A01=Alan M. Klein
Aldo Tatangelo
Andre Gunder Frank
Anglo
Anti-Americanism
Anti-Mexican sentiment
Apache
Author_Alan M. Klein
Barnstorming
Baseball cap
Batting order (cricket)
Berlin Wall
Beyond a Boundary
Border zone
Brooklyn Dodgers (NFL)
Bull Durham
Category=SFC
Cinco de Mayo
Colonialism
Color guard (flag spinning)
Cultural hegemony
Cultural imperialism
Deion Sanders
Diego Rivera
Dominican Republic
Edward Said
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_sports-fitness
Ernest Gellner
Ethnography
Feudalism
Fight song
Fraternization
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
George Plimpton
Gregorio Cortez
Imperialism
Latin America
Level playing field
Lucio Blanco
Machismo
Masculinity
Match Game
Mexicali
Mexican Revolution
Mexican War of Independence
Mexican-American War
Mexicans
Mexico City
National Policy
Newspaper
North American Free Trade Agreement
Nuevo Laredo
Nuevo Santander
Oaxaca
Octavio Paz
Pancho Villa
Ping-pong diplomacy
Racial segregation
Rafael Trujillo
Republic of the Rio Grande
Return to the Border
San Diego-Tijuana
Smuggling
Superiority (short story)
Tampa Bay
Tejano
The New York Times
Tom Wolfe
Trade barrier
Transnationalism
Un-American
United States
University of Arizona Press
Venezuelans
Product details
- ISBN 9780691007441
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 21 Mar 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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From 1985 to 1994 there existed a significant but unheralded experiment in professional baseball. For ten seasons, the Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos) were the only team in professional sports to represent two nations. Playing in the storied Mexican League (an AAA affiliate of major league baseball), the "Tecos" had home parks on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Laredo, Texas and in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. In true border fashion, Mexican and American national anthems were played before each game, and the Tecos were operated by interests in both cities. Baseball on the Border is the story of the rise and unexpected demise of this surprising team. For Alan Klein, a cultural anthropologist specializing in sport, "the border" is almost a nation of its own. Having formed teams of players from both sides of the Rio Grande for almost a century, organizers and followers of the "Border Birds" often join forces but just as frequently squabble with each other in a chronic border tension. Throughout the book, Klein includes firsthand observations of the team and descriptions of its players.
Readers will meet Dan Firova, the Tecos' beleaguered manager, a border-region native who nevertheless finds himself a target of the Mexican media. The "Ugly American," Willie Waite, is a young pitcher whose stunning success does nothing to diminish the disdain he has for his Mexican teammates. Ernesto Barraza, "The Trickster," once threw a no-hitter on only seventy-three pitches (on April Fool's Day, appropriately enough), but occasionally shows up at the park missing part of his uniform. And then there is Andres Mora, an aged slugger who, despite three seasons in major league baseball and a life of personal excesses, came within a few home runs of setting the all-time Mexican League record. This is just part of the roster of the Tecos and only a fraction of the lineup of Baseball on the Border. Anyone with an interest in baseball will be enlightened and entertained by this informative book.
Alan M. Klein is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University. He is the author of Sugarball: The American Game, The Dominican Dream, and Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction.
