Monday, February 22, 2010

Today’s Video: Baseball’s continuing color lines

Nearly every day tipsters write to us at ourlatinamerica@yahoo.com and clue us in to all sorts of news stories. Most of them are discarded since they have nothing to do with Latin American while others are press releases that are irrelevant to our blog’s content. Yet there are occasions where a particular topic or news article from our tipsters catches our attention. This week’s video theme will highlight some of the notable items we’ve recently received.

Last month the Philadelphia Daily News discussed one of the classes taught by Arcadia University anthropology professor Jeffrey Shultz. "Baseball and Beisbol: The Evolution of Race and Ethnicity in the Major Leagues" forces students to take a hard look at an exploitation that he argues exists in professional baseball. "You can hire 10 Dominican players for the price of one American college player," Shultz said in the article. In addition he brought up the historical color line that allowed light-skinned Latinos to play in the majors before Jackie Robinson became the first African-American major leaguer in 1947.

With spring training just starting we hope to interview professor Shultz very soon. In the meantime, please take a look at this trailer for a documentary on the dreams of young Dominicans to become professional ballplayers:

Online Sources- Philadelphia Daily News, YouTube

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