My favorite books on sports in Latin America and the Caribbean

One of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, James is best known for his works of history and Marxist philosophy. His book on cricket showed me something I intuited but did not truly understand: that sports are themselves deeply meaningful, and just as deserving of serious study as any other phenomenon or event. James narrates his own experience playing cricket in his native Trinidad in the early twentieth century and his lifelong passion for the game. More, he explores its artistry, its joys and disappointments, and, ultimately, its capacity to explain the nature of race, ethnicity, and power in the Caribbean and British Empire.

As is the case everywhere, sports in Latin America are deeply political, and students of Latin America have noticed how leaders like Juan Perón and Fidel Castro have used sports to gain followers and shape their nations. In her impressive work on Chilean soccer, Brenda Elsey demonstrates that it is not only charismatic leaders who have understood sports’ political utility. She shows how Chilean workers and labor activists used soccer to construct their communities and defend their class interests in the midst of rapid capitalist expansion during the twentieth century, reminding us that sports are not only arenas of athletic activity; they are also always venues for practicing citizenship.

Naturally, when we think of sports in Latin America we first think of the region’s great athletes, from Pelé to Roberto Clemente, from Lionel Messi to Albert Pujols. But baseball and soccer players do not make sports meaningful on their own; many others – owners, sponsors, politicians, fans – make them what they are. This is the essential insight that guides Thomas Carter’s anthropology of Cuban baseball. He acknowledges the important role of the Communist regime in shaping the game, but he shows convincingly that the game belongs to its fans, for it is their passion that makes baseball important to Cuba, and it is their arguments about the game which make it a site for the negotiation of what it means to be Cuban.

Put simply, in The Sovereign Colony Antonio Sotomayor uses a fascinating exception to prove an important general rule. That is, he explains clearly just how powerful modern sports can be in defining national identity by showing that Puerto Ricans have used sports to claim a sense of nationhood despite the fact that theirs is a nation but not a nation-state. He shows that whenever the Puerto Rican flag flies at an international sporting event islanders express their national identity and negotiate the character of US colonialism, and he carefully demonstrates how politicians and sports figures worked to make sports a site of Puerto Rican pride and identity.

In Dominican Baseball, Alan Klein continues his essential work to document the country’s relationship to American professional baseball. As he says, Major League teams have come to view the Dominican Republic as “a renewable resource” of baseball talent, a resource they not only consume but produce, through sophisticated recruitment strategies and the highly regimented academies many teams run in the country. Rather than offering easy answers, he shows that the system is one of American power, but also of Dominican agency, of local pride in Dominican success, but also of anxiety about the loss of national sovereignty. He thus provides an invaluable illustration of how Latin American sports help us understand the region’s position in the global commodity chain.