More than a decade ago, José Alamillo identified the significance of baseball clubs to Mexican-origin workers crafting their identities in California, in a chapter of his first book, Making Lemonade out of Lemons. That section led to a public history project about Latino baseball, as well as this book, the first monograph devoted to a “Mexican sporting diaspora” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For his impressive interdisciplinary enterprise, Alamillo draws on multiple fields of study and borrows the conception of Ben Carrington's “sporting black diaspora” across six thematic chapters that strive to maintain a chronological flow as well as a narrative style.
That narrative is strongest in Chapters 2 and 3, which focus on boxing and baseball, respectively, retracing the careers of some famous as well as lesser-known Mexican-origin athletes. Transnational networking between Mexico and the United States, a primary focus of the book, is clearly embodied by these athletes. In Chapter 5, the extent of transnational networking is unfurled by contextualizing Mexico in the cultural diplomacy of sports, specifically as a tool of Joseph Nye's “soft power,” but not only for national governments in the United States or Mexico. Alamillo casts sport as a tool for grassroots organizations working across the border as well.
Apart from transnationalism, Alamillo establishes four other “dimensions” of the diaspora in this study: displacement, racializing, gendering, and identity construction (4). Even though they are present throughout the book, these dimensions connect in the final chapter. Displaced Mexicans, or their children, confronted ethnic, racial, class, and gender barriers, especially in Southern California, as they crafted their own identity. The nebulous positioning of Latinx people in America's racial binary allowed for some fluidity for Mexican athletes to play for multiple teams in segregated fields, but changing and inherently restrictive immigration policies were harder to navigate. Likewise, sports became an avenue for Latinas to reform gender codes, and Alamillo's much-needed recovery of peloteras and other women athletes of Mexican origin is a major contribution of the book. However, as he notes, coaches remained de facto male even after de jure male chaperoneship waned, restricting how far and fast women athletes could move outside of competition.
Despite tackling such complicated themes, Alamillo's prose is accessible enough for undergraduate students. An outstanding introduction clearly maps the book, while a conclusion largely written in the first person personalizes these histories in a very compelling manner. The body chapters will certainly be valuable to graduate students and scholars, because there are dozens of biographies, teamographies, and other future projects waiting to be fleshed out—especially by interdisciplinary and multilingual researchers. Comparisons between the “Americanization” strategies of physical educators and sport organizations with regard to Mexican people and those applied to Native Americans—notably through boarding schools such as Carlisle—are ripe for examination. Other sports would merit attention similar to that paid to boxing and baseball, in particular Mexican basketball clubs, the 1936 Bronze-medal winning Mexican Olympic basketball team, and collegiate teams like the University of New Mexico A&M, which had Mexican American players such as Kiko Martinez straddling a color line on the hardwood as they played in national collegiate tournaments in the interwar era.
Ultimately, Alamillo argues that “Mexican-origin males and females in the United States have used sports to empower themselves and their communities by developing and sustaining transnational networks with Mexico” (197)—and he does so convincingly. This book will be a foundational contribution to interdisciplinary and intersectional analyses of sport in transnational contexts, and a signal work on Mexican American identity creation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
