by Ray Suarez
The Zaido brothers, Teodoro and Carlos, returned from Fordham College in New York to found Havana’s crosstown rivals, the Almendares Baseball Club. Almendares played the first game with an American club in Havana in 1878, against the Hops Bitter team from Massachusetts. By 1900, American clubs were playing winter exhibitions in Havana—in that year the Brooklyn Dodgers played the New York Giants and a Cuban all-star team.
For all the history of involvement of the United States in the Caribbean and throughout Latin America, it was not Americans who brought the game to some of its most beloved homes today. The turmoil of Cuba in the nineteenth century sent people fleeing to Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. Of all the places Cubans brought béisbol, it has sunk no deeper roots anywhere than in the Dominican Republic.
Around the same time as Almendares and Havana were nursing their rivalry as the Yankees and Red Sox of prerevolution Cuban baseball, young men fleeing Cuba’s Ten Years’ War (the same war that sent José Martí into exile) laid the foundations for Dominican leagues. As in Cuba, young men returning from high schools and colleges in the United States further solidified the game. By the time American troops began the occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916, the game was already well established.
The first steady exchanges of talent came between Cuba and the United States. Lighter-skinned Cuban and Cuban-American players trickled into the U.S. major leagues, and Afro-Cubans became standout players in the Negro Leagues. After the segregated championship series were played in the autumn, black and white players often spent the winter in Latin America, playing exhibition games against local talent, and being teammates on integrated rosters.
Adolfo Domingo de Guzmán Luque played for Almendares and Havana, and as “Dolf” Luque became one of the early Latino stars of American baseball. Beginning in 1914, Luque pitched for the Boston Braves, Cincinnati Reds, Brooklyn Dodgers, and New York Giants, and managed top teams on both sides of the Florida Straits. Luque owns the curious distinction of leading the league in losses one season (with twenty-three in 1922), and wins the next (when he went 27–8, with twenty-eight complete games, in 1923).
Martín Dihigo would have been a standout player every bit Luque’s equal, but as a black man he was barred from American baseball’s top teams. Instead, he put together an outstanding career in the Negro Leagues, the Cuban League (as a player for both Almendares and Havana, among others), and the Mexican League that stretched from 1922 to 1950. He is the only man enshrined in the U.S., Cuban, and Mexican baseball Halls of Fame. His plaque was unveiled in Cooperstown in 1977, six years after he died in Cuba.
By the end of World War II, when the draft had depleted many major-league lineups, thirty-nine Cubans played in the big leagues. Many of the greatest Cuban players ever would remain on all-black U.S. teams, like Luis Tiant Sr. and Lázaro Salazar. Over its existence, several Negro League teams had “Cuban” in their name, like the New York Cubans, Cuban X Giants, and Cuban Stars, stocking their lineups with standout players from the Cuban League.
Once Jackie Robinson (who played winter ball in Cuba) broke the major leagues’ color barrier in 1947, the gates opened for Caribbean players of all colors. Havana native Saturnino Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso came up to the majors with the Cleveland Indians in 1949, and played for four teams over the next fifteen years. A seven-time American League all-star, Miñoso was a league leader in stolen bases, doubles, and triples throughout the 1950s, and was beloved off the field for the humor and approachability that made him a perennial fan favorite, especially in his hometown during most of his career and his retirement, Chicago. Miñoso played a few games when he was a coach at Cleveland in 1976, and two with the White Sox in 1980, meaning he played major-league baseball in five decades.
The 1950s would raise the tempo of Latino entry to the American major leagues, as big-league scouts fanned out across Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Mexico.
Orlando Cepeda and Robert Clemente headed to the National League from Puerto Rico. Luis Aparicio and Chico Carrasquel joined American League teams from Venezuela. Ozzie Virgil and Juan Marichal arrived from the Dominican Republic, part of a trickle that would become a stampede over the next forty years, with more than four hundred players, far more than any other Latin American nation, putting on a major-league uniform.
Instead of filling a manpower shortage, as in the Second World War, or providing small-market teams with a source of cheap talent, as in the 1950s, Latin players became superstars who thrilled fans across the country with their style of play. They were once seen as down-roster utility players valued for their glove work, but Latinos became power pitchers and power hitters who contended for the game’s most exalted records and honors.
Catching has long been a path to managing and coaching careers after a player’s time on the active roster is over. Scouting and player development have created two generations of outstanding catchers who have led teams to World Series and will likely lead teams in the United States and in Latin America in the years to come: Panamanian Manny Sanguillén and Dominican Tony Peña, and a who’s who—or quién es quién—list of outstanding Puerto Rican catchers, including Iván RodrÍguez, the Yankees’ Jorge Posada, the Atlanta Braves’ Javy López; Benito Santiago; Sandy Alomar Jr.; and the incomparable Molina brothers, Bengie, Yadier, and José, who have all been outstanding backstops at the major-league level. All three Molinas have World Series rings in their jewelry collections.
More than a dozen Latinos have been enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, the first being the incomparable Clemente, the first Hispanic player to reach the three-thousand-hit plateau and win an MVP, and the latest being Roberto Alomar, inducted in 2011. Many latter-day players are among the game’s biggest stars. Alex Rodriguez was the youngest player to reach the five hundred and six hundred career home run marks. The Chicago Cubs’ Sammy Sosa’s home run heroics and the single-season home run race with Mark McGwire in 1998 enchanted fans who had soured on baseball after the players’ strike brought on the cancellation of the World Series. Pedro MartÍnez of the Dominican Republic played a huge part in classic Red Sox–Yankees rivalries. The Detroit Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera in 2012 became the first player since the 1960s to lead a league in home runs, runs batted in, and batting average, the coveted Triple Crown, and he rivals Albert Pujols as one of the handful of best hitters in the current game. When he was named MVP in 2012, Cabrera was the first Venezuelan to be so honored.
As America’s game steadily internationalizes, with more new players from new places (like Australia, Korea, and Japan), Latin America is still head and shoulders above other regions of the globe in producing major leaguers. Now, along with the hustling children of immigrants who have been taking to the game since the first professional teams stepped onto the diamond in the nineteenth century, American-born Latinos are also making their mark on the game.
Future major leaguers learned their baseball on rutted infields in upper Manhattan, with Little League teams in Florida and California, spurred by parents who brought a love for the game from the Spanish-speaking world or whose families had been here for generations. They include 2001 World Series MVP Luis González, Yankee first baseman Tino Martinez, standout player and successful manager Lou Piniella, six-time all-star slugger Bobby Bonilla, and six-time Gold Glove infielder Eric Chavez.
Boston Red Sox and now Los Angeles Dodgers star Adrian González presents an interesting example: The first baseman was born in San Diego, and raised on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. González’s father was a member of the Mexican national team. In the international tournament known as the World Baseball Classic, González played for Mexico.
The 1980s, the 1990s, and the first years of the twenty-first century saw Latinos moving into new areas of American life. In 1992, Latin pop star Gloria Estefan headlined the Super Bowl halftime show, the height of Americana. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/NFL PHOTOS
For all the setbacks,
Latinos continued to move into the mainstream of American life. In sports, in literature, in politics, industry, and the law, people whose parents and grandparents never could have imagined their success were climbing higher and higher. A high school dropout raised in Harlem, Richard Carmona got an equivalency diploma and headed into the U.S. Army. After distinguished service with the Special Forces in Vietnam, he returned to the States and began to make up for lost time. An M.D. at thirty, he put together outstanding parallel careers in medicine, teaching, emergency services, and law enforcement. Dr. Carmona became the surgeon general of the United States in 2002.
Chicago-born Sandra Cisneros grew up lonely and, by her account, a little out of step in a big Mexican family in a small house in a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. She nurtured her talent and willed herself into becoming a writer. She tells of one day sitting in a seminar at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and realizing her life was a source of material her classmates could not match. “It wasn’t as if I didn’t know who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But I didn’t think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, whereas it had everything to do with it! My race, my gender, and my class! And it didn’t make sense until that moment, sitting in that seminar. That’s when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about.”
The novel The House on Mango Street, published in 1984, propelled Cisneros to a place in American literature most writers can only fantasize about. The coming-of-age story of Esperanza and life in her Chicago neighborhood brings American youth to a place most of them would never get to know any other way. The book is assigned to middle and high schoolers across America, making Cisneros one of the few Latinas to find a place in the young adult canon. In the quarter century since the book’s release, millions of young people have read The House on Mango Street.
A century and a half after Apolinaria Lorenzana was brought to the mission in what became San Diego, Ellen Ochoa was growing up in nearby La Mesa, and from her schoolgirl days she showed a special interest and aptitude for science. After a stellar academic career capped by a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Ochoa led a team of scientists and engineers in developing optical systems for automated—that is, unmanned—space flight. She entered the space program in 1990 and three years later became the first Latina in space, flying three shuttle missions and logging more than a thousand hours in space.
You get the point. A people at times regarded as an inconvenience and a nuisance by English-speaking Americans heading west were now confidently entering fields where they would have been at least unexpected if not exotic and strange.
• • •
Y AHORA . . . ¿QUÉ? And now . . . what?
The 2010 census counted more than fifty million Latinos in the United States. Of these, nine million voted in the 2008 presidential election, some twelve million this time around. If that does not sound like a lot, there are some good explanations for why the turnout is still low.
In this country, older people are more likely to vote than younger ones. Wealthier people are more likely to vote than poorer ones. Better-educated people vote at higher rates than less educated ones. Citizens can vote, and noncitizens cannot, under any circumstances. In 2012, Latinos are younger, poorer, and less educated than the rest of the country as a whole, and a large fraction of the population over eighteen, even among legal residents, has not yet naturalized, not yet taken the oath of citizenship.
The median age of Latinos is twenty-seven, meaning half of the community across the country is older, and half is younger. Compare that to the median age of U.S. residents, about thirty-seven years old. That means more Latinos are school age, first-job age, first-marriage age, and so on. It also means far more Latinos than Americans as a whole have not had children, or are still children themselves, than other Americans. In 2008 and 2009, more than one of every two newborn Americans was a Latino, and the youth of the population means that number ought to rise even higher as more Latino teens enter adulthood. Sixteen states counted more than half a million Latino residents, and in twenty-one states Latinos were the largest minority group.
Since Juan de Oñate led his column of settlers through today’s El Paso to settle New Mexico . . .
Since a boat put ashore on the California coast carrying Apolinaria Lorenzana and the other parentless children . . .
Since Juan Seguín helped Texas break away from Mexico . . .
Since José Martí dipped his pen in ink and wrote of his own American dreams . . .
And since Isabel González took her fight for Puerto Ricans’ American rights all the way to the Supreme Court . . .
. . . the American vision of making many one—e pluribus unum—has been made real by people from across the hemisphere who came to the United States. They think of themselves as, and still are, people who have part of the real estate in their head occupied by a slightly different concept of race, identity, and culture. They are Americans who watch football, eat pizza, open Twitter accounts, and vote for America’s next Idol. They also carry some inheritance, some self-concept that comes from a steeply sloped farming village in Mexico, a village grocery store in Peru, a communal laundry sink in rural Guatemala.
That young population is going to have to be schooled and get health care, both significant costs downstream. In an aging country, Marta Tienda explains, that is not a bad thing, “The Hispanic population represents a significant dividend not available to other industrialized countries experiencing population aging.
“Given the projected growth of the Hispanic population growth over the next twenty years, if high school and college graduation gaps between Hispanics and others are eliminated or narrowed, by 2030 the majority of the country’s labor force could be today’s Latino youth supporting the older generation. If we compromise the future economic prospects of Hispanics by underinvesting in their education, we will likely compromise the nation’s future as well. If we ignore the Hispanic moment we do so at our own risk” [emphasis mine].
Jennifer Lopez is an actress, businesswoman, designer, producer, and singer. She’s also one of the highest-paid Latinas in the world. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MARK LENNIHAN
Sylvia Puente has spent her adult life as a community activist, educator, and scholar serving Latinos in Illinois. The vast majority of her staff time and resources at the Latino Policy Forum is now devoted to education, a make-or-break issue for Latinos—and the country. “The fate of the nation is tied to the success of the Latino community. Our futures are intertwined.”
When she looks at a state labor market where two out of three new entrants are Latino, and a nation whose educational output is lagging behind that of other industrial nations, Puente worries. “Economically this state won’t be able to function without a skilled Latino labor force.
“The good news is, when you look at young Latinos, people twenty-five to thirty-five, the numbers that have completed four-year degrees have increased considerably. And recently the data came from Pew that showed there are more Latinos than ever on college campuses, at numbers that outnumber African-Americans.”
Enrique Pumar arrived in the United States in 1974, in time to attend his last year of high school. His subsequent work as an academic has led to a large body of published work and his current post as chairman of the Department of Sociology at Catholic University. Pumar is pleased by the signs of progress he sees among Latinos, but also sees a vanguard class peeling away from the rest in places like Washington, D.C. “There are two different kinds of Latino communities: working-class and professional. And the professionals are almost invisible, but they are not a small number.” They come, Pumar says, for the opportunities America offers, just like farmers and factory workers. “And they reproduce the inequalities of Latin America.
“If our economy continues to move in the direction of an innovation, knowledge economy, a digital economy, the stratifi
cation is going to be very visible. We’ve seen this stratification, for example, in Miami.
“There are two Miamis. It looks very different if you drive along Brickell Avenue, and if you drive in Hialeah. On Brickell Avenue you have financial institutions that cater to Latin America, and it’s a whole different city. This divide is becoming visible in many cities.
“People who are moving here are people who, for one reason or another, can’t make it down in Central America. They tend to be working-class. They are likely not to speak English very well, likely not to have a degree, and even if they have a degree they won’t be able to convert it in the U.S. They end up in services and low-end jobs.”
A busy day at Miami Dade College. With more than 160,000 students, MDC is one of the largest educational institutions in America. Two out of three students are Latinos. Course offerings include a Dual-Language Honors Program allowing top students to study in English and Spanish. CREDIT: MIAMI DADE COMMUNITY COLLEGE
In the twentieth century, when the United States was the factory for the world, immigrants and their descendants could use manufacturing jobs, often at high wages, to move into lives of middle-class security that could be handed on to their children. The bulk of today’s Latino population arrived in the American workforce at a time when manufacturing was in full decline, and trade unionism was in retreat. Moving into the middle class, and staying there, is a much more complicated proposition, as it is for any American.
“The Latino middle class is very fragile.” Sylvia Puente points to the economic setbacks of the last several years: “We lost most of our wealth, since so much of it was tied to home ownership, but it’s not just this last time. If you look at the last five or six recessions, Latinos and African-Americans came back from recession more slowly than other groups.