Weighing in on discussions of masculinity, national identity, and race, this book hooks the reader with a deep and insightful cultural history of the evolution of boxing in Mexico and Cuba during a century of social, political, and economic upheaval. The author argues that both countries faced the growing and deepening political, social, economic, and cultural interference of the United States. Boxing, the book evinces, serves to illustrate the ways that nationalism, modernity, and masculinity were contingent “on the interplay between local, national contexts” (3), with the racialized male body a site where competing historical, cultural and social narratives were inscribed.
The book's significance lies in its use of boxing to build on earlier modes of analysis of day-to-day cultural practices while drawing out new perspectives and analysis on the role of sport history in Latin America. Boxing becomes a vehicle for a deep discussion on cultural and political ideologies, the role of the male body in those discussions, and a close reading of the social groups involved, in and out of the boxing ring.
The book begins with an engaging account of the prizefight between US fighters Jack Johnson and Jess Willard that took place in Havana in 1915, a sensational spectacle seen around the world. The author uses this bout between ‘a Great White Hope’ and his African American opponent to introduce the reader to the arena of local expressions of morality, virility, modernization, and race. Relying mostly on newspaper sources, the author illustrates how different socioeconomic groups constructed different meanings of the sport of boxing and around the boxers themselves. For some, particularly political and cultural arbiters, this match was an opportunity to try to eliminate the offending, barbaric, and foreign spectacle altogether. For others, it was an affirmation of national masculinity and served as a means to construct local identities.
The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters, two of which address Mexico, and three that focus on Cuba. The introduction and conclusion set up a comparative analysis and provide the theoretical framework for the study. Each chapter provides a penetrating account of the often messy ways that local communities created meaning, and both resisted and questioned definitions of modernity and masculinity. Included is an engrossing image and photographic essay that illustrates the ways that the male body circulated in popular media and how male bodies became symbols for decency, national identity, masculinity, and whiteness.
Language is one indicator of the impact boxing had on the local communities. For example, neologisms like “el box,” terms seen by some as examples of cultural imperialism, nonetheless became commonplace in print media during the nineteenth century. This process of linguistic adoption and modification reflected the ways that boxing was characterized in print media.
That the manuscript does not engage more deeply with the language of race, in the way it does with the changing narratives around boxing, seems to be a missed opportunity. The manuscript cites Spanish-language sources, but no explanation of the translation process is mentioned in the text. It is important for the reader to understand the translation process and the use of racial terms, given the role language plays in the complex racial history of both countries. Further, acknowledging the author's social location as a student of the Spanish language would help deepen the discussion of the language of race. It provides the necessary context to help explain the inclusion of multiple English-language sources that use the N-word and why a chapter title is based on a quote that includes it. Given the current discussions around racial equity and the African diaspora in Latin America, an instructor would need to provide context about the language of race and how it is used historically and in the current context.
Intellectually rigorous in its analysis and sharply detailed, this manuscript contributes to the field of Latin American cultural history writ large. It is a close comparative and cross-national analysis that reshapes the way we think of boxing, demonstrating it to be more than an expression of imposed cultural imperialism, and, indeed, to reveal local articulations of masculinity, national bodies, and discourses of race and identities.
