Culture, Politics, and Baseball in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

In examining baseball's cultural and ideological role in the Dominican Republic, it is important to consider the relations between the United States and the Dominican Republic, not only because of U.S. domination of the nation and of the sport's North American origins but because the present and future of the sport increasingly rely on Latin American (particularly Dominican) talent. What this means to Dominicans and how it plays itself out as sports drama is at the heart of the matter. I conducted fieldwork in the Dominican Republic between 1987 and 1990, during which time I ethnographically observed the sport at levels from amateur to professional, conducted a range of interviews and oral histories from players past and present, gathered archival material, carried out content analysis of the sports pages of Listin Diario, and conducted a fan survey. What follows is drawn from the resulting ethnography of Dominican baseball (Klein, 1991). Before presenting a brief history of baseball's diffusion into Dominican life it is necessary to say a word or two about the paradigm used here. As part of popular culture, sports have, until recently, been treated as cultural trinkets: flashy, perhaps, but of little value. The recent rise in popularity of cultural studies, while ushering in fresh controversy, has helped to overcome this legacy (e.g., Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Bourdieu, 1977; Hebdige, 1979). This study seeks to follow these tracks. James Scott's (1985, 1991) work on cultural resistance has been of particular importance in