Exploring the History of Latinos in Baseball

Dr. Adrian Burgos, Jr., grew up playing and loving baseball. So did his mother, his grandmothers, and many of the people he grew up around. So, when it came time for him to pick an academic pursuit, the study of Latinos and sports history naturally came to mind.

Dr. Adrian Burgos, Jr.“I just wanted to understand what [the history was] behind this,” says Burgos. “I came to learn of the interactions, the cultural exchange between Caribbean Latinos in the U.S. bringing baseball back to the Caribbean in the late 19th century. And that's what really sparked my research interest."

Burgos is an expert when it comes to U.S. Latino, African American, and sports history. He is a professor of history at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He earned an associate degree in liberal arts from Orange County Community College, a bachelor’s degree in history from Vassar College, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. His dissertation focused on Latinos, race, and baseball.

The professor studies the flow and migration of people, in particular, how individuals from Latin America came to, worked in, and were recruited to play baseball in the U.S. in the early 20th century. But his research is also a study of labor and perceptions. Recruited Latino baseball players were laborers after all.

"I want to use this as a kind of study where people could see [that] while these may be professional baseball players, they're experiencing many of the similar issues of cultural adjustment, institutions that they enter that are not prepared for these individuals who often were predominantly Spanish speaking ... [or] bilingual,” says Burgos. “There are still these perceptions in U.S. society about the abilities of people from the Caribbean and Latino America, their intelligence, and their work ethic. And baseball players – much the same as everyday workers – had to confront these perceptions in order to succeed."

Burgos says the cultural practices of Latinos were used as a way of racializing some of them, not as white nor Black, but as Brown. This resulted in certain Latino players being able to play major league baseball, while others – including African Americans and Afro-Latinos – were not allowed to do so. They instead played in the “Negro leagues.”

“The key component that I have argued was that this was more about racial perceptions than ability,” says Burgos, adding that most Latino players were regulated to the Negro leagues. “Because the majority of the best players were, in fact, Afro-Latino."