Field of Dreamers: Becoming Mexican American through the National Pastime

Abstract

The Mexican American population of the United States increased sixfold during the first half of the twentieth century. Through hostile working and living conditions, Mexican Americans established communities in the southwestern borderlands, cities, and rural areas, where they carved out important social spaces and engaged in practices that established connections between their ethnic Mexican backgrounds and their new American environments. This dissertation argues that Mexican Americans in the first half of the twentieth century used baseball as a vehicle to establish hybridized identities as Americans with a Mexican cultural heritage, to form communities around that shared identity, and to confront racialization in the United States in search for a sense of belongingness. Using extensive archival research from newspapers, oral histories, artwork, material culture, magazines, and Spanish-language sources, this project builds upon historiography established by works in Mexican American history, sports history, labor history, intellectual history, and gender studies. Baseball proved malleable enough to accommodate the various needs of this heterogeneous population, who differed in national origin, socioeconomic backgrounds, geographic settings, linguistic abilities, and age groups. Mexican Americans molded this American cultural activity to fit their own needs while reckoning with prevailing ideas about race, gender, class, and nationalism. They sustained important elements of their Mexican heritage while adopting American perspectives and ideologies, and fused together new identities in the process. Participating in the national pastime provided Mexican Americans with more than a recreational outlet; it provided them with the self-efficacy to express cultural citizenship, establish communities, demonstrate the fortitude of their shared cultural heritage, and to find a sense of belonging, both on and off the baseball diamond.