Deportes

The Making of a Sporting Mexican Diaspora

José M Alamillo

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978813687
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Sociología

Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Deportes uncovers the hidden experiences of Mexican male and female athletes, teams and leagues and their supporters who fought for a more level playing field on both sides of the border. Despite a widespread belief that Mexicans shunned physical exercise, teamwork or "good sportsmanship," they proved that they could compete in a wide variety of sports at amateur, semiprofessional, Olympic and professional levels. Some even made their mark in the sports world by becoming the "first" Mexican athlete to reach the big leagues and win Olympic medals or world boxing and tennis titles.These sporting achievements were not theirs alone, an entire cadre of supporters—families, friends, coaches, managers, promoters, sportswriters, and fans—rallied around them and celebrated their athletic success. The Mexican nation and community, at home or abroad, elevated Mexican athletes to sports hero status with a deep sense of cultural and national pride. Alamillo argues that Mexican-origin males and females in the United States used sports to empower themselves and their community by developing and sustaining transnational networks with Mexico. Ultimately, these athletes and their supporters created a "sporting Mexican diaspora" that overcame economic barriers, challenged racial and gender assumptions, forged sporting networks across borders, developed new hybrid identities and raised awareness about civil rights within and beyond the sporting world.

1 ◆ DEPORTES, AMERICANIZATION, AND MEXICAN SPORTING CULTURE

Lamberto Álvarez Gayou was a leading sports promoter in Greater Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. Born to a wealthy family in Mexico City, Gayou studied engineering in college but preferred to compete in the pentathlon and gymnastics at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). His passion for sports motivated him to earn a master’s degree in physical education at the University of California, Los Angeles.¹ To earn extra income, he wrote for the sports pages of El Eco de Mexico and El Heraldo de México. In his spare time, he organized baseball and basketball games for Circulo Latino Americano, one of many mutualistas that served the recreational needs of México de afuera.

In 1926, Gayou moved to New York City to write in English and Spanish for the Associated Press on Latin American sports. He wrote for the Pan American Union Bulletin about Latin American athletes “who have most highly distinguished themselves in the United States, winning athletic fame for the Latin race.”² A devoted boxing fan, Gayou wrote about the early Mexican prizefighters who traveled from Mexico City to Los Angeles and New York City to fight in the big arenas with the hopes of becoming a world champion.³ In 1929, he moved to Mexico City to become secretary of the Mexican Olympic Committee and head coach of the Military College. A year later, Gayou moved to Tijuana to be closer to family as the government’s newly appointed director of athletics for the northern territory of Baja California.

Living and working in a border town, Gayou organized cross-border sporting exchanges with amateur baseball and basketball teams from Southern California. He staged Olympic tryouts for the track and field team and hosted Mexican Olympians to train in Tijuana several months before the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.⁴ Gayou served as manager of the Mexican Olympic team in Los Angeles and even proposed a “Latin American Olympic Games” to be held in Tijuana, but the idea failed due to limited funding and facilities.⁵ Despite this unfulfilled goal, though, San Diego newspaper sports columnists praised Gayou for his “ability and energy to put his plans through.”⁶ Gayou was a “genius” sports promoter who preached “true sportsmanship” and “clean sports,” but focused primarily in developing the Mexican male athlete. He once wrote, “The boys down in Mexico are doing things. They are advancing in every field of athletics in such fashion that I confidently predict that the day is not far distant when they will be stout rivals to their neighbors to the north.”⁷

Gayou was referred to as the “Father of Athletics” in Mexico for launching a “peaceful revolution” in sports and physical education during the 1930s.⁸ Following Mexican president Pascual Ortiz’s resignation, Abelardo Rodríguez took over the presidency on September 4, 1932, and appointed Gayou as the director of the Department of Physical Education. In his first action “to make Mexico a sports-minded nation,” Gayou made the junior pentathlon mandatory in public schools and hosted the international junior pentathlon championships in Mexico City.⁹

For his next task, Gayou encouraged the formation of amateur sports clubs modeled after the Amateur Athletic Union in the United States. On July 22, 1933, President Rodríguez signed a bill to establish the Confederación Deportiva Mexicana (CDM) and appointed Gayou to lead the nation’s first sports federation and “develop physically the Mexican people and enhance the prestige of the nation.”¹⁰ Gayou pushed CDM to develop transnational sporting exchanges with the Mexican Athletic Association of Southern California, which I discuss in chapter 4.

After his two-year term with the federal government, Gayou returned to Mexicali, Baja California, with his wife to begin a new engineering job while also promoting sports and physical education along the border region. Five years later, in 1940, he returned to Mexico City as technical director of physical education and met with U.S. vice president Henry Wallace to share his inter-American sports proposal.¹¹ Gayou proposed a series of physical education, health education, sports, and recreational programs throughout the Americas.¹² One of these was adopted as part of the U.S. Good Neighbor Program during World War II, led by Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, which I discuss further in chapter 6. The other was the creation of the Pan American Institute of Physical Education to advise Latin American countries on health and physical education.

I begin this chapter with Lamberto Álvarez Gayou’s biography to show how the rise of sports in the United States and Mexico was interwoven across national borders producing a Mexican sporting culture. The first part provides a brief overview of the rise of sports in Mexico, focusing on the YMCA’s role in promoting “American” sports and a “muscular Christianity” ideology among its middle-class Mexican male membership. Mexican citizens selectively embraced American sports to develop their athletic talent and make demands on the postrevolutionary Mexican government to provide more recreational and athletic opportunities. The second part examines Euro-American reformer efforts to attack the “Mexican problem” by using sports as a vehicle to achieve immigrant assimilation in the United States. Settlement house staff, YMCA secretaries, physical educators, and municipal employees sought to “Americanize” Mexican immigrants through baseball, basketball, and other American sports to make them “better citizens.” The third part focuses on three México de afuera institutions—mutual aid organizations, the Spanish-language press, and the Mexican consulate office—that helped shape a Mexican sporting culture in Los Angeles. Ultimately, I argue that U.S. institutions introduced modern sports to Mexicans on both sides of the border to advance a muscular Christianity and Americanization ideology. Although Mexicans adopted American sports, they did so while maintaining their culture, enhancing their national identity, and constructing a unique Mexican sporting culture.

THE RISE OF DEPORTES IN MEXICO

Like the British Empire, the United States used sports to sell American goods, ideology, and culture abroad. U.S. imperial interests created an “athletic crusade” to spread muscular Christianity, hypermasculinity, racism, and commerce in its overseas territories of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.¹³ Foreign visitors jotted down their impressions about Mexico and created a “culture of empire” that legitimized the U.S. economic domination of Mexico and shaped popular attitudes about Mexicans in the United States.¹⁴ By and large, Euro-Americans viewed Mexico as culturally inferior in the arena of sports. Despite their enthusiasm for sports, Mexicans needed coaching instruction in the areas of sportsmanship, physical training, and self-discipline. For example, travel writer Stuart Chase claimed that “the [Mexican] body receives little exercise in the form of sport.” He charged that Mexicans should take advantage of “opportunities for games, races, and competitions in muscular skill.”¹⁵ For Chase, Mexicans required more bodily discipline and physical training under the watchful eye of Americans.

A common complaint by foreign journalists was that Mexicans lacked “good sportsmanship.” Additionally, journalist Lewis Spence claimed, “The average Mexican is more of a gamester than a sportsman … the sporting spirit is altogether lacking in Mexico.”¹⁶ Compared to a gamester, a sportsman is competitive and has self-discipline. Furthermore, Wallace Thompson wrote, “The Mexican does not take kindly to, nor does he usually play well, games which involve contest. He is a bad loser and to this psychological trait can be probably be traced the fact that he is very likely to cheat.”¹⁷ Thompson added, “Mexico’s recreations are … simple, childlike, seeking pleasure and fun first, and without any understanding of the more complicated Anglo-Saxon conception that play is something that is ‘good for you.’ ”¹⁸ Besides lacking “good sportsmanship,” Mexicans supposedly lacked an understanding of the healthy benefits of sport activity. The racial discourse of the Mexican sporting body reinforced notions of white racial superiority that began with the U.S. imperial domination of Mexico.

After the United States acquired more than half a million square miles of Mexico’s northern territory in 1848, the government stepped up efforts for an economic conquest of Mexico through an influx of U.S. capital in railroads, mining, smelting, and agriculture.¹⁹ By the late nineteenth century, Mexico had become a target of this U.S. cultural imperialism. Under President Porfirio Díaz’s long rule (1876–1911), Mexico opened its doors to American businessmen as well as writers, journalists, academics, physical educators, and sports promoters. The Porfirian elite sought to “persuade” the masses to embrace the leisure and sporting pastimes of the United States and Europe, but participation remained limited to foreign nationals and Mexican elites.²⁰ On September 5, 1896, the Mexican Sportsman, dedicated entirely to sports in Mexico, premiered. This weekly magazine announced to readers that “we do not intend to leave a town or city or district unrepresented, where there is anything of interest to the sporting world. If you take any interest in sport of any kind and if you have any news that is of general interest, send it to us.”²¹ Published in both English and Spanish, this sports magazine reflected the U.S. influence on Mexican sporting culture.

Under the Porfiriato regime, a majority of sport activity centered around a few private athletic clubs and YMCA branches in Mexico. The Reforma Athletic Club was one of the most popular venues for cricket, tennis, baseball, and track and field events.²² It was the YMCA, however, according to William Beezley, that was “the most persistent, and ultimately the most successful, promoter of Anglo-American sports.”²³ The organization became a chief promoter of gymnastics, basketball, swimming, track and field, volleyball, and other sports in Mexico. The YMCA began operations in 1891 by serving the recreational and religious needs of the American colony in Mexico City.²⁴ After several years of financial instability and lack of leadership, the International Committee of the National YMCA appointed George Babcock in 1902 as general secretary of the Railroad and City Young Men’s Christian Association of Mexico City.²⁵ Three months after opening the first Y branch, Babcock reported on how “gambling, drinking and the social evil flourish to a truly frightful extent,” and while “Mexicans, for some reason, are not so easily affec...