Asian American Sporting Cultures

Stanley I. Thangaraj, Constancio Arnaldo, Christina B. Chin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479840816
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Asian American Sporting Cultures delves into the American sports arena to explore the long history of Asian American sporting cultures and considershowidentities and communities are negotiated on sporting fields. Through a close examination of Asian American sporting cultures ranging from boxing and basketball to spelling bees and wrestling, the contributors reveal the intimate connection between sport and identity formation. Sport plays a special role in the processes of citizen-making and of the policing of national and diasporic bodies. It is thus one key area in which Asian American stereotypes may be challenged, negotiated, and destroyed as athletic performances create multiple opportunities for claiming American identities. This volume incorporates work on Pacific Islander, South Asian, and Southeast Asian Americans as well as East Asian Americans, and explores how sports are gendered, includingexaminations of Asian American men’s attempts to claim masculinity through sporting cultures as well as the “Orientalism” evident in discussions of mixed martial arts as practiced by Asian American female fighters. This American story illuminates how marginalized communities perform their American-ness through co-ethnic and co-racial sporting spaces.

Part I

Asian American Sports in Historical Context

1

From Perpetual Foreigner to Pacific Rim Entrepreneur

The U.S. Military, Asian Americans, and the Circuitous Path of Sport

Ryan Reft

“In these ‘tense and tender ties’ of empire,” Ann Laura Stoler writes, “relations of power were knotted and tightened, loosened and cut, tangled and undone. These ties are not microcosms of empire but its marrow.”1 Stoler’s anthology Haunted by Empire mapped the “geographies of intimacies” between colonizers and colonized. Indeed, beginning in the late nineteenth century, American imperial relations with the Pacific Rim rested on notions of intimacy in practice and in rhetoric. American officials in the Philippines depended on what Paul Kramer (2006) calls “the politics of recognition.”2 U.S. officials used the language of family, in particular racially heteronormative conceptions of domesticity, to invoke feelings of unity, though relations did not unfold on an equal playing field. American officials spoke of their “little brown brothers” and the United States’ role in tutoring their (nonnormative) sibling in the ways of democracy and self-governance. “Benevolent assimilation,” as some Americans called it, not only acknowledged U.S. superiority but also co-opted Filipino elites, known as Ilustrados, by acknowledging them as the class that would lead their countrymen to eventual independence, thereby securing their support in the pursuit of U.S. interests.3

For the average Filipino however, he or she encountered U.S. officials and Christian missionaries who enacted a physical education program that heavily emphasized sports like baseball.4 Missionaries believed that “muscular Christianity” warded off sin and guaranteed piousness, while American military officials thought it a civilizing force for Filipinos and a clean, safe outlet for U.S. servicemen. The commander of the Philippines Department, General James Franklin Bell (1911–1914), “boasted that baseball had ‘done more to ‘civilize’ Filipinos than anything else’” and shielded American soldiers from “tropical degeneracy.”5 Colonial governors sponsored nationwide baseball tournaments, and by the 1920s more than 1,500 schools fielded teams across the archipelago. Baseball brought with it middle-class respectabilities and appropriate racial sensibilities that local sports, like cockfighting, could not promise within U.S. imperialism.6 Ultimately, basketball would win the hearts of Filipinos, but from 1910 to 1930, the U.S. heavily promoted its national pastime of baseball among its colonial subjects.7 As most sports historians will tell you, few activities facilitate camaraderie, fraternity, and friendship like athletics.

While baseball served to inculcate American ideals among Filipino subjects, it also functioned to assert equality and independence.8 Filipinos embraced the sport for different reasons than their occupiers. “The Philippines’ shift from traditional folk games to modern organized athletics was no doubt facilitated by the fact that sports stimulate equality,” notes historian Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu. On baseball fields and later basketball courts, “the application of uniform rules and regulations to all participants, both the colonizer and the colonized,” guaranteed a certain level of egalitarianism, even if briefly.9

Throughout the twentieth century, U.S. militarization has heavily influenced the migration of certain Asian communities and the respective diasporic formations in the United States. Though the 1934 immigration legislation, the Tydings–McDuffie Act, virtually halted Filipino immigration to the U.S. for much of the early twentieth century residents of the Philippines enjoyed the ability to migrate to American shores despite prohibitions on Asian American citizenship. By the 1930s, 45,000 Filipinos lived in the U.S. with nearly 70 percent living in California and 80 percent working as migratory laborers.10 The U.S. occupation of the Philippines enabled this pattern of migration even as other Asian peoples found America off limits.

In retrospect, U.S. occupation of the Philippines would serve as the knife’s edge of both U.S. intervention in Asia and the Pacific and the proliferation of various Asian American communities in the U.S. In addition, intimacies, whether formulated around male camaraderie or heterosexual love affairs and marriages as illustrated by the 1945 War Brides Act and subsequent revisions to the law, facilitated the growth of these immigration flows.11 World War II, the postwar occupation of Japan, and the Korean and Vietnam wars would contribute to the growth of Japanese, Vietnamese, and Chinese diasporas while the 1965 Hart–Celler Immigration Act would pry open the gates of immigration further for Asians previously denied entrance.

Post-1965 military interventions continued to build intimacies and encourage Asian immigration to the U.S., thereby further diversifying Asian American demographics. Relationships established through masculine camaraderie helped Vietnamese refugees to settle in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. “Identification by empire,” writes Friedman, “may have voided the landscape of South Vietnam as their homeland, but it allowed them to settle and claim the CIA and Pentagon’s suburban landscape as their own.”12 Likewise, the combination of U.S. Pacific imperialism and sport created relationships that could be utilized by Asian immigrants in similar fashion. Therefore, from the United States’ first imperial steps into the Pacific, Asian immigration to America interacted closely with militarization and the bonds of intimacy that such intervention facilitated. In this way, Filipinos’ embrace of baseball in the 1920s embodies the winding road of sport and the means by which Asian immigration and Asian American sporting culture have been heavily influenced by militarization. U.S intervention abroad helped to create diasporas, while pre–and post–World War II sport enabled Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Vietnamese Americans to bond not only intra- and interethnically, but also interracially to their fellow American citizens.

In her landmark work Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe provocatively argues that Asian American history did not rest on European immigrant tropes about plucky ancestors who left the indulgent and corrupted old world for the meritocracy of America. Instead, on the trail of U.S. imperialism and Cold War military engagements and occupations, Asians found entry into American culture and eventually claims to citizenship. Using Asian American sport as a lens, one can better determine the influence of U.S. militarization on athletics and Asian American citizenship, while also broadening understandings of interracial relations, transnational connections, and racial binaries that have often limited discussions of race in America to a white-black paradigm. Importantly, as noted, Asian American citizenship hinged to a large extent on the United States’ military engagement and foreign policy prerogatives. Pre-1945 policies regarding Asian Americans limited citizenship to those born on U.S. soil but granted Filipinos national status. However, in the wake of World War II and the initiation of the Cold War, Asian Americans emerged as a valued example of U.S. inclusiveness, a symbol of America’s benevolence and a signpost for Asian observers. As a means to undercut Soviet efforts in Asia, U.S. officials scrambled to incorporate Asian Americans, in theory at least, as welcomed members of the nation’s body politic.

Through an examination of twentieth-century baseball and basketball in Asian American history, three themes emerge: the influence of the American military in Asian American sport, the changing meanings of Asian American citizenship, and the ways in which sport has helped create bonds of intimacy between Asian, Mexican, and African Americans in an era largely defined by segregation.13 Moreover, tracing the divergent meanings of sport for different Asian American ethnicities reveals the differences that exist at the heart of the Asian American moniker, a categorization that though useful for political mobilization, obscures a great deal in terms of culture, relations to sport, placement within global capitalism, and racial location.

1900–1945: Transnational Baseball and a Segregated U.S.

From the late nineteenth century beginning with the Chinese and expanding with stricter immigration laws through the 1920s and 1930s, Asians were largely banned from immigration.14 Government prohibitions prevented those Asians not born on U.S. soil from naturalization and in the 1910s several Western states passed Alien Land Laws that banned noncitizens, primarily Asians, from property ownership. Chinese women, public discourse alleged, were seductive prostitutes, licentious, and disease ridden, while men were “coolies” living in “bachelor societies” corrupted, effeminate, and exploitative in their “queer domesticity.”15 “Neither was considered capable of the free consent and voluntarism requisite for American political allegiance,” points out Nancy F. Cott. This perception that Asians were incapable of being assimilated had already resulted in the passage of the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which greatly restricted immigration.16 As Erika Lee has demonstrated, these acts, the latter especially, shaped not only Asian immigration but also established ethnically and racially biased precedents for immigration restrictions that were later applied to Eastern and Southern Europeans.17

Japanese and Filipino Americans endured their own set of racializations foisted upon them by whites, but restrictions on their immigration came later than those aimed at the Chinese. Japanese immigration slowed after the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908, yet from 1900 to 1910, 130,000 Japanese nationals immigrated to the U.S., many to California, where by the early 1900s public opinion and state legislation had turned discriminatory.18

In regard to immigration, Filipinos occupied a unique position. Living under imperial rule, they enjoyed the status of U.S. nationals, enabling their immigration to American shores despite prohibitions against other Asian ethnicities. However, fears over Filipino sexuality, particularly in reference to the seduction of white women, made many whites uneasy.19 While members of the predominantly male Filipino diaspora in California sought out taxi dance halls as a means of physical and emotional release and defiance of emasculating racist stereotypes, many white observers reacted negatively to the intermixing of race and gender. “[T]he worst part of his [the Filipino] being here is his mixing with you white girls from 13 to 17,” argued the nativist Judge D. W. Roherback of Watsonville, “keeping them out till all hours of the night. And some of these girls are carrying a Filipino baby inside of them.”20 When American leaders signed the agreement granting Filipino independence in 1932, they did so due to the accumulation of racial nativism, heterosexual fears, and agribusiness/labor protectionism.

American imperialism complicated the nation’s relationship to Asia and its peoples. As a result, U.S. attitudes toward Asians developed much as American military expansion increased. For example, in the wake of World War II, intimate relations between U.S. servicemen and Japanese and Chinese women forced changes in immigration laws, enabling the first trickles of post-1945 Asian immigration to the United States.21 From a foreign policy perspective, the rise of the Cold War and the related occupation of Japan by American forces encouraged U.S. officials to emphasize the importance of U.S.-Asian relations transforming the once duplicitous Japanese into a symbol of democracy and capitalism.22

While heterosexual romantic intimacies undoubtedly influenced bonds between Asians and Americans, sport too, also promoted by military engagement, helped to consolidate relationships between U.S. occupiers and indigenous peoples. If American expansionism into Asia largely began with the Spanish-American War in 1898, so too did the use of sport, particularly baseball, as a means to control the behavior of soldiers. Teddy Roosevelt worried about Rough Riders idling away, so the Army instituted organized sports in occupied Cuba to serve as a recreational outlet for service personnel. Though the Army had suggested weekly intercompany baseball games in the 1880s to ensure physical health and “combat readiness,” not until 1898 did officials consolidate these ideas into set practice. 23

In the U.S., the invention of baseball was often credited to Abner Doubleday, but contrary to this mythology, the sport developed in several places independently as a derivation of “various bat and ball folk games” and sometimes in relation to the British game rounders.24 That...