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Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line. By Adrian Burgos, Jr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xx, 362. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth; $21.95 paper.
The Brooklyn Dodgers' signing of Jackie Robinson in 1945 and the (re)integration of major league baseball two years later were milestones in the game's history and in American race relations. But, as University of Illinois historian Adrian Burgos emphasizes, these developments were part of a larger, longer, and more complex process whose significance remains incorrectly "submerged beneath a black-white narrative that renders the contributions of Latinos as inconsequential to the story of race in organized baseball" (p. 201). Even as professional leagues were moving toward segregation in the late 1880s, baseball was gaining popularity around the Caribbean, creating a talent pool that soon caught the attention of the sport's management. Cuban Esteban Bellán was the first of 55 pre-1947 Latino major leaguers, 13 of whom also played on U.S. Negro teams. Some of those 55 "brown" players surely had African or indigenous ancestors, but they were accepted, not as white but as "Spanish," a category of ambiguous and flexible boundaries...