Join nine-year-old Hubaldo Romero Paez in Venezuela as he introduces his friends, his family, and his favorite sport-baseball. Complemented by a map and an English-Spanish baseball glossary, Hubaldo's story is an inviting introduction to a foreign land viewed through the lens of a shared passion. "This dynamic sports photo-essay will be fun for sports fans and effective for social studies units."-Booklist
The dual-language (English and Spanish) ¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues / En los barrios y las grandes ligas takes readers on a journey into the heart and history of U.S. Latina/o baseball. The extraordinary stories of Latinas/os alongside the artifacts of their remarkable lives demonstrate the historic role baseball has played as a social and cultural force within Latino communities across the nation for over a century and how Latinos in particular have influenced and changed the game. Latinas/os have celebrated a shared cultural heritage, made a living, and fought for rights and justice through baseball. These stories represent experiences to which many people can relate: how one becomes part of a community; how the game can bring people together regardless of race, class, and gender; and how fans can participate in the culture of the sport as easily as players can on the field. Through eight thematic chapters, the authors illustrate how baseball has provided an important platform from which to celebrate and challenge what it means to be American. Each chapter features stories and artifacts from the Smithsonian exhibits of the same name paired with voices from the community of scholars, players, and enthusiasts who have contributed to the larger pan-Smithsonian Latinos and Baseball collecting and exhibition initiative. The variety of stories and objects included in this volume brings our seemingly disparate pasts and present together to reveal how baseball is more than simply a game. The history of Latinos and baseball is this quintessential American story.
In Chicana/o popular culture, nothing signifies the working class, highly-layered, textured, and metaphoric sensibility known as "rasquache aesthetic" more than black velvet art. The essays in this volume examine that aesthetic by looking at icons, heroes, cultural myths, popular rituals, and border issues as they are expressed in a variety of ways. The contributors dialectically engage methods of popular cultural studies with discourses of gender, sexuality, identity politics, representation, and cultural production. In addition to a hagiography of "locas santas," the book includes studies of the sexual politics of early Chicana activists in the Chicano youth movement, the representation of Latina bodies in popular magazines, the stereotypical renderings of recipe books and calendar art, the ritual performance of Mexican femaleness in the quinceañera, and mediums through which Chicano masculinity is measured.
Freighted with meaning, “el barrio” is both place and metaphor for Latino populations in the United States. Though it has symbolized both marginalization and robust and empowered communities, the construct of el barrio has often reproduced static understandings of Latino life; they fail to account for recent demographic shifts in urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, and in areas outside of these historic communities. Beyond El Barrio features new scholarship that critically interrogates how Latinos are portrayed in media, public policy and popular culture, as well as the material conditions in which different Latina/o groups build meaningful communities both within and across national affiliations. Drawing from history, media studies, cultural studies, and anthropology, the contributors illustrate how despite the hypervisibility of Latinos and Latin American immigrants in recent political debates and popular culture, the daily lives of America’s new “majority minority” remain largely invisible and mischaracterized. Taken together, these essays provide analyses that not only defy stubborn stereotypes, but also present novel narratives of Latina/o communities that do not fit within recognizable categories. In this way, this book helps us to move “beyond el barrio”: beyond stereotype and stigmatizing tropes, as well as nostalgic and uncritical portraits of complex and heterogeneous range of Latina/o lives.