Mexican American Baseball Clubs During The 1930s And 1940s

This essay scrutinizes the many implications that baseball clubs had amid Mexican Americans in Southern California during the 1930s and 1940s. This analyzes the techniques that employers and social reformers used to Americanize and socially manage the Mexican immigrant populace. The focus of this paper falls on Mexican community-based baseball clubs throughout Southern California that faced discrimination and inadequate economic prospects had to suffer. In a labor heavy, agriculture system, baseball took on a symbolic and social connotation, Mexican Americans determined baseball as a reflection of a much larger racial and class struggle. They used the sport to endorse ethnic awareness, build community cohesion, exhibit masculine performance,

The real reason was a fear based paranoia that the workers would use these secret events as a means to create unions or discuss working conditions.

The first of these organized teams, the Corona Athletics Baseball Club was created in 1931 by a Mexican American youth who worked for the Corona industry. Many of the new recruits were introduced to baseball through a arrangement of company-sponsored teams, but when companies failed to meet the players wishes for equipment and a decent playing field they decided to put together their own team. However, this had an unwelcome side effect. Although freed company control, the newly formed Corona Athletics were still reliant on the Corona business for economic

To them baseball fostered masculinity, insistent independence and began to mentally question the business hierarchy. For Mexican American’s, baseball signified more than simple recreational competitions, but a stage where they could dispel the notion of Mexicans being unequal to whites. The games provided a legal platform where they could confront these insulting allegations. From this stepping stone, Mexican Americans politicized and then used baseball for the forms of communal action that the agricultural companies wanted to avoid in the first place. Players purposely learned the leadership and organization tools which transcended baseball and ascended into the realm of the political forum. When labor affairs in Corona's citrus commerce declined in 1941, Corona Athletic members became labor organizers that challenged the authority of the agricultural