Ethnic solidarity through baseball
Hispanic Heritage Month wraps up this week, coinciding with Major League Baseball’s postseason. Locally, as elsewhere, October is a natural intersection of celebrating Hispanic culture and baseball. Kansas City’s special connection to both is real and storied.
This is evidenced in observances like the Kansas City Library’s signature event last Wednesday. The subject of the sold-out program on Oct 3: a new book, Mexican American Baseball in Kansas City. It’s a chronicle of Mexican American baseball, kinship and community. The book’s authors carefully “highlight the standout teams and players in the greater Kansas City area and other communities in the Sunflower State” from the 1920s.
In his presentation, Gene Chavez, a co-author and Kansas City Museum curator described how baseball and fast pitch softball became a unifying catalyst. It brought Mexican Americans from across the region to play the games they loved, which evolved into “communal affairs with fiesta-like atmosphere.” That fed camaraderie, forged ethnic solidarity and fostered community pride.
A panel discussion and Q&A with Chavez and panelists, Rose Arroyo, Gilbert Castro, Mario Escobar and Richard Sauceda followed Chavez’s presentation. As an adolescent, Arroyo was a championship catcher in the Parks and Recreation league. Her mother, Mary “Pipes” Carpio Montes played first base and outfield for the Kansas City Lady Aztecas, 1938-1941.
Castro played for the Argentine Eagles and the Kansas City Aztecas from the 1950s through the 1970s. Escobar was recruited by the Kansas City Bravos when he came to Kansas City in the 1960s and played through the 1980s. Sauceda joined the Argentine Eagles, a team his uncles started after World War II when they founded American Legion Post 213, Argentine Eagles Nest.
“A group of Mexican veterans went to American Legion Post 111 after the war but were told the post didn’t accept Mexicans so they organized and got a charter to form their own Legion post,” Chavez says. “Post 213 is still operating and does a lot with baseball.”
He fielded questions on various facts, teams and players mentioned in Mexican American Baseball in Kansas City, early 20th century industries’ reliance on immigrant Mexican labor, local baseball lore and Kansas City’s stake in Major League Baseball’s pioneering Mexican American ballplayer. Baldomero “Mel” Almada played for the Kansas City Blues in 1934. The Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame outfielder was the first Mexican-born ballplayer in the Major Leagues.
Poor eyesight prevented Chavez, a professor of counseling from playing competitive baseball so he channeled his keen enthusiasm for the sport and its attendant cultural dynamics to writing and teaching.
“I came to the book with a passion for history and telling the stories of ethnic groups and their experiences within the American macroculture,” he says.
In 2016, he curated an exhibit at the Kansas City Museum. Latinos and Baseball: In the Barrios and the Big Leagues is part of a Smithsonian National Museum of American History project. The KC museum is among some 10 American institutions chosen to partner in a collecting initiative for Latinos and Baseball, a traveling exhibit the Smithsonian hopes to complete by 2020.
Chavez created a documentary in 2015 exploring the history and legacy of Mexican American fast pitch softball leagues in Kansas and Missouri. He based the 30-minute film on oral histories of former players.
“It’s very culturally relevant,” he says. “It tells the stories of Mexicans coming to railroad and industrial and agricultural communities and building lives and ethnic solidarity through baseball.”
