Mexican Americans: The Lessons of Latinos, Politics and Baseball
By Tony Castro, Voxxi
President Barack Obama isn’t a big baseball fan. His game is basketball. And in a country where baseball will always be the national pastime, that’s possibly one of the big reasons he doesn’t understand the common man and specifically Latinos.
By Latinos, I mean the ones who are citizens and eligible to vote.
On any given night at Dodger Stadium during the upcoming baseball season, if you were able to poll the Latino fans, you’d likely find that an overwhelming number of them are citizens and most likely Mexican American.
On any given night at the Los Angeles Galaxy stadium during soccer season, if you could take the same poll, you’d likely find that an overwhelming number of those Latino fans are not citizens or just legal residents unable to vote and that most are not Mexican American.
To be sure, most Latino baseball fans in the U.S. are Mexican Americans, and this is important to note in baseball and in politics.
Latino players not enough to create a buzz like Fernando Valenzuela created in the 1980′s
Baseball team owners, for instance, are still learning the hard lesson that they can’t recreate Fernandomania—the craze over onetime Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuela in the 1980s—just by bringing Latino players, even big name stars, on to their rosters.
The reason they can’t duplicate Fernandomania is that Valenzuela was Mexican, and Mexican American fans not only flocked to the stadiums where Fernando played in America but also went nuts over any merchandizing associated with him.
They still do. The Valenzuela bobble head doll night was perhaps the biggest of those promotions at Dodger Stadium. And some argue that Fernando, now an announcer for the team, remains the most popular Dodger on any night at the stadium.
Major League teams have tried to duplicate that phenomenon repeatedly, and many legitimate stars have graced the diamonds from San Diego to San Francisco, from Los Angeles to New York, but none of them have succeeded in touching the massive Mexican American marketing base the way Fernando did.
Last year, the Angels tried again, paying slugger Albert Pujols what amounted to the GNP of some banana republic. The fans didn’t care, and they didn’t warm to Pujols no matter how many billboards they put up in Southern California.
It had nothing to do with Pujols having a lousy start and a disappointing year either.
It had to do with Pujols being Dominican. In the eyes of traditional Mexican American fans, he might as well have been Canadian.
It may seem like a trivial point, especially amid all the buzz about increasing Latino numbers in the U.S. And, of course, Hispanic groups understandably all try to make the most of those figures by putting them all together to have the biggest impact.
Mexican Americans account for about 60 percent of Hispanics in the country
But as the baseball fan base love, or lack of love, for non-Mexican stars shows, it all does make a difference to Mexican Americans who account for about 60 percent of Hispanics in the country and who have seen little love in return from Obama.
The president is expected to soon appoint career civil-rights attorney Thomas Perez as secretary of Labor, which will underscore again to many Mexican Americans just where they rank with Obama.
For the fact of the matter is that the majority of Obama’s Latino appointees through his first four-plus years in the White House have been non-Californians and non-Texans. Many of the important ones have been from far outside the Southwest, like Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor and Perez who do not share the Southwest Latino experience.
Add to that Obama’s appointment to the Holy See might have well have been an Italian to Mexican Americans, though he happened to be Cuban. And the biggest insult to Mexican Americans may have been Obama’s ambassador to Mexico—a Latino who also wasn’t Mexican American.
None of this has yet sunk in with traditional media nor with Republicans, who are moved by the growing number of Latinos in the U.S. but who fail to understand that Hispanics outside the capital beltway are more factionalized than even Democrats.
They would know this if, like former President George W. Bush they understood baseball and its role in America. It wasn’t coincidental that Bush, once the head of the Texas Rangers baseball team, racked up the highest percentage of Mexican American votes in Texas by any Republican when he won his governor’s campaigns and the presidency.
As American Studies authority Gerald Early put it: “I think there are only three things America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization—the Constitution, jazz music and baseball…”
This article was first published in Voxxi.
Los Angeles based writer Tony Castro is the author of the critically-acclaimed “Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America” and the best-selling “Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son.”
Read more: http://www.voxxi.com/mexican-americans-latinos-baseball/#ixzz2NMK8O8AJ
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