Description
From the mid-nineteenth century to 1910, Oaxaca, México went through many changes in order to bring stability and grow its stagnated economy. This effort was realized through modernization projects by President Porfirio Díaz, a Oaxacan, that encouraged the building of infrastructure to boost foreign investment while bandwagoning foreign culture. Perceived as civilized and ultra-modern, baseball was adopted by Oaxacan elites to counter-balance the embarrassment they had of their own indigenous population considered backwards. Baseball served primarily an exclusionary function but during the Revolution mass participation began to be seen as a way to reform and socialize the Indian masses. The professional game that emerged in México was powerful but didn't reach Oaxaca until the 1990s, the local team owned by one of México's great business moguls. The game abounds with modern and consumerist symbolism but remains tied to Mesoamerican spirituality and mysticism. The stadium itself serves as an international spectacle of baseball exoticisms yet represents a negotiation with the rooted local. Baseball has not been simply an elitist introduction, however, and some of the game's bottom-up producers have created origin myths that tie baseball to an ancient Oaxacan ballgame, working to create identity and community as they had in other places in México. While Oaxaca is not represented highly in national or international baseball tournaments, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec has boasted some of the country's best players. The still powerful link between baseball, capitalism, and modernity have partly pushed politicians and businessmen to promote participation of the game to improve the health and family life of Oaxacans, as during the Revolution, but also to help the region appear nationally relevant against other baseball producing regions of the country that are more affluent and industrial. The game has thus represented the negotiations of identity and definition of modernity over time in the state at multiple levels. In this thesis I attempt to elucidate the varying ways baseball has been, and is, used to express positions of power and identity between rich and poor, indigenous and non-indigenous, and Oaxacan and Mexican, among more. Sometimes these delineations are not so clear. Out of this research emerges extreme complexity and competition over the definition of modernity and identity. By dredging through historical archives, conducting interviews, scouring for financial data, pondering heady sociological theory, and observing baseball first-hand, I attempt to write an open-ended thesis on the game's historical production as raw and well represented as possible in the limited time and space this research provides. Sports studies often function as a way to magnify the ambitions and feelings of those in a society and this thesis aims to contribute by outlining these politics further.
