominently, the author Richard Conniff was struck by this paradox, "Apart from almost every face in the stands, the players on

185

the teams, and the vast pantheon of band members, cheerleaders, mascots, and the

Dancing Belles, there was nothing especially Hispanic about the event. This was pure

Texas high school football." "[P]eople in the Valley," he adds, "often act more American than most ordinary Americans, mas tejano than the Texans." This fluency with things

American, this almost curatorial engagement with keenly American cultural forms like the marching band, should not strike us atypical of Hispanics. Instead, we need to seat such cultural forms--no longer emergent and curious--in our understanding of what is

American. This is a gesture to which I allude in this work's title: Red, Brown, and Blue.

(Conniff 1996:66,62)

Surely, the lack of a sharply delineated greater meaning will frustrate many readers; it frustrated me also. But this anti-interpretation is not rooted in coy experimentation or a theoretical tenet like post-structuralist indeterminacy, it simply recognizes that the spectacle is so enormous and various that any interpretation is necessarily highly-qualified and contingent. Is it a modern rite of passage as Geoff

Winningham and Al Reinert argued? Yes. Is it an All-American ritual that grants new kinds of agency to Mexican Americans while also reinforcing gender and class hierarchies, as Douglas Foley argued? Yes. Does a community's passion go too far-- chew and spit out athletes in the name of tradition unexamined, as in Buzz Bissinger's

Friday Night Lights? Sometimes. Is it a game that heaps the frustrations and nostalgias of adults onto the backs of muddling youth, as Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich

(film version) show? Yes, I found strains of these theses throughout. But by interjecting

186

small analyses, by pointing to moments of agency and resistance, by ruminating on the jouissance and corporeal processes that move the performance along, I have tried to give the reader a richly-textured representation from which they can draw their own conclusions. This is not to say that this description is mimetically pure--hardly. The reader must take my leads, cues, omissions, and artistic manipulations.

* * *

“Good game.”

“Good game.” The teams file past one another, tapping paws.

They gather with their respective squads and kneel. Cheerleaders, coaches, trainers, and a peppering of administrators, spouses, and parents gather round.

Everyone is tired, hungry, relieved.

Win or lose, coach always says some encouraging words. His voice is hoarse and sincere. “What happens on the field is just like life. That’s what I have learned. You have a downfall, you get beat? Hey, you’re gonna have downfalls in life! You’re gonna get beat sometimes. But hey, you know, you gotta get up! You gotta keep going! You learn from the struggles.”

“Our father who art in heaven,” a drenched, dirty player begins. “Hallowed be thy name,” the group latches on.

Winning fans mill about bouyantly. Veni, vidi, vici. Losers slink away. As they walk to their cars and wait in traffic, fans prepare for the taunts and jokes that friends,

187

family, and co-workers will launch in the coming hours and days. How to save face when one loses? What wisecrack to make when collecting a bet? What to wear to the office Monday morning; a somber black dress to express condolences? Oh, this is good!

Already, the cell phones are ringing.18

188

Part III: Verbal Arts and Folklore

Chapter Six: The Electronic Backyard Barbecue: Fans, Radio, and the Poetics of Place

Groups provide individuals with frameworks within which their memories are localised and by a kind of mapping...no collective memory can exist without reference to a socially specific framework...our memories are local. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember

McAllen, 10:15 p.m.

I have made my way to the studios of the KGBT and KIWW Puro Tejano radio stations to meet and observe Hugo de la Cruz, a veteran radio personality and the host of Football Scoreboard. Broadcast on both AM and FM bands, "Futbol Escorbord," as most listeners call it, is a scoreboard and talk radio program that focuses on the events of local football scene.

The show's format is simple. For the first half of the ninety-minute show, de la

Cruz calls out game scores and announces the big wins and upsets. In the second half of the show de la Cruz opens up the phone lines to la fanaticada, the fans. Out of hundreds of callers, only between 35 and 50 fans will make it on the air. They call from any number of places within the 5,000 square mile patchwork of vegetable fields, orchards, ranches, towns, colonias, and cities that constitute the listening area.

189

De la Cruz's style is boisterous and melodramatic and the score-calling and commentary float on a soundtrack of classic American marching and collegiate music.

The music calls up autumnal college scenes and foggy-breathed football—an exotic idyll in these semi-tropics. One also hears more indigenous music like the Southern standard

"The Cotton-eyed Joe" and Mexican patriotic and elegiac songs of place like "No te rajes

Jalisco" and "Guadalajara," (the latter is a Country & Western version rather than the typical mariachi). Where the collegiate music is background, the indigenous songs play without interruption. In the studio the songs give Hugo a chance to catch his breath and sort through scores. In the cars, backyard barbecues, and menudos, the songs wick old- fashioned Texan and Mexican essence into the experience.

Throughout the evening la fanaticada commiserate, celebrate, spar, set things straight, and just plain 'shoot the shit'. Hugo goads and incites with questions, comic sound effects, mischievously stated comments like "áaandale" ("there you go"), "Ai, dios"

(dear God), and "mira nomás" ("now, look at that"). And as a seasoned talk radio celebrity (he hosts a daily show called Ustéd Opina (Your Opinion)), he knows when he’s got a hot caller: the pedagogue, the cornball, the aged, the deluded, the melancholy, the wavering, the lottery winner, the crushed.

A cast of regulars enjoys entrée and generous time allotments. Some use their real names, while others go by "handles" or on-air personas. They are: El Coyote Mayor

(the Elder Coyote), El Padre Nacho (Father Nacho), La Grandota Oscar Gonzales (Oscar

190

Gonzales the Big One), El Bombero Atómico (The Atomic Fireman), Victor, La Coyotita

(The Little Coyote, feminine.), El Compadre Cali Carranza (The Co-father Cali

Carranza), La Tucana (The Toucan, feminine), El Guerrero (The Warrior), La Pantera

(The Panther), El Compadre Lionél Lozano (The Co-father Lionél Lozano).

Like the lesser lords who criss-cross through Shakespeare’s dramas, the regulars step forth and offer a pocketful of words. They propose strategy, deliver criticism and praise; they prop, hedge, and make necessary repairs to town/team ‘face’.

* * *

Trini Lozano, the show’s technical producer, shows me the studios and equipment, and explains the rules. The place is slick and modern, situated high in one of South Texas's tallest buildings. It is an architectural anomaly in a sea of plain structures. "It's like it's giving you the finger," I heard a local say.

The jockey deck sits before a wall of glass. Below, the strip is thick with teenage cruisers and indefatigable tourists from as a far away as Mexico City. On the far horizon one can see the lights of the large, industrial city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas. A few miles in and parallel to the Rio Grande, we see Highway 83. Where in the 19th century, the

Rio Grande had been the spine of settlement and commerce, the action is now along the freeway. Being the corridor upon which the bulk of football towns lie, in fan banter "El

83" is a character unto itself. Fans invoke it as a site of neighborliness, an agora of sorts, and also as a place of contest, a "palenque" (a cockfighting arena), as one corrido put it.

191

Football Scoreboard 's listening area straddles Highway 83 for over 100 miles. In

1990, the estimated radio-listening audience (12 years old and over) for the region was

684,300. The area has grown at a tremendous rate since then, unofficial estimates put the U.S. population at about 1,000,000. On the Mexican side of the Rio Gran de another million or so reside. How many Mexicans tune-in to this pocho carnival is difficult to calculate. While virtually all callers to the show mentioned their location, on the shows I reviewed no one ever mentioned el otro lado (the other side). Surely, there are "lurkers."1

(Broadcast & Cable Yearbook 1996)

Broadcast on both AM and FM bands, Football Scoreboard is the most popular show in its time slot of Friday, 10:00-11:30 PM, according to Arbitron, the media survey company. During the 1996 season the show celebrated 25 years on the air. Boston’s

Eddie Andelman is usually considered sports talk radio’s founding father, but Mr. Nifu

Nifa deserves equal recognition; he launched Football Scoreboard the same year.

(Arbitron: 1997; Haag 1996:454)

While sports talk radio, according to niche marketers and listener surveys, is a white male forum, Football Scoreboard ’s listeners are almost exclusively Mexican

American. Furthermore, Arbitron estimates that for the fall of 1996, the season which I discuss here, more Mexican American women tuned in than men. The women also tended to listen for longer stretches (1997). In a discussion I had with writer Rolando

Hinojosa, who has followed Valley sports culture for many years, he posited that the

192

bulk of the female listenership consists of veterans of squads like cheerleading, pep squad, and drill team. While this is certainly a factor, many women who have no such personal attachments to the game follow it--and often with more enthusiasm than its veterans.

I was surprised when I saw listenership numbers, but I should not have been.

Growing up in Edinburg, I was surrounded by women who followed sports--my grandmother, aunts, mother, and schoolmates. The soundtrack of everyday life in their houses was not the Spanish guitar, as Hollywood would have it, but rather the drone of sports radio and television--on weekends, anyhow. This is not to say that this was all there was, but to expunge the Dallas Cowboys from a Tejano Sunday is to strike at its heart.

Like the men, women listeners are hungry for scores. But I believe fan banter, the periquiando, is the bigger draw. In reviewing many hours of the show, I observed that compared to male callers, the women tended to speak with more passion, especially when it came to defending a town and team's honor. Males also boasted and defended, but more often they tended to reflect on the performance of teams. Compared to conventional talk radio where fans tinker incessantly with microdynamics, the analysis on Football Scoreboard was superficial. Hugo allowed a few regulars like El Compadre

Cali Carranza, La Grandota Oscar Gonzales, and El Padre Nacho to speak more extensively, but their analyses were concise. Paternalistic praise for the chamacos, the

193

kids, subsumed the technical. In other words, there was an implicit understanding (and one was sternly reminded when he or she forgot) that the chamacos are at the heart of the production. Enjoy your football; back your town; but don't sully the experience by dwelling on what the young "performers" did wrong. By and large, fans respected this ethic. When tempers flared, it did not have to do with the actions of individuals on the football field; it was the words of fans. It was this verbal space, what Hugo repeatedly called "la tacleada de las emociones que es el futbol" (the tackle of emotions that is football), which women particularly enjoyed agitating and policing. 2

Time constraints limit the analytical, as does an appropriate consideration for the sensitivities of the youth performers, but the focus on teams and social bodies may derive from a cultural base. In his essay “Sport as Dramaturgy for Society,” Robert M.

Levine argues that the Latin American sports fan has a fundamentally different orientation to sport than the Anglo-American. “Latin Americans love their sports heroes, but do not as a whole emulate them as human beings. Another way of saying this is that the sociology of Latin American sports emphasizes the symbolic victories and setbacks of the teams, not of individual performances.” (1988:141)

* * *

Mr. de la Cruz walks in sipping a diet Coke and flipping through a clipboard.

Regular callers and listeners simply call him Hugo or "Mr. Ni-fu Ni-fa," "ni-fu ni-fa" being his trademark phrase. ("Los Guerreros de Santa Rosa 28, Santa Maria ni-fuuuu ni-

194

faaaaa!") Playfully-derisive, it means "zilch, zero points scored" or "neither hide nor hair."

He wears cowboy boots, polyester Wranglers, plaid western shirt, tooled leather belt, and tinted eyeglasses. His team La Máquina Amarilla (The Yellow Machine) of the rural towns of Edcouch and Elsa has won big tonight. He is beaming.

While a hurried Lozano fields calls from a network of stringers, Hugo tweaks the controls at his deck, fans his papers, and looks meditatively onto the city below. One gets the impression that he has been featured or studied many times before.

Three-two-one, the show begins.

The theme song is a rendition of Monday Night Football’s "Are You Ready for some Football," performed by Hank Williams, Jr. Hugo’s version keeps the raucous rock and roll tempo and electric guitar, and it is just as slickly produced, but it has a touch of the burlesque. The lyrics and rapping are in Spanish, the references local. Where

Williams's version has a bourbon-breathed rawness, an overreaching manliness, Hugo's is square and fun, a winking divertissement.

"A todos los que aman y a todos los que quieren al futbol, buenas noches fanáticos, les saludamos! La compañera Trini Lozano, su servidor Mr. Ni-fu Ni-fa, para llevarles al Futbol

Escorbord." ("To all of you fans who love and cherish your football, greetings and good evening! My partner Trini Lozano and I, your host Mr. Ni-fu Ni-fa, bring you Football

Scoreboard .")

195

With a verbal style that swings from exultation to soft-spoken sincerity, that fuses rapid-fire Mexican deejay talk with the argot of American sport, Hugo calls out game scores, recounts upsets and "nailbiters," and summons and rouses la palomilla and los fánaticos (the neighborhood guys and the fans, respectively). He introduces the victor's football corridos with the ringmaster's flair, and then pitches the wares and services of the auto parts shops, building materials suppliers, health clinics, and restaurants that sponsor the show. All the while, Lozano works the switchboard, cues callers, and feeds data. Signaling and speaking in code, the pair is efficient and smooth.

No glitches, no mistakes.

* * *

Mr. Nifu Nifa’s show was part of my childhood. In our huge American sedan, my parents and I would listen intently to see how the different towns and teams had fared that evening. As we drove along Highway 83, we’d be on the lookout for caravans of fans and students. Some of the larger schools had caravans of fifteen or twenty buses, and police cars with flashing lights often escorted them. (In the provinces that is spectacle!) People would wave, moon, honk, and shoot the bird on occasion. As we passed each place, my parents would comment on the lot of each town that night. My father would inevitably say, "Y aquí va’ber puro pore a la noche," ("And here there’s gonna be all party tonight.") My mother would respond, "n'hombre, te imaginas?" ("oh man, can you imagine?"). Then we’d talk about the next town and the next.

196

When I rediscovered Mr. Nifu Nifa’s show a few years ago, I was drawn in by the Texas-Mexican dialect of this place I'd left behind. The speech style on the show is primarily Tejano Spanish vernacular--the so-called mocho (shredded) everyday language of the border. That this Spanish is pocho (Americanized Spanish, low-class) is significant.

For an hour and a half this speech subsumes the smarmy pep of English-language deejay talk and the Castellano Spanish of the foreign-born jockeys, who had dominated the Spanish-language airwaves until recently.3

Also, curious were the traditional dichos or sayings that peppered the linguistic code-switching and creolized conjugations (to say "fambolear" for "fumble," for example). A few recorded were:

"De que murieron los quemados si no de puro ardór?" ("Didn't envy kill the burned?")

"Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho." ("From the saying to the act lies a great stretch.)

"Él que ríe al último ríe mejor." ("He who laughs last, laughs best.")

"Si quieres al perro, acepta las pulgas." ("If you want the dog, accept the fleas.")

The dichos were interesting because they were spoken with such frequency and ease. In my initial taxonomy Friday football and sports radio were American popular culture; dichos were Mexican folklore. But on Football Scoreboard the traditional verbal arts,

197

everyday language, and patois of mediated sports commingled. To me this suggested that football had been more or less fully indigenized.

The playful verbal sparring, a speech genre called cabuleando or periquiando, was the most beguiling linguistic feature. It was not so much the wit that appealed, but rather the enthusiasm and geniality. The following example is typical. On the night the

Coyotes of La Joya defeated the Mission Eagles, an elderly woman called in to extend a small invitation to the host.

Elderly woman: Buenas noches, señor. [Le llamo] nada más para invitarlo a cenar. Hugo: Qué van a cenar? EW: Águila, frita. Eso, como ve? No se viene ustéd a cenar aquí con nosotros? Hugo: Se lo agradezco, pero no me gusta el águila. EW: A nosotros tampoco, pero como está muerta, ni modo de tirarla.

Elderly woman: Good evening, sir. Just calling to invite you to dinner. Hugo: What are you having? EW: Fried Eagle. How do you like that? Sure, you won’t come out here and dine with us? Hugo: I’m grateful, but I don’t care for eagle. EW: We don’t care for it either, but since it's dead, we must not waste.

The woman's jest is simple, as is Hugo's response, but it’s not verbal virtuosity that makes a good caller, though those who struggle with Spanish suffer a bit of humiliation as Hugo feeds them words and fixes grammar. (One can almost see him nodding with regret.) What the fanaticada values in a caller is a willingness to play—to take a stand for one’s town and team and/or to acknowledge the efforts of Friday night's young performers. That, callers remind time and again, is the bedrock of the forum.

"Quiero decirles a los Redskins que no se agüiten. No se agüiten," a caller said wearily, for 198

example. "Los chamacos jugaron BIÉN macizo, pero la escore no la refleja ." ("I just want to tell the Redskins not to be down. Don’t be down. The lads played SOLID ball, but the score just doesn’t reflect that.")

Of course, and perhaps more importantly, to make loud and bold pronouncements is also to become a target for rejoinders and one-upmanship. In other words without hubris, without the loudmouth, there is no game. Those who fare best, who break through and become regulars understand these fundamentals. They have what Charles Briggs calls "communicative competence." (Briggs 1988)

As my nostalgia for Football Scoreboard faded, I noticed that the exchanges on the show were saturated with utterances where place names featured prominently. Over the course of the evening, callers uttered Valley place names hundreds of times; several shows had over 1,000 such utterances. In the seven-minute segment that I use for illustration in Appendix 1a, we have 62 such references.

This chapter focuses on the poetics of fan discourses in the electronic space of talk radio. More specifically, we see how fans’ verbal exchanges work to make, mark, celebrate, and defend place. Employing speech genres like periquiando, fans speak loudly and proudly about their allegiances, hometowns, and network of friends and kin.

According to M. M. Bakhtin, speech genres are relatively stable types of utterances generated by speech communities in speech situations. Speech genres are more flexible, changeable, and situational than written genres or formal spoken genres

199

like the military command, but they still have normative significance. They are both stable and fluid; in other words the speaker of a speech genre has room for performing with variation and individual ‘style,’ but speech genres "are not created by him but are given to him [by his speech community]". Because of the inexhaustible nature of human activity, Bakhtin puts special emphasis on the extreme heterogeneity of speech genres.

Because they are so boundless and diverse, there is no single common level at which they can be studied. (Bakhtin 1986:81, 60-61)

Football Scoreboard has many speech genres, but this chapter focuses on the most frequently performed. These are the invocation of home by callers; the sending of felicitaciones (greetings, congratulations); the sending of sarcastic condolences via El Niño

Llorón (a short recorded track of a bawling baby); the performance of light verse; and others that are simple challenges, boasts, or rejoinders. Because place is such a salient feature, I pay particular attention to how fan utterances work to trace and delineate the construction and expression of place and fandom.

The data I present here come from a show broadcast on September 13, 1996. It was a typical show --the speech genres and verbal sparring performed on this particular evening appeared throughout the season. While no two shows are the same, and fan presence will shift slightly as teams' fortunes rise and fall, the format and speech genres changed little. On the show from which I draw this data, 39 callers made it on the air. In the appendices I show an unedited seven-minute segment of the show. Appendix 1A is

200

a direct transcript, and Appendix 1B is its English translation.4 The transcript gives the reader a sense for the flow of the talk, the genders and ages of callers, and the various dialects/speech styles.

Home

As discussed above, virtually all callers situated themselves in a particular locale or allied themselves to a home place. "I am from Rio Grande City." "I am calling from

McAllen." Once situated, callers spoke out to their neighbors, friends, or rivals "over there" in Brownsville, let’s say.

Making mention of one’s location is common on talk radio ("Yo, this is Vinnie from Queens."). Likewise, on Hip-hop radio listeners often call in and send a "shout- out" or greeting from one neighborhood to another. The pattern on Football Scoreboard resembles the "shout out," but with a more pronounced concern or fussiness concerning place. For example, a caller might mention that she is calling from place A, but that she is from place B, but anyhow, she is calling to congratulate cousin's victory over in place

G, and she might as well howdy to all the gang over in K and L, and, of course, B.

Example:

Caller: –Estóy hablando tocante de los Nikki Rowe Warriors(McAllen). Yo soportaba a los Donna Redskins--originalmente de Donna. Nomás que ya tengo mucho tiempo aquí en Macalen. Y los estamos supporting, porque todas estamos en la misma familia. Hugo: –Ah, se vinieron con otros indios? Caller: –Vale mas que lo creas...felicitámos a todos.

Caller: –I’m calling on behalf of the Nikki Rowe Warriors (McAllen). I used to back the Donna Redskins-originally from Donna. But I’ve

201

been in McAllen for a long time now, and we’re supporting them, because we’re all in the same family. Hugo: –I see, you came and joined the other Indians. Caller: –You better believe it...well, greetings to all.

Out of the 39 calls on the 9-13-96 show, 38 callers invoke a home place in some fashion. Assuming that listeners have a little imagination and some local knowledge, the accretion of these utterances works to inscribe space. For example, let us imagine that we have a map of the region that is blank. As Hugo calls out game scores, corresponding dots appear on the map. Every town and team is represented. We might take our annotation further and mark Ws for the winners and Ls for the losers. If we give weight to Hugo's dramatic taunts and praises, we might even mark larger and smaller Ws and Ls. Big wins and upsets receive more attention after all. When callers declare their home, they too inscribe the imaginary map. Therefore, at the end of the night certain towns/teams have earned a greater presence than others; they have taller stacks of 'poker chips'. The followers of the La Joya Coyotes and Nikki Rowe Warriors easily dominated this football fan space during the 1996 season.

Besides situating the self, and showing support for one’s town, the home utterance also serves as a place to question or clarify issues of loyalty for the fanaticada's ethic dictates that one cannot sidle between teams without reproach. We see this in the example cited earlier. The caller makes the point that he has lived in McAllen for a long time and feels that it is now appropriate to back the Rowe Warriors; and Hugo jokingly appeases the caller’s guilt by saying that though he left Donna, he displayed a modicum of respect by staying with the same ilk of mascot, the Indian. We see another in Caller

202

#2 where the caller calls to report a chaquetismo (turncoat) violation by a friend. The caller's tone is serious, almost distraught.

Ah, sí, quería, este...si le podía poner el Niño Llorón [a bawling baby track] a Felix Luera de Macalen de parte de su Tía Lisa. [Bawling baby plays.]

El es lo que significa hipócrita. Porqúe? El es originalmente de Rio Grande nomas que vive en Macalen ahora. Y él acaba de ir esta noche a ver a los Rio Grande City Rattlers. Y él se sentó al lado del estadio de los Rattlers. Y habló que su tía estaba llorando porque perdieron los Rattlers. Pos, porque habla así? Él también es fanático de los Rattlers!

Yeah, I want to, well...if you could play the Niño Llorón [a bawling baby track] for Felix Luera of McAllen from his Aunt Lisa. [The Niño Llorón track plays.]

He’s the very definition of a hypocrite. Why? Because he is originally from Rio Grande, but now lives in McAllen. This very night he went to watch the Rio Grande City Rattlers and he sat on the Rattler side. And he just called to tell me that his aunt was crying because the Rattlers lost. Now, why the heck is saying that? He, too, is a fan of the Rattlers.

The message is quite clear--cousin needs to pick a team and stick with it, not to mention, be more considerate of Tía Lisa's feelings. That the sneering turncoat is formally from Rio Grande City and is now living in McAllen is most certainly part of the rub. Rio Grande City is an old, struggling, relatively isolated, working-class city, and

McAllen the region's retail, financial, and entertainment center. McAllen is big and prosperous, while the scarce wealth in Rio Grande is of questionable origin. This is to suggest that Mr. Luera's transgression is not his callousness, but rather that he has forgotten who he really is--a Rattler, yes, but more essentially, raza from Rio Grande.

203

In another example concerning loyalty, home, and home teams, a regular caller named Victor phones in to clarify some matters for which he apparently has been criticized by friends and relatives. Victor is a regular caller.

A la familia Silva de allí de Mision, póngale un Niño Llorón...que les paso? Mire, fíjese. [Niño Llorón plays.] You fuí a las dos escuelas. Fuí a Memorial y fuí a Nikki Rowe cuando era Ninth Grade Center. Y ahora que estóy siguiendo a los dos equipos, verdád, están haciéndome burla allá en Mision. [Exasperated, upset] Les digo, pero ustedes hubieran hecho lo mismo si hubieran estado en mi lugar! Digo yo...No, digo.

To the Silva family over in Mission, please play the Niño Llorón...what happened tonight? [Niño Llorón plays.] Look, sir, I went to both schools. I went to Memorial and I attended Nikki Rowe when it was the Ninth Grade Center. And now that I follow both teams, right, they are mocking me over there in Mission. [Exasperated, upset] But I tell you, you would have done the same thing if you were in my place! I'd say. I'd say.

Learning whether friends and family bought Victor's argument goes beyond the scope of this study. However, Victor being a regular caller, I noticed that he continued to speak for both teams for the balance of the season, but he clearly favored Rowe. Perhaps it was that his ninth-grade experience was indelible. More likely, Victor was drawn by

Rowe's dominance that season.

Discourse defining and contesting articulations of home sometimes spilled onto more conventional forums such as the editorial page. Writing from her college dorm room in San Antonio, a perturbed Edinburg North Cougar fan wrote that she could no longer endure the enmity between her alma mater and the Edinburg Bobcats. While she acknowledged that her school’s "mother was a Bobcat," she felt that her old school,

Edinburg, had snubbed Edinburg North, the new school in town. "Sure, at one point we were one big happy family, but that was before the boundaries were drawn. From that

204

day on [when the new school opened], we were outsiders in our own town." (Letters

1996)

The writer suggests that it is not enough to celebrate a place as a fan; there are other duties. The call from Caller #7 touches on this matter. When the fan calls in to gloat over a victory, Hugo chides him for being from a town with a notorious speed trap. He embarrasses the caller and the town of Los Fresnos for the actions of certain police officers who harassed his friend Lionél, "the most just man in the world." It is doubtful that Hugo's admonition will change law enforcement tactics in the town, but his commentary does bring to light a problem before more than a few people. Hugo states that Lionél received a "santa bailada" (a holy dance-around, spanking) from the officers, and so he delivers a bailada of his own to Los Fresnos.

Felicitaciones

The felicitación, a congratulations or greeting, is the most common utterance after the utterances of place names or home. Out of the 39 calls on the show, fans performed the felicitación 38 times. In many calls the felicitación serves simply as a stock gesture to initialize talk and invite a sympathetic ear. Even if spoken out of mere politeness, the gesture is gracious, and thereby contributes to the sense of community on the show.

Some felicitaciones invite and affirm bonds more explicitly; in tone or inflection one can detect earnestness, good will, or a sense of shared experience. Most often, the felicitación is spoken to the collective audience or one of the countless congeries of fans. Some examples:

Caller (#1 in transcript): "Quería felicitar al fanático de los football."

205

(I wanted to greet the fan of the footballs.) [Caller appears drunk.] Caller (#5 in transcript): "Quería felicitar a los de Rio Grande City even though they lost." ("I wanted to congratulate those from Rio Grande City even though they lost.") Caller (with sad voice): "Felicitaciones a Los Greyhounds de San Benito aunque perdimos. Les dimos un juego tremendo, and we have to be proud of that. (Greetings to the Greyhounds of San Benito even though we lost. We gave them a tremendous game…) El Padre Nacho: "Felicito a todos los equipos, porqúe, realmente, todos los equipos están trabajando como lo que es un team, un equipo--todos. Ninguno está haciendo mas, está haciendo menos." ("I congratulate all the teams, because, in reality, all the squads are functioning in a manner that is the very definition of a team, all of them. No one is doing more or less than the other.")

Of course, there are felicitaciones that are more personal and carefully targeted. In call #3, for example, we have grandparents sending a felicitación to a grandson via a family friend or relative. "Sí, I’d like to congratulate the Harlingen Cardinals de parte de los Salinas de aqui en Mision...El número 52, Joey Vela. Es nieto de los Salinas, and they just wanted to congratulate him." ("Yes, I’d like to congratulate the Ha rlingen Cardinals on behalf of the Salinases over here in Mission...Number 52, Joey Vela. He is a grandson of the Salinases, and they just wanted to congratulate him.")

This short missive hops fifty miles over twenty towns. Surely, a simple phone call from the grandparents would have been more efficient--certainly more personal. But is there not something larger to be had in speaking one’s ties in public?

The electronic felicitación is a sort of skywriting. It is affect performed, affect writ large.

Virtually synonymous with the felicitación is the saludo, the greeting. In this example, Hugo sends greetings out to some friends in Mercedes by way of the caller.

206

"Salúdame a tu papa y a todos los de Mike’s Pest Control allí en Mercedes. Gracias mi hermano ." ("Say hello to your dad and all the folks over at Mike’s Pest Control over in

Mercedes. Thanks, my brother.")

Another example sends a greeting to a particular family and then to a pair of hamlets. "Quiero mandar unos saluditos a la familia Alaniz de Alamo. Y me le manda unos saludos a todos los de Peñitas y el Ojo de Agua? Son de mi gente, verdád." (I’d like to send a little greeting to the Alaniz family of Alamo. And would you send greetings to all those from Peñitas and Ojo de Agua? They're my people, all right.")

There are many other examples of these sorts of greetings. We hear repeated utterances of proper names, terms of endearment and honorific respect like comadre, compadre, don, and doña . And as the saludos to the Alaniz family show, saludos and felicitaciones also call up and dust off small and largely forgotten places like Peñitas and

Ojo de Agua.

Where Hugo's verbal swashbuckling entertains and fan banter rouse, the felicitación and saludo speak to what's good, be it real, imagined, or just desired in the broader fan community. This is to say that such exchanges, one spun upon the other week after week, do social and ethical work--they make and declare bonds, however minutely and ephemerally. Like tracer bullets, fan utterances like felicitaciones and saludos help us see the arcs and frequencies of social interaction.

El Niño Llorón and La Risa Burlona

207

In examples of fan discourse cited above, we were introduced to El Niño Llorón,

"the Bawling Baby." During the call-in segment of the featured show, fans called up the

Niño nine times; he became more popular in subsequent seasons.

In the studio the Niño is nothing more than a sound effect activated by the push of a button. In the ludic space of the Scoreboard, the Niño is a benign giant that toddles across the Valley. He plops down on losers, bad sports, turncoats, braggarts-proved- wrong, and he cries away. No one can escape the Niño; everyone gets sat on sooner or later. To roil the fans, Hugo will sometimes play the Niño while announcing scores and upsets early in the show. A testament to his celebrity, the Niño also makes a cameo appearance in the show’s opening song, "Estás Listo Para el Football?"

When callers request the Niño, it is usually with a gloating, light-hearted tone.

"Hey, do me a favor and send the Niño to my Aunt Elena. We beat her Falcons, but ugly!" Or, "Oye, quiero que le mandes un saludo y que le toques el Niño Llorón cuatro mil veces a mi amigo, el tax collector de La Joya, Jorge Barreiro; que es cuñado mío ." (Hey, I want you to send a greeting and play the Niño Llorón 4,000 times for my friend, the tax collector of La Joya, Jorge Barreiro; you see he's my brother-in-law.")

Other times the caller’s motive is strategic humiliation, what the fans call "lo gacho." More often, however, as we saw in the example of Caller #2, fans will dispatch the Niño to punish small transgressions. In the case of Caller #2 (the crying Tía Lisa), the problem concerns divided loyalties or fickleness. Other callers submit the Niño to sore losers, ungracious winners, or anyone who disrupts the ethos of good sportsmanship on the field or on the airwaves.

208

For example, Caller #8 sends a Niño Llorón to the McAllen Memorial Mustangs and one of its players, Gilbert Muzquiz. Memorial was the district’s defending champion, and Mr. Muzquiz was involved in a scandal during the 1996 season where critics alleged that the young man had transferred to Memorial in order to play with a better team and boost his profile among college recruiters. (A UIL tribunal in Austin later exonerated the student.) Fans and teammates at Pharr-San Juan-Alamo-North felt snubbed--not only because of patent disloyalty, but also because he transferred from a working class school to one which drew some of the most socially elite students in the county. In any event, Memorial had a terrible season, and, fairly or not, Mr. Muzquiz had to submit to the Niño’s bawling. In this case, the Niño humiliates through simple inversion. A football star is transformed into a baby, the opposite of the macho.

When the Niño Llorón isn't quite enough, fans call for La Risa Burlona ("The

Mocking Laugh"). "La Risa" has a mean, unsettling edge to it. It is the laugh of the archetypical Joker. It ends with an elated gasp--as if the Joker has devoured the victim's pride and spit out the pit. While the Niño might be a slap on the back, a celebration of folly, the Risa is more of a punch in the gut.

When a young man from Los Fresnos proclaimed that his team would beat rival

Port Isabel by 20 points the coming week, a woman from Port Isabel immediately responded with a rejoinder and a call for the Risa Burlona. Her voice animated, her tone confrontational, she says:

"Le quiero decír al joven que habló hace ratito, que ellos les van a ganar a Puerto Isabel by 20 points, que desde ahorita nos estamos riendo."

209

("I want to tell that youngster who called a little while ago, who says that they’re going to beat Port Isabel by 20 points, well, we’re laughing at that one, already.)" Hugo: "‘a ver, riase. Riase." (Let’s see, laugh. Let’s hear you laugh.) Caller: "No, mejor póngale La Risa. Mejor, 'ta mejor La Risa. (No, put on La Risa. La Risa is much better.")

Fans requested La Risa Burlona only two or three times per show in the 1996 season; the Niño was far more popular. It may be that fans simply preferred one sound effect to the other. The Risa has a stock funhouse ring to it, while the Niño has an over- the-top corniness. More likely, fans realized that the Risa Burlona bordered on lo gacho, and as such could be invoked only intermittently. Conversely, the Niño was on his way, subsequent seasons show, to celebrity. He became the collective fanaticada's unofficial mascot, a sort of friendly giant who rambled from place to place.

Boasts, Challenges, Insults, and Counter-insults

Where the invocation of home and felicitaciones articulate hometown pride and neighborliness through simple declarations and greetings, fans temper such felicity with insults, boasts, and challenges. Typically, these sorts of utterances are straightforward declarations--we will beat you, just you wait and see. Caller #5 provides us with a typical example of the challenge and rejoinder. The caller is female and elderly. Caller #9 is a young woman.

Caller #5: Quería a felicitar a los de Rio Grande aunque haigan perdido. Hugo: Ándele! Caller: Pero como quiera, cuando los de Edinburgo vallan a jugar a La Joya, Edinburgo les va a ganar a La Joya! Y ese Coyote Mayor [very steamed, animated] que no ande tanto aullande porque va estar en la loma!” Hugo: Ándele. Caller: Y ese Coyote Mayor no debe de estar aullando tanto! [very mad, voice shaking]

210

Hugo: Ándale Coyote. Caller: Yo soy de Rio Grande! Felicito a los de Rio Grande y a los de Roma. Hugo: Bueno, pos gracias por llamar. Ándele, ba-bye. Caller: Bueno. Bye! [catching her breath] Hugo: Vámonos a Rio Grande!

Caller #5: I wanted to congratulate those from Rio Grande [City] even though they lost. Hugo: There you go, ma’am. Caller: But anyway, when those from Edinburg go to play at La Joya, Edinburg is going to beat La Joya! And that Coyote Mayor [very steamed, and loud] shouldn’t be howling so much cause he’s gonna end up on the hill! Hugo: There you go, ma’am. Caller: And that Coyote Mayor shouldn’t be howling so much! [very mad, voice shaking] Hugo: There you go, Coyote. Caller: [I am from Rio Grande! I send a greeting to those from Rio Grande and those from Roma. Hugo: Good, now thanks for calling. Take care, ma’am, ba-bye. Caller: All right, bye! [catching her breath] Hugo: Let’s go Rio Grande [City].

Caller #9: Quiero felicitár a los Coyotes. Y le quiero decir a esa señora de Rio Grande, que ya mero se le salía el pulmón! Hugo: [laughter] Caller: Ya mero se le salía el pulmón. [Hugo plays the Risa Burlona] Ye que no ande tan celosa. Y a Edinburg? Que se espere porque allí va el Demolition Crew! Les vamos a enseñar lo que tiene La Joya.

Caller: I’d like to greet the Coyotes. And I also want to tell that lady from Rio Grande [City], that it sounded like she almost lost a lung. Hugo: laughs.] Caller: She almost coughed up a lung! [Hugo plays the Risa Burlona track] And she shouldn’t be so jealous. And Edinburg? Well, just wait and see 'cause here comes the Demolition Crew! We’re gonna show them what La Joya has got.

While most boasts and challenges receive a response or three, sometimes an utterance will spawn a string of responses and mutations; the joke will run. On a show

211

broadcast in 1996, for example, la fanaticada played with a cheer originally concocted by fans of the La Joya Coyotes. "Chile, tomate, y cebolla, nadie le gana a La Joya!" ("Chiles, tomato, and onion, no one beats La Joya!"), the cheer went. That night virtually all callers from La Joya interjected comments with cheers. The following week the high- flying Coyotes barely escaped defeat. A caller from the losing team called that night and proclaimed, "Chile, tomate, y cebolla, que susto le dimos a La Joya!" (Chiles, tomato, and onion, what a scare we gave La Joya!") To that a La Joya woman replied, "Chile, tomate, y cebolla, nadie, pero nadie, le gana a La Joya!" ("Chile, tomato, and onion, no one, but no one, beats La Joya!") The cheer ran on.

The combinations of chile, tomate, and cebolla in the making of salsa are many, and so were the cheers. Finally, a rather discordant quip signaled the unraveling of the joke.

"Tortillas de harina y tortillas de masa, La Joya perdió en su casa, y feo!" ("Flour tortillas and corn tortillas, La Joya lost at home, but ugly.")

In launching their challenges some fans went beyond the simple cheer and penned light verse. Three callers performed the following verses toward the end of the season. The first example comes from Victor, the Pindar of 'Valle' football verse; the second comes from an anonymous male with a tough, drunk voice. One of the regular callers, "El Constable" (the Constable), performs the third verse.

Example One:

Eres gato cola mocha, de Edinburgo eres natal. Querías darte un triunfo y al guerrero derrotar, ‘mas el guerrero venía invicto

212

y su meta era el distrito ganar.

Ay, este arroz ya se coció, y el guerrero los equipos dominó.

Ahora dices que eres aguila real y se quedan tus alas como pavo real pero el otro fin de semana con el guerrero ni a zopilote irás a llegár.

You’re a cat with a bobbed tail from Edinburg born. You hoped for a triumph, to destroy the warrior, but the warrior came unbeaten and determined to win the district.

The warrior has dominated all teams. This here ric e is cooked already.

And now, opponent, you call yourself the mighty eagle, and fan like a peacock, but come next weekend with the warrior you’ll be nothing but a buzzard.

Example Two: Ando en busca de un tlacuache en La Joya lo voy a encontrar. Ese tlaqui anda disfrazado de Coyote y carga su celular, Nomas para hablarle a Hugo despúes del juego acabár.

Y a veces no agarra linea nomas pa’ disimular, porque la gente de ‘lla en La Joya la derrota no la han podido aceptar.

Pero el 25 de Octubre, el guerrero al coyote va atasajar.

I’m out in search of a possum in La Joya I’m bound to find it. That possum’s in disguise as a coyote

213

and it carries a cellular phone just to bug Hugo as soon as the game is over.

And sometimes he doesn't get it simply to pretend, because those folks over there in La Joya just can’t accept a rout.

But on the 25th of October, the Warrior is going to make jerky out of Coyote.

Example Three:

Esta noche es la noche que La Máquina se apagó porque se reventó el pistón. El pájaro voló y voló y Hugo lloró y lloró.

Tonight is the night The Machine stalled because it blew a piston. The bird flew and flew and Hugo cried and cried.

In the first verse, the poet reminds the Edinburg Bobcats of their submission to the warrior. It ends by tipping off the fanaticada to the fact that the strutting-like-a-peacock eagle of Mission is nothing more than a buzzard. The second verse has a similar theme of mimicry. In the guise of hunter, the speaker reveals that the sly, pesky coyote is really just a lowly possum putting on airs with the then novel cellular phone. The third goes with a mechanical trope, its target being La Máquina. The symbols and poetics echo the anthropomorphism of both the folk tale and the Mexican narcocorrido, the drug smuggler's ballad.

214

To analyze these little verses as 'texts' is to stab at a tidbit with a serving fork.

Depth, rhythm, and creativity are appreciated, but it is the gesture that matters. Though these verses (and there were many others) challenge and insult the opponent, that the words are served with a dollop of aesthetics is ultimately a compliment.

This is not to say that the clunky escapes scrutiny. The fans and Hugo do not hesitate to critique. For example, to the fellow who penned the stumbling verse on the

Máquina blowing a piston, Hugo responded with the comment, "Well, constable, I’ll be frank. I think you best stick to politics, because as a poet, ah, you ain’t gonna make it.

Yeah, you best stick to politics." (translation)

Of course, the boasting and banter we hear in these verses are not unique to this cultural performance. They are extensions of the ritual insulting and speech play found in the folklore of Greater Mexico. As José Limón noted, the insults are not forms of pathological aggression, as modern Mexical intellectuals like Samuel Ramos, Octavio

Paz and others had framed it, but rather "playful nips of skillful artistic language" that produce and strengthen trust and familiarity. Dueling interlocutors are more like partners than opponents. (Limón 1994:133)

Moreover, inter-town verbal jabs have a generative function; callers generate complimentary social relations, neighborliness, 'character' in the roundabout way of the insult. In his study of inter-regional verbal dueling in Spain, anthropologist James W.

Fernandez shows places express and amplify neighborliness through means of

"contrastive place." The speech genre is called the "deasfio," the joust, and it typically

215

mocks a neighbor’s most salient characteristics (foodways, dress, accent). The figurative speech of the joust, Fernandez writes, "becomes transformed into a part of that place...the divisiveness implicit in this poetic genre is transcended by an emergent sense of complimentarity and family identification" (Fernandez 1988:31)

Conclusion

"Space" is a term or metaphor bandied about often in criticism, but how exactly is space relevant to cultural study? To close this chapter, I discuss some key ideas put forth by Henri Lefebvre, Keith Basso, Yi-fu Tuan, and Michel de Certeau. This is hardly a comprehensive review, but I believe that these proposals will help us make sense of the jests and exchanges presented here. As I stated earlier about the verbal arts on the show, it is not so much what is said or with what wit or eloquence. It is the act of speaking to, and from, and for that is curious and yeasty.

Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974) was one of the first works to assert space in critical social theory. Lefebvre focused on social relations as produced in time

(history) and space. Space in his scheme is not only "supported by social relations but it is also producing and produced by social relations." Lefebvre grouped the spatial into three areas: the perceived, the conceived, and the lived. Fundamental to his work is the rejection of the idea of space as an empty container. It is not a stage upon which culture, civilization, and processes of power act. Culture and space are inextricably bound.

(LeFebvre 1991(1974):286)

216

More recently, Basso called for more inquiry into "the ethnography of lived topographies," or the study of how humans relate to land and place. Missing from the discipline of cultural anthropology, he argues, is "a thematized concern with the ways in which citizens of the earth constitute their landscapes and take themselves to be connected with it." ) Basso’s life-long work among the Western Apache has always focused on speech, and it was masterfully realized in Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and

Language among the Western Apache. This book investigates the inscription of Apache narratives onto features of the material landscape. Place names and topographical features serve as mnemonic pegs that encode an extensive oral repertoire of native moral tales. (Basso 1996:106)

The cultural geographer Yi-fu Tuan has also called for more reflection on how language functions in place-making. "A curious gap in the extensive and growing literature on place is the attempt to address directly the role of human speech in the creation of place," he wrote in 1991. Where in the 1970’s, Tuan had a more structuralist

(and static) take on place, space, and culture, his thinking took a linguistic turn (even as literary and cultural studies took a spatial turn). "Language makes place," and "words call places into being," he affirmed. (Tuan 1991:684-86)

Michel de Certeau is another important and highly original voice. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau ruminates on the notion of how an individual moving about a hypothetical city "enunciates" space. How the pedestrian moves through and

217

negotiates the environment ‘makes space happen,’ so to speak. Movement makes space.

"The space could be to the place what the word becomes when it is spoken: grasped in the ambiguity of being accomplished, changed into a term stemming from multiple conventions...." He extends the metaphor of enunciation by comparing the pedestrian's detours and series of turns to "turns of phrase" or "rhetoric of walking." (de Certeau

1984:173,100)

Places, thus, are situated, fixed, and distinct. They are coordinates on a map, sites; we can usually find places. Space, however, is made by mobile elements, including the linguistic. To speak for and to a place is both to create space and also to glimpse social structure. Thus, in the flurry of challenges, greetings, bawling babies, and rebuttals generating by fans on Football Scoreboard, we get a sense for how people relate to another; how different genders jest and spout off; how traditional folklore like the dichos find a host in seemingly unlikely spots like sports radio; how the scrappiest of places has its vocal defenders; and we see how a commonplace ethic like good sportsmanship gets articulated locally, and ethnically. Finally, to be attuned to the idea of space gives us a new and valuable optic for understanding the Friday football game itself. As I discussed in the conclusion of the previous chapter, the 'meaning' of the

Friday night event is frustratingly elusive. Perhaps that was because we were at too early a stage in the performance. The dough was still being kneaded and punched. As we saw here--it would rise.

218

Chapter Seven: With his Cell Phone in his Hand: the Football Corridos of South Texas

The corrido hero is not only a man of decisive action, but a man of words, able to formulate colorful verbal interpretations of the events at hand. --John H. McDowell

It’s not what you play, it’s who you play for. --Tony de la Rosa, accordionist

Part I.

Introduction

In Chapter Three we looked at the ballad “Kiansis,” one of the oldest intact

Texas-Mexican corridos. “Kiansis” gave us a glimpse of athleticism as articulated in the era of the ranch and the horse. Along with recounting the accidental death of a young worker, the song offers images of exuberant swimmers and agile vaqueros working/performing before an audience of Anglo greenhorns. This chapter looks at a far descendant of such songs--football corridos, ballads that celebrate and honor football teams, coaches, and players in modern South Texas.

Part I of this chapter looks at the history and performance contexts of the corrido genre in South Texas. Part II describes the two main types of football songs, what I call the ‘boasting’ and the ‘ethical’ corrido. Part III discusses the football corrido in a particular performative context: the playoffs of 1997 which saw Edcouch-Elsa’s team, La

Máquina Amarilla, advance to the state quarterfinals.

219

Background and Definitions

In its most characteristic and basic form, the corrido is a narrative folk song composed in octosyllabic quatrains arranged in an a b c b rhyme scheme. These ballads are sung in ternary rhythm in 3/4 or 6/8 time (Limón 1992:10). Typically, the corrido lacks a refrain, the content in each stanza is novel and rendered in markedly poetic language, especially in the reported speech of the protagonist. For example, in this stanza from “Dionisio Maldonado,” a corrido about a bloody shootout at a ranch outside of Laredo, Oliviera, a ranchero protagonist, addresses the Texas Rangers as “cowards” with the hearts of chickens while fashioning himself as a fighting cock.

Oliveira como era hombre Oliviera was a brave man, le dio rienda a su caballo, so he gave rein to his horse, “Éntrenle, rinches cobardes “Come on, you cowardly Rangers, a pelear con este gallo.” tangle with this fighting cock.” (Paredes 1995:102)

The corrido narrative is framed by a formulaic opening that introduces the narrator and situates the story in a time, place, or event. For example, “Los Sediciosos”

(“The Seditionists”) opens with the following lines:

En mil novecientos quince, In nineteen hundred fifteen, qué días tan calurosos! oh but the days were hot! voy a cantar estos versos, I’m going to sing these verses, versos de los sediciosos. verses about the seditionists.

Ya con ésta van tres veces With this it will be three times que sucede lo bonito, that remarkable things have happened; la primera fue en Mercedes, the first time was in Mercedes, en Brónsvil y en San Benito. then in Brownsville and San Benito.

220

En ese punto de Norias In that well-known place called Norias, ya merito les ardía, it really got hot for them; a esos rinches desgraciados a great many bullets rained muchas balas les llovía. on those cursed Rangers. (Paredes 1995:71)

The ballad typically closes with a despedida , a closing remark or farewell. As John

McDowell noted in his classic study, “The Corrido of Greater Mexico,” the opening and despedida function as metanarratives. These segments draw attention to the occasion of performance; here, the corridista editorializes on the narrated events, testifies to their veracity, or comments (usually with modesty) on his skills as balladeer. These elements comprise the backbone of the corrido, but there are variations, motifs, and conventions that are too numerous to list here. (McDowell 1981:48)

Though the corrido is a fairly modern genre, appearing in the mid 19th century, the song is a derivative of the décima and romance--older ballad and lyric-epic genres, the latter of which dates back to the Moorish occupation of Spain and the Reconquista.1

The Spanish-origin ballad can be found in most of its former colonies. Amazingly, some ancient motifs like the flying messenger dove (“vuela palomita ”) still appear in contemporary songs such as, “El Nuevo Corrido de Mercedes,” a football ballad. Of

Western cultural productions in the Americas, few have seen such a long history of sustained performance.

* * *

221

In Greater Mexico the corrido is one of the most important and cherished expressive forms. In the Texas-Mexico borderlands, the modern corrido emerged within the discourse of resistance triggered by the bloody violence and displacement that

Mexicans and Mexican Americans of the late 19th and early 20th century confronted under American and capitalist expansion into the Southwest. Typically, the song comments on depredations, injustices, skirmishes, and acts of resistance by the quintessential corrido hero, the common man pushed to action and defiance. As

Américo Paredes and others have noted, the corrido became the dominant socially symbolic act in this era and region. In Mexico proper, the corrido corpus is much larger and diverse with many of them being epic in subject, scope, and poetics. The most famous songs chronicle the battles, massacres, assassinations, heroics and tragedies of the Revolution years. Armies, peasants, generals, female soldiers, even locomotives populate the pantheon of corrido heroes. (Paredes 1958; Saldívar 1990:32)

Because of its medieval origins it has often been said that the corrido is an antique or primitive medium for conveying news (Redfield 1930:185). With the exception of certain broadsides printed during the Mexican Revolution (often within hours after battles or major events), corridos lack the vital details and information necessary to serve this function well; this is certainly the case in the songs of the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

(Tejano periodicals like La Prensa, Crónica, and El Correo de Laredo better filled this need.)

As McDowell has noted, the corrido presupposes an informed audience. Its primary

222

function was (and remains) “to celebrate and ultimately dignify events already thoroughly familiar to the corrido community”. To underscore this, McDowell points to the “iconic” quality of the brief scenes and episodes strung together, stanza by stanza, in the corrido. “The famous leaping and lingering technique of the ballad insures that we enter in media res, and skip unpredictably through insufficiently glossed narrative details to an often mysterious conclusion.” (1981:47, 50)

Akin to mid 20th-century jazz or the murals of the Mexican School and Hart

Benton, the corrido is that rare bird--art that it is familiar and significant to both the laity and academy. For the folk, the traditional songs serve as sober patrimonial texts, nostalgic entertainments, and arcane, yet alluring expressions of masculine bravado (not unlike white male America's attraction to the John Wayne western). Scholars have positioned the corrido as a sort of ur text in 20th-century Chicano literary and cultural studies. According to José Limón, Ramón Saldívar, and José Saldívar articulations of struggle and displays of defiance in turn-of-the-century corridos inspired and shaped the tenor and dialectics of later Chicano writing. The corrido functions as a “master poem”

(JL), “folk base text” (RS), and “central sociopoetic Chicano paradigm”(JS). In a close reading of the late-heroic corrido, “Los Sediciosos” (“The Seditionists,” circa 1915), folklorist Richard R. Flores traces early articulations of identity and resistance in a

"narrative terrain [that] is the marginalized space between U.S. and Mexican culture, and

223

not the U.S.-Mexico border.” (Saldívar 1986:13; Saldívar 1990; Flores 1992:176; Limón

1992)

* * *

The football corridos featured here are curious songs. Some are comic, cornball entertainments that celebrate football team prowess and fanaticism, while others voice a solemn regard for community, school, and the men and boys of football. Both types are popular. In these stanzas from the corrido for Los Fresnos, we have an example of the former. Here, we see the Falcons of Los Fresnos taunt their opponents in Brownsville,

Port Isabel, Roma, Mercedes, and Hidalgo with playful descriptions of the abuses they plan to dole out.

Las Aguilillas de Brownsville Those little Eagles from Brownsville desplumadas quedarán will end up plucked, y los Vaqueros de Porter and those Cowboys from Porter el dos-pasos bailarán. the two-step they’ll dance.

De Puerto Isabel Torpones From Port Isabel, the Tarpons no les ha queda’o salida have no way to escape han de pasar por Los Fresnos they’ll have to pass through Los Fresnos y los haremos sardinas. where we’ll make them sardines.

Las Avispas de Edcouch -Elsa The bees from Edcouch-Elsa, dicen que no hacen nada they say they are now worthless, porque ahora vienen cruzadas because they’ve been crossed con colmenas africanas. with the African killer bees.2

Los Tigres de Mercedes The Tigers from Mercedes los vamos a hacer chivarras we’re going to make into rugs, y a los gatos de Raimon and those Bearcats from Raymondville los vamos hacer chamarras. we’ll make into sweaters.

224

Los Gladiadores de Roma The Gladiators from Roma, los mandamos a Camargo. we’ll send across the river to Camargo. Les vamos a hundir el barco We’re going to sink the ship a los Piratas de Hidalgo. of the Pirates of Hidalgo.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have solemn odes. Take, for example, stanzas three and four from “La Joya” (circa 1997):

Los Coyotes de La Joya The Coyotes of La Joya no se cansan de entrenar never tire of training para alcanzar la victoria to get that victory o quedar en buen lugar. or finish in good form.

Los padres de estos muchachos These boys’ parents a Dios elevan su ruego to God they lift their prayers porque saben que sus hijos because they know that their sons ponen la vida en el juego. put their lives into the game.

In the first stanza cited, the corrido acknowledges the team’s determination and efforts.

In the next stanza we see a triangulation of familia , God above, and the not undangerous activities on the playing field. I will discuss the varieties of football corridos in more detail in Part II.

Football corridos often echo the heroic poetics of the turn-of-the-century famous corridos of border conflict. In the slot of Gregorio Cortez or Jacinto Treviño--the hypermasculine "Chicano warrior hero," to use Renato Rosaldo's phrase, the football corridos plug in footballers, mascots, and communities of fans (Rosaldo 1989). Where the old songs feature bands of armed and mounted rancheros cutting through the chaparral of the Texas-Mexico borderlands, we have squads of football players--los chamacos, los gallos

(the lads, the gamecocks). In the role of the ranchero leaders, the Juan Cortinas, Aniceto 225

Pizañas, and Catarino Garzas, sit the coaches: the Richard Avilas, Lionel Garzas, and

Riche Flores--Tejanos who may very well be direct lineal descendents of the classic heroes. Predictably, in the slot of the loathed rinches (Texas Rangers), we have a team’s rivals and opponents. The football songs also adhere to the border corrido’s spatial logics, the listing and invoking of place names, to mark sites of contest past and present.

This is not to say that the football corridos are true heroic corridos. These are not songs of resistance and armed struggle. Though passionate and elaborate, the footballer’s fight for turf is a mere exercise. The game-saving ‘Friday night hero’ or the beer-bellied coach directing los chamacos (the lads) is hardly the iconic corrido hero--the peaceful man pushed to fight and stand up for his right whatever the odds, whatever the dangers. No, coach is just a man fighting to keep his job.

These corridos are also significant because they maintain the vernacular corrido tradition, albeit obliquely and lightheartedly. Like the classic corridos, the football songs are quasi-spontaneous, amateur, and (usually) anonymous productions. Lyricism may be lacking, and conventions like despedidas clumsily executed, but the songs are corridos, nonetheless. A “folk may compose its best ballads in defeat,” Paredes once observed.

Of the football corridos the converse might be said: a folk may compose its not-so-great ballads the pause from the daily grind, the party, the schoolboy win.3 (Saldívar 1990:36;

Paredes 1993:130)

Compóneles un corrido: The Appearance of the Football Corrido

226

Football corridos are living texts, re-tooled and altered as needed. Winning streaks, retirements, hirings/firings, re-districtings, and shifting rivalries prompt the composition and revision of songs. On the eve of one coach’s departure, for example,

Roberto Pulido, a Tejano recording star, serenaded the teary-eyed coach at his going- away pachanga (bash). At barbecues with friends, coach’s taped corrido inevitably comes out.

Some corridos are nothing more than a few clever verses composed on the drive from stadium to post-game gathering. At an opportune moment at the barbecue or menudo, let’s say, the trovador will break out the guitar and sing. Other compositions are quality studio recordings made by moonlighting professional musicians and technicians.

Some corridos are occasional songs, written to celebrate a title win or a major upset.

Others keep the same tune year after year, and receive new verses or musical interpretations on occasion. For example, in the late 1990s “El corrido de La Máquina

Amarilla” had a dancy, rowdy version with gritos and football cheers, as well as two traditional, accordian-based renditions. One version featured a female singer, a rarity in corrido performance.

At the time of this writing there existed two dominant musical styles. One is characterized by the bass and synthesizer-heavy, overwrought sound of contemporary

Tejano music. (One informant described it as “the Love Boat sound.”) More often, songs are performed in the more traditional conjunto and norteño vein. This style

227

features the spare instrumentation of the guitar, bajo sexto (bass guitar), and accordion accompanying a nasal, almost falsetto, singing. One high school teacher derisively described conjunto as “la música que tocan las criadas”(“the music the maids play on the radio”). Though its base remains very much in the working classes, the genre does draw listeners from the middling and upper classes as well. 4 (Peña 1985:140-45)

Like the tricked-out, neon-lit pick-up trucks cruising Valley boulevards, the

Tejano sound indexes the plush and modern. Conjunto points to tradition, “roots,” and lo mexicano. If the styles were prepared foods, the Tejano style would be the sprawling food buffet at the budget steak house, and conjunto simple perfection: slices of grilled beef and chilito (chile relish) on a tortilla. Both inflections are interesting--Tejano for its fusion of eclectic musical and cultural elements (conjunto, r&b, country & western, Afro-

Caribbean, rock and roll), and the conjunto style for its inscription of traditional mexicano male expressive culture and sentiment--a ‘border blues’of sorts--onto new subjects.

It is not uncommon for the conjunto-style football corrido to reference classic songs (sometimes ironically). For example, the corrido for Los Fresnos takes the melody of “Benjamín Argumedo,” one of the great songs of the Mexican Revolution. In “El

Nuevo Corrido de los Tigres de Mercedes,” a corrido commissioned by Mercedes School

Board member, Oscar Gonzalez, the despedida quotes lines from the late 19th-century border corrido “Arnulfo.” Notice the similarity, the “Arnulfo” despedida:

228

Vuela, vuela, palomita Fly, fly, little dove párate en esos trigales. stop at yonder wheat fields. Anda avísale a Lupita Tell the news to Lupita que murió Arnulfo González. that Arnulfo González has died.

The “Mercedes” despedida: Vuela, vuela, palomita Fly, fly, little dove párate en estos rosales. alight onto these rose bushes. Estos versos los pidió These verses sung by request ‘La Grandota’ Óscar González. of Óscar González, ‘the Big One’.

The overlaying of Oscar Gonzalez’s despedida onto that seen in Arnulfo is a minor detail, but it is interesting. Because “Arnulfo” is a rather obscure, archaic text, its “echo” here, however faint, testifies to the persistence of the corrido as social text.

* * *

Folk songs about sportive activity are neither unique nor novel, of course.

Pindar composed victory odes in 4th-century B.C. Greece. The athletic exploits at the hundreds of meso-American ball courts were certainly recorded in song as they were in art and writing; Native American lacrosse has a body of music. The corrido corpus also includes many songs with cockfights, horse races, or beloved horses as their subject, classics like “El Corrido del Gallo de Oro” and “Caballo Prieto Azabache.” Matador and boxing corridos are also part of the Mexican tradition. (Santa Ana 1926; Mendoza 1954;

Simmons 1957:52; Paredes 1993:135; Vennum 1994:43)

In Europe and Latin America fan songs have long been an important and quasi- institutionalized part of the sports event. European soccer fans have a repertoire that includes team and club songs, anthems of nation and place such as “Rule Britannia,” 229

and the notorious ditties that mock opponents’ or individual player’s race, ethnicity, gender, or religion. For colonized, marginalized, or embattled groups like the

Catalonians or Irish, the songs voice nation and difference. For example, Irish-Catholic fans of the Celtic football club of Scotland are known to sing classic rebel songs like the ballad, “The Fields of Athenry”:

By a lonely prison wall I heard a young man calling Nothing matters Mary when you’re free Against the famine and the Crown I rebelled, they cut me down Now you must raise our child with dignity.

To this chant, Scottish Protestant fans might respond (as they did in Glasgow in the

1990s):

Remember our fathers brave and tall Who fought for Ulster’s cause in far off lands (fuck Bobby Sands) Oh my father said to me You must join the YCV With a rifle or a pistol in your hand. (Boyle 1994; Galeano 1995:206; Bradley 1998:209-10)

As for the Rio Grande Valley, no one knows for certain when the football corrido first appeared, but the first verifiable texts date to the early 1970s. At La Joya High

School, Alex Saenz, the marching band director, had composed “El corrido del Coyote.”

In Harlingen “El corrido de los Cardenales” had been circulating on homemade audiocassettes in the post-game pachangitas (shindigs). The tradition was definitively launched in 1971 when Hugo de la Cruz, the host of Football Scoreboard, decided to air

230

the Cardenales corrido--strictly on a lark. Before the song had even ended, calls had begun to pour in. The fans loved it: A corrido for the town and team…why not? Callers from Harlingen were boisterous and proud, their opponents envious. Within a couple of weeks the Bears of the towns of Pharr, San Juan, and Alamo had authored “El Corrido de los Osos” (“The Ballad of the Bears”), and by season’s end Hugo was also playing a polka written for the Bobcats of Edinburg. (Garcia 1997; de la Cruz 1996)

With its playful boasting, mock-heroic scripts, and clever caricatures, the football corrido seemingly dropped out of nowhere. Since the 1930s, composition and active performance of heroic corridos had waned. Though many of the original songs had survived through oral tradition, recordings, and the efforts of scholars, corridos about victimization and social issues, and “pseudo” or “movie” corridos produced in Mexico’s

Tin Pan Alley and film industry had replaced the true heroic ballad.5 But, the timing was right for the football corrido: Tejanos and Tejanas had learned and embraced the idiom of American-style sport and spectatorship; Texas and Valley high school football were at their peak in popularity and complexity of ritual; and Hugo’s radio program had created a new Spanish-language, Tejano-inflected forum for sports fans. (Hernandez

1992; Peña 1992:102; Paredes 1993:138-39)

That the corridos appear during the upswell of the Chicano Movement suggests that the movement’s optimism and affirmation of Mexican working-class culture may have also helped precipitate the football corrido. With the exception of the student

231

walkouts at Crystal City, Texas, sports and popular extracurriculars factored little in the political and cultural activities of the Chicano Movement. Sure, the Raza Unida Party did choose Ramsey Muñiz, a charismatic former college football player from Corpus

Christi, as its gubernatorial candidate, but there were no Chicano analogues to

Muhammed Ali or Tommy Smith and John Carlos (the barefoot, clenched-fist protestors at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics). Nevertheless, portions of the movimiento’s onda, the zeitgeist, radiated to spaces far from the movement’s epicenters of agricultural labor and higher education. As mentioned in Chapter Six, the Movement years saw Mexican fight songs enter the marching band repertoire in some towns. Fans and administrators also created special exhibition football games. Crystal City and La Joya staged the "Chicano

Bowl"; Corpus Christi's LULAC chapter organized the "Menudo Bowl"; San Antonio cooked up a "Chili Bowl"; and, of course, we have the surfacing of the football corrido amidst all of this.6

A-ju-ah! Corrido Performance and Reception

Since the song’s appearance in the early 1970s, fans have produced a steady stream of corridos (and other fan songs). Football Scoreboard remains the primary performance space. On the show, Hugo’s rhapsodic introductions propel the songs out into the verbal dogfight we observed in the last chapter. For example, Hugo might introduce the corrido for the Coyotes of La Joya with the sing-songy call: “¡Esta es la noche que el coyote canta con alegria! El coyote canta. ¡La esco final: La Joya 18, Mision 10! ¡Y ahora el 232

corrido de los Coyotes de La Joya! Que andan con la rabia, la mera rabia .” (“This is the night that the coyote sings with glee! The Coyote sings. The final score: La Joya 18, Mission

10! And now the corrido of the Coyotes of La Joya! Oh they’re rabid tonight, so very rabid.”). Because Hugo's introduction is so rhapsodic, it is in effect part of the corrido, a sort of llamada iniciál or initial call. A formulaic device found in virtually corridos, the llamada, sets the stage by introducing the song’s narrator and/or subject.

A mere one or two corridos make it on the air per week. To have one’s corrido played is an honor, especially because Hugo plays it alongside Mexican patriotic songs like “Guadalajara,” and “Ay, Jalisco no te rajes.”

For winners, the songs deliver a surge of power, pleasure, and a vicarious sense of dominance. As performed in this context, the corridos fit the category Paredes called

“canciones de grito”; these are songs that elicit cathartic, victory, or rebel yells.7 When listening, rivals either swallow their pride, call in to Football Scoreboard and talk back, or request the playing of their own football corrido. If a town has lost the game, it is highly unlikely that their song will be played; there are no corridos for victims or tragedias here.

(Paredes 1995:53)

* * *

Traditionally, the corrido’s performance space has been before an organized audience in either an intimate family setting or in the primarily male settings of the cantina or barbecue. Paredes also identified the performance space of the parranda, “an

233

ambulatory version of the cantina.” Parrandeando involves visiting, singing, and drinking in various cantinas, and perhaps visiting the houses of friends, family, and sweethearts.

In the latter context, performers are expected to be more sedate and respectful, of course.

The football corrido performance resembles the parranda in a sense. As in the act of parrandeando, the composers and performers of the football songs seek to entertain and commune in a public, mixed-gender, and multi-sited space. As we saw in the previous chapter on radio and verbal arts, the technologies of radio and telephone enable a geographically dispersed community to ‘gather and talk’ electronically, and there are implicit rules governing speech. In this context, the football songs are shared, communicative texts. (Paredes 1995:xx-xxii)

I point to performance contexts like the parranda to reiterate that the texts and performances swim in cacophony; we cannot look at the text in isolation. As in most electronic communities, listeners are dispersed, mobile, and distracted (they are driving, chatting, eating). Temporally, the songs come at the end of a long series of performances, events, and gatherings; the football spectacle begins in the late afternoon and does not end until close to midnight. The pleasures, tensions, surprises, and disappointments one experiences all color the timbre and reception of the songs. Unlike popular and traditional songs, the football corridos rarely appear outside the performance frame of late Friday night. One can’t purchase a recording at a store or

234

request them from a strolling trio at the cafe. Like the hummingbirds that funnel through the Valley every fall, the songs are small, colorful, but fleeting treats.

Another point to emphasize is that the corrido exists outside the official culture of the schools. Only rarely are these songs performed at a pep rally, for example, and there is no record of them ever being performed at the football games themselves. (Mariachis have strolled the stands, however.) We can only speculate as to why this is the case. The generational gap is certainly a factor. Barring the most recent immigrants and the most enlightened of students, high-schoolers as a whole perceive the corrido as “old-timey” and “corny.” Many students just “don’t get it,” literally. Their knowledge of Spanish is tenuous if not lacking altogether. Then there is the genre’s Mexicanness. In spite of the fact that Mexican Americans make up the majority of the student body and faculty, there still exists a self-perpetuated bias against and ambivalence toward Mexican and especially working-class and Mexican-American culture in South Texas schools. Not a few Mexican Americans are ill at ease with their own culture. Pastoral and classical

Mexican culture (i.e. baile folklorico, mariachi musical ensembles, and pre-Columbian

Mexican culture) does find a place in curricula and activities, but traditional working- class culture--the most organic, visible, and least romanticized texts and productions of the borderlands--remains marred by ambivalence if not shame. This culture is something familiar and sustaining, something most working and middle-class Tejanos

235

will defend to critical outsiders, but that--like some poor, shabby relative--they hesitate to embrace fully.

Part II. Song Types: the Boast and the Ethical Song

As mentioned earlier, two musical styles dominate: the tejano and norteño/conjunto styles. Regarding meaning and sentiment, the songs can be separated into two basic categories: The first I call the ‘ethical corrido’, and the other is best described as a ‘boasting corrido’. The La Joya and Mercedes corridos in Appendix 2 are examples of ethical corridos. These songs are earnest. They articulate lived or desired town values or dispositions like ganas (desire), hard work, bravosidad (swagger), and apoyo, the active backing of the local high school by the public.

The following song composed for the Coyotes of La Joya is an ethical corrido.

Notice how the second stanza discusses the will to fight for victory, the fourth stanza invokes God and family, the fifth voices the common dictum that sports teach the crucial lessons for success in life, and the sixth frames the players as gallos (gamecocks)--a stock

Mexican trope for male mettle. The corrido:

El Corrido de los Coyotes The Corrido of the Coyotes de La Joya of La Joya

El día dos de septiembre The second day of September fecha de todos los años, same date every year, se comienza como siempre American football season begins, el futbol Americano as it always has.

236

El equipo de La Joya The team from La Joya se ha ido preparando has been preparing para pelear la Victoria to fight for the victory con quienes vayan jugando. with whomever they are playing.

Los Coyotes de La Joya The Coyotes of La Joya no se cansan de entrenar never tire of training para alcanzar la victoria to arrive at that victory o quedar en buen lugar. or finish in good form.

Los coaches qué ni se diga It goes without saying los entrenan con esfuerzo those coaches train them hard porque es la ley de la vida because striving for progress el procurar el progreso. is the rule of life.

Muchos salen lastimados Many end up injured pero a ellos no les importa but they don’t care, son de los mejores gallos they are of the best fighting cocks, que se han dado aquí en La Joya. ever produced in La Joya.

Muchachos los felicito We applaud you, boys, esto es un bonito ejemplo you set a fine example. mejor estar en su equipo Better to be on your team que andar malgastando el tiempo. than out wasting your time.

Mi corrido tiene errores My corrido is not perfect pero así se lo dedico but I dedicate it, nonetheless, a coaches y jugadores to the coaches and players que componen este equipo. that comprise this team.

Pónganle ganas muchachos Listen to the crowd’s excitement, al son de sus alborotes put some heart in it, boys. y a dondequiera que vayan And wherever you go se mencionen los Coyotes. let them speak of the Coyotes.

237

Another corrido written for La Joya displays a similar sentiment and ethic. I collected this song in 2000, so it appears a couple of years after the previous ballad. This variant is not as poetically graceful as the song above, but it maintains the core ideas. It was played in a conjunto style.

Voy a cantar un corrido I will sing you a corrido, y espero no tenga errores and I hope it is without errors, porque este yo lo dedico because this I dedicate a los famosos Coyotes to the famous Coyotes.

[sonido de coyotes auyiendo] [Recorded sound of Coyotes howling] Empieza la temporada del futbol americano The American football y es una dura jornada season is upon us que tienen año por año. and it is a tough journey they take year after year. Los Coyotes de La Joya conocidos dondequiera The Coyotes of La Joya porque llegada la hora are known throughout the land se la juegan con cualquiera . for when the hour arrives they will take on anyone. No presumen de valientes ni quieren gloria ni fama The don't claim to be brave ellos solo están presente nor do they seek glory and fame. donde su deber los llama. They are here, rather, because duty calls. Hacen falta entrenadores y jovenes con acallar One needs disciplined youth para formar jugadores and coaches to mold them y se olviden de las gangas. to pull them away from the draw of gangs. A los padres yo les digo sin temor a equivocarme To the parents I say, que si apoyan a sus hijos and in this there is no mistaking, han de salír adelante. if you support your sons, they are bound to come out 238

A los famosos Coyotes ahead. les voy a dar un consejo, sí ganen este deporte To the famous Coyotes y que otros sigan su ejemplo. I give this advice: You go out and win this sport, and may others follow your example.

In this next example, “El Nuevo Corrido de Mercedes” (“The New Corrido for

Mercedes”), the corridista commends town folk for demonstrating enthusiasm and for standing unified (“unidos”) in their support. Typical of ethical corridos, the song celebrates the talents and performance of the team, coaches, and marching band, while commenting on the integrity and cohesion of the corrido town.

El Nuevo Corrido de Mercedes

Éste es el nuevo corrido This is the new corrido de Tigres de Mercedes of the Tigers of Mercedes, con gusto voy a cantarlo I sing it with gusto para que lo oigan ustedes. so that you all may hear it.

Ya llegó la temporada The season has arrived de ese football que anhelamos, for that football which we covet so, vámonos todos al juego let’s all of us head out to the game pa ra ver si así ganamos. and let’s see if we can win.

Esa gente de Mercedes Those folks from Mercedes deportista y popular, are a popular and sporting lot. se juntan todos unidos They all come together pa’ que su equipo apoyar. and support their team.

Los Tigres son malinches The tigers are badasses siempre son de mucha fama, fame follows in their path, se dedican a ganar they commit themselves to winning y con ningunos se escaman. and no one intimidates them.

239

Adios, a todos los coaches, Farewell, to all the coaches también bandas escolares and also to the marching bands que con toda inteligencia who with all this talent han sido tan populares. have been so popular.

Vuela, vuela, palomita Fly, fly, little dove párate en estos rosales. alight onto these rosebushes. Estos versos los pidió These verses were requested by ‘La Grandota’ Óscar González. Óscar González, ‘the Big One’.

We might think of the ethical corridos as being centripetal: they speak to the core values of the corrido protagonist, the football town itself. As in Garrison Keillor’s Lake

Wobegon, the ethical corrido paints an ideal picture of community, all the kids are

“above average.”

The songs also laud men and boys ‘que no se rajan’ (that won’t quit or succumb).

Recall the La Joya ballad:

Muchos [muchachos] salen lastimados Many [boys] end up hurt pero a ellos no les importa but they are oblivious, son de los mejores gallos they are of the best fighting cocks ever que se han dado aquí en La Joya produced here in La Joya

And Mercedes: Los Tigres son malinches The tigers are badasses siempre son de mucha fama, and fame follows in their path, se dedican a ganar they are set on winning y con ningunos se escaman. and no one shakes them.

240

The boasting songs may also switch into the ethical mode. Like other voices of authority in the local mexicano football world (head coaches, Hugo, school administrators, and clergy), the corridistas will sometimes remind their audience that the taunts are simple fun and games. The following stanzas from the 1996 and 1997

Máquina corridos illustrate this sentiment:

El Viernes es para el Valle For the Valley, Friday un día de gozo y consuelo a day of joy and consolation, porque cada quién apoya ‘cause everyone supports al equipo de su pueblo their town and team, y en la noche ‘lla con Hugo and tonight with Hugo qué lindo la pasaremos. what sweet fun we’ll have.

En la Tierra de la Avispa In the Land of the Bee la raza es muy especial. the folks sure are special. Somos buenos deportistas We’re good sports sin mucho fanfarronear. and not too boastful. Somos amigos de todos We’re friends with all y buscamos su amistád and we seek out your friendship.

Because the ethical corridos foreground people and place, they are thematically related to the Mexican genre of the elogio de ciudad (eulogy for a city/place), or what

Paredes has called, songs for one’s ‘patria chica ’ (little fatherland) (1993 (1958):36). Rather than praise the beauty or hospitality of a place as in the songs like “El Quelite,” “Qué

Rechula es Puebla,” or “El Corrido de Laredo,” the football songs focus on the poetics of contest, and the virtues of people backing their towns and schools--sus patrias chiquititas

(their tiny fatherlands), we might say. They echo, translate, and predicate the sentiments and ethos that are such a constitutive part of the ritual and ideology of

241

Friday football. We must remember that from the mid-week prayer breakfast to the post-game handshake, administrators, coaches, teachers, directors, students, and parents preach, act out, and adhere, for the most part, to the gospel of fair play, neighborliness, humility in victory, and honor in defeat.

* * *

Where the ethical corridos make and display core values, the boasting corridos are centrifugal, outer-directed. They too celebrate place, but they do so by contrasting the corrido town’s prowess and bluster with the neighboring opponent’s weakness, cowardice, or simple patheticalness.

This corrido composed for the Yellowjackets of the small towns of Edcouch and

Elsa is a typical boasting corrido.

La hora ya se llegó. The hour has finally arrived. Todo esta bién preparado. Everything is in order. ya vienen los Yellowjackets And here come the Yellowjackets y vienen atropellando. trampling everything under. Tigres, Gatos, y Lobos Tigers, cats, and wolves, ya se les ‘stan allegando. they’re coming your way.

Los Gatos de Raimonvíl Hey Raymondville Bearkats, vale más que no hagan planes. best you make no plans, La Máquina esta potente The Machine is potent y no es que hágamos alarde. and its not just empty boasts. Los Gladiadores ya saben The Gladiators sure know it, nunca han podido ganarle. they’ve never been able to beat it.

Y los Falcones ya saben And those Falcons know it, aquí no pueden volar through here they ain’t gonna fly, por mucho que hagan la lucha try as they might, muy poco van a lograr they won’t win a thing, 242

porqué las Avispas because the Bees are son harina de otro costal. ‘flour from another sack’.

Esos Lobitos de Brownsville Those little Wolves from Pronto van a darse cuenta, Brownsville, Para ganarle a las avispas Will soon figure out Se necesitan más ganas. That to beat the bees Con aullidos no hacen nada They need muster more desire. ¡Solo un milagro los salva¡ All that howling won’t do it, They’ll need a miracle to save them! ¡Arriba, La Máquina! ¡Arriba, La Máquina.! Arriba, La Máquina! Arriba, La Máquina! Ya saben Cascabelitos Que necesitan mas ánimo. Rattlers now know it. Y otra vez que enfrentarán They’ll need more pep A La Máquina Amarilla Next time they confront Ya saben que aquí no ganan, The Máquina Amarilla. Ni de noche, ni de día. They know that here they can’t win, Be it night or day. Eso Tigres famosos Dicen que son de Mercedes Those famous Tigers Les deciamos buena suerte Hailing from Mercedes, ‘a ver si ahora si pueden. We wish them good fortune. Pudieran llegar muy alto Let’s see what they can do this time. Si es que La Máquina quiere. They could win it all, Well, if La Máquina lets them. Esa Máquina Amarilla Hugo la hizo que luciera, That Yellow Machine, Porque la cuida muy bien It is Hugo who made it shine, Y hasta le hizo cochera. ‘cause he cares for it so well, En ese Valle de Tejas, even making a garage for it. KGBT es la primera. In that Valley of Texas, KGBT is number one. En la Tierra de la Avispa La raza es muy especial. In the Land of the Bee Somos buenos deportistas The folks sure are special. Sin mucho fanfarronear. We’re good sports Somos amigos de todos And not too cocky. Y buscamos su amistad. We’re friends with all 243

And we seek out your friendship. Like other boasting corridos, this Máquina corrido, which circulated in 1997 and

1998, is structured as a schedule of sorts. Each stanza renders or comments on past or predicted encounters. Incidentally, this sort of traveling vignetting is a signature feature of the old corrido of border conflict.

The boasts and taunts in the football songs often work by miniaturizing or feminizing the opponent. The Cascabeles (Rattlers) of Sharyland become “viboritas” (baby or baby snakes) or “cascabelitos” (“little rattlers”); “the Leathernecks,” cadets at the

Marine Military Academy, become “los soldaditos” (“toy soldiers”), and the Cowboy of

Porter High becomes the passive dance partner who gets ‘two-stepped’ off the field.

This manner of slight, where the insult implies a passive sexual role to the protagonist, is rather stock gesture in Mexican male banter; indeed, these songs are extensions of the ritual insulting and speech play found in the folklore of Greater

Mexico. In this regard the boasting football ballad is a polite version of what Merle

Simmons called the corrido “a lo valentón.” This is a song of “sheer bravado in which a

‘valiente’ of a given region indulges in unvarnished bombast, vaingloriously boasting of his own bravery and valor while challenging any son of any other region who might be so rash as to cross him.” (Simmons 1957:58)

The gendered swagger of the boasting corrido also echoes the hyper-masculine poetics of classic Texas-Mexican ballads such as “Jacinto Treviño,” “Ignacio Treviño,”

“Mariano Resendez,” and even parts of the more sober “Gregorio Cortez.” Recall how 244

Jacinto Treviño, who while coolly tying his shoelaces in the middle of a gunfight in

Brownsville, calls out to the Texas Rangers:

Aquí traigo más cartuchos I have more cartridges here pa’ divertirnos un rato. to amuse ourselves for a while. ...No corran, rinches cobardes ...Don’t run, you cowardly Rangers con un solo mexicano. from a single Mexican.

Or in “Los Sediciosos” (“The Seditionists”) we have Vicente el Giro “en su chico caballazo” (“on his little great horse”) call out to his posse: “Échenme ese gringo grande, pa’ llevármelo de brazo.” (“Give me a go at that big gringo, so we can amble arm -in-arm.”)

Then, there is “Gregorio Cortez” where the protagonist taunts the scores of lawmen whom he has managed to evade for hundreds of miles: “Me he escapado de aguaceros, contimas de nublinazos.”(“What harm is a mist [of bullets] to one who has evaded downpours.” There are many other examples; the classic corridos of South Texas abound with boasts and cocky defiance.

In Culture and Truth, Renato Rosaldo describes how modern Mexican American writers like Ernesto Galarza and Sandra Cisneros “dismantle” the traditional corrido’s

“overblown masculine ethic” (Rosaldo 1989:159). Instead of deflating or checking the genre’s masculinity, the fanaticada’s texts seem to relish donning the livery of the old

Tejano warrior. Like their forebears the football songs champion local-rootedness, and manly displays of strength and bravery. They are affirmations, assertions of a deep- seated machismo--to be sure. But they are also, I think, a sort of compensation or prop for masculinity threatened by feminist gains, the economic uncertainties posed by global 245

capitalism, not to mention, the generalized atrophy that comes with middle age. The corridos are a sort of sung Viagra.

Part III.

Poetics and Metaphor

In the first two sections of this chapter I delineate the football corrido’s history, performance context, and core themes. I show how the songs signify on various levels:

They are ordinary culture--the products of people simply periquiando, hechándosela-- gabbing, “shootin’ the shit.” They are folk texts with a colorful cast of characters: pirates, coyotes, raptors, wasps, two-stepping cowboys, and roaring ‘machines’ like La

Máquina Amarilla. They are odes to the game of football itself (“ese football que anhelamos”)--its order and decision, even its beauty. And they are also earnest eulogies that speak of honor, mettle, and apoyo--standing behind one’s community, no matter how small, backwater, or undistinguished. This chapter closes by taking a closer look at one of the most active football corrido communities, Edcouch and Elsa. These sister towns are the home of the Yellow Jackets, more often called "La Máquina Amarilla" (The

Yellow Machine).

We come to La Máquina for several reasons. The first is somewhat coincidental.

It just so happened that in the last few weeks of 1997, when I first attempted to make sense of these songs, the undefeated Máquina was the Valley team that shown most brightly. As it advanced in the finals, fans composed and performed corridos, painted

246

store and car windows with slogans; reporters covered practices and hounded players; and rivals and neighbors came out en masse to back them. The Máquina was everyone's new home team. “Es un borlotazo,” an informant told me over the telephone. “Tú sabes como se pone la raza.” (“It is a big hullabaloo. You know how folks get.”) Newspaper editor, R. Daniel Cavazos, observed that fans had taken La Máquina as “champions and surrogates.” “These teenagers in foam rubber and plastic body armor have become gladiators representing an entire region,” he wrote. “People across the Rio Grande

Valley have rallied behind the team...they have become the Valley’s team. And all across the area, people with political and personal differences have united to support the team that has been crowned ‘La Máquina Amarilla’”(1997). Edcouch and Elsa are also representative of the corrido communities that are most active; these are working-class towns with strong football programs and a single high school. My final reason is rather idiosyncratic reason. I like it as a m etaphor. Perhaps this is because my father is a mechanic of big, yellow Caterpillar-like machines, and I grew up around them. More certainly, it is the metaphor's pliability. The machine purrs and stalls, gets pampered and repaired.

On the Metaphorical

Fundamentally, metaphors are figures of speech that say one thing in terms of another; they are “similes in disguise” (Basso 1976:96-7). Anthropologist James W.

Fernandez, after Kenneth Burke, defines metaphoric expression as a means of making

247

sense of something inchoate by comparing it to something concrete in another distinct domain. It is not unlike the proverb which “says that something complete and graspable

-- a rolling stone, a bird in the hand -- is equivalent to the essential elements in another situation we have difficulty grasping.” The inchoate subject or ‘drift’ of the metaphor is called the tenor and the concrete image that embodies it, the vehicle. (Richards 1936:94-97;

Fernandez 1986:8-9; Fernandez 1991)

To be sure, the metaphor or trope expands the range of expression in language; it alleviates deficiencies, frustrations, and bridges lexical gaps. There is more at work, however. Metaphor can be structural. It can effect a transaction between lived experience and thought--teach humans about themselves and thus help them to

(re)define their relationship to the world. Thinkers like Roman Jakobson, members of the Bakhtin Circle, and more recently George Lakoff and Mark Johnson insist that the poetic, figurative, and metaphoric is much more than mere description -- epiphenomenon to the real. Instead, figurative language is fundamental to the shaping, directing, and comprehension of real experience. As Voloshinov wrote, “It is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around -- expression organizes experience. Expression is what gives experience its form and specificity of direction”(Voloshinov 1973:85). Like a blind man’s walking stick, a popular metaphor can help one feel out the next step.

248

Some metaphors ring so true that they become stock models, incorporated truths, social facts. In Western capitalist, political, and institutional culture, the sports metaphors of ‘the team’ and ‘the playing field’ are (hackneyed) examples of this phenomenon. We are asked to be ‘team players’ or to ‘run with an idea’. And in times of war sports metaphors flood official and journalistic discourse. (Fiddick 1989; Oriard

1991; Brown 1996)

Along a similar line, Victor Turner, Sherry Ortner, Clifford Geertz, Allen

Guttmann, Gerald Early, and many others have argued that in modernity, sports and games have become principal means for people (including scholars) to enact, communicate, construct, and theorize their beliefs, values, concerns, desires, identifications. Indeed, as John Macaloon writes, “playing games” has become a root metaphor and analogue for the generative process in science, art, warfare, commerce, and politics in cultures that are at the same time derisive of “mere games” as standing apart from or in opposition to “the serious life.” (Turner 1974; Guttmann 1978;

MacAloon 1984:255, 291; Geertz 1986:517-18; Ortner 1999; Early 2000)

James Fernandez urges us to examine tropes not only in logic and semantics, but also in the social; what do people do with metaphors? “A sensitive ethnography,” he writes, “must obtain the metaphors that men predicated upon themselves so as to locate the movements they desire to make in the culture they occupy.” By “movement”

Fernandez refers to the qualitative changes of situation that the metaphor effects in the

249

subject -- a movement might signify belongingness, contestation, nostalgia, or redefinition to list a few of possibilities. In for what abstraction/tenor are we reaching for with the metaphor's vehicle? With Fernandez’s pragmatics in mind, let us return to that trope of la máquina we left idling a few paragraphs back. (1986:24)

An assembly of diverse parts brought together, la máquina provides a handy vehicle for people to imagine and describe their collective actions and fortunes. More to point La máquina is an apt metaphor for the m ostly poor and working-class communities from which it springs. These are people whom out of necessity know a thing or two about how a vehicle functions. In other words, the dirt-under-the-fingernails metaphor of la máquina comes from the symbols and figurative language that have resonance and relevance to this corrido community. As John H. McDowell notes in his brilliant structural analysis of the corrido, the corridista does not pull poetic conceits from out of the blue, rather, images and tropes come from the "relevant ecological foundation of the people of whom and for whom he sings." In other words, the classic Texas-Mexican corrido ecology was agrarian and so is the imagery; one sees gamecocks, chaparral, steers, and horses, the latter of which are described with beautiful poetic nuance.

(McDowell 1981:63)

The football corrido's ecology is, of course, modern, working class, and semi- rural. One of Mexican America's most popular songs in the 1990s captures this poetic.

Sung by Selena, the slain Tejana pop star, the song uses as its metaphorical vehicle a

250

jalopy to evoke the tenor not merely of young love, but also of struggle and hope. It is a metaphor and predicament to which her primarily working-class audience could relate.

Miren muchachas que no me arrepiento Look girls, I won’t back out ni tampoco me avergüenzo, and I’m not ashamed, viene mi galán! here comes my beau! Aunque sea pobre y tiene carro viejo Although he’s poor and drives an old car me trata como reina, he treats me like a queen, un hombre de verdád. he’s a true man.

Y aunque tenga una carcacha, And though he drives a jalopy, lo importante es que voy con el, what matters is that I’m with him, tampoco sera el mas guapo, and he may not be the most handsome, pero si es mi novio bién. but he is my fine boyfriend.

Carcacha, paso a pasito, Jalopy, take a bit at a time no dejes de tambalear. don’t you stop sputtering on. Carcacha, poco a poquito, Jalopy, take a bit at a time, no nos vayas a dejar. please don’t break down on us.

Let us return to the máquina. We see this ‘machine’ primed and tweaked in the banter and joking surrounding football and corrido performance. When the team is losing or struggling, fans say que “la Máquina está fallando.” Que “necesita un tune-up esa Maquinita,” o “no sean pinches, héchenle de la buena --el super unleaded.” (The public says, “the machine is misfiring.” That “the little machine needs a tune-up,” or “Don’t be stingy, put some of the good stuff in it, some super-unleaded gasoline.”) Or as the fan from Los Fresnos Falcons quipped in the previous chapter:

Esta noche, es la noche Tonight is the night que La Máquina se apagó the Maquina blew a piston porque se reventó un pistón and shut down el Falcón voló y voló The Falcon flew and flew y Hugo lloró y lloró and Hugo cried and cried

251

When everything is working correctly and a capable operator is at the controls, the machine chugs along. Things can get done, ground is covered, points racked up.

Fans will say that “La Máquina está carburando,” o que “el motor ya le reparamos" (“the machine is carbureted,” or “we’ve repaired her motor.”). George Lozano, a running back, states gratefully, "We, as a team, see ourselves as a machine and the community is the fuel…that means everything" (Hinojosa 1997). "At times fans will praise the machine’s operator, the coach: “¡Ese coach Vela corrió La Máquina pero bien!” (“That coach

Vela ran that machine well, and how!”) Or, in a corrido that made the rounds in 1997-98, we see the Máquina parked in a cochera , a metaphorical garage (the radio program) built by its loyal fan Hugo.

Esa Máquina Amarilla That Yellow Machine Hugo la hizo que luciera Hugo made it shine porque la cuida muy bien he tends to it so well y hasta le hizo cochera. he even made a garage for it.

It was Hugo, Mr. Ni-fu Ni-fa, who first coined the Máquina Amarilla moniker.

After his favorite Mexican soccer team, El Club Deportivo Cruz Azul aka ‘La Máquina

Celeste’ (The Blue Machine of the Cruz Azul cement company’s team), Hugo gave the name of La Máquina Amarilla to the scrappy footballers of Edcouch-Elsa back in the

1970s. Angel Fernandez, a famed journalist in Mexico whom fans called "el poeta del futbol," coined the name Máquina Azul/Celeste. And Fernandez most likely cribbed the name from that storied Argentinian soccer team of the 1940s, La Máquina de River Plate.

252

Or perhaps Fernandez was inspired by the many máquinas that traverse Mexican balladry. In the classic "El Contrabando de El Paso," a smuggler's corrido from the

Prohibition era, the prisoner pleads with the locomotive to speed along to Leavenworth,

Kansas, so that he can begin his sentence. (Robb 1980:186)

Corre, corre, maquinita Run, run little machine, suéltale todo el vapor, turn loose all the steam, anda a llevar esta gaviota hurry and take this seagull hasta el plan de Livenvor. to the plain of Leavenworth.

And there are the máquinas used for transport and bunker by the various roving armies of the Mexican Revolution. In the corrido “La Toma de Celaya,” for example, Pancho

Villa’s maquinita is a trope signifying surging momentum and solidarity.

Corre, corre maquinita, Run, run little locomotive, no me dejes ni un vagón, leave not a car behind, nos vamos para Celaya we’re headed for Celaya a combatir a Obregon. to fight Obregón.

Wherever she’s been, La Máquina, like Selena’s carcacha, no deja de tambalear

(won’t stop chugging along). It's run inevitably ends, but sometimes it even takes one where they never expected. “The Máquina was great and unique,” José V. Zavala wrote in a letter to the editor of the McAllen Monitor in 1997, “like a comet that comes once in a lifetime. We jumped on the glimmering light ...they took us to heights reached by very few. All the fans thank them for this ride” (1997).

The football corridos are songs that dignify and celebrate the minor heroics of common places. Unlike great heroic ballads they don’t spring from civil war or

253

resistance, imperialist aggression, or cultural conflict. They come from space of neighborliness and laughter, but they also speak to struggle and desire. Where in the borderlands corrido of old, the hero was “an epic construction of the society that constitute[d]" him, where the hero was one of us -- “his fate...communal fate” (Saldívar

1990:36). In the football corrido the hero is us as one. "Y que bonito," as El Padre Nacho says. How lovely it is.

254

Chapter Eight: Conclusion

the world is full of abandoned meanings --Don DeLillo, White Noise

The closing scene of Richard Linklater’s film, Dazed and Confused (1993), finds a handful of Texas teenagers trespassing the town stadium in the wee hours. It is the beginning of summer recess, 1976. The plan is to smoke a joint on the field and with that cap off a busy day and night of publicly-sanctioned hazing rituals, aimless cruising, parties, fights, and initiations into school (and social class) grades. The day has seen characters’ emotions swing between love and disavowal, giddiness and anxiety, horseplay and tenderness, reflection on alma mater and longing for something bigger, more tangibly significant and solid--the real world. (The closing shot finds them trekking to brash, booming Houston to slake that thirst with Aerosmith concert tickets.) To smoke marijuana in the stadium, that showcase of straight-arrow

American and Texan values, is to challenge or invert those values, of course. It is to spark up agency, albeit in benign and indulgent fashion.

The young men and women recline and crack jokes, run mock plays with the clever calls "marijuana on one, reefer on two!" and they also ruminate on their high- schooled lives, their frustrations and obligations, the hegemony and intrusiveness of

255

big small-town athletics, and also the social benefits they have reaped as its good- looking stars. "If I ever start calling these the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself," declares quarterback and all-around-nice-guy Randy Floyd; but his eyes deny his words.

The scene is lyrical and melancholy. Linklater’s languid, circular pans suggest an axis; that the students have gravitated to here is no coincidence. But the aluminum and concrete stadium also stands like a sun-bleached skeleton, a huge, blank book, a subject without predicate. As depicted here, town football is dialogical--only as interesting, as ‘good’, relevant, and deeply meaningful, as the people and cohorts who make, embody, speak, and remember it.

I like the scene for its emotional ambivalence; the restlessness and friendship; the ennobling of the local and mundane and also their deromanticization. (Yes, homecoming kings and queens do trespass, drug, fornicate, question, and doubt.)

Linklater shows due restraint. Unlike so many sports and coming-of-age films, Dazed and Confused offers no pat or inspiring narratives and lessons, no universalizing, no easy dichotomies, no epistemological comfort food—to no detrimental end, apparently; the film enjoys a large cult following. In many ways, the film's temporal structure precludes encapsulation or full-blown denouement. In a nod to the 1970’s classics Nashville, Carwash, and especially American Graffiti, the timeframe and ‘story’ are acute, covering the events of a single afternoon and night; and it has an ensemble

256

cast--multiple ‘main characters’ and narrative threads (and frays). Laid out as such, meaning is polyvalent, half-formed, evasive, a little confused. Not to say that ‘big meaning’ or ‘truth' are absent. No, they are always palpable. Here and there characters pause, and try, and do make sense of things. A character interrupts an adolescent session of musings and gripes, for example, with a sudden revelation, "You know? I’d like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor, insignificant preamble to something else."

More often, like a cloud only beginning to form--like everyday life itself, the meaning of it all remains to be precipitated. When and where it will happen, if at all, who knows? The last weighty seconds of the big game; the afterglow of sex; the graduate seminar; the wake; the closing chapter of a semi-autobiographical dissertation? What we glimpse, as Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner put it, is a world in becoming. Wooderson, a wry ex-footballer, articulates this sense of grappling in more folksy fashion, calling it: "l-i-v-i-n'". Let us indulge Wooderson: Does not the spelling out underscore process/experience; the absent g suggest open-endedness; and the snubbing of orthographical convention perform a sort of 'redneck' common-sense poetics? (Turner 1974)

That the film shows town football out of season is also noteworthy. Such a perspective shows how town ball matters and holds in everyday life. Friday football is a distant, relevant thing; its wake lifts and rocks, but it is no leviathan, however. It

257

does not swallow folk and town and youth whole--as much popular culture, journalism, and even middle and high-brow texts like Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights and Geoff Winningham’s Rites of Fall would have it. (In the case of the latter, more in the service of a sharp, hooky thesis, I think, than out of true analytical conviction.)

Friday night rites are a big thing, sure, but they are hardly the only things; all but the youngest and feeblest of mind understand this. Texana’s other great youth and football film, Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, also exhibits the same ambivalence and irony as Dazed and Confused. It does not infantilize the folk. Football is more like a favorite drive-in movie glanced from the highway than a master trope.

Of course, this dissertation is different in purpose and scope than these films.

But like these pitch-perfect texts I have tried to represent the culture of South Texas football in broad, manifold fashion, balancing discussion on the culturally unique, visually arresting, politically pithy, or sociologically curious with the more mundane, universal, and seemingly static aspects of culture and social life.

The historical chapters show the ecology and performance of sport in the rural,

Texas-Mexican period and then again how it changed in the contexts of urbanization, the rise of the public schools and agribusiness, surges in Mexican immigration and

Anglo settlement, and the political reckoning that began in earnest in the postwar years. A common thread that runs throughout is how small acts, minor spaces, common people, and workaday policies served to maintain a status quo of white

258

dominance, segregation, and inequality, both tacitly and explicitly, and how these same acts and spaces, perhaps because their raison d'être were 'mere games', could seed tolerance, and encourage experimentation with core ideals like 'fair play' on the playing fields and beyond.

The chapters on cultural performance, verbal arts, and radio set out to describe, and 'curate' in a sense, the more salient acts, rites, and performance spaces of the regional game. While the chapters on history focused primarily on Anglo-Mexican struggles and compromises, in the ethnographic and folklore chapters we turn our attention to the ways brown fans and athletes assimilate Texas football culture, while also grafting new speech and ballad genres to traditional verbal arts. The articulations of gender are particularly interesting. We see traditional masculine expressive forms like contact sports, periquiando, and balladry, joined (and at times drowned out) by a new interlocutor, the female sports fan.

The accretion of greetings, insults, songs, and jests serves to make and perform the felicitous space of the fanaticada. Where at the football game itself the fans' role is relatively passive, the post-game activities make them active meaning-makers. In their insults, embraces, corridos, corny jokes, and praise, we begin to see folk taxonomies or mappings of the local—how place means ludically and figuratively. These spaces may be fanciful, animated with caricature and metaphor; residual, where old, but now economically marginal places get invoked, as do deep-seated kinship ties; and what we

259

might call the 'petite utopian', where fans invoke what is good and solid about their collective selves and towns, their patrias chiquititas, tiny fatherlands.

Having been on this journey through history, ethnography, and folklore, we now better understand South Texas sports, fandom, and the poetics of culture and place. Still, not unlike the young men and women who find themselves in the town stadium, I find myself asking: is there more than this? Are there overarching questions that the chapters' narrow discussions have failed to address?

There are two broader questions that I think deserve more elucidation. Why has South Texas football thrived even as the game has waned in much of the rest of the state? And what do we make of the fanaticada's thick pronouncements of place given the broad emphasis on dislocation in borderlands cultural studies?

* * *

I have made the argument, after Bourdieu, that the persistence of football stems in great part from an habitus formed in microincremental practice. In other words, ask the athlete or fan why football is so central, and the reasoning tends to the circular.

"We love it because it is big." "It is what we do in Texas." "We love it because it is fun."

"It's fun because we pour our hearts into it." Yet, as suggested in my discussion on

Dazed and Confused, the habitus, rutted as it may be, is also jostled by desire and imagination; it is burdened with meaning, anxiety, or what Fredric Jameson called the

"political unconscious," being responses to domination that lay largely repressed. With

260

this in mind, we might see town football serving as a bulwark against the proliferation of global popular culture and the sense of placelessness and superficiality such forces can effect. This a South Texas "characterized by a kind of daily intercultural making- do, a social pastiche of everyday life, a growing depthlessness," José Limón wrote. The

Friday night game, and really the season as a whole, invests the local with affect, voice, and relevance. (Jameson 1981; Limón 1994:112)

Of course, people know and admire the teams and stars from the urban centers and large universities--all of them hundreds of miles away. (There are no large university or professional teams south of San Antonio.) People wear their hats and t- shirts and ‘regulation’ jerseys; they spend weekend afternoons and Monday nights before television sets, watching games, consuming and reproducing ads, fads, and tag lines. They might even attend a big sports game some day while on vacation or in college. But unlike the situation in Texas’s larger cities where big spectator sports displaced a storied schoolboy football tradition beginning in the 1970s, mass culture and media have not (yet) flooded out town football on the border.

Part of the appeal is that home teams are actually homegrown; and as such an athlete’s name is much more than a resume or press packet anecdote. Names index relations, affiliations, and histories, they tie one to kin and place. In the fine print of the local, these things matter. As I discussed in the chapter featuring the football game, what one plays or played, for whom, and where is a speech genre among middle class

261

Tejanos. It greases the wheels of conversation among strangers; it helps men talk across generations. And these little stories get interleaved with more painful and political speech genres like the migrant farmworker travel narrative so common in the region. (e.g. "Well, we were ginners. So we followed cotton. We started here in

Hargill and….")

Names also signify more obliquely. The Miguels and Maria del Carmens on the programs speak to South Texas's sustained and growing ties with Mexico, to take one example, while the Austins and Tiffanys, also Spanish-surnamed, point to new identities, desires, and incorporations. I'm reminded of a comment made by a coach during a pregame warm-up. When I commented on his Anglo quarterback’s liquid runs and precise throwing, his response did not address the player’s athletic abilities.

Instead, with eyebrows raised, coach said "Tiene novia Mexicana. Chulísima la huerca."

("He’s got a Mexican girlfriend. A cute, cute girl.") To coach the quarterback’s distinguishing quality was not his fine athleticism, but rather his courtship of a brown woman. Mixed dating now being common, I take coach’s remark not as a comment on the uniqueness of the pairing, but rather as an additional virtue in the young man and South Texas as a whole. As a veteran coach he had done his part in bringing such small, good things to fruition.

How long local, amateur sport can maintain its vitality is anybody's guess.

Certainly, in Football Scoreboard's fanaticada we see great passion and vigor, especially

262

among the working class. While game attendance is robust, there is, as mentioned in

Chapter Six, attrition among Anglos, and the more elite and/or Americanized segments of the brown middle class may have begun to follow their lead. A generation ago these groups flocked to the Friday night lights, their social capital depended on it.

Now, one is more likely to find them watching broadcast sports teams/brands in the

'greatrooms' of their modern tract houses. The sports they participate in are more individualistic (e.g. tennis, golf, track and field), and what Bourdieu called "hygienic."

The social base of the Friday night game then seems to be shifting to the brown working class. The verbal arts and ballads discussed in Chapters Seven and Eight may be harbingers of a new, more markedly Mexican hybrid of border sports culture. It is hard to predict what forms or sites this emerging culture will take.

To be sure soccer's star will continue to rise. Indeed, it may be the best hope for fruitful encounters between mexicano immigrants and the white and brown middle classes, the latter having newfound interest in the game. Certainly, new marketing campaigns have raised the profile of soccer in the American greatrooms, but South

Texans are also attracted by the vast Latino presence. The images feed a hunger for representation in sports media, and they compliment an emerging Pan-Latino consciousness sited primarily, for now at least, in the shared consumption of popular culture, specifically telenovelas, music videos, boxing, and soccer.

263

Minor league baseball has also returned to the Valley. This is a welcome and overdue revival of a rich tradition, but the more organic version of baseball, by this I mean a form of play unencumbered by commercialism, is, in fact, amateur softball.

Often, these popular games have the casual, festive air of the town baseball of old, and participants move easily from the diamonds to more traditional spaces of social bonding and verbal arts, these are the beer drinking circle and the barbecue. On a more curious note, an experiment with minor league ice hockey in the border town of

Hidalgo has proven wildly successful. Aptly, the team is called the Killer Bees after the odd and slightly dangerous hybrid wending its way north.

If Texas's larger cities are any indication, and as I have hinted throughout, the biggest threat to the local schoolboy game will come electronically in the form of an ever-increasing and sophisticated set of images, products, and technologies. Of course, these media products and technologies have the potential to expand self-definition-- generating new experiences, role models, gender identities, and even utopian models of resistance. We see such a process, of course, in the Valley fan culture's exploitation of radio and telephony. But by now we are all very much aware of the potential for global media, by and large North American in origin, to eat away at tradition, (further), make for more homogenous communities, and fragment the individual's sense of self.

(Cvetkovich and Kellner 1997)

264

Which leads to the question of dislocation. When I began drafting this study in the late 1990s, there was a surge of scholarship on South Texas, and the border in particular, which focused on themes of dislocation, displacement, and related spatial rubrics like interstitiality, and borderlands. Naturally, I had to ponder how such a thematic and poetics affected my subject, especially in light of the fact that what I had witnessed in the field was more of a declaration or performance of emplacement than a response to dislocation.

A few voices: Writer and scholar, Alicia Gaspar de Alba wrote that "Chicano/a identity is, ultimately, a border identity: neither side wants you and you can’t go home" (Gaspar de Alba 1995:107). In José Limón’s Dancing With the Devil, he spoke of an emergent "postmodern negation" of the older grounding values of respect and identity among the South Texas poor and working class (1994). Folklorist Richard

Flores analysis of a modern performance of the "Los Pastores" folk drama speaks of a

"poetics of dislocation" (Flores 1995). In his book Border Matters José Saldívar surveys a broad range of expressive culture and theoretical models that riff off the ideas of displacement and dislocation in ways that provoke a rethinking of cultural boundaries.

Postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha, Akhil Gupta, Arjun Appadurai also argued and extended the borderlands/displacement metaphors. For example, Akhil Gupta and

James Ferguson write: "the fiction of cultures as discrete, object-like phenomena occupying discrete spaces becomes implausible for those who inhabit the borderlands"

265

(Gupta and Ferguson 1992:7). There are many other examples that work and extend this trope; indeed, the borderlands have reached "theoretical status," James Clifford declared in the late 1990s. (1997:37). Then there is, of course, Gloria Anzaldua's iconic borderlands trope:

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates agains the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country--a border culture...A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead...Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only ‘legitimate’ inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger. (Anzaldua 1987:3-4)

On the one hand the tropes of dislocation in these works adamantly acknowledge the historical, material, and political reality of life on the border and the unique articulations of culture that such "in-betweenness" bears. The Chicano/a thinkers are also responding to earlier, more bounded formulations of the region. In the 1950’s and 60’s, for example, anthropologists William Madsen, Arthur Rubel, and

Ozzie Simmons in independent (and invaluable) study exhibited a tendency to describe Valley society as an insular and static social body, especially when compared to white America. Too often, in these works, the actions and commentary of an individual or small group stand for Mexican American society as a whole. Being broad

266

and sociological in nature, these studies also failed to discuss expressive culture in the incisive and political manner of contemporaries like Carey McWilliams and Américo

Paredes. Furthermore, as Paredes later noted with signature wryness, the researchers did not understand a fundamental tenet in South Texas discourse--the native has a strong penchant for punning, irony, and the straight-faced jest. (Madsen 1964; Rubel

1966; Simmons 1974(1952); Paredes 1977)

While more attuned to difference, hybridity, and the forces of global capitalism, native intellectuals like Paredes and Rolando Hinojosa also tended to the holistic. In their writings the dislocation stemming from the legacy of the Treaty of Guadalupe

Hidalgo (1848) serves to temper the Texas-Mexican border community and forge heroes of resistance like Gregorio Cortez). In With His Pistol in His Hand, Paredes renders south Texas ranchero society as egalitarian and communal--that is until it is cleaved by geopolitics and disrupted by the waves of people from the American north and Mexican south. In his essay, "A Sense of Place," Rolando Hinojosa invokes a similar narrative: "We were borderers with a living and unifying culture born of conflict with another culture, and this too helped to cement further still the knowing of exactly where one came from and from whom one was descended." (Paredes

1958:9-15; Rosaldo 1989:151; Hinojosa 1994 (1984):20).

How does one reconcile the discourse of displacement and dislocation with the passionate acts of emplacement witnessed in the popular culture and fandom

267

presented here? Certainly, many of my arguments have underscored dislocation, rupture, and hybridity. In this sense I echo the critics cited earlier. At the same time, I have also brought to light cultural productions and forms of being that are more central than interstitial; conventional rather than radical; "red, brown, and blue" rather than red; and characterized not by vertigo and rupture but by a strong sense of place.

I think the focus on dislocation and the bigger trope of borderlands overreached, or perhaps it was prescribed too liberally—oh, how many conference themes and papers it spawned! I am not alone in this assessment. In a broad review of the anthropology of the borderlands, Robert Alvarez noted, that "in our quest to expose and illustrate the importance of difference and contrast, the role of border people’s creation of bonds and social networks over time has been neglected" (Alvarez 1995:461).

Cultural productions like football, that is ordinary culture energetically performed, are deceptive in their simplicity. An accounting of the historical, material, and political forces that undergird performance and consumption is essential, of course. We must, however, remember to look beyond what now threatens to become topological stereotypes (the de facto vertigo of borderlands, for example) and the privileging of resistance and difference over other forms expression, presence, and desire. On the other hand, we must upset that super-tidy thesis so endemic to popular narratives on small town sport.

* * *

268

At the end of each football season in November, Hugo invites El Padre Nacho to valedict to the football flock. In 2000 El Padre he closed with the following:

Que se ponga en alto El Valle. Agradecer a todos los chicos de todos los equipos. Nos dieron una buena temporada. Nos hicieron olvidar espinas, problemas, y de todo, no? ¡Y pelearnos ahí entre unos y otros es parte del circo! Pero, es bonito compartir con todos.

Let the Valley be exalted. Be thankful for all the kids and all the teams. They gave us a good season. They made us forget the thorns, problems, all of it, no? And fighting one against the other--that’s part of the circus! But it is a lovely thing to share with everyone.

Is not the father right? A cultural production like town football pushes one this way and that. It is a fight, a circus, a diversion, a celebration of youth--lovely because the people predicate it so.

269

Appendices

Appendix One-A

Partial transcript from Football Scoreboard, broadcast on 9/13/96. Length of transcribed segment: seven minutes.

Explanation of Abbreviations: Gender: M: male F: female ______

1. Caller, M, older (caller sounds a bit drunk): “Quería felicitar al fanático de los football. Este, los Crougars [sic] se van a llevar el paquete este año. Les van a quitár la rabia a los Coyotes, a los Mostangs las herraduras que traen en las patas, a los Gatos ya le arrancaron las uñas. Se van a llevar el paquete los Crougars este año. Vale mas que ya no apuesten.” Hugo: “Okay. Gracias por llamar. Buenos noches estamos en el aire.”

2. Caller, M : “A, sí, queria, este, si le podia poner El Niño Llorón a Felix Luera de Macalen de parte de su Tía Lisa. {Niño Llorón plays] Él es lo que significa hipócrita. [Hugo laughs] Porque él es originalmente de Rio Grande, originalmente de Rio Grande, nomás que vive en Macalen ahora. Y él acaba de ir esta noche a ver a los Rio Grande City Rattlers y él se sentó al lado del estadio de los Rattlers. Y habló que su tía estaba llorando porque perdieron los Rattlers. Pos, porque habla así? Él también es fanático de los Rattlers.” Hugo: “Chaquetero el hombre.” Caller: “Sí, es chaquetero! También quería felicitar as los Donna Redskins, es que se aventaron a la noche. Thank you.”

3. Caller, F: “Sí, I’d like to congratulate the Harlingen Cardinals de parte de la familia Salinas de aquí de Mision. Hugo: Exacto. Fue muy buen juego ese, no? Caller: Sí, fue muy bueno . El número 52, Joey Vela, es nieto de los Salinas. And they just wanted to congratulate him.

270

4. Caller, F, younger: “Yes, I’d like to congratulate Pharr North. I’d like to just say that I’m proud that they’re getting it together, and it’s happening because of Coach Tony Villareal coming from Port Isabel. He brings a lot of integrity and he brings a lot of winning to wherever he goes. Hugo: Bueno, thank you ba -bye.

5. Caller, F, older: “Quería a felicitar a los de Rio Grande aunque aigan perdido. Hugo: Ándele! Caller: Pero como quiera, cuando los de Edinburgo vallan a jugar a La Joya, Edinburgo les va a ganar a La Joya! Y ese Coyote Mayor [very steamed, animated] que no ande tanto aullande porque va estar en la loma!” Hugo: Ándele. Caller: Y ese Coyote Mayor no debe de estar aullando tanto! [very mad, shaky voice] Hugo: Ándale Coyote. Caller: Yo soy de Rio Grande! Felicito a los de Rio Grande y a los de Roma. Hugo: Bueno, pos gracias por llamar. Andele, ba-bai. Caller: Bueno. Bye! Hugo: Vámonos a Rio Grande!

6. Caller, M, [festivities in background]: “Hello, no, todo lo que quiero dejir [sic] es que allí en La Joya no traen nada. Espere que lleguen los Cougars allí. Son los mero, meros. Hugo: Gracias por llamar. Caller: Yessssir.

7. Caller, M: “Hugo de la Cruz?” Hugo: Sí, señor. Caller: “Buenas noches, felicitaciones por su programa. Y dile a la señora de Puerto Isabel: él que ríe al último ríe mejor. Y arriba Los Fresnos … Falcons. Hugo: Este es el tasón del Highway 100? Caller: Seguro que sí! Y todo el tiempo los de Puerto Isabel, no le hace a donde vayan tienen que venirse POR LOS FRESNOS. Arriba Los Falcons ! Hugo: Y cuidado con la policía allí [Los Fresnos has a notorious speed trap.] Si no pregúntale a cierto amigo que tengo en La Feria que se lo bailaron PERO FEOOOO. Caller: No, hombre… Hugo: Se llama Lionel y se apellida Lozano. Allí le dieron una santa bailada que pa que te cuento… Ese no se le va olvidar mientras viva. Ha ha. Andale bye. Caller: Arriba Los Fresnos! Hugo: En serio. Al hombre mas justo de toda la tierra le pasan estas cosas, válgame. Y tenía que ser en Los Fresnos. Saludos a Lionél Lozano…

271

En el aire, quién llama?

8. Caller, M, younger: Buenas noches, Hugo. Estoy llamando de Pharr – San Juan – Alamo. Quiero felicitar a los Raiders por el juego que dieron hoy en la noche. Y quiero que me haga un favor. Hugo: Dígame. Caller: Quiero que me le ponga el Niño Llorón a los Mustangs y a Gilbert Muzquiz. Hugo: [Niño Llorón plays] Okay, ya está. Caller: Y arriba los Raiders la semana que entra con los Cougars.

9. Caller, F: Quiero felicitár a los Coyotes. Y le quiero decir a esa señora de Rio Grande, que ya mero se le salía el pulmón! [Hugo laughs] Ya mero se le salía el pulmón. [Hugo plays the Risa Burlona] Ye que no ande tan celosa. Y a Edinburg? Que se espere por que allí va el Demolition Crew! Les vamos a enseñar lo que tiene La Joya. Hugo: Buenas noches, está en el aire.

10. Caller, F: Sí, sí nadamás quería felicitár a los Coyotes de La Joya y decirle a la señora esa que habló de Rio Grande: que de que murieron los quemados si no de puro ardór? De parte de acá de los de La Joya. Hugo: Andale! Chile, tomate y cebolla ! Caller: Nadie le gana a La Joya! Hugo: Hágame un aullido así como coyote. Caller: [howls]

11. Caller, F, young: Yes, I’d like to wish good luck to the Pirates, tomorrow. They’re playing against Sinton. Hugo: Contra Sinton, verdad? En Falfurrias. Caller: Yes, tomorrow. I’d just like to wish the Pirates good luck. Hugo: Buenas noches, estamos en el aire.

12. Caller, F, younger: Buenas noches. Hugo: Dígame. Caller: [With soft, sad voice] Quería felicitar a los Donna Redskins. Hugo: [teasing] A los Roma Redskins? Caller: Donna. Hugo: Ah, perdóneme. Lo oyí mal. De parte de quien? Caller: De Adriana.

272

Hugo: Adriana? Caller: Sí.

Hugo: Oye, que alegre se oye. En serio. Hasta parece que ganaron. Verdád? Verdád? Caller: Sí… Hugo: Sí, sí le nota, en serio . Caller: Okay. Hugo: Que alegría. Okay bye.

273

Appendix One-B

English translation of partial transcript form Football Scoreboard, broadcast on 9/13/96. Length of transcribed segment: 7 minutes.

Explanation of abbreviations:

Gender: M: male F: female

1. Caller, M, older [caller sounds a bit drunk]: I want to greet the football fanatic. Well, the Crougars [sic] are going to take the package this year. They’re going to take the rabid out of the Coyote, and take the horseshoes off the Mustang’s feet, and those cats [Bobcats] have already been declawed. The Crougars are gonna take the package this year. Y’all better not wager any more. Hugo: Okay. Thanks for calling. Good evening we’re on the air.

2. Caller, M : Yeah, I wanted to, well, if you play the Niño Llorón [the Bawling Baby] to Felix Luera of McAllen from his Aunt Lisa. [the Niño Lloron track plays] He’s the very definition of a hypocrite. [Hugo laughs] Because he is originally from Rio Grande [City], but now he lives in McAllen. And he just got back from watching the Rio Grande City Rattlers and he sat on the Rattler side. And he just called to tell me that his aunt was crying because the Rattlers lost. Now, why the heck is he saying that? He is also a fan of the Rattlers. Hugo: Turncoat, eh? Caller: Yeah, a total turncoat! Also, I’d lie to send a greeting to the Donna Redskins – it’s that they really shone tonight. Thank you.

3. Caller, F: Yes, I’d like to congratulate the Harlingen Cardinals from the Salinas family over here in Mission. Hugo: Exactly. It was a really good game, huh? Caller: Yeah, it was really good. Number 52, Joey Vela, is a grandson of the Salinas, and they’d like to congratulate him.

274

4. Caller, F, younger: Yes, I’d like to congratulate Pharr North. I’d like to just say that I’m proud that they’re getting it together, and it’s happening because of Coach Tony Villareal coming from Port Isabel. He brings a lot of integrity and he brings a lot of winning to wherever he goes. Hugo: Okay, thank you and ba -bye.

5. Caller, F, older: I wanted to congratulate those from Rio Grande [City] even though they lost. Hugo: [sensing seniority, Hugo addresses her in the formal Spanish prononun Ustéd.] There you go, ma’am. Caller: But anyway, when those from Edinburg go to play at La Joya, Edinburg is going to beat up La Joya! And that Coyote Mayor [very steamed, and loud] shouldn’t be howling so much cause he’s gonna end up on the hill! Hugo: There you go, ma’am. Caller: And that Coyote Mayor shouldn’t be howling so much! [her voice is shaking, very irate] Hugo: Waaatch out, Coyote. Caller: I am from Rio Grande [City]! I send a greeting to those from Rio Grande and those from Roma. Hugo: Good, now thanks for calling. Take care, ma’am, ba-bye. Caller: [catching her breath] All right, bye! Hugo: Well, let’s go out to Rio Grande [City].

6. Caller, M: [festivities in background] Hello, no all I wanted to say is that La Joya doesn’t got a thing. Just wait till the Cougars go out there. They are the real thing, the real thing. Hugo: Thanks for calling. Caller: Yesssir.

7. Caller, M: Hugo de la Cruz? Hugo: Yes, sir. Caller: Good evening, congratulations on your show. And tell that lady from Port Isabel that he who laughs last, laughs best. And arriba with Los Fresnos. Hugo: Oh, this is the battle to lay claim to Highway 100. Caller: Sure it is! And any time that those from Port Isabel want to go anywhere, no matter where, they’ve gotta pass through Los Fresnos. Arriba Los Falcons! Hugo: And watch out for the police out there. [Los Fresnos has a notorious speed trap in the region] If you don’t believe me ask a certain friend from La Feria – boy, they danced that ol’ boy around, BUT BAAAD.

275

Caller: No way, man… Hugo: His name is Lionél and his last name is Lozano. Out there they gave him a holy runaround, you wouldn’t believe if I…He isn’t going to forget that as long as he lives. Ha ha. All right, bye. Caller: Arriba Los Fresnos! Hugo: No, really. My God, the most just man on the earth and these things happen to him. And it had to be in Los Fresnos. Greetings to Lionel Lozano… On the air, who is calling?

8. Caller, M, younger: Good evening, Hugo. I’m calling from Pharr-San Juan-Alamo. And I’d like to greet the Raiders for the game they gave tonight. And I want you to do me a favor. Hugo: Tell me. Caller: I want you to play the Niño Llorón for the Mustanges and for Gilbert Muzquiz. Hugo: [El Niño Llorón plays] Okay, there it is. Caller: And arriba with the Raiders next week when we play the Cougars.

9. Caller, F: I’d like to greet the Coyotes. And I also want to tell that lady from Rio Grande [City], that it sounded like she almost lost a lung. [Hugo laughs] She almost coughed up a lung! [Hugo plays the crazy laugh track] And she shouldn’t be so jealous. And Edinburg? Well, just wait and see cause here comes the Demolition Crew! We’re gonna show them what La Joya’s got. Hugo: Good evening, you’re on the air.

10. Caller, F: Yes, I just wanted to greet the Coyotes of La Joya and tell that lady who called from Rio Grande [City]: Did not the burned die from smoldering jealousy? And this is from us over here in La Joya. Hugo: Andale! Chile, tomato and onion! Caller: No one beats La Joya! Hugo: How about giving me one of those Coyote howls. Caller: [howls]

11. Caller, F, young: Yes, I’d like to wish good luck to the Pirates, tomorrow. They’re playing against Sinton. Hugo: Against Sinton, right? In Falfurrias. Caller: Yes, tomorrow. I’d just like to wish the Pirates good luck. Hugo: Good evening, we’re on the air.

276

12. Caller, F, younger: [melancholy voice] Good evening. Hugo: What’s up? Caller: I wanted to congratulate the Donna Redskins. Hugo: [teasing] The Roma Redskins? Caller: Donna Hugo: Ah, pardon me. I heard it wrong. Who is this from? Caller: From Adriana. Hugo: Adriana? Caller: Yes. Hugo: Hey, you sound quite happy tonight. No really. It even sounds like you all might have won. Right? Right? Caller: Yeah… Hugo: Yeah, I can tell, I’m serious. Caller: [soft and sadly] Okay. Hugo: What glee. Okay bye.

277

Appendix Two Selected Football Corrido Lyrics

El Corrido de La Máquina Amarilla The Corrido of the Máquina Amarilla (inicio de los 90's) (early 1990s)

Ya se ha llegado la hora The hour we've anticipated que estabamos esperando has finally arrived. La Maquina ya esta lista La Máquina is now ready su motor bien afinado her motor good and tuned. a muchos les mostraremos To many we'll prove tonight que en el football si ganamos. that in football we do win.

Ya Santa Rosa lo sabe Santa Rosa sure knows it y Donna, pues ni se diga , and Donna, well, need we say, Los Fresnos y sus Falcones Los Fresnos and its Falcons have by now ya se llegara su via finished their flight away to Laredo and a Laredo y a Monterrey Monterrey descalzos y bien servidos. where we'll find them plucked and served on a platter. A los Tigres de Mercedes To the Tigers of Mercedes un buen juego les daremos. a good game we'll give them. La selva no está muy densa, The ain't so dense facil daremos con ellos we'll take them easily. y los Leones [La Feria] ya lo saben And the Lions [La Feria] know it well, --Cuando ganamos, barremos. when we win, we sweep it all.

Cuidado con La Máquina! [grito] Beware of La Máquina! [extended yell]

Esos Vikingos de Brownsville Those Vikings from Brownsville pongansen muy abusados put yourself on alert porque si no lo hacen bien because just one misstep les comemos el mandado. and we'll eat you lunch. La Máquina ya no falla, La Máquina doesn't misfire anymore, el motor le reparamos. we have repaired her motor.

El Viernes es para El Valle Friday is for the Valley un dia de gozo y consuelo a day of joy and consolation,

278

porque cada quien apoya because everyone supports al equipo de su pueblo. the team from their town. Y en la noche con Hugo And tonight with Hugo [radio program] que lindo la pasaremos. what sweet fun we'll have.

Nos se enojen los perdidos Don't get angry losers ni se burlen ganadores and don't deride them winners. siempre seremos vecinos We will always be neighbors y asi debemos de vernos. and we need to keep that in perspective El Viernes es especial Friday is a special time y aunque duela nos queremos. and we love each other—though it pains us. Nos despedimos de ustedes From you we now dismiss ourselves, amigos y futbolistas. friends and footballers. Les mandamos un saludo Here we take pride de la tierra de la avispa, in being good sports. donde tenemos orgullos so we send a greeting de ser buenos deportistas. from the land of the bee.

¡Y arriiba La Máquina! [grito] And arriba La Maquina! [extended yell]

279

El Nuevo Corrido de Mercedes (1996) The New Corrido of Mercedes

Éste es el "Nuevo Corrido This is the "New Corrido de Tigres de Mercedes" of the Tigers of Mercedes," con gusto voy a cantarlo I sing it with gusto para que lo oigan ustedes. so that you all may hear it.

Ya llegó la temporada The season has arrived de ese football que anhelmamos, for that football which we so covet, vámonos todos al juego let's all of head out to the game para ver si así ganamos. and let's see f we can win.

Esa gente de Mercedes The Mercedes Tigers deportista y popular, are sportinig and outgoing, se juntan todos unidos they all come together con que a su equipo apoyar. so as to support their team.

Los Tigres son malinches The Tigers are badasses siempre son de mucha fama, always seemingly bathed in fame. se dedican a ganar They dedicate themselves to winning y con ningunos se escaman. and no one shakes them.

Adiós, a todos los coaches, Adieu to all the coaches también bandas escolares and also to the marching bands que con toda inteligencia which remain so popular han sido tan populares. due to all their intelligence.

Vuela, vuela palomita Fly, fly little dove párate en estos rosales. alight on these roses. Estos versos los pidió These verses were requested 'La Grandota' Oscar González. by Oscar Gonzalez, 'The Big One'.

280

El Corrido de la Máquina Amarilla (1997) Corrido of the Yellow Machine

[zumbido de avispero] [sound of buzzing wasps]

La hora ya se llegó The time has no come todo esta bien preparado everything is well-prepared, ya vienen los Yellowjackets here come the Yellowjackets y vienen atropellando. trampling over all. Tigres, gatos y lobos Tigers, cats, and wolves, ya se les 'stan allegando. they're coming your way.

Los Gatos de Raimonvíl Raymodville Bearcats, vale más que no hagan planes. best you make no plans. La Máquina está potente The Máquina is potent y no es que hagamos alarde. and it's not just that we boast, Los Gladiadores ya saben the gladiators sure know it, nunca han podido ganarle. never have they been able to beat it.

Y los Falcones ya saben And those Falcons know it aquí no pueden volar no matter how hard they try por much que hagan la lucha through here they ain't gonna fly. muy poco van a lograr Nothing to feed on here porqué las Avispas son because the bees are harina de otro costal. flour from another sack.

Esos Lobitos de Brownsville Those wolve cubs from Brownsville, pronto van a dares cuenta soon are gonna find out para ganarle a las avispas that to beat the bees se necesitan más ganas. they need to muster more desire. Con aullidos no hacen nada. All that howling won't do a thing. ¡Solo un milagro los salva! Only a miracle can save them.

[canto de grupo] [group chant] Arriba, La Máquina. Arriba, La Máquina. Arriba, La Máquina. Arriba, La Máquina.

Ya saben Cascabelitos Rattlers now realize que necesitarán mas ánimo that they will need more pep 281

la otra vez que enfrentarán next time they face a La Máquina Amarilla. the Máquina Amarilla. Ya saben que aquí no ganan They know that here they cannot ni de noche, ni de día. neither by night, nor by day.

Esos Tigres famosos Those famous tigers dicen que son de Mercedes hailing from Mercedes les deciamos buena suerte, we wish them good luck, a ver si ahora si pueden. let's see if this time they can handle us. Pudieran llegar muy alto They could reach quite high, si el que La Máquina quiere. of course, if la Máquina let's them.

Esa Máquina Amarilla That Máquina Amarilla Hugo la hizo que luciera was made to shine by Hugo, porque la cuida muy bien because he cares for it so well y hasta le hizo cochera. and he even build it a garage. En ese Valle de Tejas In that Valley of Texas KGBT es la primera. KGBT is number one.

En la tierra de la avispa In the land of the Bee la raza es muy especial. the folks are very special. Somos buenos deportistas We are good sports sin mucho fanfarronear. and not too boastful. Somos amigos de todos We're friends with all y buscamos su amistad. and we seek out your friendship.

282

Corrido de Los Fresnos The Los Fresnos Corrido

Los Falcones de Los Fresnos The Falcons of Los Fresnos hoy lanzan su temporada today launch their season con ese Coach Lionél Garza with that Coach Lionél Garza y Coach Lopez y Amaya. and Coach Lopez and Amaya.

Han regresa'o los muchachos These young men, who in their day que en su tiempo eran campiones were champions, have returned. van a entrenar a sus hijos They're going to train their sons que juegan con los Falcones. so that they may play with the Falcons.

Las Aguilillas de [Brownsville Hanna] The Eaglets of Hanna desplumadas quedaran will end up plucked y los Vaqueros de [Brownsville] Porter and the Cowboys from Porter el dos-pasos bailaran. the two-step they'll dance.

De Puerto Isabel Torpones The Tarpons of Port Isabel no les a queda'o salida are stuck with no way out to sea han de pasar por Los Fresnos they'll have to pass through Los Fresnos y los haremos sardines. where we'll make them sardines.

Las Avispas de Edcouch-Elsa The Bees of Edcouch-Elsa dicen que ya no hacen nada are said to be rendered useless porque ahora vienen cruzadas because now they are crossed con colmenas Africanas. with the Africanized bees.

Los Tigres de Mercedes The Tigers from Mercedes los vamos a hacer chivarras we'll make into rugs y a los montes de Raimon and the Bearcats from Raymond[ville] los va'hacer chamarras. we'll make into sweaters.

Los Gladiadores de Roma The Gladiators from Roma los mandamos a Camargo [Mexico]. We'll send over to Camargo [Mexico]. Les vamos a hundir el barco We're going to sink the ship a los Piratas de Hidalgo. of the Pirates of Hidalgo.

De Harlingen Cardenales Of those Harlingen Cardinals 283

a jugar football invito a football game we challenge y los Perros Galgos and also to the Greyhounds que vienen de San Benito. that come from San Benito.

Ya con esta me despido: Now with this I bid you farewell: ¡de Sharyland Viboritas from the hides of those con su cuero van hacer little Rattlers from Sharyland los Falcones sus botitas! the Falcons will make their booties.

284

Appendix Three On Doing Ethnography

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society, has completed its intellectual journey. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

"Deep Hanging Out"

Having grown up in South Texas and having participated in the area’s football culture for many years makes me a native and "auto" ethnographer." Such a relation and perspective certainly has its benefits. By blurring distinctions between observer and observed, one can grasp unique perspectives, intimacy. But this is a double-edge sword.

Familiarity and intimacy also create blind spots and unconscious restraint or self- censorship--one can never truly leave one's native community after all. One can mitigate such problems by discussing the ethnographer's position of inquiry--where he or she "comes from," and what theoretical models inform their work.

This project has its roots in youthful discussions with my friends in the 1980s.

While going off to college and discoursing with friends is not a particularly unique practice in American society, for my generation of Mexican Americans in the Valley it was. The middle class rite of going off to college was still a novel experience. Only some of our parents had attended college, and few of our peers left the area to study.

285

We were part of the first wave of Mexican Americans to benefit from the reforms in higher education effected in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Because we shuttled between two very different worlds--one brown, bicultural, and relatively poor and the other affluent and white, the experience was vexing. For example, one friend felt guilty, even embarrassed, about being an Ivy Leaguer. When acquaintances asked what he was doing with himself, he would say that he attended

"college in New Jersey," rather than declare "Princeton!" like any other red-blooded

American. And our minds and bodies were transformed by periods of dwelling nine months at college and three months at home. (I remember being scolded by a cosmopolitan Latina friend at college for having reacquired a Tejano accent over the summer.)

Because we were dispersed across the country at mostly elite colleges, returning home for Christmas and summer breaks was special and the conversations lively, intense, and eclectic. At times we sat in the middle-class comfort of sprawling ranch houses; other times we held court in the plush but inexpensive bars and lounges across the border in Reynosa, Mexico. During the day we painted houses and did chores for our parents and their businesses. At night we held (garage rock) band practice, lifted weights, played basketball in the driveway, or cruised around the small cities and rural roads looking for something interesting to do. On weekends we met up with friends on the empty newly-paved streets and cul de sacs of new subdivisions. Other times we

286

waited for our parents to leave for Las Vegas, or for one of the richer kids to produce a key to a condo at the beach. In many ways we were "typical" American kids.

And there were always books. Whatever activity we enjoyed we inevitably ended up reviewing and debating concepts we had picked up in the classes and dorms of our respective schools. For example, I shared a summer reading list with my friends that "my cool freshman English teacher" had made for me. I would later realize that my teacher, Frank Lentricchia, was an important Americanist and literary theorist.

We hopscotched through a range of topics. I particularly remember one sleepless night when we were out regando (irrigating) a parent’s tax shelter pasture. Our discussion spanned the U.S. involvement in Central America, early Edward Said (one of the guys was his buddy at Columbia), Gabriel García Marquez, and our own intellectuals--writer Rolando Hinojosa and satirical musician Wally Gonzalez whose song "Vamos a Bailar Kicker Tonight" ("We’re Gonna Dance Kicker Tonight") our band covered.

Along with talking about artists, music, literature, and all the metaphysics that fascinate youth, we talked about our home, our unique border culture. Our sojourns in

New York, Cambridge, New Haven, or Houston, where I attended school, churned up all kinds of cultural, social, and identity questions. Initially, or commentary was basic:

"Things are so different here, right?" Or, that when we shuttled from periphery to center and bac,k we experienced "a culture shock." Over time our analysis and discussion got

287

better, more heated, political, and nuanced. What exactly made our place so different?

What was the history? And what was going to happen to this place, hit hard by a wrecked Mexican economy and a catastrophic freeze which had ruined the infamously oppressive, but economically-critical agricultural sector? What were our obligations as the lucky (though hardly wealthy) kids who were now rubbing elbows with the children of senators, professors, and power brokers? Would we return and make a life here or dissolve into the college towns and corporate meccas that glimmered so attractively in the north.

Then there was ethnicity and identity--how it so differently signified/mattered outside of South Texas and within the university. To deny it, or embrace it? To sustain the rather conservative Tejano identity, engage the much more radical Chicano positions, and/or a more cosmopolitan pan-Latino inflection. Should we just be--walk in anonymity on the American street, or need we perform it--dig up an accent mark and wear it like a dashiki?

While kneading through ideas and writing this dissertation, I constantly found myself speaking to and invoking my savvy ‘homies’, and hearing their frank and also politically-incorrect remarks. It is they who initiated my interest in hybridity, border culture, and the practices and trajectories of the growing Mexican American middle class, among so many other things. I sincerely believe that our discussions and meditations on local culture were not just preambulary, but a sort of junior auto-

288

ethnography, instead. After all, as Renato Rosaldo remarked, isn’t "deep hanging out," what anthropologists do?

* * *

Shuttling between the university and our hometown helped put culture in relief.

Minority there, majority here. Poor or average there, privileged here. Much of what had been familiar in our Valley, suddenly seemed strange, vexing. Moreover, the predominantly-white university itself was a kind of field site, "a place of cultural juxtaposition, estrangement, rite of passage, a place of transit and learning," James

Clifford writes. (1997:56,82)

I wrote quite a bit about place and culture during this period. I produced lots of poems, and some fiction and nonfiction. Most of it was set in the homes, restaurants, and backyards of Valley towns like Edinburg, McAllen, and Reynosa. Some of them were set on South Padre Island where I worked several summers as a waiter. A node in the north-south drug pipeline, the island offered a fascinating mix of beautiful people and grunts, strivers and burn-outs, bronze tans and melanoma, old Tejas and new. The last big piece of fiction I wrote was set in the fictional town of Shelly, a place based on my hometown of Edinburg and inspired by the Belken County towns in Rolando

Hinojosa’s fiction. The piece revolves around the antics of the beautiful and self- absorbed Palacios, an Anglo-Mexican, upper-middle-class family stricken suddenly by bad luck. Somehow the story ends up with Randy Palacios, the young protagonist, and

289

his friends drinking whiskey and burying a severed appendage at the fifty-yard-line of the local football stadium. Aside from the piece’s Southern gothic and postmodern ironical fabulations (the twenty-something smart-ass tone), the piece has many ethnographic qualities. In fact, when I wrote it, some of my peer critics complained that characters were oddly developed, more like composites than real people.

I think they were right, my working title all along had been Shelly, Texas, plain, broad, and unpoetic. And yes, I was clearly more drawn to exploring culture, class, place, and historical moments than developing meticulously etched characters, writing counter or emancipatory narratives, or as in the American fiction d’jour, exploring the minefields that are domestic relationships. I was representing scenes rather than weaving stories; I was looking at groups rather than individuals. Perhaps there was something in the Valley’s water. In The Dialectics of Our America, José Saldivar observed that the ethnographic impulse seems an endemic part of South Texas letters; he calls the writers Américo Paredes, Tomas Rivera, Gloria Anzaldua, and Rolando Hinojosa

‘organic ethnographers’, native informants. (1991)

Whatever the case may be, I provide this short biographical sketch for the purpose of giving the reader a sense for the trajectory of this project and this investigator’s interest and investment in it. I also hope to evoke the environment in which I grew intellectually, and thus situate myself socially and historically. My awakening as a thinker and artist occurred after and at the fringes of the Chicano

290

Movement and what (time will only tell) may have occurred at the peak of affirmative action in the universities. Unlike those Chicano and Chicana scholars who came of age intellectually in the Movement of the 1970s, our experience (my particular cohort not our generation) was more middle class or ‘middling’, than working class or ‘Third World’.

(The latter categories are seemingly paradigmatic in Chicano Studies.) My use of

‘middling’ here is more abstract than material or categorical. After Burton Bledstein and

Barbara Ehrenreich, I use it to refer to people who imagine themselves as sharing upward mobility with others. The term ‘middling’ also helps delineate the contingent and situated nature of our class status. As I wrote in the introductory chapter, outside of

South Texas our working class and/or Third World identities and subjectivities were often very real, but no more so than our positions as middling and mobile Americans.

(Bledstein 1976; Ehrenreich 1989)

On Method: Poetic Experiments in Ethnography

To represent the football cultural production’s myriad signs, truths, and meanings (and also latencies and dry wells) and my own ruminations and frustrations, I employ a variety of techniques and strategies. All are conventional writing strategies

(juxtaposition, collage, irony, poetic and metaphorical language, ruminative flights and asides, confessions, and the sketching of things in nuanced or indeterminate ways--

"show don’t tell"). Given ethnography’s roots in the positivistic social sciences, many still consider these techniques experimental, questionable, or solipsistic.

291

Because I am working in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, a field not governed by the detached, ‘ob jective’, scientific-realist narrative style dominant in the social sciences, I won’t belabor a defense of postmodern ethnography. American

Studies has a very different disciplinary history than anthropology, and it is much more methodologically diverse than positivistic social science. Scholarship in the field ranges from dry, business-like monographs to theory-steeled critiques to novelistic biography.

Though the use of the first-person reflexive mode remains somewhat taboo, especially for junior scholars, the use of literary techniques and poetic language is more common than not. For example, the best historians and biographers mount verifiable fact with flourish: They concoct gray swirling skies, deathbed scenarios; like the film director they will take a few liberties to realize the scene.

Regarding ethnography, specifically, I am encouraged by some of the ‘poetic experiments’ advanced by critics, anthropologists, and ethnographers like George

Marcus, James Clifford, Michael M. J. Fischer, Renato Rosaldo, Ruth Behar, Kathleen

Stewart, and, of course, Paredes and Limón. Stephen Tyler is correct in arguing that the

"whole point of ‘evoking’ rather than ‘representing’ is that it frees ethnography from mimesis and that inappropriate mode of scientific rhetoric which entails ‘objects’, ‘facts’,

‘descriptions’, ‘inductions’, ‘generalizations’, ‘verifications’, ‘experiments’, ‘truth’, and like concepts." (1987:207) Of course, it is Clifford Geertz who is to be most credited for this interpretive turn. If it is impossible for one to ‘capture’ and bring back in-tact

292

cultural facts from the field like one would a mask or carving, then all we can really ask of the ethnographic account is to "clarify what goes on in . . . places," Geertz says, "to reduce the puzzlement." (1973:16)

Douglas Foley was the first to argue for a more evocative, impressionistic style in the ethnography of sport. Echoing Clifford and Marcus, Foley argues that such an approach acknowledges that "textual representations of reality can never be anything but the time and culture-bound constructions of the author. Investigators can only demonstrate the relative openness of their representations to multiple realities and voices." In a later work The Heartland Chronicles, an ethnography of basketball and

Indian-white race relations in the author’s hometown of Tama, Iowa, Foley puts theory into practice. The work succeeds in drawing the lines of division and community in a manner that seems organic, unforced, and 'real', while maintaining rigorous analysis.

(1992:45-6; 1995)

I am well aware that the post-positivistic and reflexive approaches have their limitations and pitfalls. In this case I hope that personal reflection serves to shed light on culture and not merely the self; and that the experiments with narrative structure, voice

(humor, irony, slang, nostalgia) enrich and provoke more often than distract.

Multi-sited Ethnography

The other key branch of postmodern ethnography deals with the issue of what constitutes "the field."

293

This ethnography is not traditional or conventional in method. In other words I am not an anthropologist who has traveled far from the university and spent a year or more doing field work in a distant locale. For the field research I took repeated short visits to Hidalgo County and other sites in South Texas over several fall seasons. These were familiar locales.

This approach can be described as "multi-sited ethnography." George Marcus described this brand of ethnography as one that "moves out from the single sites and local situations of conventional ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space." Several factors have contributed to the rise of this approach. New developments in technology and transportation have collapsed distances and enabled the rapid movement of people and cultural products. Furthermore, time-space compression has enabled the simultaneous participation of people in multiple cultural spaces. (1995:96)

Multi-sited ethnography is also tied to the growth of academic interdisciplinary studies -- fields like science and technology, cultural, ethnic, women’s, transnational, diaspora, and American studies. Projects in these fields draw from diverse disciplinary perspectives, canons, and disciplinary discursive modes.

"For ethnography this means that the world system is not the theoretically constituted holistic frame that gives context to the very study of peoples or local subjects closely observed by ethnographers," M arcus writes,

294

but it becomes, in a piecemeal way, integral to and embedded in discontinuous, multi-sited objects of study. Cultural logics so much sought after in anthropology are always multiply produced, and any ethnographic account of these logics finds that they are at least partly constituted within sites of the so-called system (i.e. modern interlocking institutions of media, markets, states, industries, universities -- the worlds of elites, experts, and middle classes).

The author adds that the fundamental strategy in multi-sited ethnography involves following connections, associations, and "putative relationships." (1995:97)

In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, James Clifford also discusses the emergence of an ethnography and fieldwork that takes place "in worldly, contingent relationships of travel, not in controlled sites of research." Like Marcus and

Michel de Certeau, Clifford points us to cultural spaces created by movement, travel, as well as the more conventional field: the spatially delimited place. (1997:68)

These rubrics and proposals are certainly relevant to this project. My ethnographic data collecting was done in short bursts, in sites that, though part of a discrete cultural region, were sometimes spread one or two hundred miles apart.

Writing my analysis in a branch of what Américo Paredes called "Greater

Mexico," meant that I was never far from the ‘natives’. I had encounters with mexicanos and Spanish-language media on a daily basis. Therefore, my subjects were not a distant folk, but rather one with whom I shared cultural products and social exchanges.

Those involved with football also traveled through Austin and Houston where I lived. Marching bands performed in state contests in October; playoff teams and their

295

fans passed through in November and December; coaches attended clinics, meetings in the spring and summer. In the classes I taught at the university, informants revealed themselves -- a cheerleader from San Benito here, a quarterback from Sharyland there, a conscientious objector in the back. "Please, please, drop by office hours," I insisted, and some did.

Because of very limited funds, I had to be creative with data collecting. Fan magazines, the internet, and subscriptions to Valley newspapers kept me abreast of politics, local issues, public culture, sports, and fans. My extensive writing on radio and corridos grew out of the convenience of portable media. I am well aware that a long period of intensive research in one site would have yielded important data and insight and perhaps a narrative spine (e.g. "underdogs march to victory") upon which a more traditionally robust thesis could be built. But it just did not work out that way.

* * *

Being a ‘native ethnographer’ meant that the fieldwork was not difficult to launch or execute. I had a large network of informants, gaining access to male or mixed gender groups was straightforward. In fact, coaches and administrators were usually warm and inviting. For a couple of coaches and athletic directors who had coached or taught me as student, I was the proverbial local boy who’d done good. I was encouraged to give small speeches, and to advise some of the students on college choices and admissions strategies.

296

One of the best, and somewhat unique, things about this project is that my parents, Margarita and Remigio, helped in the field. As a family, we’ve always talked football. Our family follows the Edinburg Bobcats, the way some families follow their

Microsoft stock; they are something in which we have invested--solid and of value, with dry runs and bonanzas. In many ways the parents were the perfect informants. They were interested but not maniacal. Having held the same fifty-yard-line seats at Bobcat-

Cougar Stadium for over twenty years meant that they had witnessed plenty. They pointed me to sites off the beaten path, a family who had painted their modest frame house with Dallas Cowboy colors and logos, for example. The promesas (promises/vows) students and parents had left at the Virgen de San Juan del Valle Shrine in San Juan,

Texas. Mixed in with the thousands of photos, letters, locks of hair, crutches, certificates, awards, and nickel-plated milagros, were pictures of athletes, cheerleaders, and dancers.

We even found a dried out homecoming corsage. "A miracle the girl got a date," my mother joked.

My father's job running a county mechanic’s shop puts him at a node of local working class life. Because of this, I was able to hear voices I normally would have missed. For example, he had me listen to talk on the county’s two-way radio system.

Amidst the stream of work orders and 10-4’s, on football Fridays workers sent out challenges, rejoinders to rivals in the idiom of border Spanglish, of course. Similarly, through their phone calls, lunches, and group trips to the WalMart, my mother's

297

network of retired comadres kept me abreast of local scandal and politics (and there was a lot). They shared their views often and served up analysis and predictions for high school, college, and especially Dallas Cowboy football, which they watch religiously, primarily because they bet on games or bought ‘numbers’.

I happened to be home one morning when "La Bookie" drove up in her gleaming

Cadillac. She visited for a while, sipped a Diet Coke with lime, and then proceeded to pull out a Crown Royal whiskey pouch from which my mother and a neighboring comadre nonchalantly drew their numbers--just another morning in a middle-class,

Tejano subdivision.

"Don't you worry about getting caught," I asked La Bookie?

"N'hombre, la policia son mis best customers!" she laughed. ("No sir, the police are my best customers!")

298 Notes

Introduction

1. "The sport of tackles; the sport that reunites the multitudes." 2. Many local critics argue that Tejanos invest too much in football. In 1996 the Valley had three of the top 25 head coach salaries in Texas. Valley coaches at La Joya, Donna, and San Benito were compensated better than almost every teacher in Texas, and better than coaches at some of the wealthiest, tradition-rich schools like Plano (suburban Dallas), Westlake (suburban Austin), Midland (west Texas), and Highland Park (Dallas). (1996). "State's Highest-paid Coach has earned it, Backers say". San Antonio Express- News. San Antonio: 8C. 3. A sports "fandom " is made up of a body of fans and their shared texts. Traditionally, fans hailed from the same geographical region. Increasingly, the fan community is spatially dispersed, but ‘brought together’ through electronic technologies. 4. Some scholars have pointed out that the term ‘community’ implies a static group of people with a shared, uncontested world view. I find the term useful. One, because my informants used it constantly, and also because alternative terms such as ‘social bodies’ or ‘collectivities’, sometimes ignore affective/imagined affinities within groups. ‘Community’, as I use it, refers to people who share common identities or interests. Agreement, harmony, or shared visions of a common past or future are not necessarily incumbent. 5. See also “Neverending Stories: The Problem of Reading in Cultural Studies.” Here, Colin Mercer provides a discussion on the limits of lectoral critical and epistemological models. Mercer, C. (1991). "Neverending Stories: The Problem of Reading in Cultural Studies." New Formations 13. 6. Well over a hundred of the Beadle and Adams dime novels are set in the ranch country of South Texas. For balladry, see A Texas-Mexican Cancionero by Américo Paredes. Paredes, A. (1995). A Texas Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border. Austin, University of Texas Press. 7. The film is based on Cleo Dawson’s semi-autobiographical novel, She Came to the Valley. Another book in this genre is For We Love Our Valley Home by Miriam Chatelle. Dawson, C. (1943). She Came to the Valley. New York, Morrow, Chatelle, M. (1948). For We Love Our Valley Home. San Antonio, Naylor. 8. One should not assume that all people of Mexican origin live in impoverished areas, and all Anglos in prosperous. One finds Anglos and Mexicans in all strata, though the very poor are almost always Mexican. Well-meaning activists, scholars, not to mention mercenary grant writers, have perpetuated this binary stereotype. Mexican Americans now hold significant wealth and power in the region.

299 9. According to the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), which filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas in 1987, in the 1980s Deep South Texas was receiving only 10% of state higher education money, even though it had 20% of the population. The area had three doctoral programs, compared to 589 for the rest of the state. (1996). brief article. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 43: A28. 10. I also point to the transnational aspects of this society because of the debate on the relevance and increasing prominence of transnational critical models (as well as ethnic and ‘Cultural Studies’) in the academic field of American Studies. This debate was sparked by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s edited volume Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, José Saldivar’s Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, and especially Janice Radway’s keynote address, “What’s in a Name,” at the 1998 American Studies national meeting. This is not the place to rehearse their issues and arguments. It seems quite apparent, however, that if we are to understand American communities like the border dwellers discussed here, it is imperative that we imagine culture and nation in fluid and imaginative ways. American questions and their answers span borders, and we must be willing to cross cultural, national, disciplinary boundaries to find them. Kaplan, A. and D. E. Pease, Eds. (1993). Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. Durham, Duke University Press, Saldívar, J. (1997). Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley, University of California Press, Radway, J. (1999). "What's in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 20 November, 1998." American Quarterly 51(1): 1-32. 11. According to Rebecca E. Parker, the most distinctive feature of Mexican American English in Texas is that (like Spanish) it is syllable-timed rather than stress-timed (like English). It is not the transitional "accent" of a Spanish speaker still not proficient in English. Parker, R. E. (1997). Now I'm All Self-conscious, aaah': A Bracketing Speech Particle in the Speech of South Texas Mexican Americans. Master's Thesis. Linguistics. Austin, University of Texas: 59.

Chapter One. Early Sport in Texas

1. The New Handbook of Texas makes the claim that rodeo and high school football are the two sports that have most defined the state. LeCompte, M.L. (1998) Sports. The New Handbook of Texas. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/ss/xzs.1.html. Texas State Historical Association. 2. See Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero., pp. 54-55. Paredes, A. (1995). A Texas Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border. Austin, University of Texas Press. Translations are my own. 3. These are St. James and St. John days. The carreras de gallos are undoubtedly of Spanish Catholic origin, specifically the fiestas de gallo of Castile. The folklorist Aurelio

300 Espinosa posits that the carrera de gallos may even be a survival of certain ceremonies of the Roman Lupercalia. Espinosa, A. and E. b. J. M. Espinosa (1985). The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. 4. The carrera de gallo is also remarkably similar and perhaps descended from the ancient game of buzkash i. Still played on the Asian Steppes, especially Afghanistan, in buzkashi horseman carry a goat or calf carcass around a pair of goal posts. 5. A quality mount was a source of pride and marker of distinction. Mexican and early Tejano expressive culture abounds with poetic and nuanced descriptions of horse markings, colors, and builds. Well into the 20th century South Texas ranches were the principle nodes of work, life, kinship, and identity. Corridos, cattle brand books, ledgers, traveler and worker accounts, and detailed maps like that made by the Ripley Expedition of 1892, give ample evidence of strong affective, material, and familial ties of the individual to ranch or clan. See Montejano, Alonzo, Galan, and Graham. Montejano, D. (1987). Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. Austin, University of Texas Press, Galan, H. and G. Productions (1988). Vaquero: the Forgotten Cowboy. Alexandria, VA, PBS Video, Graham, J. S. (1994). El Rancho in South Texas: Continuity and Change from 1750. Denton, University of North Texas Press/John E. Conner Museum, Alonzo, A. C. (1998). Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734-1900. Alburquerque, University of New Mexico Press. See also, Tijerina for interesting discussion on Tejano kinship, patriarchy, and local governance by “patriarchal councils.” Tijerina, A. (1998). Tejano Empire: Life on the South Texas Ranchos. College Station, Texas A&M University Press. 6. Building on Nancy Struna’s work on early American sports and leisure, Jodella Dyreson rec ently urged historians of sport to re-think views of sportive practice in pre- industrial societies. Using the Anglo colonies of Mexican Texas as her subject and example, she argues that women’s activities like quilting function socially in much the same way as male activities such as sport hunting. If the latter can be considered direct precursors to modern sport, as they typically are, then certain women’s activities should be similarly categorized. To categorize women’s activities as ‘crafts’ or ‘pastimes’, while framing synchronous male activities as ‘premodern sport’ is to base definitions on notions of “manhood” instead of real social practice. Dyreson’s argument is provocative and relevant. Gaming in Mexican America certainly had overlap, socially and temporally, with male sportive activities. Struna, N. L. (1996). People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early America. Urbana, University of Illinois Press., 1997 #417:269- 70 7. The changes listed here are painted with broad strokes. Changes in labor and cultural practice did not occur overnight and in all sectors. Some areas like the King and Chapman ranches maintained some of the old paternalistic hierarchies well into the 20th century. Rather than being replaced, much folk tradition and ritual simply adapted to 301 the new strictures and spaces. 8. This is not to say that all land had changed hands. Many families held on parcels. A review of toponymy serves to illustrate the comprehensive reach of Anglo society and power. 9. Frank Goodwyn collected his ballad. The translation is my own. Roberto M. Villareal collected another version of this ballad called “El Bohimio” (“The Bohemian”). Villareal’s version places the incident at La Parra on the Kenedy Ranch (between Brownsville and Corpus Cristi). Dobie, J. F., M. C. Boatright, et al., Eds. (1940). Mustangs and Cow Horses. Publications of Texas Folklore Society. Austin, Texas Folklore Society, Villareal, R. M. (1972). The Mexican-American Vaqueros of the Kenedy Ranch: A Social History. Kingsville, Texas A&I: 78. 10. Though peripheral, folk entertainments persisted in the underground and on the border. In the western and southwestern U.S., people still participate in charreadas and jaripeo. Some of the events, like those studied by Kathleen Sands, might be characterized as “heritage” cultural productions; participants make a self-conscious and studied effort to preserve and teach the folklore Sands, K. (1993). Charreria Mexicana: an Equestrian Folk Tradition. Tucson, University of Arizona Press. Others, like the jaripeo events which take place in urban areas with large immigrant populations such as Houston and Los Angeles, are much more hybrid and commercialized. Generically, they are more like variety shows, music festivals, or ‘monster truck’ rallies. See also, folklorist Olga Nájera- Ramirez’s discussion on how the mainstream media and animal rights activists in California have represented the Mexican charreada as a sordid (and newly imported) tradition of torture. In an analysis of the poetics of such depictions, Nájera-Ramirez shows how the xenophobic, anti Mexican and immigrant sentiment that surged in the early 1990s in California and parts of the Southwest colored and distorted the sport/folklore’s meaning and history. Nájera-Ramirez, O. (1996). "The Racialization of a Debate: the Charreada as Tradition or Torture." American Anthropologist 98(3): 505-512. 11. A failure to address problems of power, agency, and contestation are this model’s shortcomings. As Richard Gruneau writes, after Gramsci, it is a tendency to see sports and modernization as an abstract and inevitable evolutionary process rather than a more open-ended set of limits, pressures, struggles, and compromises. Guttmann addresses these issues in later work. Gruneau, R. (1993). The Critique of Sport in Modernity: Theorising Power, Culture, and the Politics of the Body. The Sports Process: a Comparative and Developmental Approach. E. G. Dunning, J. A. Maguire and R. E. Pearton. Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL: 85-109, Jarvie, G. and J. Maguire (1994). Sport and Leisure in Social Thought. London, Routledge.

302 Chapter Two. Modern Sport in the New South Texas

1. The historian Matt Garcia notes that baseball was also very popular in rural Los Angeles during this period. “[E]ach colonia regardless of size, maintained a baseball team that competed in a regional ‘Mexican League’ fully funded and staged by Mexican residents.” Garcia, M. (2001). A World of its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. 2. An experiment with competitive inter-scholastic basketball and track and field was terminated in 1920 by the University Interscholastic League due to physical educators concerns that the activities were too strenuous and the values learned inappropriate for women. There was hardly a consensus on the effects and benefits of women’s competitive athletics. Some educators pushed to expand women’s athletic opportunities. And in spite of the U.I.L. position, competitive women’s basketball persisted and thrived in extrascholastic leagues throughout much of Texas. After much “agitation” and debate, 1949, the U.I.L. once again included women’s basketball in state scholastic competition. (Bedicheck 1956:390-95) 3. The last line is probably a transcription error; lyric more likely read "wear trousers for skirts." 4. Alan Klein, Stephen Chicoine, Richard Santillán, and others have brought some of the detail and texture of this history to light. One sees amity, unease, loathing, humility, discovery, and also admiration of the other--however grudging or qualified. Nevertheless, much more research remains to be done. Klein, A. M. (1997). Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos. Princeton, Princeton University Press; Santillán, R. (2000). "Mexican Baseball Teams in the Midwest, 1916-1965: The Politics of Cultural Survival and Civil Rights." Perspectives in Mexican American Studies 7: 131-151, Chicoine, S. (2002). "The Great Gallia: Texas's Melvin "Bert" Gallia and Ethnicity in Major League Baseball." Southwestern Historical Quarterly 105(4): 635-661.] 5. See Jorge Iber’s article “Mexican Americans of South Texas Football.". He lists additional examples of the ambivalence of Anglo commentary on the athletic abilities and propensities of Mexican Americans. 6. Romo and Muñoz draw their examples from Los Angeles, but many of the same organizations, churches, and missions also worked in San Antonio and on the border. See Valdés, Barrios Norteños, for a discussion on similar sports and Americanization projects in the Midwest Valdés, D. N. (2000). Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and the Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century. Austin, University of Texas Press. See also Gustav-Wrathall and Macías-Gonzalez’s discussions on how sports clubs and YMCAs provided a new, relatively free, space for homosexuals to meet and interact in the U.S. and Mexico.Gustav-Wrathall, J. D. (1998). Take the Young Stranger by the Hand: Same Sex Relations and the YMCA. Chicago, University of

303 Chicago Press, Macías-Gonzalez, V. M. (2002). "A Note on Homosexuality in Porfirian and Postrevolutionary Northern Mexico." Journal of the Southwest 43(4): 543-48. 7. Foley's follow-ups on informants found that the social group known as "jocks" had gone on to do well. Youth and scholastic-based social capital did indeed have payoffs later in life; the symbolic was not independent of the material. Sherry Ortner found a similar pattern in her study of the Weequahic High class of 1958 in New Jersey.

Chapter Three. Friday Night Rights

1. The cultural historian Michael Oriard has written extensively on the rhetoric, poetics, and ideologies in the football literature of the turn of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. See Reading Football and Sporting with the Gods. 2. Jorge Ulica was the pen name of newspaper publisher, editor, and columnist Jorge G. Arce. Arce's Ulica offered caustic commentary on the adventures and foibles of the Mexican immigrant in California's Roaring Twenties. The term pelado is somewhat problematic and polysemous—depending on context and semantics, it can mean everything from "little tramp," thug, or "everyman." 3. One teammate named Dr. L. E. Ramey would honor Lerma by co-founding and endowing the E. C. Lerma Scholarship at Texas A & I University, for example. 4. In Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, David Montejano points out that the racial views of South Texas Anglo "old-timers" were rooted in frontier memories of conflict with Mexicans and Indians, and narratives of Anglo revenge and victory. The ideas of newcomers and latter-day homesteaders at the turn of the century were rooted in germ theories and raced views of hygiene. The views of the old and new stock eventually mixed into a particularly noxious cocktail. 5. Notions of raced masculinity were not uniform. For example, the historian Neil Foley discusses the view among white Texas Socialist Party and labor leaders that Mexican males, many of whom were political radicals, exhibited a pure, vigorous manliness, which put white men to shame. (141-162) 6. During one of our interviews, Mr. Lerma fondly recalled that el profesór, an itinerant teacher who ran an escuelita (a small independent school), had coached him in boxing. "We had arithmetic, reading, orations, but he also taught me the moves. He had come from Mexico. He was an educated, very intelligent man, and the profe knew his boxing too!" Lerma, E. E. C. (1996). Interview. McAllen Texas. 7. The nickname Tlacuacha probably refers to Parr's pale face, pear-shaped body, nocturnal dealings, and many hangers-on. Of Anglo power brokers in South Texas, the Parrs were relatively generous and social to Mexican Americans. Their movida s

304 (maneuvers) and dealings with Mexican Am erican political bosses and machines angered Anglo power brokers in neighboring counties.

Chapter Four. The Golden Age of Football

1. The 1950s saw several Mexican American coaches follow in Lerma’s footsteps. In 1956 René Hinojosa, brother of writer Rolando Hinojosa, became head coach of the Rattlers of Sharyland after assisting at La Joya. Hinojosa was the first Valley-born Mexican American to coach football. R.C. “Frito” Flores would follow shortly as an assistant at Edinburg, and Joe Rodriguez would begin a brilliant career at Brownsville. Frito’s younger brother, Richard, was also among the first Mexican American coaches. After stints in the farming towns of Rio Hondo and Lyford, Richard Flores returned to his hometown of Edinburg in the mid-70s. There he revamped the program and grew the Bobcats into one of the state's winningest teams in the 1980s. Like Lerma, Flores was an important mentor. Many of his students and assistants now coach in South Texas. A sort of casual compadrazgo, Mexican and Anglo, binds coaching culture Valley. Most coaches know (or know of) one another; they put great value on where one played or coached, and with whom--valuing ethical integrity as much as records. 2. Along with tracking and denying access to desirable programs, the Anglo educational establishment subjected Mexican American students to verbal and sometimes physical abuse. These abuses are well documented in the literature. See, for example: Carter, T. (1970). Mexican-Americ ans in the Schools: A History of Educational Neglect. New York, College Examination Board, Montejano, D. (1987). Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. Austin, University of Texas Press, San Miguel, J., Guadalupe (1987). "Let All of them Take Heed": Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981. Austin, Center for Mexican American Studies University of Texas at Austin. 3. See Rubel, pp. 3-24, for an ethnographic description of Valley society as lived on different sides of the tracks. Rubel, A. (1966). Across the Tracks: Mexican Americans in a South Texas Town. Austin, University of Texas Press. A look at rates of intermarriage sheds light on Anglo-Mexican relations; greater rates suggest a merging with non- Hispanic groups, and lower rates indicate greater isolation or antipathy. In the 1960s over 50% of California Hispanics were involved in exogamous relationships, while in Hidalgo County specifically Edinburg, no more than 9% were exogamous. A number of factors can explain this gap. The sociologists Joan Moore and Henry Pachon posit that the root cause was “substantial traditional prejudice and extreme poverty, probably very close to the Southern caste system.” Hidalgo County’s rates of intermarriage may have been radically lower than California, New Mexico, and even San Antonio, but they almost doubled in the 1960s. Moore, J. and H. Pachon (1985). Hispanics in the United

305 States. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall. 4. Douglas Foley, H.G. Bissinger, Larry McMurtry, Richard Linklater and others have discussed and represented the dialogic relationship between footballers and the adult community of the town. Winners are granted liberties and privileges (lax law enforcement, employment, gifts) while losers or the injured are virtually shunned. See Foley for discussion on class, privilege, and football in a South Texas community (1970s and 1980s). The informant’s qualifying comment “middle class--for the Valley” refers to a Mexican American clerical class. They held positions that were more prestigious, though not necessarily more lucrative than blue collar workers. McMurtry, L. (1966). The Last Picture Show. New York, Dial Press, Bissinger, H. G. (1990). Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, a Dream. New York, Harper/Perennial, Foley, D. E. (1990). Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, Linklater, R. (1993). Dazed and Confused. Austin. 5. In Texas, high schools are classified according to the size of student enrollment. 4A schools had the largest enrollments, 3A schools were medium -sized, and 2A, 1A, and B were small. The largest schools are now categorized as 5A. Corpus Christi had its best football year ever in 1960. Coles, the city's African- American high school, also won the state title in division 3-A of the Prairie View League. 6. The Brackenridge team of 1963 was even more talented than the 1962 squad, but the Eagles could not get past their formidable cross-town rival San Antonio Lee. In what has often been called “the greatest high school football game in Texas history,” Lee, led by an amazingly talented quarterback named Linus Baer, would go on to beat Brackenridge 55-48--an incredible score for the high school level. Townsend, B. (1999). Long-running Classic: Two Backs Starred in game of Century. Dallas, Dallas Morning News: 10. 7. In November of the previous year students had sent a petition to the school board. Along with demands for respect from teachers and a curriculum which included Mexican American history and culture, students demanded a non-discriminatory system for the selection of cheerleaders, homecoming queens, “most beautiful,” and so on. The latter demands were at the top of their list. Trujillo, A. L. (1993). Community Empowerment and Bilingual/Bicultural Education: A Study of the Movimiento in a South Texas Community. Doctoral Thesis, Education. Austin, University of Texas at Austin: 243. 8. For a stinging indictment of Anglo-controlled politics in South Texas, including the cheerleader and twirler controversies, see José Angel Gutierez’s A Gringo Manual on How to Handle Mexicans. Gutierrez, J. A. (1974). A Gringo Manual on How to Handle Mexicans. Crystal City, Wintergarden Publishing House. 9. It is not quite fair to single out Williams and Royal. The two were at the service of many students, alumni, and regents like the autocratic Frank Erwin. To his credit, Royal had played a handful of black athletes at previous posts; his position at mighty Texas, 306 however, is regretful. 10. While beneficial to black student-athletes, campus diversity, the aesthetics of the football, and race relations in general, this development was not without its problems and abuses--most notably, the exploitation of African-American athletes by big university athletics. Much has been written on the subject, John Hoberman’s book, Darwin’s Athletes, is especially provocative Hoberman, J. (1997). Darwin's Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. Of course, high school athletics shared some of the same racial tensions and issues which played out in college game. Geoffrey Winningham and H.G. Bissinger give some of the more insightful looks in the context of East and West Texas.Winningham, G. (1983). Football, Game of Life. Texas Monthly, Bissinger, H. G. (1990). Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, a Dream. New York, Harper/Perennial.

Chapter Five. Good Game

1. Arens, Winningham, Reinert, and others have discussed the ritual aspects of football. A common feature of ritual, especially the rite of passage, is separation from the ‘contaminating’ acts or situations of the profane. In the removed, homosocial, pre-game environment athletes meditate and communicate quietly. They enjoy what Goffmann called "the privilege of familiarity...a kind of intimacy without warmth." Winningham, G. and A. Reinhert (1979). Rites of Fall: High School Football in Texas. Austin, University of Texas Press, Arens, W. (1981). Professional Football: An American Ritual and Symbol. The American Dimension: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. W. Arens. Sherman Oaks, Alfred Publishing: 1-9, Goffmann, E. (1988). Teams. Dramaturgical Analysis of Social Interaction. P. A. Hare and H. H. Blumberg. New York, Praeger: 37-45. 2. In the miniature we see a manipulatable version of experience, according to critic Susan Stewart, “a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination.” Stewart, S. (1993). On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, Duke University Press. 3. South Texas scholars often speak of ‘Anglo’ colonists as a homogenous group, but there was heterogeneity. Kay Waweehie Teer was part Comanche and Cherokee, for example. Teer worked for several years at Edinburg before moving to California. She coached drill at major universities and choreographed dance spectacles for Super Bowls, Olympics, and even a Papal visit. Around the same time that Teer worked in Edinburg, Gussie Nell Davis, a teacher in Greenville, Texas created the Flaming Flashes. Davis would go on to create the Kilgore College Rangerettes, the world’s most famous team. 4. The 'feather keepers' of Memorial serve as madrinas of sorts. Madrinas are both literal and proxy godmothers. In traditional folk rituals and performances like the quinceañera

307 (fifteen birthday mass and celebration) and the pastorela (shepherd's play), madrinas host, serve food, or gift ritual items. See Flores’s, Los Pastores. Flores, R. R. (1995). Los Pastores: History and Performance in the Mexican Shepherd Play of South Texas. Washington, Smithsonian. According to Mario Lopez of the Weslaco High Band Boosters, an average of fifty parents volunteer per game. 5. Even though students had spent hundreds of hours rehearsing and performing the music, they seemed to know little about the composers, texts, or history. None of the band members I talked to seemed to know much about Gershwin, Thomas, or the story of Carmen--clearly, a missed opportunity. 6. Because team slogans and coaching aphorisms tend to be repeated often, Anglo and non-Spanish speakers quickly learn their meaning. Veteran Anglo coaches in South Texas usually have a repertoire of Spanish phrases and expressions. Though Spanish is common, the dominant idiom is what might be described as twangy Texas 'coachspeak'. 7. This strain of 'fanlore' was especially salient in the peak decades of Valley football culture, the 1950s-80s, when most towns had single high schools. Rapid population growth and new school construction in the 90s and in the early twenty-first century have diluted it somewhat. Sprawl has dissolved the spatial boundaries (orchards and fields) between many towns. Students and coaches now move more frequently. And younger coaches take more pragmatic and flexible approaches to play--tradition be damned. See Eduardo Archetti, Philip Deloria, Garry Robson, and Gerald Gems for discussions on the ways specific fans and local media use sports to understand , propose, or interpellate cultural, national, class, and religious difference. Deloria, P. (1996). ""I am of the Body": Thoughts on my Grandfather, Culture, and Sports." South Atlantic Quarterly 95(2), Gems, G. R. (1997). Windy City Wars: Labor, Leisure, and Sport in the Making of Chicago. Blue Ridge Summit, PA, Scarecrow Press, Archetti, E. P. (1999). Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina. Oxford, Berg, Robson, G. (2000). 'No One Likes Us, We Don't Care': The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom. Oxford, Berg. 8. In her study of the history and folklore of “Wiregrass Country” in the Florida Panhandle, Jerrilyn McGregory describes a similar male oral tradition. The high school football game is one of the Wiregrass communities “core rituals.” McGregory, J. (1997). Wiregrass Country. Jackson, University Press of Mississipi. 9. As used in Texas, the term Anglo refers to all white non-Hispanic Americans. It is a homogenizing term that overlooks ethnic and religious heterogeneity. The term immigrant is used liberally here. Many Mexicans live and work on both sides of the border; many are transnationals. Within the Mexican immigrant population there is great regional ethnic diversity. While sharing many cultural products with immigrants and transnationals, Mexican Americans or Tejanos are more fluent in both U.S. culture and the distinct culture of South Texas. Many are descendants of the original Spanish- Mexican settlers. All groups interact in the workplace and thus acculturate the other, but unlike Mexican-Americans and Anglos or Mexican Americans and Mexicans, 308 Anglos and Mexicans rarely interact in leisure settings. 10. This example is cobbled together from several comments recorded. Obviously, the ethnographer was not able listen to the remote speaker. 11. The youth promenade around the stadium was a common and popular rite up through the 1980s. Fearing gang violence and/or lawsuits, many schools began to restrict contact between opposing fans. 12. Eating menudo and grilled meat at late-night gatherings is also part of Tejano habitus. Bourdieu defines habitus as being: “things that one does because they are ‘the done thing,’ ‘the right thing to do’, but also because we cannot do otherwise, without needing to know why or for whom one does them, or what they mean” Bourdieu, P. (1990 (1980)). The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Stanford University Press. The consumption of folk foods on Friday night is also part of a larger process of indigenization. In the Valley a few national restaurant and hotel chains have added folk foods to their menus. On the buffet one now finds barbacoa and menudo alongside standards like roast beef and Waldorf Salad. There are countless musical and linguistic examples of indigenization, a few examples are Spanish-English neologisms like famboleár, quiqueár, and cocheár (to fumble, kick, and coach), and student mariachi troupes sometimes stroll and perform in the bleachers. 13. This example is a composite drawn from three talks recorded. 14. White lies are common, but coaches do not have to stretch the truth much. The elderly and infirm do write, call, and compose inspirational verse. For example, in the mid-1990s Dr. Armando Cuellar from Weslaco attended games even though he was sick and bed-bound. In his last days, the physician arranged for an ambulance to take him to football games where he watched his beloved Panthers from a stretcher set up past the end zone. 15. In an essay originally published in the 1950s, Erving Goffmann described such verbal and physical interactions between teams as "dialogues." Opponents are simultaneously performer and audience. Goffmann, E. (1988). Teams. Dramaturgical Analysis of Social Interaction. P. A. Hare and H. H. Blumberg. New York, Praeger: 37-45. 16. When I was in high school, some students made a six-foot-long carrot out of foam and fabric. In the stands students tossed and petted "The Big Carrot" during the ceremony. Unfortunately, an imaginative assistant principal, who referred to it as “a phallus,” confiscated the root. 17. Raymond Williams defines the structure of feeling as: “affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosynchratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely 309 otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. These are often more recognizable at a later stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, classified, and in many cases built into instituions and formations. By that time the case is different; a new ‘structure of feeling’ will usually already have begun to form, in the the true social present.” Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford, Oxford Univerisity Press. Arjun Appadurai, Lawrence Grossberg propose that shared imagination, popular culture included, holds the potential for realizing collective action. Affect and passion in the popular can spill over onto other social and even potentially political domains. Grossberg, L. (1992). Is There a Fan in the House?: The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. L. A. Lewis. London, Routledge: 50-65, Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 18. Adult fans interviewed often mentioned bets and jokes between rival family members and co-workers. In one of the better-known wagers between archrivals Mercedes and Edcouch-Elsa, the losing town's school board and superintendent don hairnets and serve food on the victor’s cafeteria line.

Chapter Six. The Electronic Backyard Barbecue

1. U.S radio statistics are from Broadcasting & Cable Yearbook 1996. New Providence (NJ): Bowker, 1996. p. B-667. They are drawn from U.S. Census date (12-year-olds and older) and Arbitron radio surveys. In the 1990 Mexican Census, the population figures for the Mexican border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros are 281,392 and 303,392, respectively. Both cities and the towns between them have seen very rapid growth since 1990. Source: The Europa World Yearbook. V.II. London: Europa, 1996. p. 2157. 2. In Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, Bakhtin argues that every speaker is oriented toward active responses. The speaker “does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone else’s mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, objection, execution...Moreover, any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree” (69). In the speech play on Football Scoreboard, we see a clear manifestation of this principle. Unlike much ‘talk’ in mass media, where a speaker’s comments are aimed at an issue, topic, or public text, talk on Football Scoreboard is interlocution. There is a clear sense that speakers are speaking to others. Female callers appear to have a more acute sense of a respondent than the males. Women will often respond directly to an individual caller, “I want to tell that lady from Rio Grande that...,” while males respond to collectivities (“I want tell those folks over in...). 3. Aguirre and Bustamante (1993) and Gutierrez and Schement (1979) argue that while

310 Spanish-language broadcasting has transmitted decipherable messages to Mexican Americans, the industry’s dominant use of the Spanish eq uivalent of BBC English serves to undermine the linguistic cultural expression of Chicano identity. Gutierrez, F. F. and J. R. Schement (1979). Spanish-Language Radio in the Southwestern United States. Austin, University of Texas Press and Center For Mexican Studies, Aguirre, A., Jr. and D. A. Bustamante (1993). "Critical Notes Regarding the Dislocation of Chicanos by Spanish-language television industry in the United States." Ethnic and Racial Studies 16(1). 4. In this translation I try to capture the essence of the comments. While I try to be true to the original, at times I opt for connotative rendering.

Chapter Seven. With His Cell Phone in His Hand

1. “Leandro Rivera” (1841) is thought to be the oldest surviving modern corrido. Collected by John and Ruby Lomax in 1939 near Brownsville, Texas, this song has all the compositional elements of the modern corrido. Simmons, M. (1957). The Mexican Corrido as a Source of Interpretive Study of Modern Mexico (1870-1950). Bloomington, Indiana University Press. 2. The “Africanized bee” is much less effective in the pollination of plants than the native species. 3. By ‘vernacular’ I refer to songs composed and performed outside of the music industry and institutions such as universities and heritage societies. Catalina Heau de Gimenez suggests that we consider the corrido primarily as social text-- textual and musical structure being secondary to the ballad’s pragmatic functions as a critical and/or uplifting social text. It is quite common for Valley football fans to call a “corrido “ any Spanish-language fan song that uplifts with laughter or heroics. de Giménez, C. H. (1991). Así cantaban la revolución. Mexico, D.F., Grijalbo. 4. I use the term conjunto loosely. Many of the songs do not have the full conjunto ensemble. 5. James Nicolopolous, Guillermo Hernandez, and others have argued that the heroic corrido was an influential and active (albeit much smaller and transformed) text in the mid and late 20th century. In the controversial and often contradictory narcotraficante corridos, drug lords and smugglers emerge as wily heroes and untouchables Herrera- Sobek, M. (1979). "The Theme of Drug Smuggling in the Mexican Corrido." Revista Chicano-Riqueña 7(4), Hernandez, G. (1992). El corrido ayer y hoy: nuevas notas para su estudio. Entra la magia y la historia: tradiciones, mitos, y leyendas de la frontera. J. M. V. Arce. Tijuana, Mexico, El Colegio de la Fronte Norte. We also find the corrido in areas like Guerrero and Chiapas, Mexico, where marginalized and oppressed indigenous

311 communities have taken up arms Nicolopulos, J. (1997). "The Heroic Corrido: A Premature Obituary." Aztlan 22(1): 115-139. 6. I am not suggesting that Chicano nationalists embraced such things as American sports, more often than not, Americanist practices were (and sometimes still are) viewed as terribly efficient apparata for acculturating, assimilating, and distracting Chicano youth. At the same time, leaders like José Angel Gutierrez felt Chicano youth should have full right to participate in the activities of their schools, however vapid, without harassment or discrimination. 7. What I describe here is an ideal performance of sorts. Not everyone is listening to the radio, or paying attention to the songs, and only a few people actually belt out a grito.

312 References

(1893). "rugby football," brief article. San Antonio Express. San Antonio: 6. (1949). brief article. Valley Evening Monitor. McAllen, Texas: 30. (1955). Official Notes. Interscholastic Leaguer. 29: 2. (1992). The Sourcebook of Zip Code Demographics. Arlington, VA, CACI Marketing Systems. (1993). Statistical Abstract of the United States, U.S. Bureau of the Census. (1996). brief article. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 43: A28. (1996). Broadcasting & Cable Yearbook. New Providence, NJ, Bowker. (1996). Letters to the Editor. The Monitor. McAllen, Texas: 2F. (1996). State's Highest-paid Coach has earned it, Backers say". San Antonio Express- News. San Antonio: 8C. (1998). National Civic League. www.ncl.org. Aguirre, A., Jr. and D. A. Bustamante (1993). "Critical Notes Regarding the Dislocation of Chicanos by Spanish-language television industry in the United States." Ethnic and Racial Studies 16(1). Alaniz, R. (1998). Alonzo, A. C. (1998). Tej ano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734-1900. Alburquerque, University of New Mexico Press. Alvarez, R. R., Jr. (1995). "The Mexican-US Border: The Making of an Anthropology of the Borderlands." Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 447-70. Anderson, H. A. (1998). Pastores. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/pp/arp1.html, Texas State Historical Society. Announcement (1870). Celebracion del Aniversario de San Patricio. Daily Ranchero. Brownsville: 1. Anonymous (1870). Base Ball--Rio Grande vs. Officers. Daily Ranchero. Brownsville: 1. Anonymous (1936). Latin American News. Kingsville Record. Kingsville: 7. Anonymous (1936). Latin American Notes. Kingsville Record. Kingsville: 6. Anonymous (1937). "A & I Javelinas Loud in Praise of Old Mexico." Kingsville Record(December 1): 2b. Anzaldua, G. (1987). Borderlands: La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Appadurai, A. (1994). Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. P. Williams and L. Chrisman. New York, Columbia University Press: 324-339. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

313 Aranda, Homer, U.S.-born school adminstrator and former athlete. Conversation with author. Corpus Christi, Texas. April 2003. Name is fictitious. Arbitron (1997). McAllen-Brownsville-Harlingen Special Events Report, Fall 1996. Dallas, The Arbitron Company. Archetti, E. P. (1999). Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina. Oxford, Berg. Arens, W. (1981). Professional Football: An American Ritual and Symbol. The American Dimension: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. W. Arens. Sherman Oaks, Alfred Publishing: 1-9. Ashton, J. (1936). Pancho Dreams of Other Days. Kingsville Record. Kingsville: 4. Avila, E. (2003). Revisiting the Chavez Ravine: Baseball, Urban Renewal and the Gendered Civic Culture of Postwar Los Angeles. Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities. A. Gaspar de Alba. New York, Palgrave McMillan. Avila, R. (1997). Interview. Dripping Springs, Texas. Ayres, L. P. (1919). The War with Germany: a Statistical Summary. Washington, Government Printing Office. Bakhtin, M. M. (1968 (1965)). Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, M.I.T. Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Austin, University of Texas Press. Band, A. (1977). She Came to the Valley, R & V Pictures. Barker, E. C., C. S. Potts, et al. (1918). A School History of Texas. Chicago, Row, Peterson, & Co. Basso, K. H. (1976). 'Wise Words' of the Western Apache: Metaphor and Semantic Theory. Meaning in Anthropology. K. H. Basso and H. A. Selby. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press/School of American Research: 93-122. Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom Sits in Places. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco, Chandler Publishing. Bederman, G. (1995). Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States. Chicago, University of Chicago. Bedicheck, R. Bedicheck Papers. Austin, Center for American History. Box 3q44. Bedicheck, R. (1945). "Before Pindar was Twenty". Interscholastic Leaguer. 28: 4. Bedicheck, R. (1946). editorial. Interscholastic Leaguer. 30: 2. Bedicheck, R. (1947). Brief article. Interscholastic Leaguer. Austin, Texas. 31: 2. Bedicheck, R. (1948). Brief article. Interscholastic Leaguer. Austin. 32: 2. Bedicheck, R. (1956). Educational Competition: the Story of the University Interscholastic League of Texas. Austin, University of Texas Press. Besnette, C. (1999). Equality in Action--The UA and Title IX. Arizona Alumnus. 77: 52- 55.

314 Betancourt, Elías, U.S.-born high school coach. Conversation with author. Edinburg, Texas. October 1998. Name is fictitious. Bissinger, H. G. (1990). Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, a Dream . New York, Harper/Perennial. Bledstein, B. J. (1976). The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York, Norton. Bogardus, E. S. (1934). The Mexican in the United States. Los Angeles, University of Southern California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1978). "Sport and Social Class." Social Science Information 17(6): 819-840. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Bourdieu, P. (1990 (1980)). The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. New York, Columbia University Press. Boyd, H. (1933). Brahmas tie Sinton High School Team. Kingsville Record. Kingsville: 2. Boyd, H. (1933). Sideline Chatter. Kingsville Record. Kingsville, TX: 2. Boyle, R. (1994). 'We are Celtic supporters...': Questions of Football and Identity in Modern Scotland. Game Without Frontiers: Football, Identity, and Modernity. R. Giulianotti and J. Williams. Aldershot, England, Arena: 73-95. Bradley, J. M. (1998). 'We Shall Not Be Moved'! Mere Sport, Mere Songs? Fanatics! Power, Identity, and Fandom in Football. A. Brown. London, Routledge: 203-218. Braudy, L. (2003). From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York, Knopf. Briggs, C. L. (1988). Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Brown, R. S. (1996). Football as a Rhetorical Site of National Reassurance: Managing the Crisis of the Kennedy Assassination. American Studies. Bloomington, Indiana University. Buchanan, O. (1996). Westlake defends region's toughness. Austin American Statesman. Austin: C1. Burns, A. (1971). Bad 'Sports' Threaten Afterschool Athletics. Texas Coach. 14: 11. Button, M. (1997). Culture Club: Hispanic Heritage Month: Art Delgado. Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Corpus Christi. Camp, W. (1910). The Book of Foot-ball. New York, Century. Carrillo, L. (1961). The California I Love. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall. Carter, T. (1970). Mexican -Americans in the Schools: A History of Educational Neglect. New York, College Examination Board. Casey, E. S. (1996). "How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena". Senses of Place. S. Feld and K. H. Basso. Santa Fe, School of American Research Press.

315 Cashion, T. (1998). Pigskin Pulpit: A Social History of Texas High School Football Coaches. Austin, Texas State Historical Association. Castañeda, C. E. (1958). Volume VII, The Church in Texas Since Independence. Austin, Von Boeckmann-Jones Co. Cavazos, D. (1997). Just a Game? The Monitor. McAllen. Chabram Dernersesian, A. (1993). And, Yes...The Earth Did Part: On the Splitting of Chicana/o Subjectivity. Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies. A. de la Torre and B. Pesquera. Berkeley, University of California Press: 34-56. Chance, J. E. (1998). My Life in the Old Army: The Reminiscences of Abner Doubleday from the Collections of the New-York Historical Society. Fort Worth, Texas Christian University Press. Chatelle, M. (1948). For We Love Our Valley Home. San Antonio, Naylor. Chicoine, S. (2002). "The Great Gallia: Texas's Melvin "Bert" Gallia and Ethnicity in Major League Baseball." Southwestern Historical Quarterly 105(4): 635-661. Chuy, Mexican -born, student athlete. Conversation with author. Edinburg, Texas. September 1996. Name is fictitious. Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Conniff, R. (1996). Tex-Mex Border. National Geographic. 189: 44-69. Cortez, Tito, Mexican-born former college athlete. Conversation with author. Edinburg, Texas. July 1998. Name is fictitious. Creighton, J. A. (1975). The Buccaneers: Corpus Christi Football, 1904-1974, self- published. Crepeau, R. C. (1980). Baseball: America's Diamond Mind. Orlando, University Presses of Florida. Csikszentmihaly, M. (1982). Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. Cvetkovich, A. and D. Kellner (1997). Introduction: Thinking Global and Local. Articulating the Local and the Global. A. Cvetkovich and D. Kellner. Boulder, Westview Press: 1-10. Davis, S. G. (1986). Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia, Temple University Press. Dawson, C. (1943). She Came to the Valley. New York, Morrow. de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, University of California Press. de Giménez, C. H. (1991). Así cantaban la revolución. Mexico, D.F., Grijalbo. de la Cruz, Hugo, radio host. Conversation with author. McAllen, Texas. October 1996. de Leon, A. (1982). The Tejano Community: 1836-1900. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press.

316 Deloria, P. (1996). ""I am of the Body": Thoughts on my Grandfather, Culture, and Sports." South Atlantic Quarterly 95(2). Denning, M. (1987). Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-class Culture in America. London, Verso. Dickerson, R. E. (1919). "Some Suggestive Problems in the Americanization of Mexicans." Pedagogical Seminary 26(2): 288-297. Dobie, J. F. (1952). The Mustangs. Boston, Little, Brown. Dobie, J. F., M. C. Boatright, et al., Eds. (1940). Mustangs and Cow Horses. Publications of Texas Folklore Society. Austin, Texas Folklore Society. Domenech, T. A. (1858). Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico. London, Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts. Drinnon, R. (1980). Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating & Empire Building. New York, Schocken. Duval, J. C. (1966). Riding Contest in San Antonio. Tales of Frontier Texas, 1830-1860. J. Q. Anderson. Dallas, Southern Methodist University Press: 77-81. Early, G. (2000). Religion? Science? Or Just Plain Fun? Utne Reader: 50. Ehrenreich, B. (1989). Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York, Pantheon Books. Espinosa, A. and E. b. J. M. Espinosa (1985). The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. Falcón, Simón, U.S.-born high school coach. Conversation with author. Harlingen, Texas. October 1998. Name is fictitious. Fehrenbach, T. R. (1968). Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. New York, Macmillan. Feiner, M. (1995). La Mujer en el Mundo del Toro. Madrid, Alianza Editorial. Fernandez, J. W. (1986). Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Fernandez, J. W. (1988). "Andalusia on Our Minds: Two Contrasting Places in Spain as Seen in a Vernacular Poetic Duel of the Late 19th Century." Cultural Anthropology 3(1): 21-35. Fernandez, J. W. (1991). Introduction: Confluents of Inquiry. Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. J. W. Fernandez. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Fiddick, T. (1989). "Beyond the Domino Theory: The Vietnam War and Metaphors of Sport." Journal of American Culture 12(4): 79-87. Fiske, J. (1992). The Cultural Economy of Fandom. The Adoring Audience. L. A. Lewis. London, Routledge: 30-49. Flores, Dave, customs broker. Conversation with Author. Edinburg, Texas. September 1996. Name is fictitious.

317 Flores, R. R. (1992). "The Corrido and the Emergence of Texas-Mexican Social Identity." Journal of American Folklore 105(416): 166-179. Flores, R. R. (1995). Los Pastores: History and Performance in the Mexican Shepherd Play of South Texas. Washington, Smithsonian. Foley, D. E. (1990). Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Foley, D. E. (1992). "Making the Familiar Strange: Writing Critical Sports Narratives." Sociology of Sport Journal 9: 36-47. Foley, D. E. (1995). The Heartland Chronicles. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Foley, D. E., C. Mota, et al. (1988). From Peones to Politicos: Class and Ethnicity in a South Texas Town, 1900-1987. rev. ed. Austin, University of Texas Press. Foley, N. (1997). The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley, University of California Press. Frei, T. (2002). Horns, Hogs, & Nixon Coming: Texas vs. Arkansas in Dixie's Last Stand. New York, Simon & Schuster. Gaar, B. (1998). Mauro, Bush Set for Debate. The Daily Texan. Austin: 1. Galan, H. and G. Productions (1988). Vaquero: the Forgotten Cowboy. Alexandria, VA, PBS Video. Galeano, E. (1995). El Fútbol a Sol y Sombra. Montevideo, Ediciones del Chanchito. Gaonkar, D. P. (2001). Alternative Modernities. Durham, Duke University Press. Garcia, M. (1989). Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology and Identity, 1930-1960. New Haven, Yale University Press. Garcia, M. (2001). A World of its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. Garcia, T. J. (1997). Nifu Nifa, Local broadcaster voice of Friday football. The Monitor. McAllen: C1. Gaspar de Alba, A. (1995). The Alter-Native Grain: Theorizing Chicano/a Popular Culture. Culture and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bicultural Experience in the United States. Westport, Conn., Bergin & Garvey: 103-22. Geertz, C. (1973). Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. The Interpretion of Cultures. New York, Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1986). Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought. Critical Theory Since 1965. H. Adams and L. Searle. Tallahassee, Florida State University Press: 514-23. Gems, G. R. (1996). "The Prep Bowl: Football and Religious Acculturation in Chicago, 1927-1963." Journal of Sport History 23(3): 284-302. Gems, G. R. (1997). Windy City Wars: Labor, Leisure, and Sport in the Making of Chicago. Blue Ridge Summit, PA, Scarecrow Press.

318 Gilroy, P. (1987). 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London, Hutchinson. Goffmann, E. (1988). Teams. Dramaturgical Analysis of Social Interaction. P. A. Hare and H. H. Blumberg. New York, Praeger: 37-45. Gómez-Quiñones, J. (1990). Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940-1990. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico. Gonzalez, D. J. (1993). La Tules of Images and Reality: Euro-American Attitudes and Legend Formation on a Spanish-Mexican Frontier. Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies. A. de la Torre and B. Pesquera. Berkeley, University of California Press: 75-90. Gonzalez, J. (1930). "America Invades the Border Towns." Southwest Review 15: 469-77. Gonzalez, J. (1930). Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties. Graduate School. Austin, University of Texas: 115. Goodwyn, F. (1931). Folk-lore of the King Ranch Mexicans. Southwestern Lore. J. F. Dobie. Austin, Texas Folklore Society. 9: 48-62. Gorn, E. and W. Goldstein (1993). A Brief History of American Sports. New York, Hill & Wang. Graham, J. S. (1994). El Rancho in South Texas: Continuity and Change from 1750. Denton, University of North Texas Press/John E. Conner Museum. Grant, M. L. (1996). School District Experiencing Big Surge in Population. The Monitor. Mcallen, Texas: B1. Grebler, L., J. Moore, et al. (1970). The Mexican American People. New York, Free Press. Greenblatt, S. (1988). Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley, University of California Press. Gregg, J. (1954 (1854)). Commerce of the Prairies. Norman, University of Oklahoma. Grossberg, L. (1992). Is There a Fan in the House?: The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. L. A. Lewis. London, Routledge: 50-65. Gruneau, R. (1993). The Critique of Sport in Modernity: Theorising Power, Culture, and the Politics of the Body. The Sports Process: a Comparative and Developmental Approach. E. G. Dunning, J. A. Maguire and R. E. Pearton. Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL: 85-109. Guerra, R. (1998). Interview, Edinburg, Texas. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson (1992). "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." Cultural Anthropology 7: 6-24. Gustav-Wrathall, J. D. (1998). Take the Young Stranger by the Hand: Same Sex Relations and the YMCA. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Gutierrez, F. F. and J. R. Schement (1979). Spanish-Language Radio in the Southwestern United States. Austin, University of Texas Press and Center For Mexican Studies.

319 Gutierrez, J. A. (1974). A Gringo Manual on How to Handle Mexicans. Crystal City, Wintergarden Publishing House. Gutiérrez, J. A. (1998). The Making of a Chicano Militant: Lessons from Cristal. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Guttmann, A. (1978). From Ritual to Record: the Nature of Modern Sports. New York, Columbia University Press. Haag, P. (1996). "The 50,000 Watt Sports Bar: Talk Radio and the Ethic of the Fan." The South Atlantic Quarterly 95(2). Hall, S. (1992). What is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture? Black Popular Culture. M. Wallace and G. Dent. Seattle, Bay Press: 21-33. Handman, M. S. (1931). "San Antonio: the Old Capital City of Mexican Life and Influence." Survey 66: 163-66. Haney, P. C. (1997). Carpa y teatro, sol y sombra: The carpa in Mexican American society and history. Folklore. Austin, University of Texas. Harby, L. C. (1890). Texas Types and Contrasts. Harper's New Monthly Magazine. 81: 229-46. Hayner, N. S. (1953). "Mexicans at Play--A Revolution." Sociology and Social Research: An International Journal 38(2): 80-83. Hazen, M. H. and R. M. Hazen (1987). The Music Men: an Illustrated HIstory of Brass Bands in America, 1800-1920. Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press. Hernandez, G. (1992). El corrido ayer y hoy: nuevas notas para su estudio. Entra la magia y la historia: tradiciones, mitos, y leyendas de la frontera. J. M. V. Arce. Tijuana, Mexico, El Colegio de la Fronte Norte. Herrera, Mario, U.S.-born blue collar worker. Conversation with author. Edinburg, Texas. June 1997. Name is fictitious. Herrera-Sobek, M. (1979). "The Theme of Drug Smuggling in the Mexican Corrido." Revista Chicano-Riqueña 7(4). Herzfeld, M. (1985). The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Herzfeld, M. (1997). Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York, Routledge. Herzog, L. A. (1997). The Transfrontier Metropolis. Harvard Design Magazine: 16-19. Higgs, R. J. (1995). God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America. Lexington, University of Kentucky Press. Hinojosa, D. (1997). The Yellow Machine; Lanier's playoff opponent, Edcouch-Elsa, is La Máquina. Austin American Statesman. Austin: D6. Hinojosa, R. (1994 (1984)). " A Sense of Place." Texas Journal of Ideas, History and Culture 17(1). Hinojosa, R. (1999). Interview. McAllen, Texas.

320 Hoberman, J. (1997). Darwin's Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. Hoffman, A. (1972). "Mexican Repatriation Statistics: Some Suggested Alternatives to Carey McWilliams." Western Historical Quarterly 3(4): 391-404. Iber, J. (2002). "Mexican Americans of South Texas Football: The Athletic and Coaching Careers of E.C. Lerma and Bobby Cavazos, 1932-1965." Southwestern Historical Quarterly 105(4): 617-633. James, C. L. R. (1993 (1963)). Beyond a Boundary. Durham, Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (1981). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Jarvie, G. and J. Maguire (1994). Sport and Leisure in Social Thought. London, Routledge. Kadzielski, M. A. (1982). Legal Approaches to Sex Discrimination in Amateur Athletics: The First Decade. Law & Amateur Sports. R. J. Waicukauski. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Kanellos, N. (2000). Introduction. The Adventures of Don Chipote or When Parrots Breast-Feed. Houston, Arte Público Press: 1-11. Kaplan, A. and D. E. Pease, Eds. (1993). Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. Durham, Duke University Press. Kauffman, C. J. (1982). The History of the Knights of Columbus, 1882-1982. New York, Harper & Row. Kidd, R. J. (1971). Molding the Character of Youth: The Texas Interscholastic League and Friday Mountain Boys Camp. New York Times Oral History Program. University of Texas Regional History of Business in the Southwest. No. 5. I. b. L. Meyer. Austin, Graduate School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin. Klein, A. M. (1997). Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Kreneck, T. H. (2001). Mexican American Odyssey: Felix Tijerina, Entrepeneur and Civic Leader, 1905-1965. College Station, Texas A&M University Press. LaDuke, B. (1994). "Yolanda Lopez: Breaking Chicana Stereotypes." Feminist Studies 20(1): 117-130. Le Compte, M. L. (1998). Sports. The New Handbook of Texas. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/ss/xzs.1.html, Texas State Historical Society. Lears, T. J. J. (1981). No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. New York, Pantheon. Lefebvre, H. (1971 (1968)). Everyday Life in the Modern World. New York, Harper & Row. LeFebvre, H. (1991(1974)). The Production of Space. Oxford, Blackwell. Lerma, E. C. (1995). Interview. 321 Lerma, E. E. C. (1996). Interview. McAllen Texas. Lerma, L. (1996). Interview. McAllen, Texas. Levine, P. (1992). Ellis Island to Ebbet's Field: Sport and the American-Jewish Experience. New York, Oxford University Press. Levine, R. M. (1988). Sport as Dramaturgy for Society: A Concluding Chapter. Sport and Society in Latin America: Diffusion, Dependency and the Rise of Mass Culture. J. L. Arbena. New York, Greenwood: 137-46. Lewis, T. H. (1916). Along the Rio Grande. New York, Lewis. Limón, J. (1994). Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican- American South Texas. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Limón, J. E. (1992). Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican- American Social Poetry. Berkeley, University of California. Limón, J. E. (1998). American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture. Beacon Press, Boston. Linklater, R. (1993). Dazed and Confused. Austin. Longoria, M. (2002). A Brief History of Women's Professional Baseball. San Antonio, University of Texas Research Center. Lynch, D. (1976). The Duke of Duval: The Life & Times of George B. Parr. Waco, Texian Press. Macal, M. (1997). Interview with author. Edinburg, Texas. MacAloon, J., Ed. (1984). Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals towards a Theory of Cultural Performance. Philadelphia, Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Macías-Gonzalez, V. M. (2002). "A Note on Homosexuality in Porfirian and Postrevolutionary Northern Mexico." Journal of the Southwest 43(4): 543-48. MacMurray, B. (1985). Texas High School Football. South Bend, Ind., Icarus Press. Madsen, W. (1964). The Mexican-Americans of South Texas. New York, Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston. Maher, J. (1994). Friday Night Blight. Austin American-Statesman. Austin, Texas: C1, C7. Maltby, H. A. (1870). St. Patrick's Day. Daily Ranchero. Brownsville: 1. Manuel, H. T. (1930). The Education of Spanish-speaking Children in Texas. Austin, University of Texas Press. Marcus, G. E. (1995). "Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi- sited Ethnography." Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117. Martin, D. (2001). Kay Teer Crawford, 88; Guided Drill Team's Growth. The New York Times. New York: A23. Martin, P. P. (1992). Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women. Tucson, University of Arizona Press. May, M. (1997). Legend by Example. The Monitor. McAllen: 1-3C. McAllen, M. (1991). The Heritage Sampler: Selections from the Rich and Colorful History of the Rio Grande Valley. Edinburg, Texas, New Santander Press. 322 McCombs, V. M. (1925). From over the Border: A Study of the Mexicans in the United States. New York, Council of the Women for Home Missions and The Missionary Education Movement. McGregory, J. (1997). Wiregrass Country. Jackson, University Press of Mississipi. McLean, R. N. (1930). The Northern Mexican . New York, Home Missions Council. McMurtry, L. (1966). The Last Picture Show. New York, Dial Press. McNeil, W. H. (1995). Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. McRobbie, A. (1994). Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London, Routledge. McWilliams, C. (1968 (1948)). North from Mexico: the Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. New York, Greenwood. Mendoza, V. T. (1954). El Corrido Mexicano. Mexico, D.F., Fondo de Cultura Economica. Mercer, C. (1991). "Neverending Stories: The Problem of Reading in Cultural Studies." New Formations 13. Montaño, M. (1992). The History of Mexican Folk Foodways of South Texas: Street Vendors, Offal Foods, and Barbacoa de Cabeza . Department of Folklore. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania. Montejano, D. (1987). Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. Austin, University of Texas Press. Moore, J. and H. Pachon (1985). Hispanics in the United States. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall. Morgan, T. (1963). The Other Texans: the Last Angry Americans. Look. 27. Muñoz, C. (1989). Youth, Identity, and Power: The Chicano Movement. London, Verso. Nájera-Ramirez, O. (1996). "The Racialization of a Debate: the Charreada as Tradition or Torture." American Anthropologist 98(3): 505-512. Nájera-Ramírez, O. (2002). Mounting Traditions: The Origin and Evolution of La Escaramuza Charra. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. N. E. Cantú and O. Nájera-Ramírez. Urbana, University of Illinois Press: 207-223. Nicolopulos, J. (1997). "The Heroic Corrido: A Premature Obituary." Aztlan 22(1): 115- 139. Oriard, M. (1991). Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Oriard, M. (1993). Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. Oriard, M. (1996). "Home Teams." The South Atlantic Quarterly 95(2). Ortner, S. B. (1999). Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Ortner, S. B. (2003). New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58. Durham, Duke University Press.

323 Osborn, E. C. D. (1942). The History of Sports in the Rio Grande Valley. The Brownsville Herald. Owens, W. A. (1969). Three Friends: Roy Bedicheck, J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb. New York, Doubleday. Paredes, A. (1958). "With His Pistol in His Hand": A Border Ballad and its Hero. Austin, University of Texas Press. Paredes, A. (1977). On Ethnographic Work among Minority Groups: A Folklorist's Perspective. Paredes, A. (1993). Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. Austin, CMAS Books Center for Mexican American Studies University of Texas Press. Paredes, A. (1993 (1958)). The Mexican Corrido: Its Rise and Fall. Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. R. Bauman. Austin, CMAS Books, Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas at Austin: 129-141. Paredes, A. (1993 (1978)). The Problem of Identity in a Changing Culture: Popular Expressions of Culture Conflict Along the Lower Rio Grande. Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. R. Bauman. Austin, CMAS Books: 19-47. Paredes, A. (1995). A Texas Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border. Austin, University of Texas Press. Parker, R. E. (1997). Now I'm All Self-conscious, aaah': A Bracketing Speech Particle in the Speech of South Texas Mexican Americans. Linguistics. Austin, University of Texas: 59. Peña, M. (1985). The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music. Austin, Center for Mexican American Studies University of Texas Press. Peña, M. H. (1992). Folksong and Social Change: Two Corridos as Interpretive Sources. Chicano Border Culture & Folklore. J. Villarino and A. Ramirez. San Diego, Marin Publications. Pérez, E. (1999). The Decolonial Imaginary: writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Powers, S. (1886). Afoot and Alone; A Walk from Sea to Sea by the Southern Route. Hartford, Columbian. Prieto, J. (1994). The Quarterback Who Almost Wasn't. Houston, Arte Público Press. Qualls, C. (1964). Building Character Through Athletics. Texas Coach. 7: 18-19. Radway, J. (1999). "What's in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 20 November, 1998." American Quarterly 51(1): 1-32. Ratliff, H. V. (1963). Autumn's Mightiest Legions: History of Texas Schoolboy Football. Waco, Texian. Redfield, R. (1930). Tepoztlán. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

324 Reid, S. J. (1847). Scouting Expedition of McCulloch's Texas Rangers, or theSummer and Fall Campaign of the Army of the United States in Mexico--1846. Philadelphia, G.B. Zieber and Co. Richards, I. A. (1936). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London, Oxford University Press. Ripley, H. L. (1892). Map of the Rio Grande Frontier, Texas: East of Fort McIntosh and South of the Mexican National Railroad. Austin, Texas General Land Office. Robb, J. D. (1980). Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press. Roberts, K. L. (1928). The Docile Mexican. Saturday Evening Post. 200: 41. Robson, G. (2000). 'No One Likes Us, We Don't Care': The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom. Oxford, Berg. Rodriguez, J. (1998). Interview with Author. Brownsville, Texas. Roemer, F. v. (1967 (1852)). Texas, with Particular Reference to German Immigration and the Physical Appearance of the Country. Waco, Texian Press. Romo, R. (1983). East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio. Austin, University of Texas Press. Rooney, J. F. (1974). A Geography of American Sport: from Cabin Creek to Anaheim. Reading, Addison-Wesley. Roosevelt, T. (1902). The Strenous Life; Essays and Addresses, by Theodore Roosevelt. New York, Century. Rosaldo, R. (1989). Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston, Beacon. Rubel, A. (1966). Across the Tracks: Mexican Americans in a South Texas Town. Austin, University of Texas Press. Ruiz, V. L. (1993). "Star Struck": Acculturation, Adolescence, and the Mexican American Woman, 1920-1950. Building with Our Hands. A. de la Torre and B. Pesquera. Berkeley, University of California Press: 109-129. Runyon, R. Rio Grande Valley Photographs, 1912-1949. Robert Runyon Collection, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Saldívar, J. (1997). Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley, University of California Press. Saldivar, J. D. (1991). The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History. Durham, Duke University Press. Saldívar, J. D. (1986). "Towards a Chicano Poetics: The Making of the Chicano Subject, 1969-1982." Confluencia 1(2): 10-17. Saldívar, R. (1990). Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Samponaro, F. N. and P. J. Vanderwood (1992). War Scare on the Rio Grande: Robert Runyon's Photographs of the Border Conflict, 1913-1916. Austin, Texas State Historical Association.

325 San Miguel, J., Guadalupe (1987). "Let All of them Take Heed": Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981. Austin, Center for Mexican American Studies University of Texas at Austin. Sanchez, G. J. (1993). Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York, Oxford University Press. Sanchez, G. J. (1994). "Go After the Women": Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915-1929. Unequal Sisters: a Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History. V. L. Ruiz and E. C. DuBois. New York, Routledge: 251-263. Sanchez, R. (1995). Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios. Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press. Sands, K. (1993). Charreria Mexicana: an Equestrian Folk Tradition. Tucson, University of Arizona Press. Santa Ana, H. V. (1926). Canciones, Cantares y Corridos Mexicanos. Mexico City, León Sánchez. Santillán, R. (2000). "Mexican Baseball Teams in the Midwest, 1916-1965: The Politics of Cultural Survival and Civil Rights." Perspectives in Mexican American Studies 7: 131-151. Sayles, J. (1996). Lone Star. J. Sayles, Castle Rock. Schiller, D. (1997). Border Drug Violence Sparks Fears of Wild West's Return. San Antonio Express-News. San Antonio: 1A. Scott, F. J. (1923). Customs and Superstitions Among Texas Mexicans on the Rio Grande Border. Coffee in the Gourd. J. F. Dobie. Austin, Texas Folklore Soc iety: 75-84. Seymour, H. (1990). Baseball: the People's Game. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Sharp, J. (1998). Bordering the Future. Austin, Texas State Office of the Comptroller of Public Accounts. Shockley, J. S. (1974). Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press. Simmons, M. (1957). The Mexican Corrido as a Source of Interpretive Study of Modern Mexico (1870-1950). Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Simmons, O. G. (1952). Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans in South Texas. Cambridge, Harvard University. Smith, R. A. (1988). Sports & Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics. New York, Oxford University Press. Stewart, K. (1988). "Nostalgia: a Polemic." Cultural Anthropology 3(3): 227-41. Stewart, K. (1996). A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Stewart, S. (1993). On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, Duke University Press. Stilwell, H. (1947). Portrait of the Magic Valley. The New Republic. 116. 326 Struna, N. L. (1996). People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early America. Urbana, University of Illinois Press. Tamayo, Juan, U.S.-born government office worker. Conversation with author. Pharr, Texas. March 1996. Name is fictitious. Taylor, C. (1999). "Two Theories of Modernity." Public Culture 11(1): 153-174. Taylor, C. (2002). "Modern Social Imaginaries." Public Culture 14(1): 91-124. Taylor, P. S. (1934). An American-Mexican Frontier: Nueces County, Texas. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press. Tijerina, A. (1998). Tejano Empire: Life on the South Texas Ranchos. College Station, Texas A&M University Press. Toback, J. (1970). Longhorns and Longhairs. Harper's. 241: 70-73. Townsend, B. (1999). Long-running Classic: Two Backs Starred in game of Century. Dallas, Dallas Morning News: 10. Trillin, C. (1971). U.S. Journal: Crystal City, Texas. The New Yorker: 102-7. Trujillo, A. L. (1993). Community Empowerment and Bilingual/Bicultural Education: A Study of the Movimiento in a South Texas Community. Education. Austin, University of Texas at Austin: 243. Tuan, Y.-F. (1991). "Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach." Annals of the Association of Americ an Geographers 8(14): 684-696. Turner, V. (1974). "Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology." Rice University Studies 60(3): 53-92. Turner, V. W. (1974). Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Tyler, S. (1987). The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Tylor, E. B. (1861). Anahuac: or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern. London, Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts. U.I.L. (1985). A Brief History of the University Interscholastic League on the Occasion of the League's 75th Anniversary. Austin, The League. Ulica, J. (1982). Touch-down Extraordinario. Crónicas Diabólicas. J. Rodriguez. San Diego, Maize Press. Valdés, D. N. (2000). Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and the Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century. Austin, University of Texas Press. Vennum, T. (1994). American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War. Washington, Smithsonian Insitution Press. Villareal, R. M. (1972). The Mexican-American Vaqueros of the Kenedy Ranch: A Social History. Kingsville, Texas A&I: 78. Voloshinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Webb, W. P. (1935). The Texas Rangers. Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin. 327 Will, G. F. (1976). On Football. Newsweek: 72. Williams, C. (1979). "South Texas Football." Texas Coach 22(8): 37. Williams, R. (1970). Athletics Faces the 1970's. Texas Coach. 14: 5-6. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford, Oxford Univerisity Press. Winningham, G. (1983). Football, Game of Life. Texas Monthly. Winningham, G. and A. Reinhert (1979). Rites of Fall: High School Football in Texas. Austin, University of Texas Press. YMCA: Industrial Department, I. C. Y. (1919). Among Industrial Workers: A Handbook for Young Men's Christian Associations in Industrial Fields. New York, International Committee YMCAs. Zamora, E. (1993). The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas. College Station, Texas A&M University Press. Zavala, J. V. (1997). Team from Edcouch-Elsa receive congratulations. The Monitor. McAllen.

328 Vita

Joel Huerta was born in Edinburg, Texas on September 5, 1963, the son of

Margarita and Remigio Huerta. After graduating from Edinburg High School he attended Rice University in Houston, Texas. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from

Rice in 1987. In the fall of that year, he matriculated at the University of Arizona in

Tucson, where he enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. At

Arizona he taught composition and creative writing courses, worked as an assistant editor at the Saguaro Review, and wrote and performed poetry. He received his MFA in

1990. He published work in many literary journals. His prizes include The Academy of

American Poets Prize for students. After teaching English for several years, he entered the graduate program in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. While at Texas he taught American and Mexican American Studies courses, and taught part- time at preparatory schools in Utah and Houston.

Permanent Address: 1641 Castle Court, Houston, Texas 77006

This dissertation was typed by the author.

329