Baseball and Borders: The Diffusion of Baseball into Mexican and Canadian-American Borderland Regions, 1885-1911

Abstract

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the John A. Macdonald government in Canada and the regime of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico followed similar development strategies. Both countries encouraged domestic industry, made substantial investments in railways, and extended their state's influence over hinterland territories and aboriginal peoples. In Mexico's case this meant a northward gaze toward the American border; in Canada's it meant looking westward. Modernization brought American investment to both countries, especially in the resource industries. It also facilitated the diffusion of baseball into borderland regions. Despite the similar development strategies employed by the two countries in the years before World War I, however, baseball more readily permeated the Canadian-American boundary than it did the Mexican-American frontier. THE DIFFUSION MODEL In recent years Allen Guttmann, Joseph Arbena, and others have suggested a diffusion model in which sporting culture radiates the more developed nations outward to the rest of the world, entering host cultures at the elite level, before descending through the social order to the working class and urban poor. (1) As a general theory, the diffusion model helps chart the expansion of sporting culture, especially in the nineteenth century. In Mexico, for example, the Diaz regime's interest in modernization brought with it a new interest in fashionable leisure, the bicycle to baseball games, pursuits initially taken up by members of the elite. In Canada the British team sports--cricket, soccer, and rugby--supplanted earlier forms of leisure that were more attached to rural life. Despite the hopes of an Anglo-Saxon elite that British sporting practices would create respectability and a deeper allegiance to the empire, the practices were often resisted, especially in Quebec, and quickly gave way to such No rth American sports as lacrosse, hockey, and baseball. (2) This paper addresses the nature of the diffusion process as it relates to baseball in the Mexican and Canadian borderlands 1880 to 1910. It asks a simple question: how did borders affect the diffusion process? In addressing this question the paper reflects upon how the two borderlands were constructed and imagined, what they shared, and how they differed. Baseball established itself in the southwestern borderlands during the 1880s, at a time when Hispanic and Indian peoples confronted an expanding Anglo culture characterized by commercial agriculture, land speculation, mineral exploitation, railway development, and the veneration of free white labor and private property. With baseball already established as the pastime, its westward expansion symbolized the coming of a new order associated with capitalist enterprise and entrepreneurial values. By the end of the decade the game was being played Brownsville/Matamoros, Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, and El Paso/Juarez on the Texas-Mexican border, to Douglas/Agua Prieto and Bisbee/Cananea on the Arizona/Sonora border, and Tucson and Yuma in Arizona as far west as San Diego/Tijuana. As it came to the region the national pastime remained essentially an Anglo game. It increasingly embodied what David Roediger, Ruth Frankenberg, Valerie Babb, and others describe as whiteness, a white-centric assumption of privilege from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society (3) and which justified driving African Americans out of the ranks of professional baseball all over North America during the 1880s. (4) At the same time, baseball was thriving in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana and across the Canadian border in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. As in the Southwest, this region was being transformed by railway construction and settlement. In addition, the process through which native peoples were being dispossessed and in which whiteness was being privileged was nearing completion. Recently Sheila McManus has analyzed the uneven transition of Blackfoot country into the Alberta-Montana borderlands the 1860s to the 1890s. …