More than Just Peloteros: Sport and U.S. Latino Communities ed. by Jorge Iber (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: More than Just Peloteros: Sport and U.S. Latino Communities ed. by Jorge Iber Alex Mendoza More than Just Peloteros: Sport and U.S. Latino Communities. Edited by Jorge Iber. ( Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2015. Pp. 320. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Sports history, according to Jorge Iber, is a reflection of the community in which it happens to reside. As significant as sports might be to the concepts of identity and memory to many Americans, Latinos and Latinas have not participated in the nostalgia-driven narratives present in history and popular culture. In the introduction, entitled “The Perils and Possibilities of ‘Quarterbacking While Mexican,’” Iber traces this discrepancy through the prism of analyzing how University of Southern California quarterback Mark Sanchez served as a powerful lightning rod for controversy when he led the Trojans in 2007 and 2008. Ultimately, Iber points out that the growth of the Latino/a population has led to more academic study of their effect on sports. Prominent among the scholars who have explored the topic of Latinos in sports are Iber and Samuel Regalado. In 2007 they edited an anthology, Mexican Americans and Sport: A Reader on Athletics and Barrio Life. This work, which included essays on sports ranging from high school football to track and field, directly addressed the growing trend of Hispanics in twentieth century sports history. Iber’s latest work takes on a larger task, exploring the impact of Latinos/as in sports and recreation from the 1700s to the present in ten essays, most of which appeared in a special issue of the International Journal for the History of Sport. His goal is to “demonstrate how people of Mexican and other Latino descent have used sport in the United States to build community and challenge the majority population’s notion of Mexican American intellectual, athletic, and cultural weakness” (11). Jesús F. de la Teja’s essay on the recreational world of early San Antonio from 1718 to 1845 demonstrates how Hispanic residents of the city used recreational activities to enrich their lives. Activities like the rodeo and the Corrida de la Sandia (watermelon race) celebrated how Spanishsurnamed individuals in the Southwest carried themselves in their daily lives. While de la Teja’s chapter devotes ample analysis to the concepts of recreation and community, other chapters address the particular impact sports had on racial identity and masculinity. Enver M. Casimir’s “A Variable of Unwavering Significance: Latinos, African Americans, and the Racial Identity of Kid Chocolate” traces the career of Eligio Sardinas, a Cuban boxer in the 1920s and 1930s whose success in the ring underscored the importance of both racial and national identity in the contemporary media. The African American and Latino communities each laid claim to “Kid Chocolate” as one of their own, thus highlighting how ambiguous racial identity could be. The concept of masculinity in the Latino community is addressed by Eduardo García and José M. Alamillo in two separate chapters. García’s [End Page 229] essay, which studies Mexican Americans in El Paso during the 1940s, argues that Paseños used sports to carve a niche for their community during the mid-twentieth century. Their success in athletics was used to parley a more prominent place within the Anglo population as Mexican Americans proved their barrios were not poverty-stricken havens for crime and vice. Alamillo’s chapter on Richard “Pancho” González explores the world of tennis during the 1940s. Alamillo maintains that González, whom he calls an early “bad boy” of the tennis world, used aggressive play and a fiery character off the court to carve his own image of American nationalism during the Cold War era. Additional essays address the local history concept Iber mentioned in his introduction. Baseball in south Chicago, basketball in Arizona, football in South Texas, and minor-league baseball and major-league soccer in Houston round out the collection of articles that ably fulfill the editor’s goals for his work. Iber, nevertheless, concedes the limitation of his collection. He stresses the need for additional studies on Puerto Ricans and Hispanic women in sports. He also admits his heavy geographic focus on Texas sports...