Baseball, Modernization, and Identity in Oaxaca, México by David James Wysocki Master of Arts in Latin American Studies San Diego State University, 2011

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ANCIENT GAMES: BASEBALL, MODERNIZATION, AND IDENTITY

IN OAXACA, MÉXICO

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A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

San Diego State University

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In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Latin American Studies

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David James Wysocki

Summer 2011

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David James Wysocki

DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to those that work to think from scratch and understand the value of meaning and complexity within us. v

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Ancient Games: Baseball, Modernization, and Identity in Oaxaca, México by David James Wysocki Master of Arts in Latin American Studies San Diego State University, 2011

From the mid-nineteenth century to 1910, Oaxaca, México went through many changes in order to bring stability and grow its stagnated economy. This effort was realized through modernization projects by President Porfirio Díaz, a Oaxacan, that encouraged the building of infrastructure to boost foreign investment while bandwagoning foreign culture. Perceived as civilized and ultra-modern, baseball was adopted by Oaxacan elites to counter- balance the embarrassment they had of their own indigenous population considered backwards. Baseball served primarily an exclusionary function but during the Revolution mass participation began to be seen as a way to reform and socialize the Indian masses. The professional game that emerged in México was powerful but didn’t reach Oaxaca until the 1990s, the local team owned by one of México’s great business moguls. The game abounds with modern and consumerist symbolism but remains tied to Mesoamerican spirituality and mysticism. The stadium itself serves as an international spectacle of baseball exoticisms yet represents a negotiation with the rooted local. Baseball has not been simply an elitist introduction, however, and some of the game’s bottom-up producers have created origin myths that tie baseball to an ancient Oaxacan ballgame, working to create identity and community as they had in other places in México. While Oaxaca is not represented highly in national or international baseball tournaments, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec has boasted some of the country’s best players. The still powerful link between baseball, capitalism, and modernity have partly pushed politicians and businessmen to promote participation of the game to improve the health and family life of Oaxacans, as during the Revolution, but also to help the region appear nationally relevant against other baseball producing regions of the country that are more affluent and industrial. The game has thus represented the negotiations of identity and definition of modernity over time in the state at multiple levels. In this thesis I attempt to elucidate the varying ways baseball has been, and is, used to express positions of power and identity between rich and poor, indigenous and non- indigenous, and Oaxacan and Mexican, among more. Sometimes these delineations are not so clear. Out of this research emerges extreme complexity and competition over the definition of modernity and identity. By dredging through historical archives, conducting interviews, scouring for financial data, pondering heady sociological theory, and observing baseball first-hand, I attempt to write an open-ended thesis on the game’s historical production as raw and well represented as possible in the limited time and space this research provides. Sports studies often function as a way to magnify the ambitions and feelings of those in a society and this thesis aims to contribute by outlining these politics further. vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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ABSTRACT...... v LIST OF TABLES...... viii LIST OF FIGURES ...... ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1 1.1 About Oaxaca...... 2 1.2 Methodology...... 5 1.3 Literary Review: The Sociology and Politics of Sport ...... 6 1.4 Literary Review: Baseball in México ...... 13 1.5 Thesis Organization ...... 18 2 PISTOLEROS AND PELOTEROS: OAXACA THROUGH MODERNIZATION...... 20 2.1 Nineteenth Century México and the Science of Modernization...... 21 2.2 Porfirian Mining and Railroads ...... 25 2.3 Cosmopolitan Oaxaca and the Emerald City...... 30 2.4 Profile in Modernity: Charles Hamilton ...... 35 2.5 Modern Sport and the Arrival of Baseball...... 40 2.6 Uneven Development and Political Responses...... 48 2.7 Conclusion ...... 56 3 TODOS SOMOS GUERREROS: SEX, ECONOMY, AND POLITICS IN THE PROFESSIONAL GAME...... 59 3.1 History of the Mexican League...... 59 3.2 The Arrival of the Guerreros...... 64 3.3 Los Guerreros “En Vivo”...... 66 3.4 The Stadium: Oaxaca’s International Space...... 67 3.5 The Flavor of the Game ...... 72 3.6 Music and the “Spectacle”...... 75 vii

3.7 Who’s Who? The Guerreros Fans ...... 79 3.8 The Other Product: Players and the Body...... 86 3.9 Conclusion ...... 92 4 PLAYING THE FIELD: COMPETITING MODERNITIES AND SHIFTING BORDERS IN OAXACA’S OTHER LEAGUES...... 94 4.1 Amateur Leagues and Grassroots Organization ...... 95 4.2 National Recognition: The Stars and Rebel Leagues of the Isthmus...... 100 4.3 Ligas Pequeñas...... 108 4.4 Oaxaca’s New Modern Project ...... 112 4.5 Financial Barriers to Baseball...... 121 4.6 Conclusion ...... 130 5 CONCLUSION...... 134 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 140 Archival Sources...... 140 Interviews, Emails, and Fieldwork ...... 140 Books, Journals, and Other Published Work ...... 140 Papers, Theses, and Dissertations ...... 146 Non-Print and Informal Publications...... 147 Organizations and Reference Sites ...... 148 viii

LIST OF TABLES

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Table 4.1. Municipalities with Baseball Fields by Income in the Oaxaca Valley...... 124 Table 4.2. Municipalities with Baseball Fields by Income in the Isthmus...... 125 Table 4.3. Services and Occupations: With and Without Baseball Fields in the Oaxaca Valley...... 127 ix

LIST OF FIGURES

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Figure 1.1. Map of México highlighting the State of Oaxaca ...... 3 Figure 2.1. Mexico and the State of Oaxaca...... 27 Figure 2.2. The valley of Oaxaca...... 31 Figure 2.3. Charles A. Hamilton playing tennis...... 41 Figure 3.1. Eduardo Vasconselos stadium in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca...... 71 Figure 4.1. Zapotec in headdress, throwing a pitch...... 117 x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people contributed to this project and, like most projects, it should be considered a collective effort. I would like to thank Dr. Ramona Perez, Dr. Thomas Passananti, and Dr. James Gerber for their advice, guidance, and motivation through this tough process. At times they felt more like family than instructors and allowed this research to retain its personality. I would also like to thank Dr. John Crocitti for his honesty and effort outside of his own institution. Also thank you to Ryan Gwynne for his friendship and effort to help me navigate Oaxaca. He continued to make himself available to help my research when he didn’t have to and in some ways worked as a Oaxaca correspondent for me. Of course, family and friends played a major role in the successful completion of this thesis. Working two jobs, playing in a band, and humped over at my laptop many hours every day, my girlfriend Elisa Quiros, my mom Melinda, my dad David Sr., and my siblings Garrett, Erica, and Nichole have supported me and provided healthy and unconditional support. Some of the best distraction came from friends and colleagues (especially Tristin Beckman, Cynthia Rodriguez, Ashley Smallwood, Rafael Vanegas, Alaina Gallegos, and more) and I would like to thank them for the drinks and laughter in periods of both great frustration and great excitement. I would like to especially thank my participants in Oaxaca who were patient, caring, and almost always excited to help me learn about their culture, history, and lives and who invited me as part of a group to weddings and community celebrations. Most of this group I would like to thank Miguel, Martin, Rodolfo, Omar Hernandez, and Andres for their honesty and enthusiasm in interviews and archives. Lastly, I would like to thank those who impacted my experience in Oaxaca through informal conversation, translations, and companionship such as Ryan, Ana Goins-Ramirez, Alaina, Christina Buckler, Jessica Bates, and Walter, among countless others. 1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This thesis is an historical, anthropological, and economic examination of baseball participation in the Mexican southern state of Oaxaca. A mentor once related to me that all meaningful historical work emerges from asking good questions, and questions abounded when I arrived in the Oaxaca Valley in the summer of 2010. As a part of a field methods course in anthropology under the direction of Dr. Ramona Perez, I intended to go to Oaxaca and work with fellow students in a project to revamp and digitize archives for a couple of Valley communities while performing exploratory research in my free time. What I found was personally striking; a long history of baseball participation among many local communities in the Valley and a professional baseball team in a city with no soccer equivalent. Indeed, for the state that is most often considered among the most ‘indigenous’ or ‘undeveloped’ in México, baseball, generally seen played with fervor in the north or the Yucatán Peninsula, participation to this extent was intriguing. The polemic Octavio Paz once wrote that “Americans have not looked for México in México; they have looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests—and these are what they have found.”1 I grew up an avid baseball fan and worked for four years as a baseball analyst and writer. It was in reflection of my youth when I was a baseball player and musician that I began to notice the ways in which people so often had dialogue and negotiated power through cultural expression. Somehow, the popular conception of art forms has allowed sport to be separated from politics, either institutional or every day. They are often considered innocuous as the simple pastimes of children. Yet, if it was so unimportant and distant, one must wonder why governments try so hard to control its production and why people feel so attached to players, teams, and the actual sport. It is through the practices of culture that often one can find the missing voices, popular responses and hidden projects of

1 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: And Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 358. 2 power. My exposure to baseball in Oaxaca revealed a set of practices I assumed was unique in the country, especially coming from a region so promoted as traditional and unchanging. This experience spawned the project I am now presenting. A few major questions emerged that consumed me throughout the various phases of the project and that guided this research. How did baseball, a long glowing symbol of American modernity, come to Oaxaca, the country’s most southern state and one commonly assumed to be the most ‘traditional’? Who brought it and for what purpose? Has this narrative changed over time and what does participation mean to those actively taking part, historically and in the present? Why has it been so readily adopted by local people either through their own participation or through support of a local team?

1.1 ABOUT OAXACA It is difficult to place an exact figure on indigenous peoples because the idea of the indigenous is itself developed by those not part of those groups.2 Indeed, indigeneity has been measured over time using many methods including language, history, blood lineage, phenotype, and language, among more. However, there are useful estimates available. Using language and culture as a marker, anthropologist Kristin Norget claims that nearly 70 percent of the state’s inhabitants are indigenous, holding 18 percent of the nation’s total indigenous population and constituting the largest proportion of indigenous peoples of any state in México.3 The United Nations Development Programme, using language alone as the indicator, gives 44.9 percent of Oaxaca’s population credit as indigenous, a number representing 16 percent of the nation’s total.4 Despite the discrepancies, the numbers make clear that Oaxaca is highly indigenous. If we look deeper, however, Oaxaca is a geographically diverse state both ethnically and physically, featuring sixteen different

2 United Nations Development Programme, Informe sobre Desarrollo Humano de los Pueblos Indígenas en México (México: Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo, 2010), 25-26. 3 Kristin Norget, Days of Death, Days of Life: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 28-30 4 United Nations Development Programme, Informe sobre Desarrollo Humano de los Pueblos Indígenas en México, 25-26, 37. This publication uses figures taken from the Consejo Nacional de Población (CONAPO), a Mexican government statistical body. 3 ethnicities, along with towering mountains, pristine beaches, and tropical slopes.5 It is also just one state removed from Central America (see Figure 1.1). It is in part due to its varied geography that its relationship with Spanish conquerors was very different from much of the rest of México. Many of the political arrangements with the Spanish were made through negotiation rather than conquest. Even today, many indigenous elements mark the unique system of politics in Oaxaca through their use of a political practice termed usos y costumbres (traditional customs). In this system, elections are held publicly, candidates cannot represent a particular party, and a vote is taken por mano, or by hand, in a community meeting. Many communities have only recently allowed women to have a vote.

Figure 1.1. Map of México highlighting the State of Oaxaca. Source: Mexico Bus Schedules. “Oaxaca State of Mexico Map.” http://www.Méxicobusschedules.com/maps/states/Oaxaca_México_Map.gif (accessed May 16, 2011).

The unique political circumstances in the state are in part attributed to Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth century that helped create regional identity around local Church dioceses. Constant political efforts by the country to de-centralize also left interpretation of

5 Francie R. Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca:The View from the South México, 1867-1911(University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 6-7. 4 laws the responsibility of many of the varied municipalities.6 México contains 2,456 municipalities nation-wide, Oaxaca claiming a stunning 570 of that total, more than double that of any other state.7 While México is said to contain inside of it “many Mexicos” Oaxaca stands out because of its ethnic diversity, geographic and topographic variation, and sheer number of municipalities. Charles Gibson referred to “hundreds of colonial documents” to assert that borders and ethnic demarcation were powerful even in pre-conquest times as well as during colonization. Spanish officials and others claim indigenous settlements were often widely separated in the state.8 Considering the great ethnic diversity among indigenous people, we can see Oaxaca is a state of great complexity. However, academia has not always recognized this complexity and has even perpetuated some long held stereotypes of Oaxacan society. Francie Chassen-López believes that a “Black Legend” of Oaxaca exists where peasants have been colored as “immunized” from modernization projects, rejecting them altogether because of either a romanticized version of what the Indian is believed to be or because peasants are largely still seen as backward and unchanging. Even elites of the state have been stereotyped as “reactionary.”9 However, she acknowledges that the use of usos y costumbres represents a constant fight from an indigenous “world view” that negates many of the modernist structures that were incorporated in other parts of México.10 This paper attempts to avoid terminal limits placed on agents and accepts a discourse of complexity. It is intended to be the beginning of a discussion, not necessarily the final word. The Oaxacan state largely has a reputation for its indigeneity and traditionalism because of federal and state level tourism promotion of its indigenous heritage as evidenced

6 James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central México, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 57; William H. Beezley, Mexican National Identity: Memory, Innuendo, and Popular Culture (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2008), 22. 7 Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI), “Catálogo de Claves de Entidades Federativas, Municipios, y Localidades,” http://mapserver.inegi.org.mx/mgn2k/?c=646&s=est (accessed May 12, 2011). 8 Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of México. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 23-24; Norget, Days of Death, Days of Life, 96-98. 9 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 5. 10 Ibid., 6-7. 5 through arts and crafts, Guelaguetza and the Day of the Dead celebrations and the regional market systems. My research and experience largely understands Oaxaca as, in fact highly connected with places outside of itself and extremely modern by most definable aspects of the term. While the region is not considered heavily industrialized, it is highly politically aware beyond the municipality. An example of this political sense manifests through protests that often include protesters inhabiting public spaces such as the prized zocaló for weeks at a time. The most recent protest occurred during the summer of 2010 over the gubernatorial elections. At the same time, endless markets sell goods from the romantically traditional, such as tejidos, pottery, and chapulines, to the latest crazes, including music CDs, Chuck Taylor All-Stars shoes, and pirated movies still playing in US theatres. The same contradiction occurs on the outskirts of the city where burros graze sports fields while downtown bars are packed for US pro sports matches and karaoke. Many campesinos in the field often wear huaraches and toil at exhausted soil in the fields all day, but have children who wear contemporary styles and brand clothing. My experience demonstrated the depth of this globalized phenomenon when I met some young adults who knew obscure bands from my hometown that not even I knew prior to hearing of them in Oaxaca. Bi-national youth gangs often walk dirt roads and punk rockers graffiti walls with indigenous imagery. Finally, Oaxaca is filled with international capital acquired through remittances from the incredibly high rates of migration to the US.11 In these ways, Oaxaca carries a “clashing” of economic systems, a “dual economy” that is painted by complexity, and is in few ways isolated.12 This thesis largely presents these politics of modernity and complexity in Oaxaca and how they have been negotiated and defined through local participation in baseball.

1.2 METHODOLOGY Among the main sources for this thesis were newspapers. Many days were spent at the Oaxaca City archives in the Church of Santo Domingo, where I rifled through documents for hours on end. Additionally, more contemporary new sources were largely found on the

11 David J. Wysocki, field notes, Oaxaca, México, June 13-July 21. 12 Mohammed Sadli, “Reflections on Boeke’s Theories of Dualistic Economies,” in The Economy of Indonesia: Selected Readings, ed. Bruce Glassbuner (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 1971), 99-100. 6

Internet, a convenient tool for the emerging researcher. Many of the pre-1940 news sources were largely considered elite, for reasons that will be elucidated in chapter two, while the later sources are more of a mixed bag and hail from many cities and demographics. Many American sources, such as mining and engineering journals and the New York Times, were also used to cover US expansion and politics in the region during the Porfiriato and the Revolution. This thesis also relies heavily on formal and informal interviews, some of the full names of participants are not given and two of the names has been changed. Among the participants include a personal trainer, a psychologist who works with indigenous peoples, a migrant and son of a ballplayer, two former ballplayers, and an executive with the Guerreros, Oaxaca City’s professional baseball organization. Other informal interviews took place daily and were captured in a detailed field notebook, which I rely on heavily for my analysis of the professional ballgame in chapter three. As an exploratory project, I found little information useless and, in fact, much I had believed useless initially contributed heavily to the final analysis. Indeed, participant observation was a key element to the data collection of this paper. Additionally, published oral histories from community web sites were used sparingly to detail phenomena. While working in municipal archives I was also able to gather some data on the political importance of sport in the region and the various politics involved in their introduction. I rely heavily on some basic economic and baseball statistics gathered from government web sources, non-profit organizations, and other respected statistical databases. In one portion of the thesis I also analyze a produce a pricing survey conducted on the Internet and through informants in Oaxaca City. Lastly, I communicated with several officials in local museums in Oaxaca City to help navigate the beginnings of the sport in the city. Of course, this thesis would be largely empty without a healthy use of sociological theory of sport and Mexican baseball.

1.3 LITERARY REVIEW: THE SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICS OF SPORT The study of sport is a subject only recently treaded with great popularity, either because of academic “chauvinism” or an underlying “Puritan” approach that perceived sport 7 as insignificant leisure or entertainment in the opinion of sports sociologist John Hargreaves.13 However, in the 1970s, likely due to the fact that these fields of grass, turf, and mud were the only real sites of confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sports burst onto the academic radar. A simultaneous current running in academia was described by a group of historians, headed by William Beezley, who surveyed students to discover what they found relevant in the period. Influenced by the counter-culture movement and other political events, many students believed that the traditional economic and political discourse had become “bottled” and “narrowly professional” in efforts to find an objective and scientific method. Students interpreted their world differently, now less interested in “how a country died” but rather were captivated by emotional everyday human experiences such as love, fights, and overall struggle.14 In the effort to tap into this swelling sentiment, the authors recommend historical examinations of music, sports, art, and the environment as well as regional studies of Africa and Latin America, which were gaining in popularity around the US, where issues on race and revolution proved relevant.15 Patsy Neal (1972) is among the early students of sports sociology since its surge as a popular study. She imagined sport as a “man’s search for perfection,” or progression that allowed him to take chances without risking actual physical harm. She perceived sport as a venue for humankind to test his or her primal will, becoming “complete” and self-realized through competition and hard work. Sport then represents man’s risk-taking, creativity, discipline, and caring among many more characteristics that ultimately help create man as a “total being.”16 Essentially, man looks for sport more as his surroundings become upended and he seeks a new meaning of the self. Sport’s competition and intangibles, possibly like

13 John Hargreaves, “Sport, Culture, and Ideology,” in Sports, Culture, and Ideology ed. Jennifer Hargreaves (London: Routledge, 1982), 30-32. 14 William H. Beezley, Ronald D. Tallman, and Thomas H. Hariksen, “History for the 70's: An Approach to Contemporary History.” The History Teacher 6 (November 1972): 9. 15 Ibid., 10-12; Donald Bray, “A New Latin Americanist Pedagogy,” Latin American Perspectives 31 (January 2004): 10-13. 16 Patsy Neal, Sport and Identity (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 1972), 19-21. 8 science, allow man to realize this meaning.17 Additionally, sport allows freedom to the participant and an escape to a previously unreachable place in society. Rules and structure of sports can “internalize” in athletes and this makes them susceptible to social control. However, the participant generally retains ultimate control even though participation forces an athlete to follow the sport’s rules with the threat of punishment if they are broken.18 Richard Gruneau and Brian Petrie reflect modern sports’ politics and social inequality in Sport and Social Order (1975). Gruneau outlined the Marxist approach, which is narrowly materialistic, seeing sport as inextricably bonded within a framework of classist hierarchy with great differences between its participants’ wealth and power. Sport producers are seen as commodities in a process of capitalist production where the structure of sport promotes free-market ideology. Gruneau argues that the only way to establish a truly equal sports model or structure, or simply eliminate its capitalist elements, is to eliminate competition and make sports producers its controllers in a democratic establishment.19 Contrastingly, in his opinion the rational functionalist view of sport is that sport itself aims for efficiency in its division of labor and that sport is not a segregating practice, but rather is integrating because it reflects the values of the whole society. According to Gruneau this approach acknowledges incentive, and upward mobility based on these incentives, effectively establishing socioeconomic fluidity within a society and further integrating its people. This approach also recognizes the ability of a society to rally around ideas faster.20 Gruneau ultimately believes that sports promote inequality because we are forced to accept that all sports are built on unequal ground, or buried inside hierarchical systems of undemocratic rules and unequal wealth. Even within the measuring of the performance of the individual we feel a need to place a ranking on sports’ producers. Therefore, Gruneau seems to take the side of the

17 Ibid., 22-25. 18 Ibid., 33-38, 175. 19 Richard Gruneau, “Sport, Social Differentiation, and Social Inequality,” in Sport and Social Order: Contributions to the Sociology of Sport, eds. Donald Ball and John Loy. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1975), 136-137. 20 Ibid., 142. 9

Marxist approach but accepts a discourse that describes sport as a mirror of a society’s cultural traditions.21 Petrie’s piece on the political aspects of sport displays the ways sport can be fused with national politics. He emphasizes three basic “dimensions” or manipulations of contemporary sport: its use by politicians, its use by a community to build collective identity, and its relevance in the debate between political “radicals” and conservatives. He argues that most often these relationships are disgruntled and dangerous. For example, he stresses that allying with sport and placing on it nationalist legitimacy can be politically suicidal when your team loses. Petrie places heavy emphasis on sport as a relevant political and social study because it is part of a “social reality” and “anchored” to the political and economic system, outlining and underlying all the major ideologies of those in power.22 All levels of society can use sport, however, as a way to grab power, and all levels can be exploited. Elites have often used sport as proof of “positive socialization” of a society and this is displayed partially when fans use sport to leech out aggression that may have been previously directed more so at the existing power structure. Sport in this sense can be a simple distraction from the everyday problems that plague a society, a view he claims is held by radicals who see sport often as simply an “opiate.”23 Petrie advises us to primarily emphasize the use of sport as a tool for the spread and reinforcement of political ideologies that are coming from a new economic organization, which has also overlapped with the political.24 Of course, because modern sport has encouraged mass participation of the fan base, politicians also approach spectators as they would any special interest group (like those based on religion or ethnicity). The appearances at sporting events and associations politicians make with sport give the fan base direct confrontation with the political figure.25 Politicians make these appearances because they

21 Ibid., 128-129. 22 Ibid., 190. 23 Brian Petrie, “Sport and Politics,” in Sport and Social Order: Contributions to the Sociology of Sport, eds. Donald Ball and John Loy, (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1975), 191-192. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 193. 10 recognize the nationalistic potential in an audience that is already “captive,” and can fuse symbols like national anthems and military performances into the game in its downtime.26 These fusions can also hurt the politician, however, because the politician is at mercy of the crowd’s opinion and emotion, which can lead to collective antagonism.27 Petrie claims also that athletes come to change their values as they are conditioned to obey the authority of coaches and become politically conservative. Athletes in general, in fact, may be more vulnerable to this type of conditioning because at some level they choose this acquiescence.28 John Hargreaves’ work in Sport, Culture, and Ideology (1982) focuses on Marxist- functionalist debates. To Hargreaves, sport is a powerful meaning-making expression that can not only help one discern a society’s complex social order through symbols, but also can be used by subalterns to “attack” existing systems.29 Hargreaves sees the functionalist viewpoint as emerging from a nineteenth century recreation movement that stressed rationality and sport functioned essentially as a tension-release in a safe environment. Indeed, this viewpoint seems to stress integration because it relieves stress among different groups of participants as well. However, Hargreaves sees this view as ignorant to power relationships of work and politics from which, he argues, sport cannot be distanced.30 He briefly recounts the interactionist philosophy by suggesting a model of sports as simply symbolic warfare in times of rapid change between fan-bases or players that help one project threatening emotions onto others through team competition.31 Additionally, modern sports promote elitist and imperialist traits of selfishness, egotism, and societal dissection coupled with mythical lies of equality that attempt to overshadow a society’s real problems, like that of race. While Hargreaves sees the Marxist viewpoint as superior to functionalism because of its recognition of the struggle between cultural, economic, and political power, it is also shortsighted because it fails to recognize the freedom within sport that allows its continued enjoyment or

26 Ibid., 199. 27 Ibid., 207. 28 Ibid., 222-223. 29 Hargreaves, “Sport, Culture, and Ideology,” 33. 30 Ibid., 39. 31 Ibid., 40. 11 criticism. Thus, people are able to move in and out of these supposed models of production and sport itself is never represented uniformly anywhere. Marxism, then, is incompatible in cultural studies because of its failure to recognize human complexity.32 Hargreaves advises us to look at sports as a reciprocal negotiation of power between different groups of people. For him, there is no linear or all-powerful agent imposing ideology or practice and subaltern groups have, in fact, resisted and gained power by appropriating or manipulating sports and culture.33 Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning (1986) have contributed significantly to our conception of modern sport in their work The Quest for Excitement. They argue that a political calm that has followed contemporary industrial societies has created a demand for excitement.34 Moreover, contemporary sport acts in a quasi-religious manner because it has become central to identity creation with the rise of secularism. Indeed, “in-group” and “out- group” is reinforced heavily as contemporary sports teams are put together pinning place against place through team associations, and work as one of the only ways diverse and changing contemporary cities can find collective identity.35 They believe sport to be a mechanism of control and find relation to official seriousness in sport and a mass civilizing project by those populations who participate heavily.36 Martin Barry Vinokur (1988) wonders how sports can be described both as a mirror of society and an escape from society at the same time, seemingly opposing the ‘floating’ conviction of some of the previous authors.37 He argues that sport is as much a part of national character as is any kind of institution, be it religious, political or economic, and that it can be used to integrate nations. He doubts that sports can create nations or be used to

32 Ibid., 41. 33 Ibid., 51. 34 Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 63-90. 35 Ibid., 220-223. 36 Ibid., 231. 37 Martin Barry Vinokur, More than a Game: Sports and Politics (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 6. 12 effectively prevent uprisings.38 Additionally, he believes that participants of sport have already chosen, by participating, to try and maintain a certain social order, so the subaltern power often associated with sport is severely limited.39 For Vinokur, there are three “levels” of sports organization: physical education, recreation, and championship sport, the last of which is most important as a political tool.40 Physical education is government-instituted in the Western world and has attempted to ingrain capitalistic individualism in its participants. Socialist and developing nations use sport differently. These countries use sport to maintain social and political order and produce champions for international competition, which can be used to improve international relations or help spread national pride and legitimacy.41 Nearly all countries, however, try and promote leadership, health (some for the defense of the homeland), and entertainment for distraction.42 Pierre Bourdieu (1991) later added in his article “Sport and Social Class” some elements of modern sport that make it autonomous from other types of study and certainly relevant. Modern sports are an appropriation of popular games, and then are re-taken back by the popular class, generally through professionalization. The sport itself represents a field of struggles in which each participant competes over what the definition of sport will be (popular v. elite). However, it is also a struggle over the “legitimate” use of the body.43 Real constraints exist for those entering sport. One important constraint is economic, and this helps define what sport one will enter. The other is the relationship to the body one has embedded in one’s “habitus,” where the working classes often search for sports that are characterized by heavy exertion and physical pain.44 Like art, sport remains for the elite a

38 Ibid., 1-4, 135-136. 39 Ibid., 134. 40 Ibid., 7, 136. 41 Ibid., 10, 14-15. 42 Ibid., 10. 43 Pierre Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 361. 44 Ibid., 370-371. 13

“technique of sociability” and as a way to distance themselves from the struggles of the poor by severely limiting and controlling the way one moves in the sport’s practice.45 In 1994, William Morgan wrote a response for Gruneau, largely influenced by Michel Foucault and Bourdieu, presenting the popular conception of sport as a hegemonic institution or process. Despite obvious ties to a form of social control directly linked with politics and social order, sport is uniquely able to hide under a guise of weakness or harmlessness. In a sense, rules created inside a game are believed to create an alternate reality, but actually, it moves people deeper into existing realities.46 Although sport works to reinforce hegemonic control in this perspective, he believes one cannot ignore the varying “languages” and approaches to sports sociology that make the study of sport complex and perhaps autonomous from other types of sociological studies.47

1.4 LITERARY REVIEW: BASEBALL IN MÉXICO Perceived political and economic stability among modernization campaigns at the end of the nineteenth century was called the “Porfirian persuasion” by William Beezley in his famous work Judas at the Jockey Club (1987).48 This persuasion was best displayed in sport, from which the Mexican adoption of baseball came and the bullfight hidden. Baseball was developed further to distance itself from “savage” pastimes with the hosting of tournaments, making México internationally and regionally significant, and the creation of professional leagues. Baseball has since been one of México’s adopted, but embraced, pastimes.49 It was a Mexican elite’s weapon that was bandwagoned and used against its own “backwards” people.50

45 Ibid., 372. 46 William J. Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport: A Critique and Reconstruction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 63. 47 Ibid., 116. 48 William H. Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club: And Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 13. 49 Ibid., 24-26. 50 John Mason Hart. Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 14

Baseball, however, has not been solely promoted by elites, as was displayed by Gilbert Joseph (1988) in his article on baseball in the Yucatán Peninsula. The game was originally brought over by either Cuban or Mexican students in the US, but it was encouraged by local henequen elites at the end of the nineteenth century as a subtle way to modernize the Maya labor force, improving their health and morality while introducing them to a modern structure like uniforms.51 It was also a way for industrial bosses and politicians to control disgruntled workers through integration and teamwork exercises; but the workers took the game and formed their own leagues, controlling its production.52 Yucatán was the only place in México where baseball production was controlled or accepted by the masses, according to Joseph. Everywhere else it remained a manipulative elitist tool until recently.53 The appeal for the masses laid in its ability to distract or control one’s own destiny in a time of rapid modern and industrial change and also bonuses could provide real opportunities to advance up the socio-economic ladder.54 Baseball had created vast communication networks all over the peninsula unlike anything before, and socialist governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto aimed to exploit these networks and revive the Maya Caste War with the socialist revolution in the 1920s.55 Carrillo Puerto admired the game because of its ability to ingrain attitudes of collectivity and sacrifice and its “grassroots” organization made it especially politically valuable.56 The baseball clubs became deeply fused with community building and political organizing, even being used as schools, in what were called Ligas de Resistencia. For many Maya descendents, the game was more “spiritual” for them than even religion.57 Joseph’s work is relevant because it is one of the few done on baseball in Southern México, and its subjects and participants are

51 Gilbert M. Joseph, “Forging the Regional Pastime: Baseball and Class in Yucatán,” in Sport and Society in Latin America: Diffusion, Dependency, and the Rise of Mass Culture ed. by Joseph L. Arbena (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 33-35. 52 Ibid., 36. 53 Ibid., 42. 54 Ibid., 38. 55 Ibid., 45-46. 56 Ibid., 48-49. 57 Ibid., 50. 15 largely indigenous peoples like those in Oaxaca. In the Yucatán, baseball seemed to create more communication networks than the state relied upon in a spit of dense jungle and remote communities. Alan Klein (1997), an anthropologist, detailed a bi-national professional baseball team in Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas called the “Tecos” in his work Baseball on the Border. Klein details the transnational nature of the sport and origin myths that arose from the Mexican side to place their own stamp on the game. Through the Tecos, however, Klein shows that the game’s definition ultimately relies on varied regional interpretations that supersede those linked to the country. When the cities had a different team on each side of the border, they were bitter rivals. However, when a bi-national team was created the fans shared a “single identity.”58 The biggest contribution, however, may be Klein’s analysis of sexuality in the Mexican game, citing a culture of home runs and an obsession with physical power. He cites macho behavior throughout the sport in México through historical regional relationships with the United States.59 In an interesting display of nationalism, Michael and Mary Oleksak in 1991 documented Jorge Pasquel, an influential owner in the Mexican League during the World War II and post-war era, as nationalistic but a competitor for international ballplayers. His investment in baseball convinced quality Latino ballplayers to join his league over Major League Baseball (MLB) and actually offered salaries high enough to convince many MLB whites to play in México as well. He provoked and antagonized MLB officials who responded by levying bans on American players who joined the Mexican league. The Oleksaks describe each international player acquired by the Mexican League as representing “Villista-like” gains against the resented US.60 Indeed, Richard McKelvey’s Mexican Raiders

58 Alan M. Klein, Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 64. 59 Ibid., 151-169. 60 Michael M. Oleksak and Mary Adams Oleksak, Beisbol: Latin Americans and the Grand Old Game (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Masters Press, 1991), 51. 16 in the Major Leagues follows a similar story detailing the Pasquels’ work and showing the growing nationalist rhetoric in the politics of professional baseball.61 David LaFrance (2002) later described how Mexican baseball found ways to battle poor labor conditions in the 1980s. Players in the Mexican professional leagues were seen by owners as easily replaceable and cheap entertainment.The specialization of baseball skill had historically given players little leverage to mount resistance to labor abuses and low wages that plagued many of the country’s workers in the period.62 Tired of exploitation, union- busting, and lack of enforcement of the Constitution that guaranteed them labor rights, Mexican ball players created a rival league, becoming the first professional athletes to organize in the country’s history. They provided, even in ultimate failure, inspiration for future labor movements in México.63 José Almillo (2003) documented immigrants baseball in Southern California. During World War II, Mexican migrants used baseball clubs to create ethnic community and improve their organization skills in a nativist and economically exploitative environment. It was a way to show others of their capable strength and unification on social issues.64 Baseball leagues were supported by company managers, however, who viewed participation as a way to expedite production, birth loyalty to the company, and distract workers from creating organized labor movements while simultaneously promoting “baseball consciousness” that modernized and de-feminized backwards Mexicans. In this period “play reformers” took baseball as a crusade to promote organization and structure among children, especially Latinos who could be turned into obedient laborers.65 However, baseball also represented a chance for Mexicans to move up the social ladder by becoming coaches and

61 Richard G. McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues: The Pasquel Brothers vs. Organized Baseball, 1946 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2006). 62 David G. LaFrance, “Baseball, the State, and Professional Baseball in México in the 1980s,” in Sport in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Joseph L. Arbena and David G. LaFrance (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2002), 92. 63 Ibid., 93, 109. 64 José M. Alamillo, “Peloteros in Paradise: Mexican Americans in Baseball and Oppositional Politics in Southern California, 1930-1950,” The Western Historical Quarterly 34 (2003): 192. 65 Ibid., 193-194. 17 often the game gave players a financial alternative to agricultural work.66 Games and tournaments allowed players’ and spectators’ families to reconnect and worked to celebrate Mexican solidarity.67 These baseball clubs and games birthed Mexican labor unions like the United Cannery Agricultural Packing and Allied Workers of America. They also provided lessons in fundraising and collectivity.68 The open competition against white ballclubs further allowed Mexicans to contest racial superiority and masculinize the Mexican who was often seen as feminine.69 Here, the players used baseball as not only a symbolic resistance, but in fact, to organize and accumulate power. Richard Santillan in 2008 writes of the prevalence of Mexican baseball teams in the United States Midwest during the 1920s through the postwar period that provided social mobility and the creation of community in a distant land. Leagues formed by immigrants and Mexican American citizens gave a physical meeting space at baseball games for the creation of a transnational identity based on race, religion, occupation and common migratory experiences. Games would be used to engage in social and political discussion among fans in a place where their citizenship didn’t exist, or was not always readily accepted. Indeed, many community members viewed baseball, which promoted leadership and survival skills, as a vital learning experience for their children and these skills helped in organizational efforts in fights for social justice. The game also promoted integration and community building by fielding teams that mixed ages. Interestingly, the reason baseball was chosen as the cultural expression of the community was based on the game’s popularity in both México and the US and team names took after places in México, reflecting imagined and real connections with the homeland. Santillan’s argument is that baseball tied together the Mexican American community by blending Mexican culture and civil rights in America.70

66 Ibid., 197-198. 67 Ibid., 200. 68 Ibid., 199, 207-208. 69 Ibid., 204-205. 70 Richard Santillan, “Mexican Baseball Teams in the Midwest, 1916-1965: The Politics of Cultural Survival and Civil Rights,” in Sports and the Racial Divide: African American and Latino Experience in an Era of Change, ed. Michael E. Lomax (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 146-155. 18

1.5 THESIS ORGANIZATION This thesis is organized somewhat chronologically. Chapter two begins to address the questions of how and who introduced baseball to Oaxaca. It outlines the liberal project undertaken in the region from the infamous Benito Juárez to Porfirio Díaz and beyond, explaining their goals for the development of México, and Oaxaca, and the science that informed them. This chapter roughly covers the boom of investment during Díaz’s regime, the move to remake the aesthetic qualities of the capital city and provide leisurely escapes to help promote foreign investment desperately needed after decades of in-fighting, imperialism, and corruption. Here baseball was imported to fulfill an exclusionary purpose, as were many of the modernization imports of the Porfiriato, and was considered among the most civilized of sports, meant to keep busy the city’s cosmopolitan elite. However, the Revolution brought a new conception of the Indian and the Mexican nation and baseball began to be seen for its socializing qualities. While indigenous peoples were excluded from many of the Porfirian projects, they have found many ways to resist and demand access, making them not truly sub-altern. Baseball, however, for these groups would remain a vestige of elitism and most wouldn’t realize find access until roughly the 1950s. Chapter three covers the professionalism in the game now, addressing the question of how baseball’s significance has modified over time and how it became significant to local populations. Oaxaca has changed significantly from its Porfirian roots, yet capital still tends to define the participants and aficionados at the games. However, unlike the game that was imported in the late nineteenth century, the professional game now features many Oaxacan elements and the league in which they play has a rich history of confrontation with the US. Instead of being completely exclusionary, the team has attempted to channel indigenous symbols to gain legitimacy and increase its potential market around the Valley. The stadium itself has become a shrine of modernity and cosmopolitanism, trapping international and local as well as traditional and modern symbols and rituals. Ultimately, the crowds choose what to keep and what to dispose. Chapter four tackles baseball from its largely unspoken, but important, history, providing the voice of Oaxacans to this research. Using some oral histories, baseball produced from the bottom-up is analyzed and compared to contemporary amateur and semi- professional projects in the state. The game has evolved significantly since the Porfiriato and 19 no one group has complete control over its production. The government continues to promote baseball as a way to socialize its population and modernize Oaxaca’s image. It is actively engaging in projects to help create a championship sport to compete with northern rivals. However, the process has not been easy because of the rivals in the north and also, perhaps, their rivals within the state. A new economic organization in the neo-Porfiriato has created opportunity for cultural producers to rise as alternative caregivers in the state; largely this has been attempted through a baseball academy. In the end I demonstrate how economic realities have made all official projects limited in the long term. However, baseball remains a significant source of identity creation for many local populations. 20

CHAPTER 2

PISTOLEROS AND PELOTEROS: OAXACA THROUGH MODERNIZATION

In 1907 AG Spaulding claimed that baseball was first played by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839, the current residence of the Major League Baseball (MLB) Hall of Fame.71 However, historical tracing since has disputed this claim and added depth to the sport’s evolution, placing its antecedents back as far as 5,000 years ago in Egypt.72 Through Southern Europe, ball games moved into England by the fifteenth century, where popular and mostly non-gendered games such as rounders, stoolball, and trapball evolved and became baseball’s direct ancestors. Indeed, these games were played by the working class at days of festivals or feasts, but were said by elites to promote “godlessness.”73 The meaning of games changed as they were increasingly played in British schools, disconnected from their original social relevance and transforming them into organized bodily exercises, or “an art for art’s sake.”74 Slowly elites subdued the brutishness of these games and imposed a set of rules that required an “orderlied discipline” that had never existed.75 Like other institutions of social control, this redefined “modern” sport occupied the time of children and later developed into technique for the rich to distance themselves from the vulgarities around them.76 It was this spirit of the modern sport that changed México’s relationship with sport forever and deeply influenced baseball’s demographics around the country.

71 Tony Collins, John Martin, and Wray Vamplew. Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports (London: Routledge, 2005), 41-42. 72 Sálon de la Fama del Beisbol Profesional de México, “Historia del Beisbol: Antecedentes,” http://www.salondelafama.com.mx/salondelafama/beisbol/beisbol_antecedentes.asp (accessed February 5, 2011). 73 Collins, Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports, 232-233, 251-253, 271. 74 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 359-360. 75 Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 151. 76 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 365. 21

This chapter aims to trace baseball’s first importation into México and, more specifically, Oaxaca. Through historical analysis of the region’s political, social, and economic environments during the first years of the game’s participation, I hope to provide answers to some key questions of this project. In this chapter I hope to elucidate why the game was imported and by whom. Further, what conditions existed that made Oaxaca a prime landing spot for the sport?

2.1 NINETEENTH CENTURY MÉXICO AND THE SCIENCE OF MODERNIZATION Emerging from decades of political strife and infighting through the War of the Reform, Mexican liberal politics from the mid-nineteenth century carried a positivist tinge, a sociological philosophy that guided many Western governments. Oaxaca, the former cochineal capital of the nation, was placed in a rare position of national prominence, producing presidents Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz who powered the state’s “dual legacy” of liberalism on the Mexican nation from 1858 to 1910.77 During this period Oaxaca would be a major focus of the tenures of both former state governors and aggressive liberal policies of modernization were imposed to help turn around what was long believed an underdeveloped state, promoting stability, order, and, consequently, affluence. Since independence in 1821 México had suffered through incredible instability including three invasions of conquest from the Spanish, Americans, and the French, respectively, and caudillo-led uprisings that constantly disrupted the national political landscape and left much of the nation war-torn, distant, and divided. Essential sources of income from colonial times were disrupted in constant chaos such as the destruction and abandonment of productive mines, the capital flight of prominent Peninsulares and Criollos, an unstable currency, and the reduction of the role of the Church that functioned as the region’s most reliable moneylender. The combination of these factors sustained a more than

77 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 507. 22 half century-long recession, perhaps into the late 1880s.78 The lack of durable infrastructure, especially in the mountainous and southern states like Oaxaca, resulted in capital and coastal cities being developed unevenly compared to those of the countryside.79 Problems were often blamed on the state’s mass indigenous population and liberal leaders, frustrated after 300 years of “authoritarian Spanish corporatism” and conservative stagnation that allowed the survival of the “communal traditions of Mesoamerica,” became drunk over pragmatic Enlightenment ideals and a modernity defined by its individual, anti-clerical, and scientific qualities.80 The result was an embrace of a trendy “positive” science that provided easier answers to quell the state’s complicated ills. From the industrial experience of Western Europe, positivism was introduced and popularized by two of the world’s most respected nineteenth century scientists: August Comte and Herbert Spencer. Comte (1798-1857), the father of sociology, believed that the human mind was evolving in a linear fashion, leaving humans inescapably subject to the scientific laws of nature as he defined them. He argued that in humanity’s primitive stages, people wasted their minds obsessing over the meaning of life and things that could become. Because ideas “govern the world,” these “theological” and “metaphysical” stages encouraged “intellectual anarchy” of the mind through wild thinking, a path that would undoubtedly lead humanity into political chaos and revolution for eternity. The positive state is humanity’s final resting place; a point where man can overcome nature through understanding it and taking from it the gift of predictability. From here, humanity, having ditched its reliance on clericalism and embraced the rational, would no longer need to toy with the unknown and useless applications of non-scientific information. The philosophy reserves itself to never possessing “absolute knowledge,” however, reasoning and observation can reveal natural laws that are timeless and can guide humanity into a peaceful,

78 Victor Bulmer Thomas, John H. Coatsworth, and Roberto Cortés Conde, eds, The Colonial Era and the Short Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 of The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 345-353, 442; Paul Garner, Porfirio Díaz (Harlo, England and New York: Longman, 2001), 22. 79 Bulmer Thomas, Coatsworth, and Cortés Conde, The Colonial Era and the Short Nineteenth Century, 488. 80 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 3. 23 enlightened, and acquiescent existence. This state of mind would be, in other words, the “salvation” of human race, supplanting the doping of theological philosophy.81 Spencer (1820-1903) applied the ideas of Comte to the emerging discussions around the nature of Charles Darwin’s evolution itself, an idea that left positivism with a particularly racist tone in Oaxaca with its adoption and application by Mexican intellectuals of the period. His ideas of “social evolution,” later known as “social Darwinism,” described societies as if hermetically sealed, groups of people falling into near dichotomous categories such as “militant” or “industrial” using superficial empiricism. The militant society was marked by its impetuousness and was generally governed by a militant and tyrannical despot. The industrial society, on the other hand, is typified by thriving democracy that is not empty of official checks and balances. Spencer believed the society must integrate all types of societies, eventually breeding out more primitive forms of settlement and governance to civilized cooperation. This would give direction to, and eventually end, the “wandering group” by “increasing coherence.”82 Mexican intellectuals such as Gabino Barreda, Porfirio Parra, José Limantour, and other cientificos, intellectuals which acted as trusted aides to Díaz, applied these writings candidly to Mexican society. México’s “salvation” would come from re-imposing affects of European society in México including building styles, fashion, and even preference in art. While Comte imagined positivism as working with a rising proletariat power in Europe, these intellectuals believed positivism would meld with a Mexican middle class that was hoped to be strengthening from the land reforms of Ley Lerdo in 1856, which was to take church lands and distribute them among peasant farmers.83 Indeed, Parra reiterated the benefits of studying natural laws and facts frequently in letters to Porfirio Díaz as the bond between the cientificos and the presidency was strengthened.84

81 August Comte, “The Positive Philosophy,” in The Age of Porfirio Diaz: Selected Readings, ed. Carlos B. Gil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 45-48. 82 Herbert Spencer, “Societies as Organisms,” in The Age of Porfirio Diaz: Selected Readings, ed. Carlos B. Gil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 49-51. 83 Comte, “The Positive Philosophy,” 45. 84 Porfirio Parra, “The General Character of the Positive Method,” in The Age of Porfirio Diaz: Selected Readings, ed. Carlos B. Gil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 52-54. 24

Later, historian Francisco Bulnes took a particularly harsh tone through his positive application. Bulnes created a hierarchy of the world’s human races, categorized primarily by diet. For Bulnes, history had shown us that the “race of wheat” had crushed repeatedly the races of corn and rice. However, the “race of corn” still could conquer the “race of rice” because the latter was the weakest.85 Bulnes believed that what made some races weaker was that they knew only how to die, ignorant of the world and not possessing the strength or will to kill. He said, “More specifically, it is the lot of the barbarous or savage men to die like flies,” the skill and art of killing reserved for the elite who were highly trained and progressive, providing an early justification for unequal treatment of the lower classes.86 Indeed, the civilized were disciplined and could artfully control their bodily movements and weapons, making them nature’s crowned dominant class. The strength of the affluent and the weakness and unpredictability of the naïve popular classes provided justification for an authoritarian leader, more specifically Díaz.87 Feeling themselves as equals to those of Europe and the United States, the Oaxacan elite known as the vallistocracia, were embarrassed of their own indigenous population.88 Foreign travelers cited with amazement the savagery of campesinos that did not wear shoes or eat with forks. They modified new technologies to resemble what they knew from the past, perpetuating the image of the Mexican as fearful and an obstruction to progress.89 Liberals approached these issues differently, but nearly all accepted that there was indeed an “Indian Problem,” so to speak. Juárez, a Zapotec from a mountain range that now carries his name, was president of México from 1858 to 1864 and then again from 1867 to 1872. Like intellectuals of the period, he believed the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca to be backwards and too primitive to carry forward the liberal project, a precursor of what would be considered

85 The “race of wheat” refers to the diet of people of European descent. The races of corn and rice refer to Amer-Indians and Asians, respectively, in their most exoticized forms. 86 Francisco Bulnes, “The Three Human Races,” in The Age of Porfirio Diaz: Selected Readings, ed. Carlos B. Gil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 39-41. 87 Ibid., 39-41. 88 Benjamin T. Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 29. 89 Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 71. 25

Kipling’s “white man’s burden.”90 He interestingly perceived himself not as an Indian, but as a liberal.91 Like assimilation efforts in the US through Indian boarding schools during the same period, Juárez hoped to hollow out indigeneity through socialization.92 Juárez’s realization that the Mexican nation must be formed and built on the backs of the assimilated masses was, however, disrupted by the rigid and hardened policies of Díaz who took a stricter version of positivism with him into the presidency.93 Díaz followed some of the policies of Juárez except instead of sticking by the law to bring order, Díaz brought the stick, the threat of brute force from his personal police: the rurales. Knowing México needed an influx of foreign capital, Díaz instituted policies of order and progress that would provide enough stability to attract foreign investment and international “civilized” trade. As opposed to the Indian who feared and resented because he was perceived as religious, lazy, and mercurial, the diligence and inherent characteristics of the European workingman could eliminate the Indian roadblock to progress and modernity in the opinion of Díaz and his allies.94 For Díaz it was clear, then, that he would work to replace his resident population with a more foreign population, with much the same idea as a product import. The new populations of Europeans would displace the Indian who existed relatively further into the unforgiving Oaxacan periphery. In this way, Oaxaca’s capitalist modernization project was often one of blatant exclusion.95

2.2 PORFIRIAN MINING AND RAILROADS While his predecessors were often timid to invite in foreign investment following the US-Mexican War, the Gadsden Purchase, and the French imperial occupation of the mid- nineteenth century, Díaz was willing to offer attractive packages to lure investors back into

90 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 338. 91 Patrick J. McNamara, Sons of the Sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 31. 92 Eve Darian-Smith, New Capitalists: Law, Politics, and Identity Surrounding Casino Gaming on Native American Land (Belmont, California: Thompson Wadsworth, 2004), 22. 93 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 338. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 339. 26

México. For Díaz, “the political future of the country depends entirely on the development of the economy.”96 This is not to say the president did not have reservations of widespread US expansion in México. Indeed, he worked hard to influence politics in Central America and noted to British and French governments his concern of growing US influence at México’s southern border.97 But Mexicans and Díaz were most afraid it seems of another US invasion. According to Friedrich Katz, four different strategies were employed to curb the power of their northern neighbors while simultaneously growing from within. First, Díaz would “bandwagon” American investors who would in turn discourage war to protect their own investments. Secondly, the government would “balance” US investments with European ones to make sure the US could not completely dominate the economic arena. While never halting US investment, Díaz found ways to balance US interests with European ones. Finally, he aimed to bolster the domestic military and offer military bases to countries such as Japan with a larger counter-balance as to discourage further illegal US occupation.98 While funding even for the Díaz era was hard to come by, and projects were frequently planned and abandoned, much was accomplished in short time thanks to Díaz’s land and tax concessions to foreigners.99 In fact, the first useful road connecting Oaxaca City and México City wasn’t built until the mid-nineteenth century, ironically, by French imperial forces on their warpath to the Valley of Oaxaca.100 However, the landscape quickly changed on Díaz’s watch. Before 1876, when Díaz took office, a paltry 640 kilometers of railroad track was laid in México and none of it was in Oaxaca. However, by the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, when Díaz departed, there was over 19,000 kilometers of track with Oaxaca boasting 1,829 kilometers of the total.101 Non-transport communications also

96 Friedrich Katz, “International Wars, Mexico, and U.S. Hegemony,” in Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change: Crisis, Reform, and Revolution in Mexico, eds. Elisa Servin, Leticia Reina, and John Tutino, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 188. 97 David R. Mares, Violent Peace: Militarized Interstate Bargaining in Latin America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 60-61. 98 Katz, “International Wars, Mexico, and U.S. Hegemony,” 187-190; Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005), 24-25. 99 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 49-51. 100 Ibid., 47. 101 Ibid., 45-48. 27 improved vastly in the state, by 1900 wielding “one of the best telegraph networks in the country.”102 New urban centers arose around railroads and promoted the development of crop commercialization and new haciendas in the Central Valleys and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; export commodities which necessitated the building of new sea ports.103 Just before the outbreak of the Revolution in 1910, railroads continued to be the most important issue in Oaxaca for foreign capitalists. At times, the US government even considered their construction a vital part of US national security, especially in the Isthmus where a railroad could connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans bringing New Orleans 1,400 miles closer to thriving San Francisco.104 Figure 2.1 shows transportation routes of importance.

Figure 2.1. Mexico and the State of Oaxaca. Source: Arthur Murphy and Alex Stepick, Social Inequality in Oaxaca: A History of Resistance and Change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 11.

102 Ibid., 74. 103 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 25-26 ; Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 45. 104 Paul Wooten, “Oaxaca,” Mining World, January 22, 1910, 224-228. For more information on the Tehuantepec National Railway see Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 61-63. 28

The Oaxacan boom in railroads piqued the attention of foreign capitalists who longed believed the region to be a “land of tomorrow” if stability and infrastructure ever reached it. Mining journals claimed Oaxaca to be the richest in metals of any region in México, while one American miner found no comparison to its potential value in regions in the US.105 These ideas came from, in part, an official statewide and nationwide marketing effort in which pamphlets in English and French were distributed throughout the state and abroad by both locals and foreign interests already cemented in Oaxaca.106One of the most famous was by Matías Romero, one of Díaz’s closest allies, who worked as Mexican Minister in Washington and published a book in 1886 outlining the state’s great potential for investment.107 Romero even negotiated a free-trade agreement with the US through former US President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877) that would allow the duty-free trade of machinery for fruits, minerals, and other export crops that flourished in Oaxaca during the period. The failed plan was duplicitous as Grant and Romero had also started a company and received concessions from Díaz to build railroads in Oaxaca in 1883 before Grant’s company went bankrupt. The proposed free-trade agreement, perhaps the first “NAFTA,” was voted down in the US Congress.108 The commitment to transportation and communications paid off economically for modernizing liberals throughout México. The mining boom in Oaxaca, in fact, was presumably spawned by the coinciding completion of the Díaz-subsidized Mexican Southern Railway, which connected Oaxaca City and México City, and a reform to the Código de Minería, which allowed for private land ownership by foreigners in mining operations, in

105 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 191-192. John Hays Hammond claimed Oaxaca to be more diverse and rich in metals. RW Ford believed Oaxaca to have no American counterpart. 106 Consul Wm. W. Canada, Veracruz, “Mexican Business Notes,” Daily Consular and Trade Reports, February 19, 1912. Governor Benito Juárez Mara was the first governor to produce an official investor pamphlet for foreigners in 1912. 107 Garner, Porfirio Díaz, 202. 108 Marvin D. Bernstein, “Mexican Mines and U.S. Capital,” in The Age of Porfirio Diaz: Selected Readings, ed. Carlos B. Gil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 95-97; Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 52-54. NAFTA is an acronym for the current North American Free Trade Agreement that was agreed upon by the US, México, and Canada in 1994. 29 addition to other reforms that made doing business easier for aliens.109 In 1888, $5 million was invested in Mexican mining. By 1892 that total escalated to $55 million. At this time, most investment was still in the northern states of México; however, Oaxacan promoters pressed harder to sell the promise of land-owning and export-agriculture, especially the potential of coffee which had been thriving in much of the nearby Central American states, such as neighboring Guatemala.110 Indeed, new haciendas were created often near rail lines, commonly cutting out new land from jungle.111 Miners would find great ease in their operations with specialized rails linking their camps, avoiding the tumultuous dirt roads and unpredictable weather known in the region.112 Movements at the end of the nineteenth century changed Oaxaca forever as immigrants from Europe and the US piled in to take advantage of the Porfirian give-aways, with migrants most often deciding to stay in the capital city. These avecindados, as they were called, quickly blended into the existing vallistocracia. As noted above, many of these new settlers lived in the state capital if near the Central Valley or bought haciendas in other regions. Some even lived along rail lines and sold food staples like maize and beans in the capital.113 Engineers, or team managers like Charles A. Hamilton, formed the majority of new immigrants, but often branched out to start their own companies. Indeed, fluidity was great among the new mushrooming Oaxacan population as opportunities grew. A sound example is John Body, who came as a manager for the Tehuantepec National Railway project and eventually came to own a dozen mines. While many mines had already been claimed by

109 Charles A. Hamilton and Eric Jervaise, Fotografías Panorámicas de la Ciudad de Oaxaca, ed. Sebastián van Doesburg, Laetitia Dufrancatel, and Laura González Flores (Oaxaca de Juárez: Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú, 2009), 11; Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 52, 56. The Código de Minería was a new national mining reform law. 110 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 53, 190; Robert G. Williams, States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of National Governments in Central America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 113-122. 111 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 25-26. 112 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 35, 192-193. Sugar was grown in more fertile parts of the Valleys in Oaxaca like Zimatlán and Etla. Other Valleys grew maize, beans, agave, chili, and squash. 113 Claudia Ivette Palacios Arango. “Santa Gertrudis, Zimatlán, Oax.” Infiernitum Ciber Café: Temas Oaxaqueños. Summer 2009. http://www.infiernitum.com/temas/hi-HisStagertrudis.htm (accessed March 3, 2011). 30 local families for decades, especially the antiguas, the Porfirian government recognized and gave concessions to those with capital or technical expertise, like engineers, generally those being foreign.114 It was not long before mining became the undisputed golden child of the newly dynamic Oaxacan export economy. The most significant mining zones were located in the Sierra Juárez, Tlacolula, and the Taviche district in addition to parts of the Valley such as Zimatlán, Etla, and Nochixtlan (see Figure 2.2 for a map of the Central Valley). Etla and Zimatlán were known to be among the most valuable mines in Oaxaca since colonialism, while Taviche was newer.115 Prominent minerals extracted included silver, gold, onyx, copper, lead, carbon, and iron.116 In the southern regions of Oaxaca, where metals were less apparent, battles over mining in salt flats raged for decades.117 Big investors like the Guggenheims, the most important mining investors in México in the period, sunk millions into Oaxacan mines, often creating on-site smelting companies. In fact, Guggenex, one of the family’s mining corporations, bought the ever-productive Escadura mine in Taviche in 1902 for roughly $2 million.118

2.3 COSMOPOLITAN OAXACA AND THE EMERALD CITY In a very manner as the gold rush in San Francisco, California, trade around mining flourished. This new trade was dominated by Spanish and French merchants, creating import and export companies and general stores near mining camps and along rail lines.119 This new aspect of the economy brought cosmopolitanism as general stores began to specialize in foreign goods for the home, such as religious and musical items. One such store was the

114 Julio César Cabrera Ramirez, Los minerales estratégicos de Oaxaca en el contexto del mercado mundial (Tesis de Licenciatura, May 2005), 146, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. http://www.ciesas-golfo.edu.mx/istmo/docs/borradores/acabrera.html (accessed May 2, 2011). 115 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 193. 116 Ibid., 196-197, 201; Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 25. 117 Cabrera Ramirez, Los minerales estratégicos de Oaxaca en el contexto del mercado mundial, 140. 118 Bernstein, “Mexican Mines and U.S. Capital,” 96-97. 119 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 203. 31

Figure 2.2. The valley of Oaxaca. Source: Arthur Murphy and Alex Stepick, Social Inequality in Oaxaca: A History of Resistance and Change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 12.

American “Díaz Hermanos” in Ocotlán. Similarly, a French version called “México City” opened in the capital and sold imports from Germany, England, France, and the US. Even the French A. Philippe & Co. came to own hardware stores to provide equipment for miners and 32 the urban centers that grew around their camps.120 Of all of the migrant groups in Oaxaca, the British and Americans brought the most with them from home, including their families.121 The golden age of mining in the state raged from 1897 until 1907. While many of the immigrants were Spanish, French, English, Italian, and German, the Americans dominated mining operations in this period to tune of 80 percent of all mining and railroad investments by the close of the Porfiriato (1876-1910), and likewise seemed to culturally gain in importance relative to the others.122 The Porfirian plan was rarely obscure. Addressing Oaxacans in 1883, Díaz said: We should hope that the day is not far away when an extensive immigration of the sons of commerce from more civilized countries arrives in our state…Those citizens will provide us with the first step in the life of true progress, acquiring the good work habits and tastes that characterize the people of Europe.123 From the beginning of the Porfiriato to 1910, over a billion foreign dollars were dropped into Mexico, one New York Times correspondent estimating the figure at near 66 percent of all Mexican investments at the period’s close.124 While many were apprehensive to allow the flooding of foreign investment, economic results were tangible. Díaz had amazingly balanced the national budget for the first time, brought trade surplus, and was able to improve México’s credit rating to “enviable” levels.125 These cosmopolitan spaces, especially in Oaxaca City, were some of the most active for bonding between the existing vallistocracia and new foreign capitalists. Unlike other parts of México where foreign competition often brought resentment, these two factions,

120 Olga García Montes, “Oaxaca: economía, sociedad y poder: Siglo XIX.” Grupo de investigación eumednet de la Universidad de Málaga y Fundación Universitaria Andaluza Inca Garcilaso. http://www.eumed.net/eve/resum/06-04/omg.htm (accessed April 12, 2011). 121 Ramirez, Los minerales estratégicos de Oaxaca en el contexto del mercado mundial, 140. 122 Bernstein, “Mexican Mines and U.S. Capital,” 95. 123 Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, “Visions of the Emerald City: Politics, Culture, and Alternative Modernernities in Oaxaca City, Mexico, 1877-1920” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2002), 50. 124 Mark Wasserman, “Foreign Investment in Mexico, 1876-1910: A Case Study of the Role of Regional Elites,” The Americas 36 (July 1979), 3; Jonathon Kandell, La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City (New York: Random House, 1988), 392. The 66 percent figure may be exaggerated by Kandell. 125 Kandell, La Capital, 354. 33 even landed colonial families, merged nearly seamlessly.126 The intensity and international cooperation in México during the period was unique, and Oaxacan projects frequently were headed by investment groups including men of multiple nationalities.127 Traditional elites allowed foreigners to dominate certain economic realms in México because it accomplished many tasks. On the one hand foreign investment meant an efficient path to modernization backed by the government, while, on the other hand, the infusion of more capital often meant reinforcement of their own power and incomes through bribes and property sales.128 One newspaper described the zocaló in the capital as a mélange of European languages where only one existed previously. While one could rarely comprehend the exchanges, it mattered little because their sheer presence in the city left one feeling as if Oaxaca was on track for elegance, glory, and progress.129 Further, bonding between the ancien regime and capitalists was literally consummated through strategic intermarriage, a practice common throughout México.130 What all elites generally did have in common was ample access to the presidency, holding close relationships and loyalty with Díaz himself that helped guarantee healthy concessions for the proprietor. These relationships kept Díaz directly involved in the affairs of local business and assured foreign capitalists, such as the Guggenheims, that their investments would be protected.131 For Díaz, these relationships were important in dealing with foreign capital. He was ambivalent to let in too much foreign money, especially when these foreigners controlled vital pieces of information surrounding production, geology, and communications of the state that they were developing. By befriending Díaz, then, elites of

126 García Montes, “Oaxaca: economía, sociedad y poder: Siglo XIX.” 127 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 29. 128 Wasserman, “Foreign Investment in Mexico, 1876-1910,” 3. 129 Overmyer-Velázquez, “Visions of the Emerald City,” 51. 130 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 29; Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810-1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 147, 168. 131 Bernstein, “Mexican Mines and U.S. Capital,” 97. 34 this period especially came to dominate local politics and held a rare direct line to the presidency.132 The personal involvement in Oaxacan industrialization from the presidency made the state economically relevant again after the virtual death of the once powerful cochineal trade during colonialism, but it also meant that Díaz was very hands-on in the local political scene.133 In Oaxaca, Díaz constructed a system of governance that placed choice regional strongmen, called jefe politicos, in positions that allowed them to carry out his interests and to supersede all political elections and municipal political exercises.134 Indeed, democracy would be a small sacrifice for the long-term development of the Oaxacan economy, showing the deep pragmatism embedded into Porfirian modernization projects.135 Politics were a closed-door negotiation between Díaz and the vallistocracia through Díaz’s imposed governors and jefaturas.136 The small concentration of power among elites in the city and the exploitation of cheap, generally highly indigenous, labor in the countryside has led some to believe the Oaxacan environment at the end of the nineteenth century to have been similar to that of colonialism.137 Attracting new foreign capital into Oaxaca, however, was a more active process than distributing pamphlets and “schmoozing” through elitist networks. Oaxaca would also have to prove it was capable and ready to be modern in order to keep money and interest in the country. The Porfiriato bought the “Emerald City” a new facelift, its exoticized and exaggerated colonial past celebrated but its wrinkles tactically smoothed out. Oaxaca through this change became not only a “modern” city, but a cosmopolitan one beyond the general store, offering worldly leisure and international eateries. Electric lighting, plumbing, and drainage would be paramount to augmenting the grandeur of the capital city as the rich

132 García Montes, “Oaxaca: economía, sociedad y poder: Siglo XIX.” 133 Garner, Porfrio Díaz, 202-204. 134 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 29. 135 Overmyer-Velázquez, “Visions of the Emerald City,” 42. 136 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 32-33; Overmyer-Velázquez, “Visions of the Emerald City,” 43. 137 García Montes, “Oaxaca: economía, sociedad y poder: Siglo XIX.” 35 worked hard to “screen out” anything related to the poor and “backward” past that had defined México, believing the economic progress of Díaz’s regime would clean it all away.138 Díaz, in fact, often worked as an intermediary between lower level politicians and foreign companies that had capabilities to install it, assuring the progress of these projects.139 Other aesthetic endeavors aimed to improve the Oaxacan reputation in the period in regional showcases of the development of not just the city, but also the mining operations and railroad projects already underway. Among the major showcases of the potential of México was found in 1901 when mining interests flocked in droves to attend the American Institute of Mining Engineers convention in México City. Here 165 people were trucked around to mining camps while being dined, serenaded, and invited to dance balls while many of the country’s most influential men gave speeches. Most of the participants left with brochures to distribute to their important friends at home.140 While many worked to showcase Oaxaca, among the most active was Charles Alexander Hamilton.

2.4 PROFILE IN MODERNITY: CHARLES HAMILTON Hamilton was born in Ireland in 1853 and immigrated to the United States, spending much of his youth in San Francisco, California as an engineering apprentice.141 Biographical information on Hamilton is in short supply but he is significant as an example of the life of a foreign capitalist in Oaxaca in the period. While some believe he came down for mining, a Charles Hamilton seems to first appear in Oaxacan capitalist ventures in 1899 as treasurer of the Oaxaca Coffee Culture Company. The company sought to promote the cultivation and exportation of coffee, exotic fruits, and rubber and claimed to have owned or access to 2,500 acres in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, each acre purchased for just five dollars allowing the company to function in the green full-time.142 It is certain Hamilton had arrived in the

138 Kandell, La Capital, 354. 139 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements. 140 Bernstein, “Mexican Mines and U.S. Capital,” 96. 141 Hamilton and Jervaise, Fotografías Panorámicas de la Ciudad de Oaxaca, 9. 142 “Oaxaca Coffee Culture Company,” U.S. Investor and Promoter of American Enterprises, April 1, 1899. The company was incorporated in 1897 in Illinois, but the article describes the officers, including Hamilton, as hailing from St. Louis. 36

Oaxaca Valley by 1902 where he formed a group headed by David M. Goodrich to purchase the famous Escadura and the undeveloped San Juan mines in Taviche in the district of Ocotlán from Juan Baigts, a French immigrant and prominent foreign miner.143 The payment for the two properties was to be $450,000 for Escadura and $10,000 for San Juan, the latter a property for which Baigts had little use. Hamilton would work as a manager of all mining operations for the investment group headed by Goodrich.144 As part of the agreement between Hamilton and his associates, Hamilton would be given the San Juan mine as a commission for organizing the purchase of the touted Escadura site, his new company, the Cia. Minera de San Juan de Taviche, officially in charge.145 Under just four years of Hamilton the San Juan mine became among the most profitable in the country, yielding over one million pesos and punching out 200 tons of quality ore every month.146 With his newfound profits and growing address book that included capitalists, such as Max Friend and Adams Huntington, Hamilton started multiple companies around the state in mining and other industries such as Compañía Minera San Carlos, Providencia San Carlos Mining Co., El Rosario Syndicate Ldt., and Baldomero Mining Co. in Oaxaca between 1904 and 1907.147 He became deeply involved in railroads and eventually lobbied successfully for a rail link from Taviche to Oaxaca City through San Pablo Huixtepec after the Mexican Southern Railroad project swallowed up the city’s tram lines. No doubt these lines were desperately needed as the main mode of transporting fresh ore remained ox-cart on dirt roads, making delivery only possible in dry months.148 Later, he

143 “Special Correspondance: Mexico,” Mining and Scientific Press, February 19, 1910, 300-301; “Late News from the World’s Mining Camps: Mexico,” Mining World, February 12, 1910, 401-402; Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 196-197. Escadura is also listed as “Escuadra.” This paper will cite it as “Escadura.” 144 “Late News from the World’s Mining Camps,” Mining World, February 12, 1910. 145 Ibid.; “Special Correspondance,” Mining and Scientific Press, February 19, 1910. 146 Ibid. 147 Enrique Canudas Sandoval, Las Venas de Plata en la Historia de México: Síntesis de Historia Económica Siglo XIX (Mexico, D.F.: Utopia, 2005), 578; Cabrera Ramirez, Los minerales estratégicos de Oaxaca en el contexto del mercado mundial, 145. 148 Wooten, “Oaxaca,” Mining World, January 22, 1910. “Special Correspondance,” Mining and Scientific Press, February 19, 1910. 37 even opened the Oaxaca Refining Smelting & Company where he was said to have brought in the most modern smelter in all of Oaxaca.149 Like many of the unforeseen ills of investing in turn of the century México, all was not fairy tale for the ambitious engineer. Unfortunately, Hamilton’s group failed to complete the last payment for the Escadura and Baigts used his influence with Porfirian elites like Don Eutemio Cervantes to bring the dispute to court and seize control of both operations.150 With his political and social clout rising, Hamilton made efforts to achieve amparo, or a legal stay, and re-open the case with Baigts to reclaim his prized San Juan mine in 1909, traveling to the United States and swaying the infamous judge L.R. Wilfley to represent his claims. Wilfley arrived in Oaxaca with a letter from President William Taft prompting local newspapers to call Wilfley corrupt.151 Indeed, it appeared Hamilton believed that his commission should have been legally separated from the Escadura sale and mining journals of the period claim that the case itself made many Americans pull out of investments in the state, believing the law to be unjust.152 In January of 1910, Judge Calderón granted a stay, Hamilton leading a crowd of local celebrities such as such as José Vasconselos, Federico Sandoval, Manuel Flores Castro, and Hamilton’s sons, Harloe and Charles Jr., to jubilantly and theatrically recover the property.153 However, Baigts’ pull with Díaz, and the Díaz tactic to rule in favor of European interests to restrict power of US capital, lead the president to intervene and “force” a decision in his favor.154

149 García Montes, “Oaxaca: economía, sociedad y poder: Siglo XIX.” 150 Isidro Fabela,“Historia Diplomática de la Revolución de México" (presentation from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), http://www.mexicodiplomatico.org/lecturas/historia_diplomatica_revolucion_mexicana_Isidro_Fabela.pdf (accessed May 2, 2011). 151 Ibid.; “Special Correspondance,” Mining and Scientific Press, February 19, 1910; Hamilton and Jervaise, Fotografías Panorámicas de la Ciudad de Oaxaca, 13. 152 “Special Correspondance,” Mining and Scientific Press, February 19, 1910. 153 Hamilton and Jervaise, Fotografías Panorámicas de la Ciudad de Oaxaca, 13. 154 “Special Correspondance,” Mining and Scientific Press, February 19, 1910; Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 196-197. For the Wilfley purchase see Consul Wm. W. Canada, Veracruz, “Mexican Business Notes,” Daily Consular and Trade Reports, February 19, 1912, 748; Katz, “International Wars, Mexico, and U.S. Hegemony,” 188-189. 38

Hamilton’s early success had allowed his investments to spread wide in the Valley, and for this reason he became one of the region’s most active promoters, leading tours around the Valley to capitalize on still eager and optimistic entrepreneurs.155 Taking advantage of the Porfirian metropolitan redevelopment projects, which eliminated cantinas, prostitution, and informal vending while promoting high culture and European influenced architecture in many of the capital’s new museums and monuments, Hamilton bought the new and rare Kodak “Panoram” camera to capture Oaxacan modernity in order to sell it. His now famous photos twinkled with Porfirian symbols of progress and modernity by capturing this new regional development of mines, buildings, bridges, and other such infrastructure.156 He also captured travels by prominent foreigners in the region, adorned with lavish parties and fine dining, such as James Creelman before his infamous interview with Díaz that proved an impetus for the Mexican Revolution.157 Despite the fighting around México, Oaxaca was not ground-zero for much violence during the Revolution, leading many to believe the good fortune could continue in the state. In 1912, Hamilton even purchased the Santa Gertrudis hacienda, famous as the hideout for Benito Juárez’s wife during the War of the Reform according to oral histories. Hamilton used the property as a personal showplace for visitors, becoming the first parcel of its kind to be exclusively owned by American interests in Oaxaca.158 Here he grew sugar cane, corn, and beans on the backs of resident laborers who were paid in staple foods and were forced to buy from an on-site company store.159 This was the model for foreign businessmen just as it had been the model for centuries in the region, revealing Hamilton’s own assimilation into the resident vallistocracia. Later Hamilton would try unsuccessfully to build a railroad for

155 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 202-203. 156 Hamilton and Jervaise, Fotografías Panorámicas de la Ciudad de Oaxaca, 10, 21. 157 Ibid., 16. Creelman was a journalist who came to México to interview Díaz on his modernization projects. Díaz seized the opportunity to announce he was not, in fact, going to run for re-election, claiming México was ready for democracy. 158 Consul Wm. W. Canada, Veracruz, “Mexican Business Notes,” Daily Consular and Trade Reports, February 19, 1912, 748; Jenny Ramírez Hamilton, “Hacienda de Santa Gertrudis,” Infiernitum Ciber Café: Temas Oaxaqueños, January 27, 2007, http://www.infiernitum.com/temas/lt-hdastagertrudis.htm (accessed March 3, 2011). 159 Arango, “Santa Gertrudis, Zimatlán, Oax.” 39 agricultural exports that would link Acapulco and Oaxaca City and a line into Tehuantepec.160 While Charles Hamilton would fade away from the records with the post- Revolutionary decline of mining, his family continued to dominate social life of the city even after his death in Taviche in 1929.161 Harloe Hamilton, his son, inherited the Santa Gertrudis hacienda and was arrested for murder in a squabble on the property during the Mexican Revolution in 1916.162 His family was known to be associated with politicians that were not supportive of Venustiano Carranza, president of the time, and after appealing to the US State Department he was released.163 However, the family continued to dominate the local scene, his wife a welcomed celebrity guest at the inauguration of Oaxaca City’s first Monte de Piedad, an official welfare program that gave pawn loans to whomever needed it.164 Later, the family would also go on to open the first Ford and Chevrolet agencies in the state.165 However, the family also worked its way into modern sport. Indeed, Harloe Hamilton reigned as president of the Asociación Estatal de “Base Ball” through much of the 1930s and baseball was to play a large role in the modernization process in the state.166

160 “Railway Construction,” Railway Age Gazette, March 6, 1914, 492; Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 59. 161 Nevada Nugget Hunters, “Prominent Men You Should Know,” http://nevadanuggethunters.myfreeforum.org/index.php?component=content&topicid=429&postdays=0&postor der=asc&start=0 (accessed April 3, 2011). Originally printed in Mining Journal, April 15, 1929. 162 “One Arrested Held for Murder of Which He Says He Is Innocent,” New York Times, June 23, 1916, under “Americans Put in Prison,” http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive- free/pdf?res=F10D12F63A5B17738DDDAA0A94DE405B868DF1D3 (accessed January 12, 2011). 163 Ibid.; “Hamilton Held in Oaxacan Cell,” New York Times, June 29, 1916, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F50A12F73A5B17738DDDA00A94DE405B868DF1D3 (accessed January 13, 2011). 164 Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, “Historia del Monte de Piedad de Oaxaca,” http://www.montedepiedad.gob.mx/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=39&Ite mid=58 (accessed March 3, 2011). Many celebrities and local elites attended the inauguration of the Monte de Piedad. 165 Arturo Fuentes Calvo, “Mecánico, aprendizaje con caballos de fuerza,” Diario Despertar, July 15, 2099, http://www.diariodespertar.com.mx/agenda/13621-Mecnico-aprendizaje-con-caballos-fuerza.html (accessed April 7, 2011). 166 “Renuncio El Presidente,” Oaxaca Nuevo, Nov. 3, 1939, 2; found in Archivos Santo Domingo, Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, Mexico. 40

2.5 MODERN SPORT AND THE ARRIVAL OF BASEBALL The importation of foreign corporations and modern sport were as much a part of the Díaz modernization project as electric lighting or bridge building. Indeed, sport represented equal opportunity through level competition, specialization, rationality and quantification, while encouraging its athletes to reach for records, representing, then, a congregation of secular and capitalistic characteristics.167 Bulnes, a renowned Porfirian cientitfico, even tied sport participation to military practice saying that civilized nations should train militaries based on the regiments of modern athletes.168 Further, the vallistocracia took to modern sport, which was rising in popularity in the United States and Europe, to “reinforce” its authority and social position in leisurely aspects of daily living as well.169 Indeed, they created sporting and social clubs that dually engaged in promoting the fine arts (Figure 2.3).170 The flagship sport of the Oaxaca social club was none other than the great American pastime, baseball. The origin of Mexican baseball is largely unknown, the initial site of its importation the center of many debates. Among the wildest claims is that Abner Doubleday, once believed to have played the first baseball game in the US, brought the sport to México as a soldier in the US-Mexican War in 1848, one soldier even using Antonio López de Santa Anna’s leg as a baseball bat.171 However, it seems likely that baseball first appeared in México City in the late 1880s or early 1890s.172 William Beezley claims that miners in Oaxaca had learned the game from American mining and railroad engineers by 1900 and the game appears in Oaxaca City newspapers by 1907 where the “gente decente” would support

167 William H. Beezley, “Sports: Introduction,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 4 (1985): 1. 168 Bulnes, “The Three Human Races,” in The Age of Porfirio Diaz: Selected Readings, ed. Carlos B. Gil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 41. 169 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 29. 170 Ibid.; Rodys, Ricardo, of the Casea de la Ciudad, Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, Email with author, March 14, 2011. 171 William H. Beezley, “The Rise of Baseball in Mexico and the First Valenzuela,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 4 (1985): 6. 172 Ibid. 41

Figure 2.3. Charles A. Hamilton playing tennis. Source: Ricardo Rodys, Casa de la Ciudad, Oaxaca City, Oaxaca. large crowds.173 Unlike other modern sports in the period, elites in Oaxaca City felt baseball to be “the most complete and pure of sports.”174 Unlike soccer and bullfights, which were considered brutish, baseball was among the modern sports that had civilizing qualities and was to represent the changing face of Oaxaca’s international vallistocracia through the bond

173 Ibid., 9; Overmyer-Velázquez, “Visions of the Emerald City,” 64. 174 Overmyer-Velázquez, “Visions of the Emerald City,” 63. 42 with North American capitalists.175 Indeed, as in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, many Oaxacans may have also preferred baseball because it allowed many locals to gain control over the sport that represented their own domination with the heavy US investment in the region.176 Further, there is little doubt that positivists found baseball as a perfect tool for socialization at times while also using it as a tool to promote exclusion at others.177 Some liberals no doubt bought into the thinking that baseball participation assumes a participant’s acceptance and submission to the rules and order of modern capitalism.178 Indeed, historian Joseph Arbena believes that elite-controlled Latin American societies in middle of the nineteenth century willingly imported American culture to help prepare its people for impending modernization through mass capitalization.179 Government officials, such as Felipe Carrillo Puerto in the Yucatán Peninsula, embraced baseball for its ability improve health and the morality of henequen workers, while providing them a useful outlet for their pent up frustrations.180 Indeed, Albert Spaulding, former professional ballplayer and creator of AG Spaulding Sporting Goods, believed that baseball should “follow the flag” and help business and political, and perhaps military, pursuits by working as a cultural broker to México.181 Additionally, the US cornered the market in baseball equipment and its promotion opened luxury markets.182 Further, Spaulding believed that baseball specifically embodied contagious American attributes of discipline, morality, and opportunity.183 The American economy was stout in the late nineteenth century and while fans of cricket had preceded those of baseball with mid-eighteenth century mining operations, these enthusiasts quickly

175 Ibid.; Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 13-16, 19. 176 Joseph L. Arbena and David G. LaFrance, “Introduction” in Sport in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Joseph L. Arbena and David G. LaFrance (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2002), xiii. 177 Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 13-16, 19. 178 Richard Schultz, “El Rey de Deportes: A History of Baseball in Northwestern Mexico” (Master’s thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2004), 6. 179 Ibid., 4.3 180 Joseph, “Forging the Regional Pastime,” 33-36. 181 Alan M. Klein, Sugarball: The American Game, the Dominican Dream (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 15. 182 Schultz, “El Rey de Deportes,” 9. 183 Ibid., 27. 43 took to baseball that was a similar game but represented an attractive and excitingly fresh and emerging American modernity.184 J.A. Mangan called modern sport an “ecstasy as potent as any religion, escapism as real as any cinema, an enjoyment as intense as any carnival. It is the tool of governments, the toy of oligarchs and the passion of peoples.”185 He asserts that modern sport spread into Latin America from uneven power relations, exported by American businessmen who wanted Latin Americans to learn “Puritan” ideals and thus become better business partners. Mangan asserts that the US came to dominate Latin America through sport and was cited as evidence of US moral superiority. In fact, for Mangan, cultural domination almost always moved hand in hand with economic or political domination, especially in an era of free market exaggerations of inequalities, the first direct mention of economic free market polarization.186 While baseball seemed to cement US economic influence, especially in places like Oaxaca City where baseball was likely imported en masse by American companies, and carried a sort of desire by local elites to mimic American culture, there was a two or three way flow influence occurring. Because of its embrace by locals, baseball also cannot be considered imperial imposition in Oaxaca. Indeed, Arbena further sees the diffusion of culture affecting the north as much as the south. Globalization has brought hybridity of the baseball workforce that parallels a blending of economies and, through negotiation, Oaxacan participants chose what elements of the sport to keep, and what to reject.187 Indeed, the first recorded games in 1907 pinning Mexican and American teams against each other were won handedly by the Mexican clubs in Oaxaca.188 William Beezley states that Porfirian sport, as modernities. Baseball games were sites of heavy gambling, a practice that blended Mexican machismo and capitalistic risk-taking.189 Matches were held on Sundays and didn’t adopt the

184 Beezley, “The Rise of Baseball in Mexico and the First Valenzuela,” 6-7. 185 J.A. Mangan and Lamartine P. DaCosta, “Prologue: Emulation, Adaptation and Serendipity,” in Sport in Latin American Society: Past and Present, ed. J.A. Mangan and Lamartine P. DaCosta (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 1. 186 Ibid., 10-11. 187 Ibid., 53. 188 Overmyer-Velázquez, “Visions of the Emerald City,” 64. 189 Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 21- 27. 44

Puritanical “blue laws” embedded in the US version of the game in the period.190 At the same time, baseball’s quick popularity and survival through multiple economic crises and the Mexican Revolution represent a deep Porfirian “persuasion” in Oaxaca, as people participated through the formation of the elitist Jockey Club in México City in 1881, was not only a vestige of mimicry, but also was to compete with and rival foreign continued to participate voluntarily revealing their potential optimism in baseball’s symbolism . For Beezley, the popularity represented the great influence new immigrants had on Mexican culture.191 However, as the above examples suggest, Oaxacans had a significant hand in how the game was actually produced and participated. The first Mexican baseball association was formed in part by American H. Remsen Whitehouse, secretary of the American legation. It was made up of thirty players and had individual teams that were run by Americans.192 Games would be played against other trades, industries, social clubs, schools, and even public service sectors. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century, prices for games were steep at $3.50 (seven pesos) per ticket, which was triple the cost of a bullfight and was cost prohibitive for the poor.193 The game had gained so much notoriety that in 1906 Charles Comiskey brought his World Series champion team, the Chicago White Sox, into México City for the winter where his clubs pounded on the green Mexican clubs, causing much frustration and resentment among fans.194 In Oaxaca, there were no barnstorming professionals, but the games generally followed a similar pattern, where championship tournaments were deeply important to aficionados in the city that could afford to watch. In fact, a conflict over the rightful winner of a championship in November of 1939 led to the resignation of Harloe Hamilton from his post as president of the Asociación

190 Beezley, “The Rise of Baseball in Mexico and the First Valenzuela,” 9. 191 Ibid., 3. 192 Ibid., 8-9. 193 Ibid., 10. 194 Ibid., 10. 45

Estatal de “Base Ball.” An unsettled tournament drove some impassioned fans to riot, forcing the state to intervene with lawyers to decide on a winner.195 Games in Oaxaca featured teams in the twentieth century’s first decade like Sur, Ocotlán, Filadelfia, and los Gillo which gave way to teams like Turu Mining Company, Aguilas de la Mixteca, Escuela Agricola de Soledad de Etla, Aguiluchos, and Policia in the 1930s and 1940s.196 Tournaments and stadiums, such as campo deportivo “Venustiano Carranza,” were frequently dedicated to local elites and politicians, while elite newspapers like Oaxaca Nuevo frequently included editorial sections with pitching and hitting tips alongside advertisements for American appliances, radios, and cars from General Electric and Ford as well as Hollywood celebrity updates and news on the latest developments in medicines.197 Newspapers excitedly updated ciudadanos of places in the Oaxaca Valley where baseball was “discovered,” such as with the Leones de Ocotlán in 1941where players were found to be surprisingly competitive.198 Baseball as an elitist nook continually dominated in Oaxaca City despite the growing numbers of lower-class participants like those found around old mining areas. Elite sports clubs persisted throughout the 1940s and beyond, continuing its bond with social clubs like Social Xico which held mixers with the Club Deportivo at the ritzy Casino Macedonio in the late 1930s.199 Indeed, social clubs and baseball deeply suggest the depth of “comfort” that the Oaxacan elite had in their newly cosmopolitan Oaxacan culture.200 Beginning in the 1920s, however, the post-Revolutionary period began to think of the Indian differently, and thus baseball’s function changed. Oaxacan writer, and founder of the

195 “Renuncio El Presidente,” Oaxaca Nuevo, November 3, 1939; “El Campeonato de Base Ball,” Oaxaca Nuevo, November 11, 1939, 2; “El Base Ball Tendrá un Vigorosa Resurgimiento en esta Ciudad,” Oaxaca Nuevo, November 25, 1939, 1. 196 Overmyer-Velázquez, “Visions of the Emerald City,” 63-64; “Base Ball para el Día de Hoy,” Oaxaca Nuevo, Jul. 6, 1941; “Beisbol y Futbol para Hoy,” Oaxaca Nuevo, July 13, 1941; Oaxaca Nuevo, September 7, 1937; “Calentandose,” Oaxaca Nuevo, July 19, 1941. Los Gillow was named after Oaxaca City’s archbishop of the period. 197 Ibid. 198 “En la Ciudad de Ocotlán Encuentra Adeptos el Base Ball,” Oaxaca Nuevo, November 23, 1939. 199 Oaxaca Nuevo, Nov. 5, 1939. 200 Beezley, “The Rise of Baseball in Mexico and the First Valenzuela,” 4. 46

Ministry of Education (SEP), José Vasconselos bent the positivist and social Darwinist conceptions of the rural poor to create a program of hybridity or mestizaje that would allow México to enjoy the benefits of both the Indian and Spanish races. In a new effort to modernize, Mexican Indians were elevated, and simultaneously limited, as possessing inherent qualities such as egalitarianism, virtuousness, bravery, and resiliency; ironically to cover up the racist pseudo sciences that had dominated for so long before.201 If an indigenous person did not comply with the compromised federal version of what it was to be Indian, they would be punished or shunned as in the Porfiriato. Still, the goal of mestizaje was to slowly breed out the indigeneity of the Indian to create a new Mexican nation based on a singular ethnicity. Indeed, this mestizo “Cosmic Race,” the “apotheosis” of humanity, involved racial, spiritual, and cultural assimilation, and, although racially determined, inspired “an elitist, non-Indian construct” of nationhood in indigenismo, deeply influencing assimilation policies around Latin America.202 Indigenismo gained steam under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas from 1934 to 1940.203 Under indigenismo, the mass indigenous presence was recognized in México and instead of instituting polarizing policies such as “pan o palo” that frequently left the poor with “the stick,” the new policy saw indigenous and poor mestizos as educationally malleable and potentially useful. Cardenistas firmly believed that through education and “federal paternalism” Indians could be de-ethnicized and Mexicanized through incorporation into the Mexican state. This integrative approach was instituted on the ground through nationalist and socialist programs of the SEP that promoted hygiene, Spanish literacy, temperance, and secularization to quell “religious fanaticism.”204 In 1940, 30 percent of the state spoke no

201 Alexander S. Dawson, “From Models for the Nation to Model Citizens: Indigenismo and the ‘Revindication’ of the Mexican Indian, 1920-40,” Journal of Latin American Studies 30 (1998): 284-285. 202 Stephen E. Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution: Forging State and Nation in Chiapas, 1910-1945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 45-46; Richard Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 4, 82; Winthrop R. Wright, Café con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Néstor García- Canclini, Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture in Mexico, trans. Lidia Lozano (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 43. 203 Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution, xii, 119. 204 Ibid., xii-xiii, 119-120; Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 32-36. 47

Spanish and only 20 percent was literate.205 In the same census, less than half a percent of Oaxacans had completed formal education.206 Indeed, a performative learning may have seemed like a creative way to “whiten” Oaxacans considering school had historically failed those in the countryside who needed to work long hours and who carried a deep mistrust of central authority. It was during this period that records show physical education emerging as an important national program where sports competition, just as with science, could allow man to reach his full potential.207 Parades filled the colonial Oaxacan streets featuring baseball players militaristically marching and representing clubs in full uniform.208 Other parades put muscle training and body building on display, celebrated for ingraining “undoubtedly habits of discipline” and strengthened will. Indeed, newspapers described Oaxacans as known for their “organic degeneration” caused by poor diets and hygiene and sport could help improve and reform the “ethnic” Oaxacan race.209 While sports in the Porfiriato may have been practiced to dissect the vallistocracia from those in the capital’s periphery, sport as an integrative practice in the post-Revolutionary period was to work as many modern sports were intended: truly as a “civilizing process” with mass participation.210 Simultaneously, Americans continued to promote baseball as possessing these inherently contagious characteristics. American League commissioner Ban Johnson once swore that participation of the game could educate Mexicans out of savagery.211 After the Mexican Revolution, baseball and women’s softball were revitalized although they had never completely stopped.

205 Octavio Delgadillo García, “Radio Broadcasting and Popular Culture: Forming the Nation in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1920-1940”( master’s thesis, San Diego State University, 2007), 34. 206 Delgadillo García, “Radio Broadcasting and Popular Culture,” 39. 207 Neal, Sport and Identity, 33-38. 208 Oaxaca Nuevo, Nov. 19, 1939; “El Club Deportivo de ‘Tecomavaca’ Teot. se Prepara Entusiastamente a Celebrar el Primer Año de su Aniversario,” Oaxaca Nuevo, Aug. 5, 1941. 209 Oaxaca Nuevo, Nov. 19, 1939. 210 Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 213, 227-231. 211 Beezley, “The Rise of Baseball in Mexico and the First Valenzuela,” 11. 48

In 1921, Mexican officials honored Johnson by hosting its biggest championship in his name.212

2.6 UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICAL RESPONSES While some of the highly indigenous popular classes rejected modernization, burning federal schools and hoping for the restoration of the power of the Catholic Church, most in Oaxaca supported much of the Díaz program such as those aspects involving improved public lighting and other services.213 The problem, however, was that many of these services never reached peripheral areas and these exclusionary tactics left scores destitute in the already impoverished countryside. During the Porfiriato, population in México had nearly doubled from 8.7 million to roughly 15 million. While the gross national product (GNP) rose 350 percent under Díaz, more than 80 percent of Mexicans were in the agrarian sector and nearly half of these workers “transformed” into “peons” as the concentration of land ownership became more unequal. Indeed, purchasing power for rural peoples in 1910 had dropped to pre-1800 levels.214 Among the few recognitions of the Indian in Oaxaca under Díaz outlined the Indian phenotype. This resulted in later administrations creating beauty contests like “La India Bonita.” The winner was considered young and beautiful, represented progress, and, combined with a fulfillment of common indigenous stereotypes like style of dress, was one of the first attempts at promoting regional tourism.215 As in many parts of México, the Porfiriato’s modernization also translated into stolen ejidal and private lands, especially in the Isthmus where communal jungle was plowed for new coffee plantations or prospective rail routes.216 Export-led agricultural enterprises cut jobs in the countryside and reduced the amount of food that was produced domestically. In

212 Ibid. 213 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 41; Dawson, “From Models for the Nation to Model Citizens,” 305; Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 330-331. 214 Kandell, La Capital, 354. 215 Delgadillo García, “Radio Broadcasting and Popular Culture,” 31. Indigenous was identified from the Porfiriato by phenotype according to Rick A. López and Deborah Poole. “La India Bonita” contest measured girls by their indigenous look, dress, and language. 216 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 25-26. 49 combination with communal land loss, some were literally led to starvation.217 While new capitalist operations augmented a small wage earning class, labor conditions in the state were among the worst in all of the country; some hacendados coerced prisoners and vagabonds into work and treated their hired hands like slaves.218 Indeed, oral histories from Hamilton’s Santa Gertrudis even depict life on the hacienda as exploitative and suggest enganche may have been practiced. This exploitative system placed laborers into perpetual debt with low wages and workers were forced to purchase and rent all goods, including tools for everyday work, from an on-site company store run by the hacendado.219 While urban elites distanced themselves from the poor as much as possible and participated in leisurely escapes like bicycle riding and baseball, the poor, who attempted to access the benefits in capital cities, were isolated in urban peripheries where environmental hazards raged.220 Even for those fortunate to find work in the city life was extreme as urban workers frequently logged 84 to 117 hours a week with little hope of meeting basic necessities.221 Elites apologized for inequality in their society by blaming the highly indigenous poor for their own cultural and biological retardations believed inherent. Indians were an obvious roadblock for progress and local elites encouraged foreigners to remember, “If they love, it is from habit; if they get dead drunk, it is from need; if they quarrel, it is from moral instability; if they work, they do it out of fear.”222 This “class racism,” tabbed by Pierre Bourdieu as the practice of labeling expressions or qualities as ignorant or rude while ignoring the social conditions from which one emerges, was not a difficult transition for Americans and Europeans who already believed indigenous Mexicans to be “stone-aged.”

217 García Montes, “Oaxaca: economía, sociedad y poder: Siglo XIX”; Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 77, 87. 218 Hamilton and Jervaise, Fotografías Panorámicas de la Ciudad de Oaxaca, 11; Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 25-26. 219 Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution, 9-10; Jenny Ramirez Hamilton, “Hacienda de Santa Gertrudis,” ; Palacios Arango, “Santa Gertrudis, Zimatlán, Oax.” 220 William H. Beezley and Colin M. MacLachlan, Mexicans in Revolution, 1910-1946 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 2, 5. 221 Kandell, La Capital, 354. 222 David M. Pletcher, “American Railroad Promoters,” in The Age of Porfirio Diaz, ed. by Carlos B. Gil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 93. 50

This was especially true for Americans who were in the finishing stages of terminating their own “Indian Problem” at home.223 Mexican elites told their American counter-parts that Indians were incapable of developing a sense of capital accumulation, or even fair pay, because the Mexican Indian comes from temperate climates where covering the most bare of necessities was personally satisfying for them. Indeed, from this mindset, if a Mexican peon did earn more than what was necessary then he would waste his money on alcohol and become a work liability. These facts made the treatment of poor Mexican workers, especially those in the countryside and with Indian blood, more than justified and even preferred in many circles.224 While cientificos and indigenistas believed to varying degrees that a reformation or breeding out of the Indian was possible through capitalism and introduction of new technologies, official mandates in Oaxaca to act on these beliefs often bordered on the bizarre. Among the most famous examples was a legally mandated public dress code for Indians, banning straw hats and white linen clothing, which led to the “War of the Pants.”225 Foreigners often criticized campesinos for wearing huaraches, refusing to eat with utensils, mutilating new technologies to resemble ones they had known, avoiding diets of wheat and being lazy with little regard for family. It was, however, rural practicality and collective memories of change, stemming from the colonial experience that deeply influenced indigenous politics and lifestyles. Indeed, for many rural Mexicans of the period, change in the past had only brought worse conditions, a perception which fuels indigenous “balance mechanisms,” or a conservative strategy in which predictability and stability prove as among one’s most valuable assets.226 For example, Mexican workers may have disregarded efficiency in work time, drawing calls of laziness from a Euro-centric or American perspectives, but acquiring surplus capital was not historically useful. History had told farmers, often paid more in commodities or credit, not

223 Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 71; David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 169. Traveler accounts frequently depict Mexican country life as backwards and stuck in time. 224 Pletcher, “American Railroad Promoters,” 92. 225 Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 71,79; Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 1. 226 Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 77-79. 51 cash, that they would be heavily taxed, their excess output seized by local caciques, hacendados, or the state.227 Further, criticisms of the indigenous diet and clothing style failed to recognize the practicality of both. Indeed, the use of the tortilla made both wheat and utensils near obsolete while European style shoes were likely among the most impractical form of footwear for a farmer from hot, and sometimes tropical, climates, who often could only afford the “the clothes on their back.”228 This fermenting memory of mistrust and exploitation from foreigners led many indigenous communities to resent modern, or foreign, things, even while simultaneously wanting many of the benefits of the projects themselves.229 The political landscape in Oaxaca most certainly reflects this tenuous position. While the initial liberal project of modernization was intentionally favorable to those in power, great space still existed to resist in a multitude of ways. Ranajit Guha claims that forms of violence include those forms of delegitimization that aim to incinerate the symbols of one’s oppressive culture or leader, or appropriate them. This action, while passive, seems to exist in all popular movements around the globe.230 Indeed, around México, indigenous politics often began with a simple “mocking” of the “culture of modernity” forced upon them and displayed in major urban areas. Throughout the Díaz period, not even the Catholic Church could slow the peasant appropriation of saint’s days fiestas in which effigies of local politicians or elites were often hung and burned in protest, the world turned symbolically upside down. Díaz made great effort to stop these forms of resistance with some success, but Beezley believes they really were a “seedbed for populist political campaigns” and helped form real cultural boundaries between the rich and the poor during the Porfiriato.231 Indeed, sports were not excluded from resistance as bicycle riders were berated and laughed at by campesinos.232

227 Ibid., 78, 87. 228 Ibid., 68, 85-86. 229 Delgadillo García, “Radio Broadcasting and Popular Culture,” 31. 230 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 28-29; Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 334. 231 Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 129. 232 Ibid., 48-50. 52

Other forms of resistance were more common and followed those typical in James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak where supposed subdued agents sabotaged, ran away, slandered, foot-dragged, and played up their own ignorance when in a position of perceived limitation under oppressive agencies or institutions.233 Frequently, as was the case with the imposition of public dress codes and many land disputes, campesinos simply ignored laws in non-violent acts of defiance.234 However, Chassen-López believes that patterns evolved in Oaxacan politics in which non-violent forms of resistance constantly threatened to grow into machete-wielding revolt.235 Indeed, a general political pattern emerges among the state’s highly indigenous campesino communities in which peoples first find a local leader to bring their problems to public officials or local elites. If this tactic proves fruitless then one may seek litigation. However, if this doesn’t work, delegitimization and defiance, like the examples above, could spill into the violence that deeply rattled the imaginations of elites.236 Historian Mary Kay Vaughn assures us that to understand popular resistance, we must understand the symbolic meaning surrounding the use of space. Indeed, federal schools in rural areas were often burned and privatization of property resented. Both were perceived as living symbols of imperialism in what is understood as communal indigenous space.237 Much of the most violent resistance in Oaxaca has taken place in the Isthmus, often over land use disputes. Among the most notable of these uprisings was in Juchitán with “Che” Gorio Melendre who, in resistance to Benito Juárez’s privatization of communal salt flats, raised an indigenous army to occupy the territory, even claiming it autonomous from Oaxaca and México for three years before finally being driven out.238 Before resorting to violence, however, Gorio and Juchitecos engaged in delegitimization campaigns in local newspapers

233 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 28-42. Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 332-333. 234 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 2, 333. 235 Archivo de Santa María Atzompa. There are multiple unsorted documents that describe the frequent use of machetes and violence to solve community conflicts. See also Wysocki, field notes, June 25, 2010. 236 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 330-331. 237 Mary K. Vaughan, “Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican Revolution,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (1999): 275-279. 238 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 321-325. 53 against prominent politicians and staged sit-ins in the mining territory, retreating when troops were sent only to return just as they had left.239 In the 1890s, “Che” Gomez continued the fight over the flats and some argue that the region, even today, remains in a state of rebellion due to land and tax issues and cultural exclusion, leading Benjamin Smith to assert the region to be “years ahead of the rest of the Mexican Revolution.”240 Importantly, Juchitecos wanted access to the flats to help provide a stable income, as well, and always fought to gain access to the benefits that came with national modernization efforts from the top. In all, Juchitecos supported some aspects of modernity, but wanted to be represented in modernity’s definition, something that porfiristas and indigenistas did not support in plural forms.241 Due to geographical closeness to Oaxaca City and mining and railroad operations, many in the Valley were drawn into wage labor and began to somewhat acculturate to US and European customs, actually instilling alternate forms of resistance drawn from other foreign workers. Indeed, many wage earners encountered labor unions through foreign workers; among the biggest was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from which the prevalent culture of obedience in the Valley was challenged.242 While at the turn of the twentieth century many Valley communities still primarily spoke an indigenous language, by the 1940s most exclusively spoke Spanish, or were bilingual, and the closeness to Oaxaca City allowed many to learn the rules of the political game.243 As opposed to the coffee zones to the south and west, Valley haciendas were generally not stolen by foreigners, but were purchased, and some laborers even achieved share-cropping status instead of that of complete debt peon.244 However, it is clear that opportunities to gain under all systems were severely limited for indigenous labor everywhere.245

239 Ibid., 324-325. 240 Ibid., 327-329. Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 28-29. 241 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 333. 242 Pletcher, “American Railroad Promoters,” 93. 243 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 216-218; Delgadillo García, “Radio Broadcasting and Popular Culture,” 29-34. 244 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 216-218. 245 Norget, Days of Death, Days of Life, 33-38. 54

Most Valley resistance would come in the middle to the end of the twentieth century. While the Mexican Revolution was to redistribute land, reform under Revolutionary presidents was fairly weak until the presidency of Cárdenas. By 1940, nearly all of the Valley haciendas had been redistributed, the first land taken from foreign properties.246 In response, many landowners began “campaigns of terror,” perhaps like that of Harloe Hamilton in 1916 who murdered two men on his father’s property at Santa Gertrudis.247 In such circumstances violent resistance and land invasions were no less common than those of the Isthmus. Indeed, at Santa Gertrudis residents claim workers had fought for decades for land reform, winning it in 1935 only to lose it again to a local cacique, or a regional strongman. Their fight again picked up in the 1970s and was the subject of a popular documentary of the period.248 Tax issues were also a sensitive point in the region and again the Hamiltons stood at the forefront. In 1952, in protest of perceived unfair tax codes, mobs burned tax records and attacked elitist symbols in Oaxaca City including Jimmy Hamilton’s Chevrolet dealership and the Nuevo Diario newspaper.249 Many communities in the Oaxaca Valley continue with this tradition, such as Santa María Atzompa, a community that is known to take quickly to machetes to help settle disputes even today.250 As with inequality within society, elites attributed frequent uprisings to the nature of the popular classes. Indeed, the naïve and simple Indian naturally preferred to have less than the rich. Delegitimization campaigns claimed that it was this simplicity and naiveté that allowed the Indian to be corrupted by warlords whom, in turn, brought out buried bloodlust

246 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 35, 218-219. 247 “One Arrested Held for Murder of Which He Says He Is Innocent,” New York Times,June 23, 1916. 248 Arango, “Santa Gertrudis, Zimatlán, Oax”; Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México, http://www.e- local.gob.mx/work/templates/enciclo/oaxaca/municipios/20387a.htm (accessed May 2); Julio Moguel, “Los Campesinos de Gilles Groulx,” La Jornada, January 13, 2009, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/01/13/campesinos.html (accessed May 13, 2011). 249 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 388. 250 Wysocki, field notes, June 23, 2011; Archivo de Santa María Atzompa; Yazmín Gómez, “Atzompa, un foco rojo; sigue ocupado el palacio municipal,” Diario Despertar, January 10, 2011, http://www.diariodespertar.com.mx/politica/46105-Atzompa-foco-rojo-sigue-ocupado-palacio-municipal.html (accessed January 12, 2011). Through the 1970s and 1980s dozens of documents describe various domestic and political disputes settled in Santa María Atzompa with violence, often with machetes. A recent political election even saw the municipal palace occupied by protesters with machetes. 55 and savagery.251 This strategy was likely spawned out of a rising fear among the upper classes that made up a stark minority in the state. Indeed, even small pockets of popular resistance led skittish elites and newspapers to designate the settings as a habitat of anarchy and race war, leading many into no less than “hysteria.”252 Of course, still fresh in upper- class memories was the Caste War in the Yucatán Peninsula in 1847 where united rebel Maya nearly took the entire region, even garnering support from the adjacent British Honduras.253 Díaz had also struggled to put out the flames of rebellion from the Apache and Yaqui in the country’s northern borderlands and constant peasant-led revolts from the nation’s southern states proved difficult to extinguish. These revolts in the south often pressured government leaders to negotiate with their peasant masses and other leaders later refused to join in larger campaigns against the poor, fearful of their own population’s response.254 It is, then, that violent resistance proved a useful strategy for many indigenous peoples to force negotiation, or at times, even their own autonomy, as was the case with Gorio.255 Oaxacan politics have been largely negotiated through this impending fear and a demand from indigenous and campesino communities to take some part in the conventional definition of modernity. This is expressed most clearly in the unique survival of communal and indigenous usos y costumbres in local government and the historical presence of regional caciques, who often subvert the official political process and gain access to power through kinship ties and negotiation. These men have been known, like many of the communities in Oaxaca, to settle political disputes outside of the law, often with pistols.256 Indeed, even governors were placed into power holding deep camarillas themselves, relying on an odd

251 Peter Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero, 1800- 1857 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 187. 252 Garner, Porfirio Díaz, 22. Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 334. 253 Paul Sullivan., Xuxub Must Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2004). 254 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 334; Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 190-191. 255 Ibid. 256 Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements, 70. 56 balance of agreements between local peoples and the vallistocracia, like that of Eduardo Vasconselos near the middle of the century, to help maintain stability.257 What came about from these relationships from jefe politicos to caciques, on opposite sides, was an odd and tenuous political system that functioned through ongoing negotiation of personal ambition, usos y costumbres, and federal decree.

2.7 CONCLUSION The liberal modern project in Oaxaca was never fully completed as is evidenced by the failure of the government to eliminate usos y costumbres.258 From Juárez to Díaz, the state found itself pulling in hoards of new immigrants and investment while workers found a mixed bag. While some workers in the state earned humble wages, for most the Porfiriato developed an exclusionary “Emerald City” while campesino communities widely suffered from land theft, poor work conditions, and sometimes starvation.259 This project spatially separated a core and periphery and was constructed through ritual, grandiloquence, engineering, and even leisurely activities such as baseball. Like the “other rebellions” running underneath official claims of independence unity a century earlier, Beezley asserts that Porfirian popular restrictions to official identity allowed a separate movement to take place under Díaz’s feet.260 Interestingly, Oaxacan communities have developed a reputation for resistance, but they still wanted access to many of the material benefits of “modernization” of the capital. Some, such as those in the Sierra Juárez, actively worked to support modernization for a short time.261 Indeed, while Oaxaca City received plumbing and electric lighting, some significant populations of the Valley and the Isthmus to this day do not have access to one or other, or neither. Modernization in the Porfirian sense (which seems to incorporate economic development, embrace of foreign culture, and some types of homogenization) did not stop in

257 Ibid., 330-334. 258 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 347. 259 Anthony M. Orum and Xiangming Chen, The World of Cities: Places in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 14-18. 260 Beezley, Mexican National Identity, 58-59, 66. 261 McNamara, Sons of the Sierra. 57

Oaxaca after the Porfiriato as is evidenced by the gross rhetoric that refers to, and assumes a need for, racial cleansing, obedience, and assimilation during the Revolutionary period. Indeed, educational curriculum under President Álvaro Obregon (1920-1924) was to teach hygiene, temperance, and Spanish, all characteristics long advised to erase the Oaxacan Indian.262 President Plutarco Calles (1924-1928) attempted to capture that institution, which foreigners and promoters long claimed was stagnating the naïve campesinos: that of the Catholic Church. Indeed, he went so far as to attempt to replace the Catholic Church with a national version.263 Calles’ political apparatus worked hard to promote cosmopolitanism and urban modernism, renaming Porfirian symbols with those of heroes from the Revolution.264 Finally, while Cárdenas recognized the importance of land reform, the plural identities of indigeneity were no longer allowed to exist. The Mexican nation, still not formulated in indigenous areas, was to consist of mestizo campesinos without regard for ethnicity or collective history. For Cárdenas, as under Díaz, sport was to have a central role in the modernization and rehabilitation process of the state’s most primitive inhabitants.265 Baseball was brought to Oaxaca in this period and carried a specific function for liberals and revolutionaries, being the most complete and civilized of sports. For liberals in the Porfiriato, baseball served as an exclusionary retreat for affluent foreigners and could even work as a method to channel frustrations of workers in a safer way. Indeed, baseball worked as a “mirror” of Porfirian society, both in its uneven access, like rural peoples to the services of the capital city, and due to its inherent demand of player obedience to the umpire, a paternalistic and uncompromising authority of the game.266 During the Revolution baseball continued to work for modernization. Modernization, however, meant not just filling the Emerald City with foreign things, but worked as a performative assimilation project of indigenous peoples in hopes of reforming them into civilized and obedient Mexican citizens.

262 Beezley and MacLachlan, Mexicans in Revolution, 54, 65. 263 Ibid., 67. 264 Ibid., 77, 91-93. 265 Ibid., 113-134. 266 Eric A. Wagner, “Sport in Revolutionary Societies: Cuba and Nicaragua,” in Sport and Society in Latin America: Diffusion, Dependency, and the Rise of Mass Culture ed. Joseph L. Arbena (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 130-132. 58

However, these projects were just the beginning of baseball’s life in the state and largely due to a weakness in central authority and the peasant desire for control over their own definition of modernity, baseball moved to take many different shapes. 59

CHAPTER 3

TODOS SOMOS GUERREROS: SEX, ECONOMY, AND POLITICS IN THE PROFESSIONAL GAME

Professional baseball in Oaxaca has many contradictory and complex expressions that run through it. It has been the site of excitement and one of frustration. Its outcomes have been influenced by ancient gods yet it is measured through performance based statistics. It is produced by warriors but encouraged by gentility. Moreover, it is a mimicked site without borders in ways yet it is physically quarantined inside the Valley of Oaxaca. While some affects are hyperbolized, others are very real. The space professional baseball occupies blends constantly the dichotomous glorified memories of the past with glitzy symbols of the modern. Often these dichotomies appear not so dissected. Indeed, the professional game tells us much about the current and historical state of Oaxaca by expressing the identities of its participants and aficionados and translating meanings of the sport’s bodily movements. Moreover, this examination describes a new function of baseball unrealized during the Porfiriato and Revolutionary periods in Oaxacan history, while significantly drawing from them. This chapter aims to precisely answer questions surrounding the identity of the current professional game in the state. Many of the questions are the same: Who is producing this game and who is participating? Who is the fan? How does the game’s professional production relate to its historical antecedents seen during the Porfiriato and the Revolution? Finally, what does the production and participation in the contemporary professional game tell us about the identity of Oaxacans?

3.1 HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN LEAGUE The first professional baseball league in México began as the Porfiriato approached its twilight with the founding of the semi-professional Mexican Association of Baseball in 60

1904.267 While baseball leagues have since fluctuated and varied in popularity around the country, they have lasted to become one of México’s favored pastimes and now the sport is commonly referred to as “El Rey de Deportes.” However, it was June 28, 1925 at Parque Franco Inglés when Mexican professional baseball took a gargantuan step by hosting the first game of the Liga Mexicana de Béisbol (Mexican League), a six-team summer league that became the class of the country. Created by “Fray Nano” Reyes, the founder of the first sports-only newspaper in the world, and Ernesto Carmona V, the league was initially very small and represented clubs just from around México City.268 Like the more informal teams in Oaxaca during the period, most teams represented social clubs and official collectives such as the “74th Regiment of General Andrew V. Zarzosa” (the league’s first champion), “Nacional Agraria de Ernesto Carmona,” and “México de Gualo Ampudia.”269 Since, however, the league has expanded greatly and is now considered one of the world’s most competitive, reaching Triple-A designation from Major League Baseball (MLB).270 While the Liga Mexicana del Pacífico (LMP) garners much attention during the winter season, featuring many MLB players and Mexican stars, the Mexican League has grown past a single region, touching distant spheres from the Yucatán, to the northwest, to Veracruz, through México City, and, of course, even into Oaxaca.271 The strength of the league was never more realized than when Alfonso, Bernardo, Girardo, Jorge, and Mario Pasquel took it over with intentions to morph it into the world’s “third major league,” even competitive with MLB in the late 1930s.272 The Pasquel period, which roughly occupied 1938 to 1954, is marked as the second major stage of the league’s history that also included a

267 Beezley, “The Rise of Baseball in Mexico and the First Valenzuela,” 10. 268 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 43. Reyes’ newspaper was called The Liking. 269 Janet Contreras Loyola, “Historia del Beisbol - Nacimiento de la LMB,” Archivo del Beisbol, http://www.archivodelbeisbol.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=130&Itemid=34&lim itstart=4%29 (accessed March 6, 2011). 270 Baseball Reference, “Mexican League (AAA) Encyclopedia and History,” http://www.baseball- reference.com/minors/league.cgi?code=MEX&class=AAA (accessed May 4, 2011). 271 Salón de la Fama del Beisbol Profesional de México, “Immortales, Búsqueda por lugar de origen,” http://www.salondelafama.com.mx/salondelafama/trono/origensf.asp?pais=0 (accessed March 2, 2011). 272 Ted Williams and John Underwood, My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1988), 122; McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 41. 61 move to capture performance-based statistics and embrace official record keeping likely to augment the league’s modern image by enhancing its professionalization.273 Moreover, the Pasquels, led by the flamboyant Jorge, would aim to enhance the league’s image in another way: by signing American players. Jorge Pasquel, “eccentric” and “dapper,” was one of the México’s wealthiest men, living well off his highly successful import and export company, and was politically well- connected, married to the daughter of President Plutarco Calles (1924-1928), yet maintaining an extended relationship with alluring actress María Felix.274 With the MLB ban on African- American players, mass deployment of MLB talent to the Pacific and Europe during World War II, and MLB’s union-busting tactics and ownership fat-cattery, Pasquel exploited a window of opportunity by offering staggering contracts to some of the world’s top talent such as Negro Leaguers Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, Cuban stars like Martin Dihigo, and even some white players like Max Lanier of the St. Louis Cardinals and Mickey Owen of the Brooklyn Dodgers.275 Indeed, Pasquel, bold and perhaps arrogant, even went after players that seemed least likely to move. On one such occasion he approached Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, known by some as the greatest hitter of all time, offering him a three-year, $300,000 contract. For comparison, he was making a paltry $40,000 per season in MLB. Williams turned down the money saying, “I knew the moment I got into Pasquel’s room I wasn’t interested,” citing the flashiness and style of the Mexican League owner who smoked big “Havana cigars” and was draped in “three or four-carat diamonds.”276 That wasn’t all, however, as Pasquel was known to carry two “pearl-handed revolvers” and according to rumor may have actively engaged in duels. He was also widely known to have ordered thugs to beat up Satchel Paige after he felt he was swindled by the right-hander.277 Still, in all, twenty-three players jumped from MLB into the Mexican League from ten different clubs

273 Loyola, “Historia del Beisbol.” 274 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 44. 275 Ibid., 45-55; Contreras Loyola, “Historia del Beisbol.” 276 Williams and Underwood, My Turn at Bat, 121-122. 277 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 43-44, 51; Mark Winegardner, The Veracruz Blues (New York: Viking, 1996). Satchel Paige, a pitcher, apparently had an injured shoulder that he did not disclose with Pasquel. When he played in the Mexican Leagues he was limited to mostly hitting. He was a terrible hitter. 62 and caused incredible uproar among sports writers and owners in the US, as Pasquel was raiding the nation’s cherished pastime.278 In 1946, however, MLB commissioner “Happy” Chandler, former Governor of Kentucky, embarrassed of the defections, began to issue lifetime bans to American players who crossed the border to play, calling the Mexican League an “outlaw league.”279 In all, seven players were banned for life even after amnesty was offered in 1949.280 Nevertheless, Pasquel used the media to denounce MLB, framing Chandler’s punishment as a hateful attack against México and its people, adding that he was personally hurt and wanted an apology. He drove the dagger deeper by claiming players in MLB to be “peons” of the league’s penurious owners and that “slave wages” had driven the players into his arms.281 However, it was rumored by many of the American players that Pasquel, in fact, often did not pay what he promised, limiting the potential exodus of MLB’s top talent.282 The heated rhetoric and growing feud between MLB and the Mexican League became so intense that the US State Department became widely concerned, believing the parties were, in fact, creating great problems for the relations of the two countries.283 Jorge Pasquel’s nationalist tone and powerful friendships meant politics were often fused with the professional game in México. Outside of his convenient marital circumstances, Pasquel was also close with fellow veracruzano, and future president, Miguel Alemán (1946-1952) who often appeared at Pasquel’s side at ballgames, likely a political move to seize an already “captive” audience and fuse symbols of government and sport together.284 While Pasquel bonded with Alemán to get closer to the office of the presidency, perhaps to run himself in the future, Alemán was able to bond to baseball, still a glowing symbol of American modernity. Indeed, he glued himself in this way with symbols of

278 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 70-71. 279 Ibid., 58; Williams and Underwood, My Turn at Bat, 120-125 . 280 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 189. 281 Ibid., 45, 57, 64. 282 Williams and Underwood, My Turn at Bat, 120-125. 283 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders of the Major Leagues, 64. 284 Petrie, “Sport and Politics,” 199. 63 promise and strength. Further, appearances at sporting events gave rare access and confrontation to politicians for fans, allowing the politician to appear approachable or relatable.285 After leaving the presidency, Alemán continued to work in sports, helping to bring the Olympics to México in 1968. The Mexican League never was able to secure enough international talent to challenge MLB, but the league has closely moved in step with their former rivals since the departure of the Pasquels. Since, teams have agreed to development contracts with MLB franchises, stadium dimensions are largely the same, and no more are the days of the corky Mexican ballpark with an active railroad track running through its outfield.286 In 2005, the league hosted sixteen clubs including the “Campeche Piratas,” “Puebla Pericos,” “Tabasco Olmecas,” “México City Diablos Rojos,” “Cancun Langosteros,” “Yucatán Leones,” “Puebla Tigres,” “Veracruz Rojos de Águila,” “Monterrey Sultanes,” “Monclova Acereros,” “Aguascalientes Rieleros,” “Tijuana Toros,” “Saltillo Saraperos,” “San Luis Potosí Tuneros,” and the “Laguna Vaqueros” in addition to the Oaxaca Guerreros.287 In 2011, the league has contracted with fourteen clubs; teams from Tijuana, Aguascalientes, and San Luis Potosí have disappeared while clubs in Reynosa and Minatitlán have risen.288 Despite contraction, the Mexican League continues to be a launching pad for the country’s talent into the world’s top leagues, and some have argued that it is Mexican players in MLB, like Fernando Valenzuela, that helped truly internationalize the US league.289

285 Ibid., 193. 286 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 80. 287 Jonathan Clark, “‘We are all Guerreros’: Oaxaca's unique culture is on display at local ballpark,” Entrepreneur, March 2005, http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/131329671.html (accessed January 8, 2011). 288 La Liga Mexicana de Béisbol, “Standings,” http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/milb/stats/stats.jsp?t=l_sta&lid=125&sid=l125 (accessed March 10, 2011). 289 David G. LaFrance, “A Mexican Popular Image of the United States through the Baseball Hero, Fernando Valenzuela,”.in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 4 (1985): 14-23. 64

3.2 THE ARRIVAL OF THE GUERREROS Alfredo Harp Helú was born in Oaxaca City in 1944, a Lebanese-Mexican and cousin to billionaire Carlos Slim Helú.290 He attended Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and later went on to create the Casa de Bolsa Acciones y Valores de México (ACCIVAL) that later turned into the Banco Nacional de México (Banamex), among the most successful institutions in Latin America.291 Not surprisingly, growing up a baseball fan in the period, he claims to have obsessed as a youth over the New York Yankees, a team that appeared in an unprecedented fifteen World Series, winning ten of them, and featured stars such as Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Don Larsen, and Roger Maris from 1947 to 1964.292 In fact, his childhood dream was to one day own a professional franchise. His dream came to fruition when he purchased the México City Diablos Rojos in 1994. Indeed, the Diablos Rojos are the Mexican equivalent to the Yankees with a big stadium, expansive domestic market, marquee players, and five championships over fifteen seasons under his direction.293 Despite the long popularity of El Rey de Deportes in Oaxaca, before 1996 the state had no top-level team in either of the country’s major leagues. However, after another disappointing season, the “Jalisco Charros” were put up for sale, allowing Harp Helú, one of Oaxaca’s native sons, to make a move on the club. Growing popular for his philanthropic work in México City and Oaxaca, Harp Helú, with a team of associates from the Diablos Rojos, including the president of the Mexican League Pedro Treto Cisneros, bought the struggling Charros and moved them to Oaxaca City.294

290 Archivo del Beisbol, “Nuestro Fundador,” http://www.archivodelbeisbol.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83&Itemid=2 (accessed February 22, 2011); “The World’s Billionaires: #937 Alfredo Harp Helú,” Forbes, March 10, 2010, http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_Alfredo-Harp-Helu-family_G4YN.html (accessed May 3, 2011). 291 Archivo del Beisbol, “Nuestro Fundador.” 292 Ibid.; Baseball Reference, “New York Yankees,” http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/NYY/ (accessed February 2, 2011). 293 Archivo del Beisbol, “Nuestro Fundador.” 294 Ibid.; Guerreros de Oaxaca, “Historia,” http://www.guerrerosdeoaxaca.com.mx/?page_id=182 (accessed January 2, 2011); Curiously, the Mexican League has no rules against purchasing multiple franchises. 65

The arrival of the franchise spun the city into excitement, the brand priding itself on the fact that baseball in the state was deeply tied to local culture. Before the 1996 season a public survey was supposedly given to ciudadanos which would determine the club’s name. According to one foreigner, it was here that the name “Guerreros” (Warriors) was chosen, something marketing director Raul Solis believed was close to the people because of pride in the historical resistance of the Valley and Isthmus Zapotecs. It was also from this that the team came to develop its slogans “We are all Guerreros” and “Proudly Guerrero.” Indeed, Solis argued that the people demanded something local and that “Everything that we do in terms of publicity is going to connect the team in some way with the traditions and pride of Oaxaca.”295 It is not surprising, then, that the club often refers to itself as “the Zapotec tribe.”296 In their inaugural season the club acquired the great “Almirante” Nelson Barrera, a star of the Mexican League, who in 1997 broke the circuit’s record for career runs batted in (RBI) with 1,574 as a member of the Guerreros. He gave the team immediate recognition and, after just two seasons, the Guerreros won their first league championship in 1998, on the way defeating the powerful México City Diablos Rojos with whom the Guerreros hold a heated rivalry.297 Later, in 2001, Barrera became the all-time Mexican League home run champion by belting career number 454 at age forty-three, surpassing the legendary Hector Espino.298 In 2002, Barrera died in what is described as a tragedy while working on home repairs, but the Guerreros returned to the playoffs multiple times after.299 The symbolic merging of the professional franchise and indigenous lore did not stop with the club’s naming rights. Stated with optimism, the Guerreros apologized for the disappointing results of the 2008 season by invoking a power beyond their own. The team

295 Clark, “We are all Guerreros.” 296 Ibid. 297 Guerreros de Oaxaca, “Historia;” Archivo del Beisbol, “Nuestro Fundador.” 298 Guerreros de Oaxaca “Historia;” Baseball-Reference, “Nelson Barrera,”, http://www.baseball- reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=barrer001nel (accessed January 17, 2011). 299 Guerreros de Oaxaca, “Historia.” 66 quickly termed the season, the thirteenth in team history, as the “Pesadilla Histórica.”300 The fourteenth season, however, combining two sevens, provided deliverance. Indeed, the club’s website found many opportunities to list odd seven-related occurrences that season. First, their new manager Ramon Esquer was the club’s seventh in their history. Secondly, in the past, the Guerreros had made the playoffs seven times, while failing another seven. The manager and head coach wore numbers one and fifteen respectively, meaning 1+1+5= 7. Further, one of the new coaches chose to wear the lucky number. Lastly, the Guerreros managerial successor wore number six, making another seven when combined with the current manager’s number.301 “Disneyfication is Dollarfication,” and the marketing of the club as indigenous, subject to the mystical laws of ancient gods and curses, carves out a market niche while symbolically embracing the local.302

3.3 LOS GUERREROS “EN VIVO” While the franchise continues to push its traditional imagery, it has simultaneously become one of the more technologically progressive clubs in the Mexican League. While games are routinely broadcasted on radio (XEOA 570 AM) and can often be found on television on local channel nine, the team offers a state of the art interactive website, designed with Flash.303 While most Mexican League clubs register a standardized page under minorleaguebaseball.com, a sub-directory of MLB, the Guerreros site is personal and offers in depth information such as the history of the club, schedules, news updates, player biographies, ticket pricing, statistics, and email and telephone contact information.304

300 Ibid. 301 Ibid. 302 Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: I.G. Editions, Inc., 1984), 62; Orum and Chen, The World of Cities, 14-18. John Gledhill, “Neoliberalism”, in A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, ed. David Nugent and Joan Vincent (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 340; George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 17. 303 Ron Mader, “Baseball in Oaxaca,” Planeta, http://www.planeta.com/ecotravel/sports/baseballoax.html (accessed February 22, 2011); Guerreros de Oaxaca. 304 Guerreros de Oaxaca; Minor League Baseball, http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp (accessed April 21, 2011). 67

The most impressive aspect of the Guerreros website, however, is an interactive live broadcast of every home game from the grandstand of the ballpark, which is called “TV en vivo.”305 Here fans with an Internet connection can watch every game as if sitting behind home plate, without announcers, and a chat box on the right hand side of the screen provides an interactive element. Indeed, during the summer of 2010 it was common to find anywhere from 90 to 300 people logged into this chat during games, talking about the game itself, but also making jokes, flirting, and engaging in informal conversation that one would expect to hear at a ballgame in the US. Because of the tumultuous weather in the summer in Oaxaca City, rainstorms frequently change game schedules and updates often don’t make it onto the team’s official site.306 Often these announcements are made directly from the Guerreros announcing booth into the chat room on the “TV en vivo” page, often attributing the delay to that of the will of Tlaloc, the Mesoamerican god of rain. The popularity of the interactive feature suggests the club has a fairly strong core following and evidences a fluidity and expansion of Arjun Appadurai’s “tecnoscapes” and “mediascapes” into even the places most considered “backward” or cut off.307 Indeed, it is interesting to find the league’s most interactive website in Oaxaca, still among the nation’s poorest states and likely among the states with least popular Internet access.

3.4 THE STADIUM: OAXACA’S INTERNATIONAL SPACE The Guerreros play in a refurbished Lic. Eduardo Vasconselos Stadium, named after the state governor who allowed the site’s development for a local university in 1950.308 The stadium is enclosed by hulking white walls that near thirty feet tall behind the grandstand. In the center of the complex, on a busy corner of a street called Niños Heroes, is the entry gate,

305 Wysocki, field notes, July 5, 2010. 306 Ibid., July 3, 2010, July 15, 2010. 307 Ibid., June 30; Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy,” Public Culture 2 (1990): 1-24. Appadurai described print media (mediascapes) and technology as extremely fluid in globalization and allows the wide and largely unabated movement of images. For information on services in Oaxaca see Figure 4.2. 308 Alvin Starkman, “Baseball at its Best... Los Guerreros De Oaxaca,” The Pacific Coast of Mexico, March 11, 2006, http://www.tomzap.com/baseball.html (accessed October 4, 2010); Mader, “Baseball in Oaxaca”; “Historia,” Guerreros de Oaxaca. 68 guarded by playful security officers. Across the street are a line of busy taco huts, one with an upper shelf lined with baseballs on bottle-cap stands to remind you the place is baseball- friendly.309 To the left of the front gate of the park sits the ticket window; an imposing six- foot piece of darkened glass about six feet tall sitting atop a four foot concrete half wall. Oddly one cannot see through the glass and can only hear through a four inch slot near its bottom.310 While in the US the standard walk-up ticket purchase on game day has been largely replaced in popularity by Internet purchases, one still cannot purchase tickets for a future Guerreros game. Fans can usually only purchase game day tickets a couple of hours ahead of the first pitch. Depending on the circumstance, the game start times don’t seem to be maintained with much rigidity, making showing up early a fair strategy. Additionally, most fans seem to walk to the ballpark and there is very limited parking, most of it relegated to the street.311 While the stadium retains freshness, indigenous symbolism has not escaped this realm. Indeed, paintings from the renowned Juchiteco artist Demián Flores Cortes were plastered across many of the park’s interior walls. Flores is “obsessed” with baseball symbolism and expresses what he sees as the “violent collisions of competing value systems” in the Isthmus that he sees as both traditional and modern. Two of the more popular pieces in the stadium are an indigenous man in a headdress of feathers and baseball uniform throwing a pitch and an “El Zorro” type of character brandishing a wooden bat and a black mask across his eyes.312 He also displays work depicting changing family life in the region. One spectator believes that the murals fit nicely in the ballpark because Oaxaca “abounds” with artisanal markets and art museums, the domestic product world-renown for their indigenous character and high quality.313 Flores believes that the installment of his ‘gallery’ in the

309 Wysocki, field notes, July 14, 2010. 310 Ibid., July 2, 2010. 311 Starkman, “Baseball at its Best”; Wysocki, field notes. 312 Clark, “We are all Guerreros”; Reed Johnson, “Conflict Resolution,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/feb/19/entertainment/ca-flores19 (accessed July 12, 2010). 313 Clark, “We are all Guerreros”; Ramona L. Perez, “Challenges to Motherhood: The Moral Economy of Oaxacan Ceramic Production and the Politics of Reproduction,” Journal of Anthropological Research Vol. 63 (Fall, 2007): 307-308, 313-314. 69 stadium “brought a cultural space to a public space,” to be enjoyed by all people, not limited to collectors.314 Of course, the public here is limited to those who can afford to attend ballgames. Upon entering the stadium one encounters not only artwork, but also a bustling atrium that leads to two different passages for stadium seating on the third and first base sides.315 The park holds roughly 7,500 people at capacity, about the size of the Mexican League’s smallest parks even in the 1940s. In 2008, in addition to the installment of a state of the art video board in right field and a new canopy roof for the grandstand, about 5,000 seats were replaced.316 In the outfield one still finds affordable bench seating, but the grandstand now has individual numbered red and white (the team colors) plastic seats where only benches once sat.317 Nets line the grandstand providing much needed protection for the fans, but the new tarp-like roof over this section often gives errant foul balls a slingshot action back onto the crowd below.318 The field is an artificial turf in the faux grass, not the ‘astro-turf’ carpet, look. This was likely chosen because it’s cheaper and easier to maintain, not to mention it is practical considering the varying weather patterns of the mountainous region. Field dimensions themselves follow typical MLB guidelines, the left field, center field, and right field fences measuring 350, 410, and 320 feet from home plate, respectively, the outfield walls standing roughly eight feet tall.319 Interestingly, the scoreboard in right-center field listed categories in English including “at-bat,” “runs,” “hits,” and “errors,” and even defensive positions on the field were given their English acronyms with the exception of right field and left field which were demarcated as “JI” (jardinero izquierdo) and “JR” (jardinero derecho).320 In other Latin American countries these designations are made differently, and may say much about

314 Johnson, “Conflict Resolution.” 315 Wysocki, field notes, July 14, 2010. 316 Mader, “Baseball in Oaxaca”; “Historia,” Guerreros de Oaxaca; Wysocki, field notes, July 6, 2010; McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 61. 317 Wysocki, field notes, July 6, 2010. 318 Ibid., July 5, 2010. 319 Mader, “Baseball in Oaxaca”; Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 320 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010; Starkman, “Baseball at its Best.” 70 the respective place. In Cuba, for instance, the scoreboard uses the Spanish version of “runs” (correos) spelling out “C-H-E,” for runs, hits, and errors, linking their political project and baseball together through a seemingly ‘natural’ fit by resurrecting the name of Che Guevara, the ideological lifeblood and hero of a now withering Cuban Revolution.321 The Mexican professional game, however, surely is different from the “amateur” Cuban version in the types of symbols promoted.322 As Figure 3.1 suggests, the real bombardment of images one finds at a Guerreros game is predictably plastic, resembling other professional leagues around the world. Corporate advertisements plaster seemingly every available nook in the park where across the outfield walls one cannot escape from Modelo, Marti Sports, and Banamex. Above the wall stood large twenty foot panels, stretching from foul pole to foul pole, pitching Sports City Gym among others. Finally, competing with the beautiful mountain scenery of the majestic Sierra Juárez from one angle, and the twinkle of the five hundred-year-old urban metropolis from another, are the golden arches of the local McDonald’s restaurant behind the left field wall.323 In 2002, a McDonald’s was to enter the city’s zocaló and was met with intense protest.324 However, today the McDonald’s next to the park seems a local favorite and a Burger King is stationed just a few blocks from both the zocaló and Santo Domingo Church, two of the city’s biggest attractions.325 The city’s lone McDonald’s was likely not placed next to the ballpark by accident as many fans in attendance of baseball games may be reasoned to be somewhat open to American ‘products,’ and arguably few more entities produce or contribute more to this expanding culture than does McDonald’s, among the world’s largest corporations.

321 Eric Enders, “Through the Looking Glass: The Forgotten World of Cuban Baseball,” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 12, (Fall 2003): 147-152; Sujatha Fernandes, Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 130-134. 322 Cuban baseball leagues are considered amateur but players do receive some benefits. Certainly, their alent would place them among the world’s best professionals. See Roberto González Echevarría, The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 363-364. 323 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. The local McDonald’s was frequently packed full during the summer of 2010. 324 Jonathan Clark, “In tradition-minded Oaxaca, 'Antojitos Lupe' is the queen of ballpark snacks,” John Clark, Freelance Reporter, May 19, 2005 (Story originally published in Miami Herald, Mexico edition), http://jonclark500.com/stories/stories/lupe.html (accessed May 11, 2011). 325 Wysocki, field notes. 71

Figure 3.1. Eduardo Vasconselos stadium in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca. Source: photo by author. Taken in July, 2010.

It remains interesting, however, that in the 1940s Jorge Pasquel described the sight of advertisements from Coca-Cola, Seagram’s, Calvert, and Bacardi at Mexican League ball parks positively as vestiges of progress, modernity, and respectability for the league.326 While many westerners may see this barrage of consumer symbols smeared around the stadium as evidence of corporate imperialism, many poor Mexicans do not value “Old México” which often represents poverty and “servitude,” while access to new products and skills associated with the percolation of globalization often makes “traditional” values and lifestyles unwanted.327 Indeed, the baseball stadium is argued to have taken over the religious

326 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 46. 327 David Lida, First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century (Riverhead Books, 2008), 98; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 240-241. 72 cathedral in a new era of human existence dominated by international capital and technology. Here, an image-based shrine, the rituals of consumerism are celebrated and reinforced.328 While cosmopolitan and international capital symbols abound, interestingly missing from the stadium is a visible Mexican flag or a pregame national anthem. This is a far cry from the Cuban and American game where stadiums are emblazoned with national symbols.329 Indeed, even Petco Park in San Diego, California, the home of the San Diego Padres, hoists flags for the US, Canada, and México because of the city’s bi-national community and because of the existence of a Canadian team in MLB. One has to wonder if the effort to promote regional pride, through the naming of the stadium and team and the gallery of Juchiteco art has come at the expense of the Mexican nation, or if the Mexican nation exists at all inside the Oaxacan fortress of modernity.

3.5 THE FLAVOR OF THE GAME The international again invades the local when one examines the variegated food choices at ballgames. When the Guerreros first arrived in 1996 all food concessions were handled through contract by “Antojitos Lupe,” a family business three generations deep with over twenty years of serving experience at municipal and semi-professional baseball games in the state of Oaxaca. The family grandmother, Eustolia Cruz, draped in her rebozo and her braids twisted into the classic rodete, was considered a “fixture” at Guerreros games, balancing baskets on her head while selling empanadas in the stands.330 According to an article on the family, a careful and traditional approach to Oaxacan cooking that stressed “patience and exactitude” was carried over into the family’s preparation for game-day snacks. All ingredients were fresh from local markets and the chefs maintained time-worn techniques of milling corn by stone for empanadas and sun-drying tostadas, all beginning at four in the morning on the day of each contest.331 In addition, one could find chapulines

328 Robert C. Trumpbour, The New Cathedrals: Politics and media in the History of Stadium Construction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 1, 3, 39, 59, 275-276, 283. 329 Wysocki, field notes, July 5, 2010. 330 Clark, “We are all Guerreros.” 331 Ibid. 73

(dried grasshoppers popular in Southern México), hand-packaged seeds, fruit, nuts, esquites, various candies, and tacos.332 The family business thrived for years, beating out powerful competition from corporate foods such as Domino’s Pizza who provided their own vendors at the park. Indeed, the long survival of Antojitos Lupe is seen as a familiar story throughout Oaxaca where “do- it-yourself ethic is more than a way of life, it's a necessity for survival.”333 Competing with Domino’s Pizza proved a difficult task for the home-based business, but the Oaxacan loyalty to wholesome and traditional foods drove them out of the stadium completely in 2005. Another spectator believed that Domino’s “vendors just didn't have that same ‘spark’ as Lupe.”334 Whatever the root of victory, it was short-lived. In the 2010 season Antojitos Lupe no longer sold at the park, the complex’s menu swallowed up by corporate foods.335 Omar Hernández, the business manager of the club, explained that the reason the stadium must provide Domino’s and Pepsi was because young people simply demand it.336 However, the most popular foods seemed to be hot dogs, empanadas, tortas, and tlayudas. The hot dogs were prepared in the atrium near the park’s entrance and usually had a line of customers six to ten-deep. A middle-aged woman took all of the orders and cooked simultaneously. While transnationalism and hybridity are often examined most commonly through language, music, and dance, an examination of the Oaxaca hot-dog may be in order. The standard frank is wrapped in bacon or ham before cooking then placed in a warmed bun, topped with onions, cilantro, jalapeños and other chilis, and then smothered in warm mayonnaise and ketchup, or salsa. This style is close to what Keli Dailey calls “Sonoran style” dogs that have even reached San Diego in 2011.337 Tlayudas, known as a uniquely Oaxacan food, often referred to as the “Oaxacan pizza,” are a common sight in the zocaló in

332 Starkman, “Baseball at its Best”; Mader, “Baseball in Oaxaca”; Clark, “In tradition-minded Oaxaca.” 333 Clark, “In tradition-minded Oaxaca.” 334 Ibid. 335 Mader, “Baseball in Oaxaca.” 336 Omar Hernández, interview by author, San Pablo Huixtepec, Oaxaca, July 6, 2010. 337 Keli Dailey, “Major League Menu”, San Diego Union Tribune, April 4, 2011, http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/apr/04/major-league-menu/ (accessed April 4, 2011). 74

Oaxaca City. These have made their way into the ballpark and are sold from street vendors, appearing to outnumber the sale of hot dogs slightly.338 Ham and pineapple pizza is also served, the dough seemingly extra sugary. Of course, beer, candy, cigarettes, and soft drinks were also all available in great abundance although, according to Hernández, while men over twenty-five drink the majority of the beer, women usually only purchase water.339 With the exception of hot dogs, everything was delivered to fans by vendors.340 The food vendors at the park were not Antojitos Lupe, but they did appear to be a family-run business. Two circled the main walkway on the grandstand, wearing bright orange construction vests and carrying trays or buckets of food and beer. One of the vendors was a woman who often brought her kids to the game. The children, roughly four to seven years old, sat with booklets of reading material or math problems. The female vendor periodically came over to check on the youngest child, who wore a “Bob the Builder” cap, at times laughing at the child’s math answers before giving him encouragement and walking away. At times, however, the kids would steal drinks out of the cooler, causing great stress for their mother who likely didn’t make much money. The other main vendor was a man who primarily sold Corona and Victoria brand beers. During busy games these vendors even had older children go through the crowd and take drink orders, collecting money and being paid some unknown amount in return. There is little doubt that vendors at Mexican ballgames do more to appease the crowd than their US equivalents. Often vendors in Oaxaca carry hot sauce in their trays and offer to empty it into opened potato chip bags, collect garbage, and even wipe down wet seats with a towel always buried in their pockets. Some in the crowd actually demand these services, whistling to get the vendor’s attention, but frequently refusing to acknowledge the existence of the vendor when the task is complete, let alone acknowledge the need for gratuity which doesn’t seem to be common for this type of service.341

338 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010, July 13, 2010, July 14, 2010; See also Clark, “In tradition-minded Oaxaca.” 339 Hernández, interview by author, July 6, 2010. 340 Wysocki, field notes, July 13, 2010. 341 Ibid., July 2, 2010, July 5, 2010, July14, 2010. 75

3.6 MUSIC AND THE “SPECTACLE” While appreciable fans follow the Guerreros even when not attending ballgames, an equal amount admit that the appeal of attendance is the sheer entertainment at the stadium referred to as “the spectacle.”342 Featuring a video board and loud speaker system, the stadium rocks from first pitch until the seventh-inning stretch in an atmosphere that reminds the avid US baseball fan of what they would expect to see at a minor league baseball game at home, where mascots, promotions, and antics border onto the ridiculous to attract people into the game who would not normally find themselves there. Commonly, the ball park plays recycled MLB bloopers and fans clamor to appear on the video board, women drawing predictable catcalls and whistles.343 However, it is through the production of foreign exoticisms, especially that of Caribbean and US culture, and intense sexuality, that prove to be the biggest draw for those seeking entertainment off of the field.344 It is unlikely one will hear a norteño ballad or a country music song at the ballpark through most of the game. More likely, the popular sounds of other prominent baseball producing nations are what rings the ear. Indeed, it is American classic rock and pop, Dominican bachata, Puerto Rican salsa, and reggaeton that get the crowd excited. Often these songs are combined with sexually explicit music videos, sometimes which curse in English and are unlikely to be shown at ballparks in the US.345 Perhaps the selection of hyper-sexual songs and those associated other prominent baseball producers is a way to further commodify and sell an international experience generally associated with modernity. However, a team executive says, like the choices in vended foods, those songs which are selected are those demanded by their consumers.346 The relative absence of regular regional

342 Hernández, interview by author, San Pablo Huixtepec, Oaxaca, July 6, 2010; Miguel, interview by author, San Pablo Huixtepec, Oaxaca, July 5, 2010; Andrés, interview by author, Zimatlán, Oaxaca, July 11, 2010. 343 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010, July 13, 2010, July 14, 2010. 344 Marte E. Savigliano, “Exotic Encounters,” in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, 169-206 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). 345 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 346 Hernández, interview by author. 76 folk songs and conservatism through the majority of the game once again harshly opposes a discourse of a sealed and unchanging Oaxaca. Likely the most popular spectacle at Guerreros games, however, are the Guerreritas, a team of scantily dressed, and poorly choreographed, cheerleaders that prove to be a draw all on their own.347 However, blaming the dancers for their poor routines may be unfair considering the uniform. The six-woman team wears black four-inch heeled boots, which extend up to just above the knee, and black mini-skirts or spandex shorts that barely cover their buttocks. Their tops vary but generally show off their shoulders and stomachs, sometimes the cleavage of their breasts. Clearly the intention is for the girls to be models first, dancers second. All six are attractive, thin, young, have fair skin, wear significant makeup, and some have exposed navel piercings, likely a shocking image for those expecting the totality of Oaxacan women to be reserved and wielding rebozos. Often ballpark sponsors sent their own girls. For example, Modelo beer sent a team of busty dancers dressed similarly that would compete with the Guerreritas in between innings, signing autographs in the down time. On another occasion, a representative from Monroe, an auto-parts company, traversed the grandstand, flirting with men in the crowd and handing out free “thunder-sticks” with “Monroe” emblazoned across them, turning the crowd raucous.348 Like the Monroe and Modelo girls, the Guerreritas are encouraged to walk the main drag of the grandstand every few innings to give their fans a more personal experience.349 They often stop to pose for photos, giggling at the barrage of whistles that are thrown their way from the restless men in the crowd while the women in the stands typically laugh to themselves in embarrassment.350 The cheerleaders even host games and contests between fans in-between innings on the field. In one of these contests, two middle-aged men were pulled out of the crowd and given three heavy bags for which they were to hold out perpendicularly, straight out from their body, to see who could walk the furthest without dropping a bag. With the Guerreritas cheering them on, the men tested their strength, the

347 Hernández, interview by author; Andrés, interview by author; Starkman, “Baseball at its Best.” 348 Wysocki, field notes, July 14, 2010. 349 Hernández, interview by author. 350 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010, July 14, 2010. 77 winner receiving hugs as champion macho.351 Sexuality and machismo are likely not absent in any professional sport around the world, however, the overt sexuality promoted through the Guerreritas and the music videos played at the park are somewhat unique and seem to violate the unwritten code of ethics embedded into baseball lore. It was this civilized nature of the game that had made it an elite modernization practice that stressed discipline, conceivably especially over one’s sexual impulses as well. While few admit it, to this day the US brand still holds these values tight to the chest and cheerleaders have never been widely used in the sport there. In addition to the Guerreritas, there’s Tato, the Guerreros’ mascot. Although he doesn’t take one form, he begins the game typically dressed as a large red-bird wearing a jersey with his name on the back. This stays on throughout the game, but he changes his head piece, sometimes into a black lucha libre wrestling mask or even a mask of a man in black face. This mask would be undoubtedly deemed politically incorrect or even blatantly racist in the US, especially when taunting a Puebla Pericos pitcher from the Dominican Republic who clearly carried African physical traits.352 Indeed, for Tato, the gloves seem to be off. On one occasion, playing off of a sexually explicit music video on the video board, Tato pointed to the crowd and began grind-dancing, miming himself holding a woman in front of him. In order to hammer the point across, he faced the crowd, ran his hands down in an hourglass shape, to mimic a woman’s body, and then thrusted his crotch towards it, quickly pointing to the video board once again before scurrying off into another project. Later in the same game, against the Campeche Piratas, the opponent’s right fielder made an error on a Guerreros’ base hit. After the play, Tato sprinted out towards the player, and, within a few yards of him, lifted his arms in the air, as if to ask, “what happened?” The red-suited mascot then turned around, bent over towards the player, and abruptly pointed to his anus, leading the crowd in a ferocious series of “culo” chants directed at the downtrodden outfielder.353

351 Ibid., July 2; Starkman, “Baseball at its Best.” 352 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 353 Ibid., July 14, 2010. “Culo” is roughly translated as “asshole.” 78

The spectacle, no doubt, consists of a series of odd influences from around the globe in a collaboration that makes the game feel new and exciting. However, the traditional that so many want to find when they travel to Oaxaca is also not completely left out, and, in fact, makes the Oaxacan ballgame distinctly unique from other stadiums within the Mexican League. For example, in Oaxaca, the seventh inning stretch serves as a departure point in the common event of rain, a unique function. Therefore, the spectacle is planned throughout the match up until the middle of the seventh inning, from which point “it’s all baseball.”354 However, the game becomes much more regional here as well. Indeed, if there is no rain, the traditional “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is not sung during the stretch, as it is widely in the US and other Latin American countries, but instead a stream of local folk songs are played as the crowd sings along.355 Indeed, since the club’s inception, “Mi Linda Oaxaca” has played in place of the American piece.356 The lyrics read as follows: Oaxaca, vives en mí (Oaxaca, you live in me) y yo por ti doy la vida, (and for you I give my life) oye la voz de mi angustia (it hears the voice of my anguish) que llora y que canta (that cries and that sings) queriendo volver. (wanting to return) Linda Oaxaca de mi alma, (Pretty Oaxaca of my soul,) no quiero morirme (I don’t want to die) sin volverte a ver [...] (without returning to see you…)357 Other songs that frequent the latter innings or postgame celebrations are the “Pinotepa Nacional” and “El Dios Nunca Muere.”358 In addition to the seventh-inning stretch, the fans sing a cheer after every home victory. The cheer follows, “A la bio, a la bao, a la bin bon bah, Guerreros, Guerreros, rah rah rah.”359

354 Hernández, interview by author. 355 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 356 Clark, “We are all Guerreros." 357 Ernesto Valenzuela, “La geografía en la música tradicional mexicana como estrategia didáctica,” Revista Investigación Universitaria Multidisciplinaria (December 2004): 90. 358 Starkman, “Baseball at its Best”; Hernández, interview by author. 359 Mader, “Baseball in Oaxaca.” 79

3.7 WHO’S WHO? THE GUERREROS FANS While profiling the game’s attributes and ‘popular’ expressions, or Flores’ “public,” we must understand what we really are profiling. It is important to note that the estimated average annual per-capita income in the state of Oaxaca sits at a despicable $3,400, among the lowest in all of México; México City lies near $20,000, according to one organization. Certainly one would not expect a family from the Mixteca to make the trek to attend a game in normal circumstances anyway, but the fact of the matter is that Oaxaca is host to great social and economic inequality even within the Valley.360 However, the municipality of Oaxaca de Juárez, where the Guerreros play, has the seventh highest per capita income among the state’s 570 municipalities at $11,491 a year. Surrounding communities in the Valley such as Zimatlán de Alvarez and Ocotlán de Morelos rank high as well at $5,333 and $5,833, respectively, although far off the capital’s numbers.361 Even San Pablo Huixtepec, while not having accurate income data available, likely lies in the more affluent category due to their extremely high rates of US-bound migration. All of these communities are within fifty kilometers of Oaxaca City and one can easily find a bus, collectivo (collective taxi), or drive their personal cars to games in a relatively short trip. Hernández, however, is forced to admit that costs of attendance remain very restrictive for most Oaxacans. The Guerreros offer tickets that range from 10 pesos (US$1.00), in the metal bleachers in left field, to 70 pesos (US$7.00) for ground level seats next to the clubs’ dugouts.362 Interestingly, these prices are comparable to many Mexican League prices in the 1940s that ran about US$3.50.363 However, seemingly 85 percent of the

360 Oaxaca Fund Initiative, “About Oaxaca,” by Fundación Comunitaria Oaxaca and International Community Foundation, http://oaxaca.icf-xchange.org/aboutoaxaca (accessed March 2, 2011). Reliable income data is difficult to find. Most economic data here is estimated by the International Community Foundation and the Fundación Comunitaria Oaxaca. Typically, the ICF does not provide raw dollar figures for estimates. The organization says its data comes from the “PNUD (Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo) 2003, Informe sobre desarrollo humano México 2002,” or the United Nations Development Programme. The figures in this research are meant to primarily give the reader an idea of relative conditions in Oaxaca and México. However, the literal figures themselves may be fairly scrutinized. 361 Oaxaca Fund Initiative, “About Oaxaca.” 362 At the time of the research, the exchange rate of one dollar US was equal to roughly ten Mexican pesos. 363 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 61; Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010, July 5, 2010, July 6, 2010. 80 crowd sits in the 50 peso (US$5.00) “Central” grandstand behind home plate or the 40 peso (US$4.00) “Laterales” that parallel the outfield foul lines.364 Also, women get entry into gates at half of the cost of men.365 Considering the ballgame experience that many covet as part of the spectacle, which generally includes eating from the concessions or buying club merchandise, or both, the picture becomes more ominous. The club recognizes the high price of concessions, saying a slice of pizza was roughly 30 pesos and drinks were priced highly as well.366 Hot dogs and tlayudas were priced at 15 pesos each.367 All in all, games run about $15 per person in the opinion of one American, if one is sitting in the grandstand and not buying merchandise.368 If we were to accept the $15 figure, which seems fair considering the cost of concessions and transportation, then someone making an average income in Oaxaca City would be surrendering roughly 0.1 percent of their annual income for an excursion at the park. For better perspective, if we apply this percentage to the average per capita income of someone in the US, a Guerreros game would cost roughly $40. Now if we compare the original $15 figure to the average income of someone in Zimatlán de Alvarez, the percentage of annual income sits at 0.3 percent for a single-game attendance. Again, compared to the US equivalent this would represent nearly $119 per person. Now, if the original $15 figure is compared to the average of San Simón Zahuatlán, the poorest municipality in Oaxaca where per-capita income is near $933, a Guerreros game represents 1.6 percent of annual income. For an American this same distribution would mean a game costs $634.369 It is not hard then to understand that, even for Oaxacans in the highest income levels, Guerreros games are

364 Guerreros de Oaxaca, “Localidades,” http://www.guerrerosdeoaxaca.com.mx/?page_id=82 (January 2, 2011); Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010, July 5, 2010, July 6, 2010; Hernández, interview by author. 365 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 61; Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 366 Hernández, interview by author. 367 Wysocki, field notes, July 14, 2010. 368 Starkman, “Baseball at its Best.” 369 Bureau of Business and Economic Research,“Per Capita Personal Income by State,” http://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-pci.htm (accessed April 2, 2011); Oaxaca Fund Initiative,“Oaxaca's Per Capita Income by Municipality,” http://oaxaca.icf-xchange.org/munipercap.html (accessed March 3, 2011). The figure for Americans was calculated based on the average per-capita income in the US. US per-capita income data was taken at 2009 levels from the University of New México and is estimated at $39,626. 81 quite restrictive, if not impossible, for many to attend without sacrificing significant time and money needed by many for basic food and shelter. Indeed, even among those who attend the game, the difference in price works to separate the rich in the grandstand and poor in the outfield bleachers just as it does in most professional venues globally and as it had in the bullring during the early Porfiriato.370 As one would expect, the cost restrictions largely expose the Guerreros regulars. While demographics by age and gender are mixed, the core following of Guerreros fans are males between the ages of 35 and 70, mostly because this is the group that has the best prospects of finding jobs that pay well enough to support attending multiple games.371 Most of the regulars were dressed nearly head to toe in Guerreros merchandise including officially licensed fitted hats, jerseys, shirts, and jackets. Some even bring their gloves.372 If one wants to purchase a jersey, one heads into the “Guerreromania” atrium merchandise booth. Here, while the lines were always bustling at the food vending booths, the merchandise line was rarely more than one or two people deep, most often empty.373 Here jerseys cost 650 pesos, or roughly $65, while fitted caps ran between 225 to 250 pesos, or $22.50 to $25.00.374 The prices of official jackets are typically much higher in professional baseball; almost double the cost of the jerseys, so their prevalence among the regulars in the crowd is quite indicative of from where these fans come. The regulars were fairly easy to recognize and all seemed to know each other, at least superficially. Among them is an elderly man, perhaps in his seventies. He wore a tall straw sombrero, painted red and black, and a button-up beige shirt. Carrying a drum at his waist, the man gave a slow and steady beat that he hoped would pace the Guerreros to victory.375 Another man, thin and feasibly in his sixties, consistently wore a red Guerreros winter jacket, an Atlanta Braves cap, and what could be considered a trademark white Porfirian mustache.

370 Wysocki, field notes; Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 5. 371 Hernández, interview by author; Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 372 Wysocki, field notes, July 5, 2010. 373 Ibid., July 13, 2010, July 14, 2010. 374 Ibid., July 5, 2010, July 13, 2010. Currency conversion figures based on marks from April 4, 2011. 375 Ibid., July 2, 2010. 82

In the first few rows sat a young man, likely in his mid-twenties, wearing a grey Guerreros jacket, who always kept score with a pencil and old fashioned baseball score sheets. He normally talked to another younger man, possibly the same age, a few seats away, who wore a red and black Guerreros jacket. Then, always sitting alone, was a young man who dressed as if he was the first player off the bench for the team, in official red jersey and fitted black cap pinned down as if he was on the mound ready to challenge the next hitter. On cold nights he predictably slung a solid black Guerreros jacket over his shoulder, but he always wore his blindingly white Nike “kicks.”376 For those in the grandstands, it was clear that attendance at Guerreros games may have functioned as a “technique of sociability;” a space for the accumulation of social capital among what appeared to be people of the upper classes.377 Just because the Guerreros grandstand is likely dominated by the region’s wealthy doesn’t mean Guerreros fans are reserved. In between every pitch one is likely to hear random cheers and sound making devices inspired from within the crowd.378 In addition to the elderly drumming man, one may see people clapping ‘thunder-sticks,’ spinning wooden noisemakers, banging their seats, striking cowbells, or shaking rattles. At one game, a boy even brought a trumpet.379 The fan base is strong even facing as much as a ten run deficit in the last innings. The crowd never seems to have their spirit leave them; even in the case of a tie score one may find themselves witness to the raining of confetti.380 The behavior of the crowd stems likely from a certain feeling of closeness that fans feel with players in the Mexican League. Indeed, in Oaxaca, players are actively engaged in conversation with fans while waiting for their turn to bat in the on-deck circle and the ballpark is likely one of the only professional baseball venues where the fan shares a bathroom and urinal with the actual uniformed, and cleated, players mid-game.381 This closeness is never more evident than the disruptive and consistent razzing of opponents

376 Ibid., July 14, 2010. 377 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 372. 378 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 379 Ibid., July 2, 2010, July 5, 2010, July 14, 2010; Clark, “We are all Guerreros.” 380 Wysocki, field notes, July 14, 2010; Clark, “We are all Guerreros.” 381 Wysocki, field notes, July 13, 2010. 83 through whistles, the Mexican equivalent of booing, and derogatory name calling.382 The fans surely make the most of what they pay for in a seemingly open social engagement. In fact, once in the early 1940s, Don Beaver Monton, one of the Mexican League’s early promoters and owners, was rushed and attacked inside his luxury box at his own park because the team had committed so many errors.383 Mexican League players of the same period, especially foreigners, often begged teammates not to botch a play in fear of the raucous reaction from the ruthless fans. At that time it became necessary for Mexican League officials to line the field with police officers armed with teargas; the same period that baseball fans rioted in Oaxaca City when unhappy with the results of the city championship.384 Any action can trigger fan arousal; however, the most fervent reactions come after an error, a home run allowed, or when a player gets hurt. In one game experienced during my research, Willis Otañez, slugger for the Puebla Pericos, fouled a ball off of his ankle and fell to the ground. The crowd taunted him to no end, some even cheering, but most calling him names because he was revealing pain.385 A couple of days later, a different Pericos player was hammered in the middle of his back by a 90 mile-per hour fastball, forcing a gasping “AHH!” to echo through the park. The crowd stood up and whistled at him, calling him “culero” as he rolled at home plate in pain.386 One American and former Guerreros outfielder Greg Martinez said, “I've found that in México I've been offended pretty much the most I've been offended anywhere.”387 He followed this quote up by stating the personal nature of obscenities, most often against his mother or sexual acts involving a donkey.388 Even umpires, symbols of paternalism and authoritarianism in many Latin American baseball leagues, are not immune to this fan on-field dialogue. On one occasion an umpire

382 Ibid., July 14, 2010. 383 McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues, 43. 384 Ibid., 46. 385 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 386 Ibid., July 5, 2010. 387 Clark, “We are all Guerreros.” 388 Ibid. 84 received a foul tip into the crotch, dropping him immediately to both knees and prompting a collective gasp from the empathetic crowd. However, it didn’t take long for this empathy to turn into parody as whistles, obscenities, and laughter filled the Oaxaca night sky. After a man called him a “chela,” a term used to describe both a cold beer and a perfect woman in México, the umpire got up, splashed water on his face and with great haste threw the mask back on his head, bending over to call the next pitch. The crowd roared in support as the umpire had risen up to their challenge of toughness.389 Alan Klein experienced a similar incident at a winter league game for the Laredo Tecos, where an umpire was also struck in the crotch by an errant ball. Similarly he was subsequently razzed by the crowd, but instead he shot back, “Chingen sus madres, pendejos!” to the awe of the audience, before laughing loudly and resuming the game, drawing the crowd into cheers once again.390 For Klein, one’s machismo isn’t measured in sexual exploits or how much alcohol one can consume, but instead it’s more specifically a behavioral mix of pride and humility where one is respected by the community if they remain steadfast to the unwritten code.391 Clearly, then, fan and umpire dialogue resembles much of this process. Crowd participation in the stands is certainly unique in the sport compared to American and Asian games. Indeed, “catcalls,” certain putdowns, and the treatment of injured players may be perhaps considered rude or uncivil for the sport. This difference reveals a sort of raw and honest aspect of the Mexican game but also reveals how many in the society measure each other. Octavio Paz believed that the jokes from the macho are exaggerated, individual, and absurd, often evoking violence or symbolic tearing or ripping, a symptomatic feeling of helplessness inherited from a culture raped in colonization.392 Often spaces in Oaxaca are gendered, as are behaviors associated for those spaces. The “profane” reserved for males and the “sacred” for women, severely limiting both in many respects.393 However, these spaces can blend at sporting events and fiestas, as was documented by one

389 Wysocki, field notes, July 5, 2010. 390 Klein, Baseball on the Border, 156. 391 Ibid., 152. 392 Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 81. 393 Norget, Days of Death, Days of Life, 74. 85 journalist who saw women participating in and perpetuating machista culture despite simultaneously “venting their rage” at it during a lucha libre match.394 For Paz, “The humor of the macho is an act of revenge.”395 However, despite the ever obvious presence of the city’s wealthy elite at ballgames, the selling of the game itself as a spectacle, and the relative vulgarity of fan behavior compared to the sport’s intended purposes as a civilized enclave, show evidence that baseball in Oaxaca, has, in fact, been seized back by the popular at least in spirit.396 The insults, music, and cheers are believed to not only prove an advantage for the home team by distracting opponents, but, according to Solis, also ferment a growing unity among the fans through laughter. For these reasons, these behaviors are not only welcomed, but encouraged by the team.397 Indeed, Elias and Dunning claim that because of the strong “in group” and “out group” associations in modern sport, with teams and players representing cities and countries, a powerful “in-group identification” that is created at sporting events are perhaps among the few ways cities can unite in contemporary times due to rising inequality and increased displacement.398 Despite the fervor present at ball games and the seeming personal relationship between fans and players, a Guerreros game has never sold out in Oaxaca, and most often the venue appears about one third to half full.399 Because of restrictive costs, groups are generally small, even for families, limited to about three people or less. The Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú even claims that the Guerreros have lost significant money since bringing the team to Oaxaca, and are appealing to the state government to help support the professional club and its facilities through promotion and fundraising.400 Indeed, tickets are

394 Ibid.; Lida, First Stop in the New World, 65. 395 Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 81. Emphasis in the original. 396 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 363. 397 Clark, “We are all Guerreros.” 398 Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 223. 399 Hernández, interview by author; Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 400 Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Deportes, “Baseball Projects,” http://www.fahh.com.mx/ModeloArtsFijos.aspx?l=en&s=1&idx=66 (accessed February 12, 2011); Archivo del Beisbol, “Nuestro Fundador.” 86 often given away to government workers and corporations before they go on sale at the ballpark, the club with little hope of filling to capacity.401 However, this may not have indicated a long-term downward trend. In 2006 and 2007 the Guerreros tallied more than 123,000 for yearly attendance, respectively. In 2008 that figure rose to 149,492 only to climb by over 25 percent in 2009, reaching a staggering 200,822, a year where the Guerreros finished third to last with a dismal 42-63 record. This year they even outgained the México City Diablos Rojos, one of the league’s best draws, by nearly fifteen thousand. In 2010, the number settled back at 166,393.402

3.8 THE OTHER PRODUCT: PLAYERS AND THE BODY The spectacle and fans aside, certainly the play on the field is a significant part of the entertainment of the eighty-seven year old league. While the league does feature international players, it is unique in that it relies primarily on Mexican-only talent, capping the number of foreigners for each team, unlike the winter league that features the best players available regardless of nationality. The reasons for this strategy are partially rooted in marketing, perhaps a symptom of the league’s overall weakness, as it is much easier to sell players from one’s region if the fan base largely is indifferent to winning or losing. The other option would be to attract a major superstar as the Pasquels attempted for many years. Clearly, judging by rumored salaries, this is not an option for most Mexican League clubs. The Mexican League is among the few major baseball leagues globally to not publish their team payrolls, a right reserved from Ley López, which argued owners had license to block certain information related to their private business.403 For this, there are no precise numbers published on what players earn, and during interviews one front office executive seemed personally insulted when the practice was questioned.404 While LMP players are said to make roughly 10,000 pesos (US$1,000) to 150,000 pesos (US$15,000) per month,405

401 Hernández, interview by author. 402 Baseball Reference, “Mexican League (AAA), Encyclopedia and History.” 403 Schultz, “El Rey de Deportes,” 142. 404 Ibid., 7; Wysocki, field notes, July 6, 2010; Hernández, interview by author. 405 Schultz, “El Rey de Deportes,” 142. 87 rumor has it that those in the Mexican League make between $2,000 to $20,000 per month, depending on skill level, popularity, and experience. This figure is likely competitive, although it falls well short of the Dominican League.406 While many Mexican League teams target local players, this has been especially pressing for the Guerreros who represent a region that is largely in extreme poverty and has little experience with professional baseball. According to Hernández, it is very important for the Guerreros to find players like Jaime Brena, current second baseman and an Oaxacan native from San Sebastian Etla in the Valley. Fans can personally identify with players like Brena, making travel of great distances to see them far more likely. The infielder admits there is an additional responsibility to perform for the home crowd for this reason, as he believes they see him as one of their own. He said, “They'll always say to me: ‘I go to the stadium to see you play, so if you're not playing, I have no reason to go.’” Indeed, Brena even has held a special biographical section in the club’s media guide.407 Other players have emerged from the state to find great success. Among them are Vinny Castilla, a former MLB third baseman from Oaxaca City, and Geronimo Gil, a former MLB catcher from El Barrio de la Soledad. Gil did briefly play for the Guerreros in 2008 before Harp Helú traded him to his other team, rival México City.408 In fact, Gil and Brena are currently the only players in the Mexican League listed as from Oaxaca, and those good Oaxacan players that do exist often play in the Isthmus which hosts their own semi-pro circuit.409 While nearly one-hundred Mexican players have played in MLB, just two of them have been from Oaxaca.410 In México’s Salon de la Fama in Monterrey, the Hall of Fame for players of México’s professional leagues, there are 183 players enshrined for outstanding

406 John French, email with author, January 29, 2011. French is currently a pitcher in Major League Baseball and has experience playing in Latin America. 407 Clark,“We are all Guerreros.” 408 Baseball Reference, “Geronimo Gil,” http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=gil--- 001ger (February 23, 2011). 409 La Liga Mexicana de Béisbol, http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?sid=l125 (accessed March 10, 2011). 410 Baseball Historian, “Mexico Béisbol,” http://www.baseballhistorian.com/mexico_baseball.cfm (accessed February 23, 2011); Baseball Almanac, “Major League Baseball Players Born in Mexico,” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/birthplace.php?loc=México (accessed February 27, 2011). 88 achievement. Of these, 153 are Mexican-born. Of these Mexican-born players, none are from Oaxaca.411 Every Mexican team does feature some foreigners to compete and keep play on the field exciting. Indeed, many of the imported Dominican pitchers seem especially superior to Mexican equivalents.412 Carrying foreigners also increases star power as the Mexican League has often been the site where failed MLB prospects such as Ruben Rivera, the former San Diego Padres outfielder, once considered the “next Mickey Mantle,” come to realize their potential, or where former regulars fritter in their twilight.413 Some notable names that have played on the Guerreros have included former All-Star Felix José of the St. Louis Cardinals, Randy Milligan of the Baltimore Orioles, Hector Villanueva of the Chicago Cubs, Juan Uribe of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Luis Sojo of the New York Yankees, and even Jim Leyritz, World Series hero of the Yankees and Padres.414 Undoubtedly, these foreigners have been among the club’s top performers.415 While foreign players enhance the quality of play, fans cannot connect with them as easily because they tend to leave after a season or two due to restrictive salary demands versus cheaper Mexican equivalents.416 While the terms ‘property’ and ‘product’ are often used to describe players, much to the delight of Marxists, the aesthetics of the professional Mexican game force one to think in these terms. Like professionalism everywhere, the promotion of consumer products and services has gone hand in hand in the sport’s production, as was described with the stadium’s outfield signage. However, in the Mexican League, the uniform serves as bonus advertising space.417 In fact, the Guerreros uniform design left little space for the individual in 2010, a

411 Salón de la Fama, “Immortales,” http://www.salondelafama.com.mx/salondelafama/trono/default_trono.asp. (accesed February 22, 2011). 412 Wysocki, field notes, July 5, 2010, July 14, 2010. 413 Mal Florence, “USC Frequents Pick and Save to Buy a Tie,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1994, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-11-28/sports/sp-2360_1_usc-tie-team (accessed April 23, 2011). 414 Baseball Reference, “Mexican League (AAA), Encyclopedia and History.” 415 Baseball Reference, “2010 Guerreros de Oaxaca,” http://www.baseball- reference.com/minors/team.cgi?id=8dadb97c (accessed March 23, 2011). 416 Hernández, interview by author. 417 Wysocki, field notes, July 14, 2010. 89 large Modelo Especial patch running across the middle of their backs where typically a player’s last name would be found.418 In the past, the Guerreros wore large “Volkswagen” emblems on their backs and each player was introduced during his at-bat with a different sponsor.419 The Campeche Piratas had it worse, however, resembling auto drivers with large patches on their left thighs, a Telcel patch across their stomachs as big as their team name, and an elephantine Tecate patch across their upper backs.420 These uniform tendencies led one scholar to compare players to “walking billboards,” symbolic of the excessive corporate concessions given by the Mexican government during waves of neoliberalism.421 Perhaps to find an individual space, players are often seen loaded with jewelry, chewing tobacco in their back pockets, and big-league style sunglasses, all of which are common in MLB.422 Comically, many players’ wives in the LMP believe that much of the machismo found in baseball players is derived or enabled by the player uniforms that are worn “like a badge,” as if giving those who don them immediate and legitimate physical power over others.423 In fact, in the LMP, players actively engage with each other in macho challenges where lines like “ese vato no se raja,” work to call out what is “real,” while simultaneously actively measuring toughness in a “sexually-anally aggressive” way, a characteristic found in Mesoamerican cultures which once used symbolic and real anal rape of idols and enemies to publicly display their own positions of power and prestige.424 This language is used between ballplayers to naturally get “sexual one-upmanship” over others and double-entendres such as “cachucha” and “Sácala” pock the Mexican baseball landscape.425 Considering the percolation of other extreme sexually active symbols in the

418 Ibid., July 2, 2010. 419 Starkman, “Baseball at its Best.” 420 Wysocki, field notes, July 14, 2010. 421 Schultz, “El Rey de Deportes,” 30. 422 Wysocki, field notes, July 5, 2010. 423 Klein, Baseball on the Border, 158. 424 Sigal, 28. Klein, Baseball on the Border, 155-158. 425 The rough translation for “ese vato no se raja” is “that guy doesn’t back out, he’s not a pussy.” “Cachucha” refers to both a baseball cap and a woman who is of little value, or used up, and thus can be thrown out at any moment. “Sácala” means both “knock it out of the park” and to “pull it out,” meaning one’s penis out of his pants. See Klein, Baseball on the Border, 155, 157. 90

Guerreros spectacle, and the prevalence of Northern Mexican players in the Mexican League, the same regions that dominate the LMP, it is reasonable to believe this culture exists in Oaxaca as well. Baseball all over the world seems to promote some aspects of the macho in its most intimate and frequent movements, much like other modern sport. While the US contemporary version of the game has given heavy space to the home run ball, a symbol of power and domination, the Mexican game seems to worship this style of play. Indeed, Klein has noticed a “cult of home runs” with the Tecos as well, where a player’s ability to run was near unimportant and ‘round-trippers’ were celebrated with a powerful salute, or “chop,” from the chest.426 Indeed, the Mexican League seems to play a brand of ball that can be labeled relatively “stiff,” perhaps “choreographed,” in that one rarely sees a “scrappy” or “dirty” player who gives full effort on each play at the expense of his unperturbed and vainglorious, yet rugged, style.427 Pierre Bourdieu, in fact, noted the masculinity in modern sport as “an artistic practice but it affirms the manly virtues” of a society’s young leaders.428 Often “body culture” of sports, especially professional modern sport, is used as an exclusionary ritual, a feature expressed by the cientificos of the Porfiriato who tied control over the body to represent civility and refinement.429 According to Bourdieu, the style of a body’s movement reflects the social position of the person, and a reflection of their experience of their social, and sometimes physical, world. Indeed, physical space and distance from one’s opponent in, and on, the field often works to reflect the social distance one occupies when dealing with “adversaries” off of the field in their respective social world. The practices most “distinctive” are those with the most distance from one’s opponent.430 The emphasis placed on the stylized power of baseball in México may be an inheritance of its affluent roots, and the modern era pursuit of civility that has provided

426 Klein, Baseball on the Border, 155. 427 Ibid., 152; Wysocki, field notes, July 5, 2010. 428 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 360. 429 Schultz, “El Rey de Deportes,” 25. 430 Pierre Bourdieu, “Programme for a Sociology of Sport,” in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, by Pierre Bourdieu, trans. by Matthew Adamson, 156-167 (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1990), 157. 91 escapism where all participants occupy elitist spaces. The style represents a clear distance from the ‘gritty’ expressions seen in other baseball producing countries, and the batter works to measure his own success by the distance from which he can drive the ball, preferably all the way out of the park, thereafter not even needing to run the bases, but instead jogging slowly where he bakes in the glory of adoring fans. Indeed, modern sport was initially intended for the gentleman who exercised “strict self-control” and had no need for “immediate gratification” like that of running out a ground ball.431 While the player may feel in control by not seizing these minimal gains, ultimately his restriction of bodily movements represents a larger obedience to the sport’s initial controllers, and may fear the inherent punishments associated.432 Indeed, “Bodily discipline is the instrument par excellence of every kind of domestication.”433 Further, the “self-assured slowness” and the ideological worship of mastering one’s bodily movement works as a sign of disinterest compared to the “working-class abruptness and petty-bourgeois eagerness.”434 The Japanese game is commonly known for its strategically strict adherence to the fundamentals, sacrifice, and discipline, as well as its scrappy play. These features are considered symbolically feminine in relation to the Mexican preference for controlled physical strength, contributing deeper into the Orientalized discourse on men in Asian culture thought of as feminine, weak, and unchanging, placing México at some level above some that play internationally.435 Emphasizing power also allows greater confrontation against another country almost as obsessed with home runs: the US, with whom a tumultuous and bitter relationship resulted in the evolution of contemporary machismo, according to Paredes.436

431 Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 220. 432 Ibid. 433 Bourdieu, “Programme for a sociology of sport,” 168. 434 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 372. 435 Daisuke Nishihara, “Said, Orientalism, and Japan,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 25 (2005): 249; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 436 Klein, Baseball on the Border, 151. 92

Paz may have hyperbolized and may be considered outdated in contemporary academic circles. However, as Klein surmises, Paz is describing an outfit of male behaviors and attitudes that do exist in some shape or form in México.437 Indeed, like the reenactment of conquest popular in celebrations of the nation during the Porfiriato, with European men symbolically overpowering Indian women, baseball in its style proves to function as a performative masculinity, an element attributed to a developing Mexican citizenship even in Revolutionary México.438 Perhaps, then, baseball in Oaxaca was officially intended to also instill these performative, notably masculine, qualities into their own mass of Orientalized and feminized indigenous demographics.

3.9 CONCLUSION While Oaxaca sits at México’s most southern border, the domestic professional game was created and molded like a clay model from MLB. Most of the league’s players hail from Sinaloa, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Baja California, and Sonora and are brought south. It is through professional baseball, then, at its highest level in México that the nation’s northern borders begin to be redrawn through relational experiences between players and other players, and players with fans. The game, through advertising, music, and the players themselves, provides an international space interpreted by a select group of Oaxacans that attend games, as every symbol in the stadium is in some way bent to satisfy their preferences as consumers. Mass marketing and use of media in Oaxaca have further muddled this experience where a Guerreros game is more than just baseball; it is a spectacle. It’s a spectacle not because of the half-naked dancers and an outrageous mascot, although they do contribute significantly, but in the plethoric music, rituals, and food hailing from baseball’s imagined and real roots in the US and the Caribbean. Indeed, while the fan base is largely affluent, and the professional modern game works to control all aspects of participation, including the limiting of fan physical violence, the history and confrontation from fans with owners and players shows that Oaxacan baseball, indeed, cannot belong specifically or completely to those who

437 Ibid., 154. 438 Beezley, Mexican National Identity, 67; Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Post Revolutionary México, 11. 93 produce it at its highest levels.439 Indeed, “capitalism does not only destructure and isolate: it also reunifies and resets the scattered pieces into a new system.”440 While the Guerreros wish to claim their indigenous heritage by evoking Zapotec symbols of resistance and battle, their product serves as a playground for modernity and consumerism through its most expedient contemporary channels and works to reinforce these traits into those who attend and participate in games. Indeed, the Mexican League’s obsession with statistics, like other major leagues around the world, pushes a capitalist message across to its participants, stressing hard work and individualism. In many ways, Oaxacan professional baseball represents nicely what Oaxaca is becoming. While the state retains many of its traditional symbols, it is little doubt modern in most definable aspects while allowing space for some to call the game’s production in the capital city “distinctly Oaxacan.”441 No one discourse can be applied evenly throughout the state. Like Nahua markets and Mexican puppet shows that made communication and definition of symbols expedient, the professional baseball stadium represents a “point of contact,” a border overlapping with borders and a folding of places common in a period of rapid economic and technological expansion that has made physical space itself less important in some respects.442 Places like this force the academic to think of Oaxaca outside of the “traditional” and accept a discourse that gives inhabitants room to maneuver. The state has never been completely shut out from, or ignorant to, the “modern,” but the stadium itself represents the state’s furthest reach into what is among the most capitalist and cosmopolitan of spaces in the world. Whatever the intention of the sport’s producers, however, the economic realities of the vast majority of Oaxacans restrict access to the Guerreros whether it be through live attendance, watching on television, or interacting on the Internet. The professional game, then, should be considered primarily an exclusionary production, but one with flexibility.

439 Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 222. 440 García-Canclini, Transforming Modernity, 64. 441 Clark, “We are all Guerreros.” 442 Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest, 170; Beezley, Mexican National Identity, 105-117; Schultz, “El Rey de Deportes,” 5-6. 94

CHAPTER 4

PLAYING THE FIELD: COMPETITING MODERNITIES AND SHIFTING BORDERS IN OAXACA’S OTHER LEAGUES

Baseball has no grand narrative among communities in the Valley or the Isthmus, and its participation varies greatly.443 The sport was initially brought by foreign engineers and companies and was further promoted by elites during the Porfiriato as an exclusionary practice. More integrative aspects of the game were promoted during a wave of indigenismo in the Revolutionary period from 1910 to 1946.444 Certainly baseball in the Valley has not been wholly elite in production and the wider availability of communications technologies have helped create undercurrents of baseball belonging. Indeed, sociologist Brian Petrie placed heavy emphasis on sport as a relevant political and social study because it is part of a “social reality” and “anchored” to the political and economic system. He argues that it outlines and underlies all the major ideologies of those in power yet all levels of society can use sport as a way to grab power or to be exploited.445 Contemporary baseball in the Valley and the Isthmus draws participation at multiple levels. There are youth leagues, amateur adult leagues, and semi-professional leagues. Within these leagues teams come to fruition for different reasons, influenced by historical identity, a desire to feel a part of a modern community, the need for exercise, the desire for entertainment, and as a way to escape from poverty with the rise of professionalism in

443 Wysocki, field notes, July 2, 2010. 444 Beezley and MacLachlan, Mexicans in Revolution, 170-171; Charles A. Hale, “The Liberal Impulse: Daniel Cosío Villegas and the Historia Moderna de Mexico,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (1974): 485-486. William Beezley used these years to mark the span of the México Revolution. In 1946 land reform was largely halted and México entered a period of corruption and growing inequality where many of the Revolution’s perceived gains were reversed. These trends were noted by Daniel Cosío as well as noted by Hale. Neo-Porfirianism is more commonly used to describe México from the 1980s to the present. 445 Petrie, “Sport and Politics,” 190-192. 95 baseball. Additionally, similar to the Porfiriato and Revolutionary periods, governments and local business continue to use the game as a way to promote their own agenda. Just as during the Porfiriato, nearly all of Oaxacans want a piece of modernity, just some want more say in what modernity looks like and who defines it. This chapter examines these competing “modernities” in an economic period similar to that of the Porfiriato where a neoliberal push since President Carlos Salinas (1988-1994) has deepened canyons that have dissected Oaxaca’s rich and poor. This chapter reopens questions about how and why baseball came to the Oaxaca Valley and the Isthmus and compares this to how and why baseball is produced in present times. It is also logical to elucidate who exactly has and is playing. Moreover, this chapter seeks answers on why and how people from all segments of society feel baseball belongs to them. This section relies heavily on the voices of Oaxacans.

4.1 AMATEUR LEAGUES AND GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATION San Pablo Huixtepec is a small municipality just outside of Zimatlán, and an hour bus ride from the capital. It was once a crossroads for development in the Valley and was situated among productive mines and Hamilton’s railroad. However, after the Revolution and the decline of mining, little lasting economic opportunities remained. It is possible that a baseball team once existed here as the sun set on the Porfiriato, but if one did, it certainly left with the foreign capital from which it arrived. It was in 1958, however, when the town’s baseball spirit was reawakened, in part from one man’s acquisition of a radio and to a mythical historical connection between the modern sport and the ancient indigenous ball game known as pelota mixteca that made baseball feel natural and inherently indigenous. Rodolfo, a 68-year-old very fit local, claims that San Pablo never had foreign investment or Mexican corporations but rather was just a small conglomeration of farms and humble homes in the 1950s. At that time Rodolfo and his teenage friends gained access to a radio that played MLB and Mexican League games, which helped ferment excitement in a new feeling of closeness to the US and México City.446 Indeed, like the almanacs from the

446 Rodolfo, interview by author, San Pablo Huixtepec, Oaxaca, July 12, 2010. 96

Revolutionary period that helped ethnically, linguistically, and regionally diverse Mexicans imagine a fresh collective sense of place, baseball on the radio worked as a “vehicle of culture,” allowing those in the community to think outside of its relatively bucolic and pastoral existence.447 At sixteen, Rodolfo and a handful of friends took to the open fields, wearing towels around their hands in place of expensive leather gloves and using a ball that was made from whatever they could find.448 Soon after, the group created a team name, “Los Tigres de Huixtepec,” and entered into the Valley’s popular Liga Joaquin Amaro, an amateur circuit supported by a band of local promoters who organized tournaments and championships between clubs from all over the Valley.449 San Pablo grew enough to create a tiered four- team pyramid-style system that would ensure that the community’s best players would end up on a single team in order to compete with Valley powerhouses from the communities of Tlacolula, Etla, Zimatlán, and Colonia Reforma.450 At times the team would even get a crack at distant clubs from Puerto Escondido and the Isthmus that exposed many to far regions of the state for perhaps the first time.451 The Tigres acted as a catalyst for community building against rival municipios and offered a unique opportunity for exercise beyond toiling away in the fields.452 The team learned on the run, but media and increased experience soon transformed the team into a legitimate baseball club with skilled managers. It did not take long for Rodolfo to understand the complex strategies of the sport, such as the hit-and-run. Likewise, the team quickly digested the culture of the game with its many unwritten rules, such as intentionally hitting a batter in retaliation to a hit batsman on one’s own team. Indeed, “eso es

447 Beezley, Mexican National Identity, 25-27. Various documents and birth records in the Archivo de San Pablo Huixtepec, San Pablo Huixtepec, Oaxaca, an archive being constructed at the time of writing, point to a relative timelessness in San Pablo, yet connections to the French imperial invasion and economic ventures show the many flows moving in and out of the village. 448 Rodolfo, interview by author. 449 Ibid.; Miguel, interview by author. 450 Ibid. 451 Rodolfo, interview by author. 452 Ibid.; Miguel, interview by author. 97 béisbol.”453 The team also came to adopt one of baseball’s greatest traditions: that of the nickname. Players were donned with all sorts of playful monikers, Rodolfo’s being “Tony” because of his large size, likely a reference to “Tony the Tiger” from Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes cereal that was popular through advertisements of the period, evidence of the widening cultural penetration by US brands.454 While the team was never a champion, they electrified San Pablo where attendance was always great. They even attracted the attention of Mexican League scouts.455 While skeptics may label these expressions as simple mimicry, those in the community believed the game to have unique Oaxacan elements.456 Indeed, the club valued conditioning and weight training programs before they had become standard practice for sports even in the US.457 Moreover, while those in San Pablo and many neighboring communities consider themselves mestizos, baseball, according to Rodolfo and others in the community, was considered to be in their blood, an inherent primordial expertise that was handed down from their indigenous ancestors who communicated with the gods in an ancient ball game that also involved a glove and a ball, high skill, and the need for superior hand-eye coordination—that of pelota mixteca.458 Grassroots organization of baseball in indigenous areas of México has precedent beyond San Pablo Huixtepec. In fact, many Maya in Yucatán worked as producers of the game at the beginning of the twentieth century and formed political collectives and opposition schools called Ligas de Resistencia around the sport’s organization. The descendents of Mesoamerica’s greatest ballgames believed that

453 Rodolfo, interview by author. 454 Ibid.; Advertising Age, “The Advertising Century: Tony the Tiger,” http://adage.com/century/icon09.html (accessed April 3, 2011). 455 Rodolfo, interview by author. 456 Miguel, interview by author. 457 John D. Lukacs, “Programs Decades in the Making,” June 22, 2010, ESPN.com, http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=5312405 (accessed April 20, 2011); Winegardner, The Veracruz Blues, 23. A misunderstanding of muscle contraction and expansion stagnated US programs until the 1960s. Some players did lift weights in the US but the benefits were not widely understood. 458 Meliton, interview by author, Valdeflores, Oaxaca, July 5, 2010; Rodolfo, interview by author, Miguel, interview by author; Wysocki, field notes, June 27, 2010; Beezley, “The Rise of Baseball in Mexico and the First Valenzuela,” 1; Varina Del Angel, Gabriela Leon, and Oscar Necoechea, El Juego de Pelota Mixteca (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones Castillo, 2005), 21. 98 participation in baseball was more “spiritual” than even religion.459 The ancient Oaxacan game, at times referred to as pelota zapoteca, was promoted as early as 1869 as a tourist attraction and is still played today where nearly 800 teams are believed to exist.460 History, however, would seem to consider the current ball game connection to both ancient Mesoamerican ballgames and to baseball as part of an origin myth, a tactic used by many cultures to create historical authenticity and legitimacy for their own participation. It also helps anchor an identity in that production.461 In fact, the scoring of pelota mixteca mirrors that of contemporary tennis and other Southern European antecedents, and even includes the rare “chase rule” found only in Franco-Flemish games known to have moved through the Iberian Peninsula by the fifteenth century.462 Playing with rackets or the mano desnuda was interchangeable. While anthropologists Jorge R. Acosta and Hugo Moedano Koer declared it wholly unique to the region decades ago, the historical tracing of ball games since that time shows Basque and Spanish ballgames spread all over the Spanish Americas during colonization including Colombia and Ecuador, featuring nearly the same rules.463 The game incorporates some elements unique to the region, as one would expect since every sport evolves, including baseball.464 Indeed, during the Spanish conquest the way sports were played changed, and during the Porfiriato many modern sports took on new meanings.465 Interestingly, with nearly all modern ball games originating from similar areas in Europe, it is plausible to believe that baseball and pelota mixteca are distantly related. Either way, the

459 Joseph, “Forging the Regional Pastime,” 50. 460 Archivo Historico Municipal, “Actas de Cabildo,” April 16, 1869, Oaxaca City, Oaxaca; Del Angel, Leon, and Necoechea, El Juego de Pelota Mixteca, 5; Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 319. 461 Lise Waxer, “'In Those Days, Holy Music Rained Down': Origins and Influences of Musica Antillana in Cali and Colombia,” in The City of Musical Memory: Salsa, Record Grooves, and Popular Culture in Cali, Colombia, 31-68 (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 31-34. 462 Gillmeister, Tennis, 71-72; Del Angel, Leon, and Necoechea, El Juego de Pelota Mixteca, 10-11. 463 Gillmeister, Tennis, 71-73. 464 Ibid., 318-319.; Salón de la Fama del Beisbol Profesional de México, “Historia del Beisbol;” Collins, Martin, and Vamplew, Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports, 41-42, 252-253, 271. 465 Josephine, interview by author, Zimatlán, Oaxaca, July 11, 2010; Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 33. During the Porfiriato, Beezley argues that many modern sports channeled cultural associations and meaning from sports then banned. For example, the significance of boxing replaced that of the duel. 99 belief in the connection provides power to those at the bottom rungs of the social ladder to claim the sport as their own. While the San Pablo club’s presence has declined since its glory years of the Tigres days, another Valley league has risen to prominence over the last thirty years. In 1983 the amateur Liga Regional de Beisbol Eduardo Vasconselos (Liga Vasconselos) was created and today boasts over 1,000 players and 59 teams, the most the league has ever had. The league extends all over the Valley featuring teams from Tlacolula, Oaxaca City, Zaachila, Ocotlán, and Miahuatlán. Some teams outside of the Valley compete as well like those from La Cañada. San Pablo Huixtepec is also represented among these regions.466 The league has four active divisions organized by skill level, not necessarily age. The top division is the “Primera Fuerza Especial,” featuring eight clubs. The next is the “Primera Fuerza Intermedia,” also with eight clubs followed by “Segunda Fuerza” with fifteen clubs, and lastly “Segunda Fuerza B” with twenty-nine teams. Most of the teams in the league’s upper divisions feature younger players, often between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three. The lower divisions, on the other hand, are a complete mixed bag. For example, the “Cuerudos de Miahuatlán” featured four players born in 1998 while the “Cuervos de Polo Sánchez,” of the same division, listed thirteen players born before 1960.467 This puts the majority of players of one team at thirteen years old against a team of men well into their fifties, sixties, and even seventies. Most clubs have between sixteen to twenty players and coaches listed on their rosters but the Santo Domingo Etla club had just ten. This diversity lends to a more informal practice of the game and gives the league a unique quality compared to those in the US. Team names reflect at some level the character, inspiration, geography, and circumstances of communities in the league. Many teams take their name after MLB clubs such as the “Bravos,” “Piratas,” “Tigres,” “Angeles,” “Atleticos,” “Astros,” “Yankees,” and “Reds,” showing the fondness and awareness they may hold for MLB. There is even one team that takes its name from Japan with the “Lions de Tokio,” reflecting global baseball

466 Liga regional de béisbol Eduardo Vasconselos, “¡¡Somos 59 equipos!!,” Feb. 2, 2011, http://www.ligavasconcelos.com/nota.php?nota=1431 (accessed February 22, 2011). 467 Liga regional de béisbol Eduardo Vasconselos, “Rosters,” http://www.ligavasconcelos.com/campeonato.php?opc=5 (accessed February 24, 2011). 100 consciousness among players and coaches. Other teams take names from sponsors, unions, or local industries such as the “Oaxaca Inn,” “Tubos y Conexiones,” “Carniceros RESCER,” “Gasolineras ‘Las Joyas,’” “Cerverceros,” “Escribanos,” “Gladiadores INEGI,” “Nueva Era,” and more. Others just use family or city names.468 Many of the men play for the love of the game while others in the league are actively scouted by professional clubs. Others may play to capture the cash prizes that are often awarded to tournament winners. The Oaxaca Valley boasted seventeen semi-pro clubs in 2011 with the region’s best players hailing from Etla, Ejutla, Zimatlán, and Vulcanes. In the Valley the game is expanding.469

4.2 NATIONAL RECOGNITION: THE STARS AND REBEL LEAGUES OF THE ISTHMUS While baseball is in its nascent stages for many Valley communities, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec has been host to the most zealous of peloteros.Nearly every municipality hosted a field either for professional or amateur games in 2011.470 Indeed, the region features near 200 semi-professional teams, many coming from the competitive Liga de Beisbol Regional del Istmo (Liga del Istmo).471 The Isthmus of Tehuantepec has nearly as many municipalities with baseball fields as it does those with soccer or basketball, a striking fact considering that basketball courts nearly come standard to municipal plazas in Oaxaca and soccer fields are sometimes just tracks of open land and dirt.472 The Isthmus is home to some of the most indigenous municipalities in Oaxaca, defined by the ability to speak an indigenous language. They are the proud descendents of the Zapotec resistance movements in the mid-nineteenth century that pestered Benito Juárez and challenged former ally Porfirio Díaz.473 Of the Isthmus’ forty-one municipalities, twenty have indigenous populations that number over 1,000. By contrast, the Oaxaca Valley hosts just thirty-five out of 120

468 Ibid. 469 Hernández, interview by author. 470 Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México, Estado de Oaxaca. 471 Academia de Béisbol Alfredo Harp Helú, “Video,” http://www.oaxacabeisbol.org/Academia_de_Beisbol/Video.html (accessed May 11, 2011). 472 Josephine, interview by author. 473 Chassen-López, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, 315; Johnson, “Conflict Resolution.” 101 municipalities with the distinct advantage of closeness to the state’s capital where service and tourism jobs support larger populations.474 The Liga del Istmo is one of the country’s most competitive leagues and features players almost exclusively from the Isthmus itself. It has recently incorporated teams from Chiapas as well.475 The Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú, Alfredo Harp Helú’s philanthropic organization, conceded that the talent level in the Liga del Istmo is competitive with the Mexican League. In fact, the leagues frequently play exhibition matches against each other during the offseason to help prepare for their respective regular seasons.476 The region also features a highly competitive amateur league called the Liga de béisbol Municipal.477 Arguably Oaxaca’s three greatest players passed through the Liga del Istmo on their way to illustrious baseball careers elsewhere. Jesús “Chito” Ríos Villalobos is still one of the most infamous names on the Oaxacan diamond, especially in the Valley where he coaches the “Tigres de ‘Chito’” in the Liga Vasconselos. Ríos was born in El Espinal in the Juchitán district in 1963, a town that now populates a little over 8,000 people, nearly half of its inhabitants indigenous.478 Ríos was signed at a very young age and it wasn’t long that other professional leagues in the country took notice of the budding right-handed pitcher. His first professional action came in the LMP with the Tomateros de Culiacán, but harassment from Mexican League scouts to sign pushed him a different direction.479 He joined the

474 Jeffrey H Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 63; Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México, Estado de Oaxaca. Nearly one-fourth of all jobs in Oaxaca are service based because of tourism. 475 Jaime Velázquez Olmedo, “Liga de béisbol Oaxaca-Chiapas,” El Sol Del Istmo, Mar. 4, 2009, http://www.elsoldelistmo.com.mx/index.php?ver=deportes&dia=3&nuevo_mes=04&nuevo_ano=2009¬a=L iga%20de%20b%E9isbol%20Oaxaca-Chiapas (accessed April 18, 2011). 476 Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Deportes; Conexión Deportiva “Cultural pierde los dos amistosos ante Olmecas de Tabasco,” Conexión Deportiva (March 2009), http://www.conexiondeportiva.net/html/beisbol.html (accessed May 2, 2011). 477 Jaime Velázquez Olmedo,“Liga de béisbol municipal,” El Sol Del Istmo, March 4, 2009, http://www.elsoldelistmo.com.mx/index.php?ver=deportes&dia=3&nuevo_mes=04&nuevo_ano=2009 (accessed April 18, 2011). 478 Baseball Reference, “Jesus Rios,” http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=rios-- 002jes (accessed April 23, 2011); Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México, Estado de Oaxaca. 479 Beismex, “Biografias Pitchers Mexicanos,” http://beismex.galeon.com/enlaces943027.html (accessed April 23, 2011). 102 controversial Asociación Nacional de Beisbolistas player’s labor union in the early 1980s, soon after signing with the Tigres Capitalinos, now the Tigres de Quintana Roo of the Mexican League.480 It was here that Ríos made himself one of the country’s greatest pitchers of all time. In one of his first seasons with the Tigres, he punched out an astounding 202 hitters and went 63 innings without allowing an earned run. His domination earned him a try out for the Chicago White Sox and the Philadelphia Phillies of MLB, failing to stick with either organization because of a fastball that only reached 88 miles per hour.481 At twenty-one years old, Ríos’ career seemed to soar and his advanced feel for his best pitch, a slider, improved further. In 1985 he had his best season completing all 26 games he started and throwing a powerful 225 innings.482 He was again given MLB auditions at ages twenty-two and twenty-three with the New York Yankees and California Angels organizations, reaching the Triple-A level on both occasions. While his strikeouts were healthy, he walked too many hitters and would later be forced to continue his career in the Mexican League.483 Ríos went on to become the Mexican League’s strikeout leader in five different seasons and led the Tigres to a championship in 1992.484 If this were not all enough, the right-hander played until age forty-three, throwing two shutout innings for the Tigres de Quintana Roo in 2007 to end his career.485 He retired as the all-time Mexican League leader in strikeouts.486 While never reaching great accolades in domestic leagues, Geronimo Gil, born in El Barrio de la Soledad in the Juchitán district in 1975, is one of the most successful ballplayers in the state’s history. The lead-footed catcher incredibly broke into the Mexican League at seventeen years old with the México City Diablos Rojos, but stayed only briefly. At twenty, Gil’s contract was purchased by the Los Angeles Dodgers where over the next five years he

480 Ibid.; Jaime Cervantes Pérez, “El Sindicado del Béisbol, ¿Ayudaría o no?,” Mi Religión y su Dios Teobol, April 24, 2006, http://www.jaimecervantes.netfirms.com/ArSindicato.htm (accessed May 3, 2011). 481 Biesmex, “Biografías Pitchers Mexicanos.” 482 Ibid. 483 Baseball Reference, “Jesus Rios.” 484 Beismex, “Biografías Pitchers Mexicanos.” 485 Baseball Reference, “Jesus Rios.” 486 Beismex, “Biografías Pitchers Mexicanos.” 103 ascended through the minor leagues, reaching Triple-A before being dealt to the Baltimore Orioles. In 2001, Gil made his Major League debut with the team and played in 17 games, batting an impressive .293. In 2002 he became the first rookie catcher since 1966 to start on opening day for the club.487 The 2002 season would prove to be his best in MLB, playing 125 games as the Orioles’ primary backstop and hitting 12 home runs. Gil ended his MLB career after the 2007 campaign with the Colorado Rockies, but since he has ignited the Mexican League as a member of both the Oaxaca Guerreros and the Diablos Rojos.488 Gil continues to play in the LMP over the winter with the Yaquis de Ciudad Obregón and was the starting catcher for the Mexican national team in the World Baseball Classic in 2006.489 The greatest player of them all, and the closest thing to an Oaxacan Fernando Valenzuela, is Vinicio “Vinny” Castilla Soria. Valenzuela, born in Sonora, was a phenom at age fifteen, transforming Mexican baseball forever by permanently putting the nation’s mark in MLB.490 “Fernandomania” introduced MLB to thirty to forty million Mexicans, with only World Cup matches beating his ratings during his outings.491 As a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Valenzuela dominated the competition like no other Mexican athlete had ever, winning a World Series title, Rookie of the Year, and the National League Cy Young Award, given to the league’s best pitcher. Over his career he was a six-time MLB All-Star and won two Silver Slugger Awards for the league’s best hitter at his position.492 While Castilla would never be the immortal that Valenzuela became, his performance fits nicely next to Valenzuela’s. Castilla was born in Oaxaca City in 1967, but he began his baseball career in the Liga del Istmo as a teenager. Always overshadowed by his polished older brother and dad, who

487 Ángel Domínguez,“Gerónimo Gil, ‘Grandes Ligas’ de Naranjeros,” El Vigia, October 8, 2010, http://www.elvigia.net/noticia/ger-nimo-gil-grandes-ligas-de-naranjeros (accessed April 14, 2011). 488 Baseball Reference, “Geronimo Gil” 489 Ángel Domínguez,“Gerónimo Gil, ‘Grandes Ligas’ de Naranjeros,”El Vigia. 490 LaFrance, “A Mexican Popular Image of the United States through the Baseball Hero, Fernando Valenzuela,” 14. 491 Ibid., 15-16. 492 Baseball Reference, “Fernando Valenzuela,” http://www.baseball- reference.com/players/v/valenfe01.shtml (accessed April 3, 2011). 104 played in amateur leagues in the state, one venerating recollection tells of Castilla entering the Universidad Benito Juárez as a youth to become a lawyer, but being unable to refuse his true vocation.493 Castilla broke out in his rookie season and in 1986 was picked as a reserve for the Mexican National Selection.494 By 1987 he was a regular in the Mexican League with the Saraperos de Saltillo and at age twenty-one he was signed by the Atlanta Braves of MLB.495 Despite struggling in the low minors, Castilla was rushed through the Braves’ system and in 1991 the shortstop turned third baseman made his MLB debut. In 1993, he was drafted by the expansion Colorado Rockies.496 Over a sixteen-year MLB career ending in 2006, Castilla hit .276 with 320 home runs, driving in 1,105 runs, and is easily the most successful Mexican hitter in MLB history. Between 1995 and 1998 alone Castilla belted a gargantuan 158 homers with 460 runs batted in (RBI), all the meanwhile posting batting averages above .300 annually. His career high in home runs and RBI came in 1998 when he slugged 46 with 144 RBI. Over his career he appeared on the Most Valuable Player ballot four times, won three Silver Sluggers, and was an All-Star twice. Some advanced defensive measures even count Castilla as one of the league’s best defensive third basemen.497 He played often in the LMP with the Naranjeros de Hermosillo as late as 2009 and 2010 and represented México in the World Baseball Classic.498 His star power is not faded in Oaxaca, where tournaments and playing fields in the Liga Vasconselos and amateur leagues commonly don his name next to national heroes such

493 Shaila Rosagel, “Vinicio Castilla, El señor cuadrangular,” May 17, 2009, http://shailarosagel.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/vinicio-castilla-el-senor-cuadrangular/ (accessed April 28, 2011). 494 Ibid.; Ivan Santos, “Vincio Castilla,” Archivo La Revista Historica de Beisbol Mexicano, 17-21, http://www.archivodelbeisbol.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=138&Itemid=99 (accessed May 3, 2011). 495 Rosagel, “Vinicio Castilla, El señor Cuadrangular”; Baseball Reference ,“Vinny Castilla,” http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/castivi02.shtml (accessed March 7, 2011). 496 Ibid. 497 Ibid. 498 Julio Sánchez León, “Vinny, deportista del Bicentenario,” Voz e Imagen, March 19, 2010, http://174.123.68.163/portal/deportes/vinny-deportista-del-bicentenario (accessed April 4, 2011). 105 as Juárez.499 In 2010 he was recognized in México as the nation’s Athlete of the Year with a special Bicentennial distinction.500 He works not only as a special assistant to the general manager for the Rockies, but also as manager for the Mexican national team. Interestingly, his pitching coach is Valenzuela.501 Baseball in the Isthmus reigns as the undisputed king of sports but baseball politics may be tumultuous. The state wishes to use its baseball acumen as a weapon to strike down the stranglehold of the country’s northern states. Indeed, the nation’s northern stretches and México City dominate in the production of baseball and represent the most economically active and viable regions of the country in industry and finance. This relationship is reflected often through baseball. Perhaps by showcasing great skill in the sport long associated with affluence and cosmopolitanism, baseball holds power to help transform the image of Oaxaca that is still portrayed as largely traditional and indigenous. While much of this image is attributed to national tourism campaigns that many communities in Oaxaca often perpetuate, recognizing the immediate profits that can be made from “Indian” tourism, the state’s economy is among the least industrialized in the country representing just one percent of the national figure.502 In fact, the lone economic sector to grow consistently in the state from the mid-century mark was tourism.503 As in rural Cuba which played baseball as a way to assert their own regional relevance against the dominant capital Havana, baseball in Oaxaca seems to be officially promoted in part to augment the region’s importance versus other modern baseball-playing regions in the country.504 Indeed, sports are, in the estimation of one, among

499 Julio Sánchez León, “En la Monte Albán arrancan las acciones,” Voz e Imagen, September 9, 2010, http://174.123.68.163/portal/deportes/beisbol/local/liga-monte-alban/monte-alban-arrancan-acciones (accessed April 4, 2011); Liga regional de Beisbol Vasconselos; Hernández, interview by author. 500 Sánchez León, “Vinny, deportista del Bicentenario.” 501 Rosagel, “Vinicio Castilla, El señor Cuadrangular.” 502 Norget, Days of Death, Days of Life; Perez, “Challenges to Motherhood,” 313-314; Arthur D. Murphy and Alex Stepick, Social Inequality in Oaxaca: A History of Resistance and Change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 2, 79. 503 Norget, Days of Death, Days of Life, 38. 504 Wagner, “Sport in Revolutionary Societies,” 131. 106 the most affordable and least risky “foreign policy weapons” a country, or region in this case, can use to legitimize itself.505 To help show off the recent progress and development of the state, local officials such as Benjamín Salinas, president of the Asociación de Beisbol del Estado de Oaxaca, have pushed to organize the state’s leagues in the Federacion Mexicana de Beisbol, AC (Femebe). In exchange for compliance with the blanket organization, federated states have opportunities to play in and host national baseball tournaments. There have been problems to accomplishing federation in Oaxaca, however. Harkening images of Che Gorio’s Zapotec autonomy movements of the mid-nineteenth century, many Isthmus and Valley leagues have not agreed to federate, likely desiring to maintain independent of the organization’s rules and perhaps to avoid restrictive costs associated with those rules. In fact, this sort of organizational move by Femebe marks what Elias and Dunning have seen as the “civilizing of sports,” where a governing body tries to control the physical force inside a game and maintain power over roles assigned within it.506 In exchange for membership, Femebe recommends the employment of some standardized rules from how to train players to how to maintain a ball field.507 Most of all, however, they want to rope-in independent leagues that they feel are slowing progress for Mexican organized ball as a whole.508 Frustrated at the lack of progress in Oaxaca, Femebe has given ultimatums to state sporting promoters that threaten to ban it from national and regional tournaments they sponsor, along with it potential funding opportunities associated. A ban would conceivably handcuff the potential of local leagues, the national organization, and the state’s promotional project associated.509

505 Paula J. Pettavino and Geralyn Pye, Sport in Cuba: The Diamond in the Rough (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), 6, 225, 229. 506 Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 230-231. 507 Federación Mexicana de Béisbol, A.C (Femebe), “Sistema de Capacitación y Certificación para Entrenadores Deportivos,” http://www.femebe.net/htmltonuke.php?filnavn=html/sicced.htm (accessed March 16, 2011). 508 Julio Sánchez León, “Oaxaca, presente en la asamblea de la Femebe,” Voz e Imagen, February 1, 2011, http://www.noticiasnet.mx/portal/deportes/oaxaca-presente-asamblea-femebe (accessed February 22, 2011). 509 Gerardo Santaella, “Solucionado el conflicto de beisbol,” El Imparcial, January 22, 2010, http://www.imparcialenlinea.com/?mod=leer&id=110332&sec=deportes&titulo=Solucionado__el_conflicto__d e_beisbol (accessed February 22, 2010). 107

The state, on the other hand, believes Oaxaca’s lack of federation lies partly in discrimination. Indeed, Salinas states that the federation’s requirements for inclusion have changed as Oaxaca has met them; the organization demanding first the inclusion of five leagues at minimum, but just months later asking for an even greater commitment of 1,500 players.510 As of February of 2011 the state had federated 1,300 players, 200 short of the requirement.511 That did not stop officials from campaigning, however. Believing they will reach recognition, in December of 2010, Alberto Ortega Castro of the Comisión Estatal de Cultura Física y Deporte (Coesde) announced that Oaxaca would host their region in the Olimpiada Nacional 2011in baseball and softball, which includes strong baseball regions such as México City, Veracruz, and Puebla.512 However, Eduardo Carrasco Toral of the Asociación Oaxaqueña de Beisbol had bigger plans: to lobby Femebe to host the 2012 seventeen to eighteen year old and the nineteen to thirty-nine year old brackets of the baseball national championships, claiming that the state’s infrastructure was ready and in place.513 Salinas believes that Oaxaca has been fired “cheapshots” from the north who depict it as underdeveloped or unsafe. In response, he has cited the north’s obvious instability brought by the war on drugs. Frustrated, he believes that nobody in the north cares about baseball contributions from Oaxaca.514 Since the rise of nearby port cities, such as Salina Cruz and Acapulco, Oaxaca City has largely been productively irrelevant at the national level, tourism and remittances representing two of the larger sources of income for the state.515 The city does not even appear on the World Bank’s “Doing Business” website, which measures the

510 Gerardo Santaella, “Ultimátum al béisbol oaxaqueño,” El Imparcial, April 23, 2010, http://www.imparcialenlinea.com/?mod=leer&id=119066&sec=deportes&titulo=Ultim%E1tum_al_b%E9isbol _oaxaque%F1o (accessed February 22, 2010). 511 Sánchez León, “Oaxaca, presente en la asamblea de la Femebe,” Voz e Imagen. 512 Victor Hugo Villanueva, “Fiesta en Zimatlán de Álvarez,” NSS Oaxaca. January 12, 2011, http://www.nssoaxaca.com/deportes/34-local/59017-fiesta-en-zimatlan-de-alvarez (accessed January 19, 2011). 513 Julio Sánchez León, “Oaxaca solicitará sede de Nacional 2012,” Voz e Imagen, January 24, 2011, http://www.noticiasnet.mx/portal/deportes/oaxaca-solicitara-sede-nacional-2012 (accessed February 22, 2011). 514 Santaella, “Ultimátum al béisbol oaxaqueño,” El Imparcial; Murphy and Stepick, Social Inequality in Oaxaca, 2, 79. 515 Murphy and Stepick, Social Inequality in Oaxaca, 18, 86. 108 ease of creating and maintaining a firm in México. The Emerald City has no doubt fallen from prominence in this way; a far cry from the cochineal and mining prosperity of the region between 1700 and 1800 and the Porfiriato respectively.516

4.3 LIGAS PEQUEÑAS Youth leagues also offer a mixed bag of producers. While youth leagues are spread all over the Valley, the most advertised are the Liga de Beisbol de Aficionados Oaxaca (Liga Oaxaca) and the Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil Monte Alban (Liga Monte Alban) near Oaxaca City. Both are associated with Little League baseball. The Liga Oaxaca features forty-eight teams and the Liga Monte Alban features thirty-three. The divisions are divided by age from the five to six-year-old category (Escuelita) to thirteen and fourteen (Prejunior).517 The season runs from late winter into summer and games are usually played in tournaments held on Saturdays, Sundays and Tuesdays. Often there is a registration fee of around 250 pesos per team for each tournament. Sometimes monetary prizes are offered for those that play well.518 While the San Pablo club evolved from playing in dirt lots with creative equipment, most youth leagues around the capital would hardly be considered so informal. In fact, the bureaucratic nature of these leagues is mildly surprising. The Liga Monte Alban holds regular board meetings to discuss issues such as league rules, scheduling problems, playoffs, punishments, fundraising, and spending. Many decisions are made through a vote requiring a quorum.519 The league also hosts an updated website which features the game schedule, team

516 Ibid., 22; Doing Business: Measuring Business Regulations, “Economy Rankings: Mexico,” from the World Bank, http://www.doingbusiness.org/Rankings/mexico/2009 (accessed March 26, 2011). 517 Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán, ACTA DE ASAMBLEA No. 10, Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán (March 28, 2011), http://www.ligamontealban.com/ (accessed March 30, 2011). 518 Moret García, “Play ball en la Liga Oaxaca,” Oaxacain.com, January 18, 2010, http://www.oaxacain.com/eventos/50-eventos/843-play-ball-en-la-liga-oaxaca.html (accessed January 25, 2011); Convocatoria, Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán, November, 2010, http://www.ligamontealban.com/ (accessed March 30, 2011). 519 Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán, ACTA DE ASAMBLEA No. 10. 109 standings, previous meeting minutes, team photos, news, and a contact page.520 Further the site provides Google-Earth GPS satellite maps that demarcate the locations of ball fields.521 To raise money for new playing fields, the Liga Oaxaca has even held public auctions of donated vehicles worth in upwards of 150,000 pesos.522 Moreover, the paper trail for registering a child for tournament play is extensive. A family is required to provide documentation including an original birth certificate, a copy of their CURP, two recent photographs, proof of the child’s participation on a team, a waiver from a parent, proof of a passing physical examination, and sometimes school records for each player. All of the material is kept by the tournament board as a permanent record for the participant.523 It is likely that the organizational effort among youth leagues is partially a result of the leagues’ association with Little League, which, like Femebe, requires its federated leagues to follow mandated rules in exchange for funding opportunities and participation in tournaments. Little League was established in the US in 1939. In 1954 there were 3,349 leagues. By 1996, however, the league had widely expanded, reaching its peak with 7,452 leagues worldwide. In 2010, the organization had 2,168,850 registered participants in baseball and a small amount in softball in seventy-five different countries.524 Today Little League All-Star teams, which represent every registered league, compete for the right to play in the annual Little League World Series tournament held in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It is considered the most participated youth sports tournament in the world, providing potential

520 Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán, http://www.ligamontealban.com/ (accessed May 12, 2011). 521 Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán,“Décima Asamblea,” Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán (March 28, 2011), http://www.ligamontealban.com/ (accessed March 30, 2011). 522 Gerardo Santaella, “La Liga Oaxaca entrega premio,” El Imparcial, January 9, 2011, http://www.imparcialenlinea.com/?mod=leer&id=144172&sec=deportes&titulo=La_Liga_Oaxaca_entrega_pre mio (accessed March 12, 2011). 523 Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán, Convocatoria, Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán ( November, 2010); Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán, ACTA DE ASAMBLEA No. 10. A CURP is the Clave Única de Registro de Población, a proof of nationality. 524 Little League Baseball and Softball, “Little League Around the World,” http://www.littleleague.org/learn/about/historyandmission/aroundtheworld.htm (accessed May 3, 2011); “Reason 8: History and Mission of Little League,” Little League Baseball and Softball, http://www.littleleague.org/learn/Start_Find_a_League/whyaffiliate/reason8.htm (May 3, 2011). 110

“instant recognition” on a global scale of each region that sends a representative.525 Oaxaca has never had a team reach this level and most of México’s top teams play in the country’s borderlands. However, outside of the immediate metropolitan area, Little Leagues are also firmly established in Vulcanes, Ejutla, Etla and more.526 As is often the tradition in México since the Porfiriato, official playing fields and tournaments are typically named after prominent locals or baseball heroes. Often these titles are rewarded for personal charity. In 2010, a wave of powerful rain storms caused severe flood-related damage to many of the Liga Monte Alban’s complexes. Campo Daniel Jarquín Zayas, Campo Pedro Cardenal, and Campo Salvador Luna were slammed with small mudslides that turned fallen tress into battering rams against structures and fencing. All three fields were near completely underwater.527 In response, Harp Helú donated significant money through the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú to help repair the damaged fields. The league later opened a tournament bearing his name with a military-style band and national anthem. Here Harp Helú gave a speech about the importance of baseball to help strengthen family life. The native Oaxacan proudly exclaimed, “Oaxaca se merece tener esto y más,” before giving way to the internationally recited Little League pledge.528 The Little League pledge, unchanged since its creation in 1954, provides a stellar example of the believed socializing potential of sport realized through symbolic fusions and rituals associated with it. The Little League creed follows as so: Creo en dios (I trust in God) Amo a mi patria (I love my country) Respetaré sus leyes (And will respect its laws) Jugaré limpio (I will play fair) Me enforzaré para ganar (And strive to win)

525 Little League Baseball and Softball, “Reasons to Affiliate,” http://www.littleleague.org/learn/Start_Find_a_League/whyaffiliate.htm (accessed May 3, 2011). 526 Hernández, interview by author. 527 Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán,“Lunes 20 de septiembre,” Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juvenil de Monte Albán (September 20, 2010), http://www.ligamontealban.com/ (February 22, 2010). 528 Julio Sánchez León, “Ambiente, colorido y beisbol,” Voz e Imagen, February 4, 2011, http://www.noticiasnet.mx/portal/deportes/ambiente-colorido-beisbol (accessed March 6, 2011). 111

Pero gane o pierda (But win or lose) Siempre hare lo mejor que pueda (I will always do my best)529 The pledge was written in an effort to “give all leagues…a pledge reflecting some of the sentiments of the Pledge of Allegiance, minus the references to the U.S.”530 The explicit references to God and nation, in a still very Catholic and ethnically diverse state, contribute to the general promotion of obedience long demanded from regional leaders. In this way Little League baseball may be seen as among Oaxaca’s most successful performative socialization efforts with baseball since it was first attempted in the Revolutionary period. Interestingly, Little League does not require its leagues to recite the pledge to maintain registration, evidencing the generally positive attributes the pledge is still believed to carry. The organization claims, however, that those who choose not to use it typically substitute it with a national anthem or prayer, both of which can be argued to share goals of mass obedience and discipline from its participants.531 Indeed, from US President Dwight Eisenhower to President George W. Bush, who led a public recitation of the pledge on the White House lawn every year with children, the pledge, as intended, has been politically charged. Here is part of the mission statement from the burgeoning Little League organization: Through proper guidance and exemplary leadership, the Little League program assists youth in developing the qualities of citizenship, discipline, teamwork and physical well-being. By espousing the virtues of character, courage and loyalty, the Little League Baseball and Softball program is designed to develop superior citizens rather than superior athletes.532 Even the Mexican Little League website claimed that baseball is important for the promotion of health and to keep children monitored, orderly, and disciplined, reminding us of the

529 Fundación LLB, México, “!WILLIAMSPORT 2011!,” http://www.llbMéxico.com/ (accessed March 20, 2011); “Pledge,” Little League Baseball and Softball, http://www.littleleague.org/learn/about/pledge.htm (accessed March 7, 2011). 530 Little League Baseball and Softball, “Pledge,” http://www.littleleague.org/learn/about/pledge.htm (accessed March 7, 2011). 531 Little League Baseball and Softball, “Pledge.” 532 Ralph Dannheisser, “Little League Baseball Aims to Blend Fun, Character Development,” America.gov, September 8, 2008. http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplace- english/2008/September/20080908123707madobbA0.3626215.html (accessed April 7, 2011). 112 civilizing qualities the game is still believed to possess and further defining the citizen by amount of civilized capital one has drawn from these socializing experiences.533

4.4 OAXACA’S NEW MODERN PROJECT As was championed by AG Spaulding, and restated by porfiristas and indigenistas, many believe baseball to carry inherent and contagious civilizing characteristics that instill obedience, discipline, and collective self-sacrifice among others. Patsy Neal believed that sports’ rules and structure, for which the participant accepts punishment, if violated, carry the ability to “internalize” into athletes and make them particularly susceptible to social control.534 Further, Brian Petrie believed that the behavior in athletes to accept the unquestioned authority of coaches and umpires conditions the participant into becoming politically conservative, at times even changing the participant’s value systems. The voluntary participation of athletes makes them even more vulnerable to this type of penetration.535 Indeed, Max Weber said that a “rationalization accompanies the autonomization of the field of sport to ensure predictability and calculability.”536 Here a “body” governs the “field” that carries significant power in the ability to punish those who don’t cooperate with its rules. However, it also rewards those who do with trophies and records, according to Pierre Bourdieu, “just as governments do.”537 While Vinny Castilla believes México is close to being a global force in baseball, he realizes that in order for the nation to be competitive it must divert resources from its long favored sport of soccer into baseball. For Castilla, México has the talent; it just needs money to exploit it.538 He likely has a friend in Oaxaca governor Gabino Cue Monteagudo who has taken baseball performance to a new level of importance at the local by announcing that to “develop” the state, Oaxaca has to invest in sports programs. With Manuel Portilla, the sub-

533 Fundación LLB México, “CONCANACO,” http://www.llbMéxico.com/inicio/confederacion-de- camaras-nacionales-de-comercio-concanaco/ (March 20, 2011). 534 Neal, Sport and Identity, 22-29, 33-38. 535Petrie, “Sport and Politics,” 222-223. 536 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 360. 537 Ibid. 538 Rosagel, “Vinicio Castilla, El señor Cuadrangular.” 113 director of Conade, and Alberto Ortega Castro, of the Comisión Estatal del Deporte, Cue announced plans to build one new sporting facility each year for youths with state funding that will promote “physical culture” and provide better life training for men and women, socializing kids and instilling discipline to avert youth gang membership.539 Indeed, the promotion of physical education has been frequently outlined as an important task in the state. Organizations such as the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS) have worked hard to organize sporting tournaments to keep people active and strong, especially in urban areas.540 The rhetoric used, however, surrounding baseball generally is one of reform and development. Additionally, the state hopes to give scholarships to support the Oaxacan Olympiad. Cue’s announcement was met with immediate praise by Conade representatives who agreed to donate six million pesos to help construct sports facilities in the state.541 Standing with prominent local businessmen and government representatives, as is common for such an announcement, Luis Uhartechea Begué, municipal president of Oaxaca City, assured a large crowd at a Liga Oaxaca tournament that the sporting future of the state appeared strong.542 What has remained consistent is that when large announcements involving sports are to be made, baseball games are typically the venues that are exploited in the state. When Alejo Peralta, owner of the Tigres Captalinos, created México’s first youth baseball academies, he did so with an economic end-point in mind and acted ahead of the curve. Although his baseball academies at El Carmen, Nuevo Leon and México City, “Ing. Alejo Peralta” and “Pasteje Academy” respectively, were to have “revolutionized” the Mexican professional development process by hiring full-time scouts, creating “farm” teams,

539 “Construir cada año un polideportivo en Oaxaca, anuncia Gabino Cué,” Realidad Oaxaca, February 4, 2011, http://realidadoaxaca.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=20247:construir-cada-ano- un-polideportivo-en-oaxaca-anuncia-gabino-cue&catid=70:deportes&Itemid=109 (accessed March 21, 2010). 540 “Promueven IMSS y CFE el deporte en Instituciones Públicas y Privadas,” Realidad Oaxaca, May 28, 2010, http://realidadoaxaca.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13078:promueven-imss-y- cfe-el-deporte-en-instituciones-publicas-y-privadas-&catid=70:deportes&Itemid=109 (accessed March 21, 2011). 541 “Construir cada año un polideportivo en Oaxaca, anuncia Gabino Cué,” Realidad Oaxaca. 542 “Creará Ugartechea espacios para el deporte,” Realidad Oaxaca, January 24, 2011, http://realidadoaxaca.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19740:creara-ugartechea- espacios-para-el-deporte&catid=70:deportes&Itemid=109 (accessed March 20, 2011). 114 and having players dedicate their whole lives essentially to baseball, since their opening in 1996 México had not seen another academy like them emerge.543 One academy went under, and the other is considered subpar. No baseball academy was dedicated to the “complete development” of its children at the time.544 In 2001, Harp Helú announced plans to build his own academy in Oaxaca that would feed his professional organizations: the Guerreros and the Diablos Rojos. Long seeing the financial benefits reaped through improved on the field performance of this own clubs, the project broke ground at San Bartolo Coyotepec in 2002, a small municipality five miles from Oaxaca’s main airport and twenty miles from the capital.545 To help finance the operation, Harp Helú promptly secured development deals with the San Diego Padres and Conade while also creating working relationships with local Little Leagues.546 The ribbon-cutting of “Academia de Beisbol Alfredo Harp Helú” in 2009 was aureate, attended by prominent politicians, such as Ulises Ruiz from the governor’s office, Bernardo de la Garza of Conade, and businessmen such as Jorge Toledo Ruiz.547 Oaxaca’s finest did not come out to celebrate the advancement of professional baseball. The opening of the academy seems to fit nicely into an ongoing narrative for Oaxacan politicians and business elite. Upon the opening of the complex, Harp Helú announced that the facility was to be a “grand slam” for Mexican baseball as a “high performance” center, but would also work to better the lives of the players and their communities. For Harp Helú, the training the children were to receive would help them achieve professionalism in other job pursuits if they were to fail as athletes. Indeed, this

543 Bertha Servín and Eduardo González, “Un reto, la academia de beisbol,” El Universal, March 17, 2002, http://www2.eluniversal.com.mx/pls/impreso/noticia.html?id_nota=47152&tabla=deportes (accessed March 20, 2011); Clark, “We are all Guerreros.” 544 Jesús Alberto Rubio, “Academia de béisbol.. y Zenón Ochoa,” Remehibe, blog, November 13, 2009, http://www.conexioncubana.net/blogs/remehibe/academia-de-beisbol-y-zenon-ochoa/ (accessed March 17, 2011). 545 Servín and González, “Un reto, la academia de beisbol,” El Universal. 546 Ibid.; Wysocki, field notes, July 7, 2010. 547 Publimetro, “Inauguran en San Bartolo Coyotepec Academia de Beisbol Harp Helú,” Publimetro (November 12, 2009), http://www.publimetro.com.mx/deportes/inauguran-en-san-bartolo-coyotepec-academia- de-beisbol-harp-helu/nikl!ToblbYp0ZsjNAd3uLwt2Hg/ (accessed February 21, 2011). 115 facility was the first of its kind in México because not only did it work to produce professional ball players, but it also worked to create better citizens and improve living conditions for supposedly all Oaxacans. Through the academy and baseball, Mexicans were to work together, just as is required in baseball to succeed, according to Harp Helú.548 The overtly political rhetoric is reminiscent of those who wished to modernize and promote mestizaje in the state nearly a century earlier, where baseball socialization was perhaps intended as an alternative to official education. Like those periods, the political embedded into the Oaxacan baseball project is mostly blatant. For example, Harp Helú believed the academy was needed desperately to help create a generation of role models for other Mexicans. This would require more academies to be built in the future.549 He added, “El Beisbol es una de mis grandes pasiones me resulta un buen parámetro para comparar la vida. Todos los días salimos al campo de pelota y jugamos en equipo.”550 The Fundación Harp Helú assures the public that with the academy, and promotion of other sports programs, the overall health and values of Oaxacans will, in fact, improve, although it is not specific in what improved health means.551 Further, Harp Helú assures that baseball will help promote hard work and, in doing so, will help reform Oaxacan family life, in part saving the population from desperation by molding a new class professionals. Of course, these claims assume a deficiency in family life already existing and further seem to imply laziness among the population, long a stereotype given to the dark-skinned Mexican, especially by foreign

548 Ibid.; E-consulta Oaxaca “Inaugura Harp Helú academia de beisbol en San Bartolo Coyotepec,” E- consulta Oaxaca (November 12, 2009), http://www.e- consulta.com/oaxaca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11867&Itemid=27 (accessed July 20, 2010). 549 E-consulta Oaxaca, “Inaugura Harp Helú academia de beisbol en San Bartolo Coyotepec.” 550 Ivan Santos, “Alfredo Harp Helú: un diablo con alma de Ángel,” Archivo La Revista Historica de Beisbol Mexicano, año 1, no 1, pg. 14-15. 551 Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú, “Deportes”; Luis Felix, “Inauguran Academia de Beisbol en Oaxaca,” To2: Desarrollo Integral, November 12, 2009. http://www.to2.mx/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1599:inauguran-academia-de-beisbol-en- oaxaca&catid=1:timas&Itemid=76 (accessed January 12, 2011). 116 travelers during the Porfiriato.552 However, as many Oaxacans will assure you, only those who don’t work are widely considered lazy.553 The combination of the rhetoric and the means to achieving these goals make this academy unique compared to those previous in México, and even those in the Dominican Republic; the latter of which have long been criticized for their substandard facilities and as a colonial outpost by American capital.554 This academy is, in fact, run by an Oaxacan and was to be an intensive academic center featuring coursework extending beyond superficial English language training. The complex provides state-of-the-art medical and therapy facilities, private bathrooms, 1,422 square meters of garden space, dining facilities, a library, a reading room, a television room, and even a computer lab. The 10.65 hectare facility also includes two baseball fields and practice facilities intended for sixty students between fourteen and seventeen years old.555 Moreover, the academy is steeped in “high” culture, part of the academic curriculum including training in art. Indeed, pieces from José Luis García, Adam Paredes, and Demián Flores, depicting the blend of the indigenous and the modern through baseball, line the facility’s interior walls.556 Flores’ art is featured in a promotional video produced by the academy, one of the “El Zorro” holding a bat and another with the Zapotec donning full headdress, throwing a pitch in uniform. These are the same pieces shown at Eduardo Vasconselos Stadium. Additionally, the video features a montage of calaveras diving for balls in pelota mixteca before the gloves are transformed into baseball gloves.557 A still-shot is displayed in Figure 4.1. These images are powerful, suggesting an extinction or ‘natural’ acculturation of the indigenous to modern vestiges such as baseball. The use of blanketed symbols of indigeneity

552 Julio Sánchez León, “Ambiente, colorido y beisbol”; Academia de Béisbol Alfredo Harp Helú; Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 71. 553 Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico, 40. 554 Klein, Sugarball, 42, 85; Rob Ruck, The Tropic of Baseball (Westport: Meckler, 1991). 555 E-consulta Oaxaca, “Inaugura Harp Helú academia de beisbol en San Bartolo Coyotepec.” 556 Ibid.; Felix, “Inauguran Academia de Beisbol en Oaxaca.” 557 YouTube.com, “ACADEMIA DE BEISBOL ALFREDO HARP HELU 2,” uploaded by CIASDIABLOSROJOS, November 13, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x7p6AzaGL0&NR=1 (accessed May 19, 2011). 117

Figure 4.1. Zapotec in headdress, throwing a pitch. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x7p6AzaGL0&NR=1 (accessed May 19, 2011). serves many purposes. Perhaps most of all, it conditions people to live submissively because the action itself suppresses “plurality” and submerges “everything into uniform totality.”558 Further, however, by teaching art and promoting a school of professionalism, the academy aims to set up a mass transfer of “cultural capital” that can only be possessed by those who are given the means to accumulate it.559 Further, the academy aims to do it at an age Adam Smith considered among the most malleable and formative for people.560 However, art and baseball are not far separated in the promotion of class based difference: The art of sport and the body is similar to the elite use of language as an end. Among the poor sport is often seen as childish and abandoned when one enters

558 García Canclini, Transforming Modernity, 67. 559 Ibid., 17. 560 Sen, Development as Freedom, 295. 118

marriage or other serious responsibilities associated with adulthood. However, the frequency of sport rises with education level. In school, especially boarding schools, kids are taken away from the real world of practices in bourgeois form, and engage in activity for no purpose. The bourgeoisie act disinterested and take to art and sport to show how distant they are from the concerns of material interest.561 As Petrie advises us, contemporary sport is most often used as a tool for the spread and reinforcement of political ideologies that emerge from a new economic organization, where the economic organization itself has overlapped and is increasingly blended with the political.562 The economic climate in México changed in the 1940s, hosting a sort of “development at all cost” met with “a withering of democratic institutions, failure of leadership, and pervasive corruption and servility in government.”563 This period graduated into a “Mexican Miracle” through the 1970s where inflation and growth remained steady and moderate. Unfortunately, it was followed by a harsh debt crisis in the 1980s that sunk the value of the peso. Under the presidency of Carlos Salinas from 1988 to 1994, the answer was found in embracing World Bank recommendations for an economically open México. Under Salinas, lessened barriers to investment and production were coupled with an imposed undemocratic structure and partial abandonment of the social; a move some have tabbed as the neo-Porfiriato.564 Simon Kuznets once argued that with all rapid economic growth, inequality should be immediately expected, later subsiding.565 This pattern has been inconsistent in Latin America. Oaxaca, which is firmly among the country’s poorest states, has historically found economic growth to increase inequality in the state.566 While Oaxaca never experienced the benefits of the Mexican Miracle, it is said to have felt the worst of the debt crisis.567

561 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 359-360. 562 Petrie, “Sport and Politics,” 191-192. 563 Hale, “The Liberal Impulse,” 482. 564 Gledhill, “Neoliberalism.” 565 Patrice Franko, The Puzzle of Latin American Economic Development (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 401. 566 Murphy and Stepick, Social Inequality in Oaxaca, 10; Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 14. 567 Murphy and Stepick, Social Inequality in Oaxaca, 79. 119

It is common to draw comparisons to a time of great change and importance in one’s history, and thus recent neoliberal economic expansion has led to significant comparisons to the Porfiriato. However, this period is unique because of communications and information accumulation. George Yúdice has outlined the recent globalization as a period where national governments have generally chosen to cut social spending, especially in education and art. This has opened the door for “artists” and philanthropists, among other producers of culture (perhaps brands or NGOs), to fill the void to help stabilize the nation for the spread of capitalism. Reduced state spending helps these institutions grow politically strong, and as almost an alternative governing body. New capital organization in this process puts cultural producers often in charge of managing the social.568 John Gledhill believes that space is even created for non-governmental organizations to grow as an extension of economic empire.569 Harp Helú and his academy would seem to fit into this discourse by becoming cultural producers and working to enhance the stability and citizenry of the region in an economic re- organization. More than with baseball, Harp Helú has become an essential provider for all types of cultural capital by giving needed dollars for the maintenance of, or buying outright, youth facilities, sporting fields, libraries, and archives. Further his foundation provides educational opportunities and contributes to solving environmental problems.570 Photos at press conferences frequently portray the man with children sitting on his knees, or holding his hand, and his own Archivo del Beisbol described him as one of the great owners in Mexican League history, interestingly next to Jorge Pasquel.571 Little doubt, Harp Helú is contributing greatly to the improvement of the quality of life in a tough economic time for many Oaxacans. However, if we are to believe Elias and Dunning’s claim that in an increasingly

568 Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 12. 569 Gledhill, “Neoliberalism,” 335. 570 Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú. 571 “Joakim Soria visitó la academia de beisbol Alfredo Harp Helú,” Voz e Imagen, November 26, 2010, http://174.123.68.163/portal/videos/2010/11/26-0 (accessed March 1, 2011); Archivo del Beisbol, “Introducción - Beisbol en México,” http://www.archivodelbeisbol.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=112&Itemid=102&li mitstart=1, (accessed May 2, 2011); Santos, “Alfredo Harp Helú: un diablo con alma de Ángel,” Archivo Hla Revista Historica de Beisbol Mexicano, 14-15. 120 secular and capitalist world that sport, in part, fills a void left by declining religion, then some may argue he is in fact sliding into a quasi divine interventionist persona as well as a paternal alternative to a government often seen as untrustworthy.572 Indeed, Jaime Brena and Joaquim Soria, the most dominant Mexican pitcher in MLB today, have made appearances at the academy advising children to obey and trust in “Don Alfredo.”573 While widespread religious baseball fervor is questionable across the state of Oaxaca, for those who participate these symbols may not be so elusive. Baseball production in the Valley has benefits for many of those who participate in its production. Bourdieu believed that the arrival of modern sport brings a system of institutions. Among these are public and private sporting clubs and producers and vendors of goods one needs to follow the sport. Finally there are those who promote the goods based on the entertainment of sport itself. All help form a “field of competition.”574 However, in Oaxaca, Harp Helú interestingly represents all three by controlling the only professional team, opening a baseball academy and acting as a primary sponsor to local amateur leagues, and by holding a majority stake in Grupo Martí, among the biggest sporting goods stores in the country.575 Promoting the participation of baseball creates a new consumer base for baseball gear, and perhaps other products that are associated with that culture, as was suggested by DS Spalding when he barnstormed México with his own sporting goods stores at the beginning of the twentieth century.576 Additionally, the rise of professional baseball in the Valley, and the building of Harp Helú’s academy, place Oaxaca into a greater conversation of Latin American baseball which has proven to offer a potential escape from poverty and opportunities for societal advancement that rarely exist outside of migration.577 Baseball in

572 Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 222. 573 Ricardo Urquidi, “Visita Joakim Soria la Academia de Béisbol de Oaxaca,” Furiagris.com.mx, November 28, 2010, http://furiagris.com.mx/sitio/?p=9336 (accessed January 10, 2011); “Joakim Soria visitó la academia de beisbol Alfredo Harp Helú.” 574 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 358. 575 “The World’s Billionaires: #937 Alfredo Harp Helú,” Forbes. 576 Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 21. 577 Ruck, The Tropic of Baseball, 198; Klein, Sugarball, 1; Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 366. 121

Oaxaca, in this sense, is “elevated” as it is in the Dominican Republic where relatively high paying jobs outside of tourism are difficult to find.578

4.5 FINANCIAL BARRIERS TO BASEBALL While contemporary Oaxacan elites may want to integrate its population through programs of mass participation, it is questionable whether they are succeeding or even if they can potentially succeed without significant subsidies. San Pablo Huixtepec brought baseball from what can be considered the basement, organically, and produced the sport themselves. However, while some still play in the town, participation has since significantly dropped. Some believe it’s because of incredibly high out-migration to the United States, as nearly 80 percent of all Oaxacan migrants are males and typically young, the demographic associated with the production of the sport.579Rodolfo believed the lack of participation was the direct result of failing education in the town’s schools, while others believe the sedentary lifestyle of the US has been imported with children that return.580 While baseball seems to be growing in some parts of the Valley, other segments are experiencing a sharp decline in participation similar to San Pablo. Interestingly, in Zimatlán, a city just a few kilometers outside of San Pablo, roughly four out of ten kids still play organized baseball in the estimation of a resident trainer. In fact, baseball is a part of school physical education in which everybody participates. Additionally, many practice basketball and other sports, like kung fu and weightlifting, and the study of nutrition is also gaining in popularity, polarizing communities when it comes to physical education and leisure activities.581 What is to be made of these contradictory currents? Can the decline of baseball or other sports be blamed on a lack of education in one town, or even several towns? This may be true in part. An alternative suggestion made by some in San Pablo seems to paint a much clearer picture of what is happening. Indeed, “the probability of practicing a sport depends

578 Klein, Sugarball, 2. 579 Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico, 41. 580 Rodolfo, interview by author; Miguel, interview by author. 581 Andrés, interview by author. 122 primarily on economic capital and, secondarily, cultural capital and spare time.”582 Most of the Oaxaca Valley outside of Oaxaca City remains employed in the primary sector, mostly farming, which is generally tied to long work days and low income. Indeed, one resident psychologist suggests that these groups still worry primarily about eating, making participation in sports for fun, improving physique, or for the “feeling” incredibly impractical.583 Moreover, organized baseball requires a high amount of equipment and generally a specific kind of field with measured bases, a pitching mound, and outfield fences. Even sandlot games, like those organized by Rodolfo, are difficult to assemble in the scattered countryside because of the sheer number of players needed to cover the field. Further, baseball’s rules can prove frustratingly complicated. For these reasons (the ease of finding equipment, simplicity of rules, lack of necessity of umpires, and the ability to play a game with few participants), soccer is generally what is practiced most in the countryside, and maybe increasingly so in poor areas.584 However, in cities and larger municipios baseball still appears to be El Rey de Deportes, where travel is easier, neighborhoods more dense and economic opportunities greater, making organization of larger teams simpler.585 Bourdieu believed the value of sport sociology came from the relation between the social world of the participant and the sport itself as a field of struggle.586 An understanding of the social position of participants and consumers is then badly needed to understand the real space baseball occupies in Oaxaca. As was noted in the previous chapter, Oaxaca is the second poorest state in México and many of its residents have restricted access to ample food, water, or important services such as education or healthcare according to the Oaxaca Fund Initiative, a Ford Foundation project.587 Oaxaca experiences the third highest marginalization in all of the México with high illiteracy and infant mortality rates and low

582 Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class,” 369. 583 Josephine, interview by author; Andrés, interview by author. 584 Josephine, interview by author; Rodolfo, interview by author. 585 Josephine, interview by author. 586 Bourdieu, “Programme for a sociology of sport,” 158-159. 587 Oaxaca Fund Initiative, “About Oaxaca.” 123 income.588 The per capita income of the state is at $3,400, featuring a median between $2,200 and $2,500. Only seven percent of Oaxacans are self-sufficient on their incomes alone, but rely on pooling incomes, remittances, and welfare of some kind.589 Further, the state is claimed to have a Human Development Index (HDI) comparable to many countries in Africa and Southern Asia.590 According to the United Nations Development Programme, 44.9 percent of Oaxacans are considered indigenous, and these communities experience great marginalization in the state, generally speaking.591 Most of the municipalities with accessible baseball-only fields are among the most affluent in the state, as Table 4.1and Table 4.2 demonstrate.

It is evident that municipalities with baseball-only fields make significantly more, on average, than the state-wide per-capita income reflects. This is especially true for the Valley in which every municipality, with the exception of San Juan del Rio, is near $1,000 above the average. This figure is significant considering the state’s poorest municipalities of San Simón Zahuatlán, Coicoyán de las Flores, and Santos Reyes Yucuná average less than $1,000 per capita annually.592Oaxaca is divided into 570 municipalities, yet those with baseball fields litter the upper third in per-capita income. Another way of judging relative affluence is through comparative examination of occupational sectors and services available to the public, as is shown in Figure 4.2. Primary sector occupations are defined as primary food gatherers or resource extractors.593 In Oaxaca, the majority of these workers are farmers.

588 Norget, Days of Death, Days, of Life, 29-30. 589 Oaxaca Fund Initiative, “Oaxaca's Per Capita Income by Municipality;” Murphy and Stepick, Social Inequality in Oaxaca, 98. Estimation is based on the compared average incomes of municipalities around the state. Murphy and Stepick’s claim that seven percent of Oaxacans are completely self-reliant attempts to eliminate welfare from the economic picture to show relative positions of many in the state. 590 Oaxaca Fund Initiative, “About Oaxaca;” United Nations Development Programme, “Human Development Index- 2010 Rankings,”Human Development Reports, http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics (accessed April 27, 2011). There is a slight discrepancy in data here. The HDI of Oaxaca is listed at 0.716 which would rank it closer to Eastern European nations and the Middle East more so than with most of Africa or India. For example, Russia rates a 0.719 HDI in 2010 and India with a 0.519, putting Oaxaca much closer to that of Russia. 591 United Nations Development Programme, Informe sobre Desarrollo Humano de los Pueblos Indígenas en México. 592 “Oaxaca's Per Capita Income by Municipality,” Oaxaca Fund Initiative. 593 Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México, “Estado de Oaxaca.” 124

Table 4.1. Municipalities with Baseball Fields by Income in the Oaxaca Valley Municipality Annual per-capita Income (USD) Oaxaca de Juárez 11491.51 San Sebastian Tutla 10701.01 San Agustin Etla 9178.37 Villa de Etla 7538.53 San Pablo Etla 6108.26 Ciénega de Zimatlán 5886.43 Ocotlan de Morelos 5883.46 Tlacolula de Matamoros 5612.01 Zimatlán de Alvarez 5332.99 Guadalupe Etla 4934.67 San Bartolo Coyotepec 4256.03 Heroica Ciudad de Ejutla de Crespo 4095.33 San Juan del Rio 2022.53 Source: “Estado de Oaxaca,” Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México; “Oaxaca's Per Capita Income by Municipality,” Oaxaca Fund Initiative. 125

Table 4.2. Municipalities with Baseball Fields by Income in the Isthmus Municipality Annual per-capita Income (USD) Ciudad Ixtepec 13588.59 Salina Cruz 11495.59 El Espinal 7243.78 Barrio de la Soledad 6398.87 Santo Domingo Tehuantepec 6107.99 San Pedro Tapanatepec 5701.1 Juchitán de Zaragoza 5673.19 Santa María Mixtequilla 5575.09 San Pedro Huilotepec 5498.39 San Pedro Comitancillo 5141.4 Santo Domingo Ingenio 5120.31 San Blas Atempa 5082.35 Unión Hidalgo 4967.9 Matías Romero 4590.61 Santa María Jalapa del Marqués 4452.91 Santiago Laollaga 4287.63 Santo Domingo Chihuitán 4272.58 Santa María Xadani 4190.32 San Francisco Ixhuatán 4158.71 Santo Domingo Zanatepec 4111.55 Asunción Ixtaltepec 4009.66 Magdalena Tlacotepec 3955.51 Chahuites 3955.18 Reforma de Pineda 3818.6 San Francisco del Mar 3677.56 Santiago Niltepec 3360.27 Magdalena Tequisistlán 3295.72 Santiago Astata 3156.36 San Pedro Huamelula 2755.15 San Mateo del Mar 2382.99 San Dionisio del Mar 2025.19 Source: Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México, “Estado de Oaxaca.” See also Oaxaca Fund Initiative, “Oaxaca's Per Capita Income by Municipality.” According to the data, in both the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Valley, there is a strong correlation between income and primary sector occupation. Further, while Oaxaca struggles to give its residents access to basic needs, most of these municipios have significant 126 access to water, public lighting, and drainage, the last often considered a luxury.594 These figures are not insignificant as even those with access to water, for example, largely receive it tainted. However, those without services gather water that is likely worse, often directly from the Ayotac River in the Valley in which sewage and other pollutants are poured untreated from the capital. Consumption of this water has led to alarmingly high rates of e-coli infections and other gastro-intestinal problems, like dysentery which rank among the highest in the world. Many residents cannot afford the health care to fix these problems.595 Further, as Table 4.3 elucidates, those municipalities in the Oaxaca Valley that claimed baseball fields also had nearly half the amount of primary sector workers on average. They also had significantly higher access to potable water sources and drainage than those municipalities that do not have a baseball-only facility. Even public lighting receives a higher mark for those that participate in El Rey de Deportes. The diversity of Oaxaca is often described in ethnic, linguistic, or political terms. However, the significant variation in income equity around municipalities is striking. Interestingly, in both 2000 and 2005, Oaxaca boasted multiple municipalities that qualified among the five most equal municipalities in the entire country using the Gini coefficient. Indeed, Santiago Camotlán (0.2428), Santa María Pápalo (0.2688), and San Antonio Tepetlapa (0.2693) in 2000 and San Juan Teita (0.2469), Santiago Nundiche (0.2554), Santo Domingo Ixcatlán (0.2672) y San Juan Bautista Suchitepec (0.2694) in 2005 all appeared on these lists. However, in those same years Oaxaca rated as the third most unequal state in México posting Gini figures of 0.5646 and 0.5259 in 2000 and 2005, respectively.596 Frequently, those municipalities with baseball fields rate as the most unequal municipalities, likely because many retain an urban status where the poor often invade surrounding land or

594 Ibid.; Oaxaca Fund Initiative, “Oaxaca's Per Capita Income by Municipality.” 595 Murphy and Stepick, Social Inequality in Oaxaca, 50-51. 596 Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social, “Mapas de Desigualdad 2000- 2005,” http://www.coneval.gob.mx/cmsconeval/rw/pages/medicion/mapas_de_desigualdad_2000_2005/index.es.do;jse ssionid=b83e8b4d97dae97a69665c6ffdc9571e83d1621ca21c1bc0348d17ffdc3266a2.e34QaN4LaxeOa40Lc350 (accessed April 25, 2011). 127

Table 4.3. Services and Occupations: With and Without Baseball Fields in the Oaxaca Valley

100 Potable water Public lighting (baseball), 90.18 (baseball), 89.72 90

60 % Drainage

n (baseball), 49.52 e c

r 50 e P 40 Primary sector 30 (baseball), 24

0 Primary sector (no Potable water1 (no Public lighting (no Drainage (no baseball), 47.91 baseball), 68.35 baseball), 87.69 baseball), 31.67 Source: “Estado de Oaxaca,” Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México. live on the periphery in hopes for access to service jobs.597 Considering that baseball is played generally in more densely populated areas, and urban areas are, in fact, among the most unequal municipalities in the state, a mass participation and integration program through baseball seems difficult, even within communities that already have high levels of participation. Thus far the discussion of cost has traversed in extreme generalities, but equipment costs may be the easiest way to measure one’s ease of entry into organized baseball. Generally, US equipment is among the most expensive, but often cheaper Mexican alternatives cannot be found. Sometimes Mexican alternatives prove not to be cheaper at all. To discover what the entry costs to the sport via-equipment is in Oaxaca, a survey was

597 “Estado de Oaxaca,” Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México; Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social, “Indicadores de desigualdad con errores estándares 2000 y 2005,” http://www.coneval.gob.mx/cmsconeval/rw/resource/OAX%20desigualdad%2000-05.pdf?download=true (accessed April 25, 2011); Norget, Days of Death, Days of Life, 38. 128 conducted of online baseball stores “Beisbol Sports” and “Si-Beisbol.” Additionally, these stores were compared with selection and pricing at three different sporting goods outlets in Oaxaca City. These stores were “Ahorro de Oaxaca,” “Deportes Mexicanas,” and “Sport Shack.” The survey begins with baseball gloves, an item used by all. The results seem to confirm the conclusions above. While there exist many types of baseball gloves, standard infield versions were used as a representative cost because, while other specialty gloves exist (first baseman’s glove, catcher’s mitt, etc), infield gloves are used most widely and tend to be least expensive. For this survey, online stores provide a wide range of product including some of the top American brands. Here Rawlings, Wilson, Worth, Easton, and Pro-Line adult gloves ranged from 650 to 1,990 pesos with the average price falling at 1,217 pesos. The national alternatives such as Palomares, Reguz, BS-Matus, and Rolin ranged from 380 pesos to 990 pesos with the average settling at 561 pesos, a significant difference from the top American companies, yet still high. Interestingly, children’s gloves did not reflect much difference in price. With far fewer options, national children’s gloves from Rolin, Palomares, and Comax ranged from 199 pesos to 990, the average being 692 pesos. The American brands of Mattingly, and those already mentioned, ranged from 270 pesos to 1,450 pesos with an average of 684, actually cheaper than the national brands.598 The sporting goods stores Ahorro de Oaxaca, Deportes Mexicanas, and Sport Shack had markedly less selection. Here, the American brands ranged from 655 pesos to 1,180 pesos and the national brands from 495 pesos to 690 pesos.599 While one may be able to find a plastic rip-off glove such as “Spaldy,” these items prove impractical for a serious player who will use it more than a handful of times.600 Next surveyed was the aluminum bat. While some leagues around the world use wood, generally youth and amateur leagues everywhere use aluminum because it gives the ball “jump” when struck correctly and the bats rarely break, providing some safety and cost

598 Si-Beisbol.com, http://www.si-beisbol.com.mx/ (accessed March 13, 2011); Beisbol Sports, http://www.beisbolsports.com/ (March 13, 2011). 599 Ryan Gwynne, email with author, March 14, 2011. 600 Schultz, “El Rey de Deportes,” 1. 129 benefits that have prompted top level leagues like the Liga del Istmo and the Cuban League to use them. For an adult, online aluminum bats ran between 1,050 pesos up to 9,990 pesos, averaging 3,865. For children the number was cut nearly in half starting at 550 all the way up to 5,700 pesos a median of 750. 601 One store offered a bat for 475 pesos, but another had five bat options averaging 1,321 pesos each.602 All manufacturers of bats were American- based companies like Rawlings, Mattingly, Louisville, and Easton , leaving few options for the consumer. Certainly, however, to play organized baseball one needs more specialized equipment as well. To get an idea of the cheapest alternatives, plastic and rubber cleats, the cheapest form of cleats, were surveyed instead of the expensive metal cleats used at the upper amateur and professional levels. Prices ranged from 450 pesos to 950, not including one outlier which was priced at an astounding 1,850 pesos. The average cost minus the outlier, which priced comparably to metal cleats, sat at 694 pesos.603 Catching equipment, not surprisingly, was also high with a median online price at 3,350 pesos, with child’s gear pricing at nearly 4,800 at its highest point.604 Only one of the stores surveyed offered a set of equipment with a mask, chest protector, and shin guards and it ran near the aforementioned median at 3,250 pesos.605 Most baseballs themselves, from both online stores and sporting goods stores in the city, were sold for between 50 and 60 pesos, not including MLB or other official major league balls.606 If we assume that when available the player will buy all national brands to lower costs, a glove will on average cost 561 pesos, a bat 1,321 pesos, and cleats for 694 pesos bringing a total of 2,576 pesos (~US$219).607 Of course, this figure does not include the cost of a jock strap and protective cup, which run for 45 pesos, or pants, socks, batting gloves,

601 Si-Beisbol; Beisbol Sports. 602 Gwynne, email with author. 603 Si-Beisbol; Beisbol Sports. 604 Ibid. 605 Gwynne, email with author. 606 Ibid.; Si-Beisbol; Beisbol Sports. 607 Currency conversion was calculated on May 15, 2011. The exchange rate was 11.73 Mexican pesos for one dollar US. 130 sunglasses, jerseys, or tournament entry fees, which can all vary in price significantly.608 One must also consider transportation costs. All of these may drive up the tally near $100 putting the total at $319 for a bargain-hunting player in his inaugural season. However, judging by the selection at sporting goods stores and online versions, which feature much more high priced and foreign made equipment, it is likely that this total is commonly more than doubled. For example, an American-made glove, a Rawlings bat, and good cleats would cost closer to 6,000 pesos ($512) without including the ‘extra’ costs cited above. Metal cleats, more often used in adult leagues, and specialty fielding gloves also drive the cost of their respective items 100 to 200 percent higher than what is cited here.609 If we consider the near $2,200 per capita median income by municipality in Oaxaca, the cost for an Oaxacan baseball player buying quality gear is roughly 23.3 percent of annual income. For an American making median income of $50,221, this same percentage would represent $11,701 per year, an astounding figure.610 It is clear that those who are participating en masse, and likely reaching higher levels with superior gear and leisure time, are those with more comfortable income or significant sponsorship.

4.6 CONCLUSION Largely due to national and statewide promotion of the indigenous qualities of Oaxaca to further tourism, the state has been continually depicted as backwards and unchangingly traditional. Further, its communities have been depicted as isolated and hermetically sealed from each other, never seeing the benefits or desire for modernity as expressed through contemporary consumer capitalism. Among the poorest of states in the country, and with historically bad infrastructure, Oaxacan officials and local businessmen have supported a move to use championship tournaments in baseball to reassert itself as relevant in a neoliberal age. Indeed, baseball, the favored sport of the affluent north, and also strong in México City, remains a glowing symbol of progress and modernity since its

608 Gwynne, email with author. 609 Ibid.; Si-Beisbol; Beisbol Sports. This estimation is based on averages from American-made infield gloves, average of online aluminum adult bats, and averages of plastic and rubber cleats. 610 United States Census Bureau , “Household Income for States: 2008 and 2009,” United States Census Bureau (September 2010), http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/acsbr09-2.pdf (accessed April 20, 2011). 131 introduction during the Porfiriato. The building of the academy in the Oaxaca Valley is already drawing resentment from some baseball fans in the north even though it has not produced one quality professional player, showing the symbolic importance of such a move.611 Even so, Oaxacan officials still believed they are discriminated against by those who control baseball’s national organization in the north, believing themselves to be seen as primitive and unstable. Oaxaca’s success on the national level in tournaments, likely from the perspective of its domestic promoters, could potentially catapult the state into a position of respect, by beating teams in the north at their own game. Likely due to the already glowing talent of the Isthmus, and a historical preference for the civilizing qualities of baseball, baseball has once again taken center stage in the political arena. While the Oaxaca Valley had always featured baseball teams in youth, amateur, and semi-pro leagues, a new effort has been launched in the Valley to organize and mine prospects for top talent due to the move of professionalization in the sport. However, likely believing in the backwardness or primitiveness of its own residents, officials also seem to be using baseball as a way to condition and socialize its residents into accepting the rules of modern capitalism as they define them, leading ultimately to a healthier, more fulfilling, and more prosperous life in their estimation. Indeed, with a return to free market economic organization, citizenship often becomes largely based on how much one can consume.612 In México there are “cabrones” and “pendejos.” One values self-interested gain and the others simply submit to that body. Those who reject it are described as a “moral problem” that needs to be fixed.613 The official vow to construct baseball and other sporting facilities across the state is a key sponsorship of these programs of societal integration. In a place where political strife is often met with mobs wielding machetes, the conservative mindset promoted in baseball also increases the tolerance and acceptance of paternalism and inequity for the benefit of a few. Indeed, baseball in these ways works to control the political landscape by limiting the social world of participants. What makes this political project unique or relevant is its overt plan to

611 Rubio, “Academia de béisbol.. y Zenón Ochoa.” 612 García Canclini, Transforming Modernity, 29. 613 Gledhill, “Neoliberalism,” 339-340. 132 reform the culture of the people to promote modernity. Martin Vinokur believed that as governments realize more the political potential of sports, they make greater efforts to seize control of it. Further, the stronger the association between nation and sport, the more social integration can take place underneath its production.614 One must consider that the realization of mass participation follows an economic logic.Spaces of possible practice depend on a supply that must meet with a demand or “disposition” to play.615 While the efforts to build facilities is a positive step to realizing increased participation, some communities that have participated in the past no longer do so due to poor economic conditions that have led to increased out migration and made the already restrictive costs of entering the game impenetrable. This makes the supply for many nonexistent. Indeed, even in pelota mixteca, seen by many as an ancient game of pride among communities tied to a deep indigenous identity, participation among youth is increasingly and alarmingly low due to the high costs of equipment like gloves, which are manufactured by only one family and cost near $300.616 It is likely that even in the baseball communities that are very active, due to increasing inequality under the new economic organization wrought in neoliberal expansion, baseball has largely worked in practice to be extremely exclusionary just as it had been during the Porfiriato as it was initially intended. Cultural productions can often give a safe feeling to citizenship, but ultimately what underlies much about one’s identity are one’s values which can manipulate cultural expression in a way that differences, not unity, are augmented.617 No doubt a modern project is underway in Oaxaca, as it is seen in perpetuation, but there is significant space in the Valley for the bottom-up participation of the sport. Indeed, sports production is like a “musical score,” with “competing interpretations,” each participant contributing their own.618 Inspired by mythical and mystical connections to an ancient game, many Oaxacans who participate do not feel the game to be foreign, but instead in the blood

614 Vinokur, More than a Game, 18-19. 615 Bourdieu, “Programme for a sociology of sport,” 162. 616 Meliton, interview with author. 617 Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 22. 618 Bourdieu, “Programme for a sociology of sport,” 163. 133 of indigenous descendants of the region. Pelota mixteca was believed at one time to adhere the voices of people with those of gods, and as the academy and stadium for Harp Helú exploits, the game is believed to belong to them. Baseball is the toy of politicians and the weapon of peasants. Indeed, as Joseph Arbena has claimed, modern sports often represent a multifaceted transcultural fusion. It is beneficial for all walks of society and every socioeconomic group uses it to meet its own goals.619 Even while the sport’s production can be dominated by a single class, which certainly seems the case in Oaxaca where most participants in the Valley carry significant economic capital, another class’ participation may reflect their own feeling of agency.620 Lamatrine DaCosta takes this further, believing sport to be a reaction to poor social conditions and poverty. Modern sports growth on the bottom, then, is not asserting dominant relationships, it’s actually “emancipating” its participants throughout Latin America. Indeed, what ground-up baseball does do is turn unequal relationships between dominant and subordinate society on their heads, giving those not normally in positions of negotiation a place to help define what exactly modern is to look like. Despite similar economic conditions in the Isthmus, however, baseball is thriving even among the most indigenous communities showing no matter the intention of baseball promotion from the top, all people contribute to the definition of symbols and meanings in the sport.

619 Joseph L. Arbena, “The Later Evolution of Sport in Latin America: The North American Influence,” in Sport in Latin American Society: Past and Present, edited by J.A. Mangan and Lamartine DaCosta (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 44-46. 620 Ibid., 53. 134

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

In this thesis I set out to answer a core group of questions regarding the participation of baseball in Oaxaca: How did baseball, a long glowing symbol of American modernity, come to Oaxaca, the country’s most southern state and one commonly assumed to be the most ‘traditional’? Who brought it and for what purpose? Has this narrative changed over time and what does participation mean to those actively taking part, historically and in the present? Why has it been so readily adopted by local people either through their own participation or through support of a local team?621 In chapter two, I began my analysis by introducing the state of Oaxacan politics during a unique period of Mexican history. Following decades of in-fighting since colonialism, México was in relative shambles in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its economy was rotten, its politics divisive, and choice military figures wielded power to dethrone presidents nearly at their will. After the War of the Reform, however, a liberal government took power and held it until the Mexican Revolution. This era was marked by the leadership of Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz, two of Oaxaca’s sons. Both aimed to bring obedience and stability to its inhabitants before instituting policies of mass modernization. Modernization meant catching Oaxaca up to some of the world’s great powers in the US and Europe. Ultimately, the period aimed to improve the economy before looking to reform its citizens. Oaxaca was long considered to have great potential in export commodities but the region was deemed unsafe for investment. Díaz’s threat of force and uncompromising politics helped create some stability. What followed was nothing less than a boom in mining that witnessed a pouring of foreign investment into the state. Díaz and his hand-picked jefe politicos gave concessions and land to foreigners and Oaxaca City received a virtual make- over. Indeed, electric lighting and plumbing were installed, bridges were built, monuments

621 See Chapter one. 135 were erected, and the streets were cleansed of many of its perceived backwards symbols in efforts to create a city that mirrored in appearance those of Europe and the US. However, the state also “bandwagoned” another component of modern nations: modern sport. Likely because of the large investments from Americans in the state, baseball was chosen as the sport the newly bonded vallistocracia could collect around. Because games were expensive to attend and were promoted by elite social clubs, the sport in this era proved exclusionary. The fall of the Díaz regime, however, meant baseball would take on more integrating aspects. Indeed, it was believed that the sport held inherent and contagious characteristics that could help reform the backwards citizenry and acculturate indigenous peoples to capitalism. Modernization during the Porfiriato was extremely uneven and those in the countryside found living conditions worsen significantly. The response was varied, but each community adapted in some way. Most communities did not reject official projects, but resented its uneven qualities and elite definition that excluded the indigenous masses. Communities resisted in a multitude of ways, the most significant being that of violence. Ethnic wars around the country made the minority elite in Oaxaca skittish and fearful of its population. This fact, combined with the relative success of other forms of resistance, pushed politics of negotiation compromise between communities and the state through intermediaries. Through exclusion and negotiation Oaxacans developed competing modernities colored by the social conditions from which people emerged and collective historical memory. Chapter three examines the professional baseball environment through mostly the Mexican League club in Oaxaca City: the Guerreros. The Mexican League began in the 1925 but considered among its most exciting periods were those when it competed with MLB for international talent in the 1940s. Stadiums in this period also represented an exciting time for Mexican fans as the stadium was packed full of advertisements for appliances, foods, cars, and other products associated with modern living. The baseball stadium emerged as a quasi- religious shrine to global capitalism and cosmopolitanism in its choices of its entertainment as well, referred to in Oaxaca as the spectacle. The stadium is as much a theme park for an international, and highly sexual, spectacle as it is a field of baseball competition. Despite the club’s official fusion of indigenous imagery into the team’s, an examination of the costs of 136 games shows that the professional version of the game continues to function as mostly exclusionary. The Oaxacan professional game is not one of mimicry because it retains much regional uniqueness. Due to weather patterns in the state, the seventh inning stretch serves as a unique breaking point in the ballgame where the spectacle gives way to regional songs and chants. For over a decade a family-owned business that provided homemade regional treats such as tlayudas out-dueled corporate foods such as Domino’s Pizza because the fans preferred something more wholesome. Further, the intense sexuality and confrontation in the game’s participation by fans shows some evidence that the game is being re-appropriated by the popular from which ball games emerged and certainly don’t reflect the civility that was intended to be promoted by its first producers earlier in the century. While the club’s core following are likely more affluent, the stadium does provide some cheap seating and games are broadcasted on television, radio, and the Internet. Attendance levels over the last few seasons have shown that baseball is a welcomed sport in the region. The fourth chapter examines other baseball participation throughout Oaxaca, including some at the grassroots level. Indeed, many Oaxacans find baseball a natural fit, historically linked to an ancient ball game through which participants could communicate with the gods. Without a company team or any baseball experience, one community with access to a radio formed a grassroots team that competed with other communities in the region. The game worked as a boon for community pride and represented something new and exciting from largely agrarian town. Some players were even scouted by Mexican League organizations. The highly indigenous Isthmus, where most of the state’s 200-plus teams reside, also proves to harbor some of the state’s most fervent participants. These leagues have manufactured and developed the state’s best players, some that have since become national icons. The game is produced by wide array of people, communities, and institutions, but the state’s elite have not given up on the sport as a tool for modernization. The state has renewed its baseball efforts as a way to show its contemporary relevance, not against the US, but against regions in México that champion the sport. Indeed, the northern regions and México City simultaneously represent some of the best baseball playing regions and most economically productive regions in the country. However, Oaxacan organizations have found 137 it difficult to meet requirements to enter into and host national tournaments, some claiming the state is being unfairly treated because it is looked down upon by the north as underdeveloped. Mass participation efforts have been further promoted in children’s leagues and through a new state of the art baseball academy maintained by Alfredo Harp Helú, the owner of the Guerreros. As was the intention of indigenistas during the Revolution, Harp Helú has rhetorically linked his academy with the development and reformation of Oaxacan people into improved and healthier citizens. As an important regional philanthropist, he is an increasingly important political figure and baseball imagery has helped maintain his position as a paternal caretaker. His academy marks renewed efforts at alternative socialization but in a new economic organization. His project seems hand in hand with the state efforts, both hoping to reap the perceived benefits of mass participation in the sport in the state. Despite this optimistic integrative spirit, dire economic circumstances of many Oaxacans caps the potential of such projects and baseball again proves exclusionary in fundamental ways. Oaxaca is still generally thought of by outsiders as “traditional.” The traditional is generally attached to time and place as is the modern; the modern associated with newness and the Enlightened West while the traditional draws images of a slow and unchanging past.622 The modern of the twentieth century began by outlining one’s relation to liberalism and capitalism. This later incorporated one’s relation to an exponentially intensifying expediency of communications technologies and information. Certainly, Oaxacans would be considered “modern” by most of these standards as they have among the highest rates of migration to the US, domestic markets are full of goods from all around the world, and nearly all have relative access to television, Internet, and some phone.623 While many have moved to recognize the significance and importance in societies once believed primitive or traditional, few can doubt that identity creation is now heavily influenced by how much one can consume as much as access to certain products and information.624

622 Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 28. 623 Wysocki, field notes, June 18, 2010; “Estado de Oaxaca,” Enciclopedia de los Municipios de México. 624 García Canclini, Transforming Modernity, 16; Robinson, Ordinary Cities. 138

Italo Calvino showed in his monumental work Invisible Cities that truly nothing is hermetically sealed. Those places considered traditional borrow from the modern, and those considered modern are inextricably linked with elements of the traditional.625 Because Oaxaca is home to such great inequity, the “modern” is deeply segregated because the ability to consume certain products and information is greatly varied.626 This segregation finds many levels from within the state, within the country, and even within the continent. Limited access to this modernity has perpetuated designations of spatial and ethnic territories in first, second, and third worlds, and has even perpetuated the use of the term “modern” itself as a defining characteristic of a society in what is considered a postmodern world. Indeed, for something to be modern there must be a traditional, or less modern, of which it plays off, even though they realistically reside inside of each other always.627 These designations are powerful political terms to wage a war of legitimacy for the accumulation of power. However, not all groups accept defeat if restricted access. Nestor García Canclini argues that Mexican popular culture is a fusion of what is considered the “folk” and what is associated with modernity. However, popular culture has never been dominated completely by any person or institution.628 Likely in response to their own failure to fulfill the unwritten prerequisites for entering the modern, perhaps categories such as religious views, education, income, ethnicity, or even place of residence, alternative and competing modernities rise to replace the modernities that are believed unreachable. In Oaxaca, this fact must prove especially true where informality, multi-lingualism, mass migration, and a collective memory of resistance has always painted the state as in flux; complex and constantly redefining itself.629 Baseball is one of the many fields this game is played out where agents pick and choose points of both entry and exit when they see it fit.

625 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1972); Robinson, Ordinary Cities, 28. 626 García Canclini, Transforming Modernity, 29. 627 Robinson, Ordinary Cities, 28. 628 García Canclini, “Transforming Modernity,” 12-26. 629 David Bacon, Communities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2006), 45. Migrant Oaxacans often speak multiple languages. Many speak two or all three of an indigenous language, Spanish, or English. 139

Culture, including baseball, has not represented themes of domination in Oaxaca, although dominant classes have attempted to use baseball in such ways. Like the resistance movements and political negotiations that have marked the region, culture has always represented a two-way flow mapping.630 This is also represented in the typical Oaxacan choice to migrate where a culture of migration has generally left room for communalism, attachment to the village, while accepting some cultural fusions in new places.631 Modern identities are in this way “liquid.”632 While some “balance mechanisms” will continue to exist for all societies in some capacity, the Oaxacan traditional is one marked by adaptation.633 In this thesis baseball has been presented as a window to examine some of the ways people express their own position within the political field. In Oaxaca baseball can be perceived as both a mirror of society and a place for a group to assert difference. It has worked as host to a fair of international capital symbols and as a way to vent frustration and confront politicians, elite symbols of modernity, and surrounding communities. It has been introduced by those conceivably near the bottom of the social ladder as well as those from the top. Baseball demonstrates nicely some of the ways a “society manipulates power and status to create cultural change.”634 Without a dominant narrative, baseball and other art forms function as hosts to these social poetics that help us color the complexities in human societies.635

630 Arbena, “The Later Evolution of Sport in Latin America,” 53. 631 Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico, 5-7; Bacon, Communities without Borders, 41- 42. 632 Gerard Delanty, “The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory,” The British Journal of Sociology 57 (2006): 30-36. 633 Norget, Days of Death, Days of Life, 224; Bacon, Communities without Borders, 41-42. 634 James Fernandez and Michael Herzfeld, “In Search of Meaningful Methods,” in Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, edited by H. Russell Bernard (Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press, 1998), 95. 635 Ibid. 140

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NON-PRINT AND INFORMAL PUBLICATIONS Arango, Claudia Ivette Palacios. “Santa Gertrudis, Zimatlán, Oax.” Infiernitum Ciber Café: Temas Oaxaqueños. http://www.infiernitum.com/temas/hi-HisStagertrudis.htm (accessed March 3, 2011). Beismex. “Biografias Pitchers Mexicanos.” http://beismex.galeon.com/enlaces943027.html (accessed April 23, 2011). Clark, Jonathan. “In tradition-minded Oaxaca, 'Antojitos Lupe' is the queen of ballpark snacks.” John Clark, Freelance Reporter. http://jonclark500.com/stories/stories/lupe.html (accessed May 11, 2011). Clark, Jonathan. “‘We are all Guerreros’: Oaxaca's unique culture is on display at local ballpark.” Entrepreneur. http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/131329671.html (accessed January 8, 2011). Conexión Deportiva. “MAR 2009 - Cultural pierde los dos amistosos ante Olmecas de Tabasco.” http://www.conexiondeportiva.net/html/beisbol.html (accessed May 2, 2011). Dannheisser, Ralph. “Little League Baseball Aims to Blend Fun, Character Development.” America.gov. http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplace- english/2008/September/20080908123707madobbA0.3626215.html (accessed April 7, 2011). Doing Business: Measuring Business Regulations. “Economy Rankings: Mexico.” From the World Bank. http://www.doingbusiness.org/Rankings/mexico/2009 (accessed March 26, 2011). E-consulta Oaxaca. “Inaugura Harp Helú academia de beisbol en San Bartolo Coyotepec.” http://www.e- consulta.com/oaxaca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11867&Itemid=27 (accessed July 20, 2010). 148

Felix, Luis. “Inauguran Academia de Beisbol en Oaxaca.” To2: Desarrollo Integral. http://www.to2.mx/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1599:inauguran- academia-de-beisbol-en-oaxaca&catid=1:timas&Itemid=76 (accessed January 12, 2011). García, Moret. "Play ball en la Liga Oaxaca." Oaxacain.com. http://www.oaxacain.com/eventos/50-eventos/843-play-ball-en-la-liga-oaxaca.html (accessed January 25, 2011). Lukacs, John D. “Programs Decades in the Making.” ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=5312405 (accessed April 20, 2011). Mader, Ron. “Baseball in Oaxaca.” Planeta. http://www.planeta.com/ecotravel/sports/baseballoax.html (accessed February 22, 2011). Mexico Bus Schedules. “Oaxaca State of Mexico Map.” http://www.Méxicobusschedules.com/maps/states/Oaxaca_México_Map.gif (accessed May 16, 2011) Nevada Nugget Hunters. “Prominent Men You Should Know.” http://nevadanuggethunters.myfreeforum.org/index.php?component=content&topicid=42 9&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 (accessed April 3, 2011) Publimetro.“Inauguran en San Bartolo Coyotepec Academia de Beisbol Harp Helú.” http://www.publimetro.com.mx/deportes/inauguran-en-san-bartolo-coyotepec-academia- de-beisbol-harp-helu/nikl!ToblbYp0ZsjNAd3uLwt2Hg/ (accessed February 21, 2011). Ramírez Hamilton, Jenny. “Hacienda de Santa Gertrudis.” Infiernitum Ciber Café: Temas Oaxaqueños. http://www.infiernitum.com/temas/lt-hdastagertrudis.htm (accessed March 3, 2011). Rosagel, Shaila. “Vinicio Castilla, El señor cuadrangular.” Shaila Rosagel Blog, entry posted May 17, 2009. http://shailarosagel.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/vinicio-castilla-el-senor- cuadrangular/ (accessed April 28, 2011). Rubio, Jesús Alberto. “Academia de béisbol.. y Zenón Ochoa.” Remehibe Blog, entry posted November 13, 2009. http://www.conexioncubana.net/blogs/remehibe/academia-de- beisbol-y-zenon-ochoa/ (accessed March 17, 2011). Starkman, Alvin. “Baseball at its Best... Los Guerreros De Oaxaca.” The Pacific Coast of Mexico. http://www.tomzap.com/baseball.html (accessed October 4, 2010). Urquidi, Ricardo. “Visita Joakim Soria la Academia de Béisbol de Oaxaca.” Furiagris.com.mx.. http://furiagris.com.mx/sitio/?p=9336 (accessed January 10, 2011). Villanueva, Victor Hugo. “Fiesta en Zimatlán de Álvarez.” NSS Oaxaca.. http://www.nssoaxaca.com/deportes/34-local/59017-fiesta-en-zimatlan-de-alvarez (accessed January 19, 2011).

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Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Deporte. http://www.fahhdeporte.com.mx/ModeloArtsFijos.aspx?l=en&s=3&idx=77 (accessed May 15, 2011). Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Deporte. “Baseball Projects.” http://www.fahhdeporte.com.mx/ModeloArtsFijos.aspx?l=en&s=3&idx=77 (accessed February 12, 2011). Fundación LLB México. http://www.llbmexico.com/ (accessed March 20, 2011). Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca. “Historia del Monte de Piedad de Oaxaca.” http://www.montedepiedad.gob.mx/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&lay out=blog&id=39&Itemid=58 (accessed March 3, 2011). Guerreros de Oaxaca. Official website. http://www.guerrerosdeoaxaca.com.mx/ (accessed March 7, 2011). Guerreros de Oaxaca. “Historia.” Official website. http://www.guerrerosdeoaxaca.com.mx/ (accessed January 2, 2011). Guerreros de Oaxaca. , “Localidades.” Official website. http://www.guerrerosdeoaxaca.com.mx/ (accessed March 7, 2011). Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI). México. http://www.inegi.org.mx/default.aspx (accessed May 20, 2011). Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI). “Catálogo de Claves de Entidades Federativas, Municipios, y Localidades.” http://mapserver.inegi.org.mx/mgn2k/?c=646&s=est (accessed May 12, 2011). La Liga Mexicana de Béisbol. Official website. http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?sid=l125 (accessed March 10, 2011). La Liga Mexicana de Béisbol. “Standings.” Official website. http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp?sid=l125 (accessed March 10, 2011). Liga de Béisbol Infantil y Juventil Monte Albán. League official website. http://www.ligamontealban.com/ (accessed May 12, 2011). Liga Regional de Beisbol Eduardo Vasconselos. Oaxaca, Mexico. http://www.ligavasconcelos.com/index.php (accessed March 20, 2011). Little League Baseball and Softball. Official website. http://www.littleleague.org/Little_League_Online.htm (accessed May 3, 2011). Loyola, Janet Contreras. “Historia del Beisbol – Nacimiento de la LMB.” Archivo del Beisbol. http://www.archivodelbeisbol.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id =130&Itemid=34&limitstart=4%29 (accessed March 6, 2011). Minor League Baseball. Official website. http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/index.jsp (April 21, 2011). Oaxaca Fund Initiative. By Fundación Comunitaria Oaxaca and International Community Foundation. http://oaxaca.icf-xchange.org/index (accessed March 10, 2011). 151

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