As the end of Hispanic Heritage Month draws near, I found myself interested in the barriers faced by Latina/o athletes in the United States. A really great New York Times article written in 2002 discussed the specific cultural challenges for Latina girls in sports. Poverty, language barriers, obesity, and high dropout rates prevent many girls from joining athletic programs. (These factors are all connected, btw. They are perhaps the most visible symptoms of racial inequity as it affects Latina/o communities in the US.) Cultural traditions also frequently place Latina girls in charge of household chores more often than their brothers. In addition, competitive sports are often seen as unfeminine and therefore undesirable activities for girls. Also consider the lack of Latina athletic role models; can you name three professional Hispanic female athletes? I can’t.

The New York Times cites these reasons for the under-representation of Hispanic girls in high school sports programs.

[Side Note: When I did a Google search for “famous Latina athletes,” Google responded, “Did you mean ‘famous latino athletes?’” It reminds me of that period of time when typing “she invented” into a Google search elicited the automatic response, “Did you mean ‘he invented?’” The bloggers went wild over that one (for good reason—check out this feminist critique), and I believe that Google administrators went in and manually changed the auto response. Ah, the evidence of a sexist society shall appear in the form of Google’s best attempt to make helpful suggestions for search term typos.]

USA Today also discusses how traditional household roles for Latina girls often prevent them from playing. Who’s going to take care of the baby sister while Mom’s at work? Who’s going to cook dinner when parents need to make money for the family? These domestic responsibilities often fall upon the teenage girls, and limit girls’ time to engage in after school activities, sports, etc. In Mexico, for example, most schools don’t offer after school activities. The afternoon is for helping the family, not for playing sports. That custom carries over across the border for many first generation families moving to the United States from Mexico.

"The racial/ethnic sub-group to benefit the most from sports participation is Latina girls," Women's Sports Foundation executive director Donna Lopiano says. "There's no question that if we can solve the problem of parental support ... and create a more nurturing, motivating environment ... that we can make some great contributions to Hispanic girls in terms of their future health and well-being." (USA Today)

While I can’t blame struggling families for asking their daughters to help, I do hope that Hispanic American girls will be able to overcome social barriers that make athletic participation difficult. It would be great to see more Latina girls and women playing sports.

What do you think of when you imagine revolution? If you came up through American schools, you probably think about muskets and redcoats, armed struggle and minutemen. That's how the American Revolution went down, and for the last 250 years, we've been enjoying sovereignty in the states, thanks to a successful revolution. But these days, it would be near impossible to pull off any kind of defection from the ruling power of our National Government. And bloody battlefields are so 50 years ago, anyway... our ideas about revolution should probably get updated for the twenty-first century.

One group that's doing just that are the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. Chiapas is one of the poorest regions in Mexico, and in 1994 when things were looking bad, a group of rebels tried to engage in armed conflict to take control of Mexico in the name of the poor and underrepresented. However, they engaged in military conflict with the state and couldn't win. Eventually a ceasefire was brokered by local churches, and the Zapatistas reconsidered their approach.

The Zapatistas as a group now "demand that the revolutionary armed forces not intervene in matters of civil order", in other words, they are opposed to violence that could injure or disrupt people from their day to day activities. As a group, this means that they need to find nonviolent ways to spread their political ideas. One way to do that is by holding tight to the small amount of land that they control and asserting autonomy, independence from other forms of government, insistence upon self-rule. Fighting against a nation-state is a game that most revolutionary groups simply can't win.

But some games (and now I mean 'games' more literally) are actually really productive for a group like the Zapatistas. For instance, a Zapatista-Milan soccer match. In a letter to the manager of Italy's Inter-Milan soccer team, one of the region's most popular teams, Zapatista leader Subcomadante Marcos wrote "I challenge you to a match against a team from the Zapatista national liberation army, at a time and a place to be determined. Given the affection we have for you, we're not planning to submerge you in goals". The team in Milan has been supportive of Zapatistas efforts toward self-government, donating food and water in the past. Soon they may allow the revolutionaries to step onto an international stage, making their efforts known to potential supporters around the world, making their movement more powerful without firing any weapons.

September 15 through October 15 is Latino Heritage Month. I decided to do a bit of research on salsa, a popular ballroom dance that fuses elements from Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican music and movement.

The New York Times said that the basic salsa rhythm came from Cuba, but the dance itself originated in New York in the 1970s when a convergence of jazz musicians from all over the world began developing a unique new style. Salsa began as more of a street dance, and wasn’t really taught in the studios or on a professional level until the late 80s. Now you can find Salsa Congressos all over the world (multi-day salsa workshops and performances that often bring in thousands of participants).

There’s a cool activist dance company in LA known as Contra-Tiempo. They teach salsa, hip-hop, Afro-Cuban, abstract theatrical movement, and other dance styles. Contra-Tiempo’s classes “address social, political and race issues through movement and through traditional cultural dance forms....[W]orkshops focus on how the body can be used as a tool for communication....[Our] mission as a company is to create dialogue and greater understanding across populations, in particular around issues of resistance and power.” The company reaches out to underserved youth and communities of color throughout Los Angeles.

And now some salsa inspiration from Contra-Tiempo:

The month from September 15 through October 15 is Latino Heritage Month.  I already investigated a little bit of Mexican history with my post on Luchadores last week, and today I'm going to keep looking into the history of sports in Latin America.  In the region of 'Mesoamerica', which stretches from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua, there are a number of giant, mysterious athletic stadiums where Mayans, Aztecs, and other pre-Columbian civilizations played what scholars have come to call "The Mesoamerican Ballgame".  In reality, the ballgame was probably a family of similar ballgames played throughout the region that elements in common with soccer, volleyball, and racquetball.

 

I've always thought that professional wrestling was a uniquely American phenomenon-- something about huge, brawny men performing in a faux-struggle strikes me as appealing to specifically American tastes, but that's not exactly the case.  In actuality, U.S. professional wrestling has been highly influenced by Lucha Libre, a Latin American take on pro wrestling.  In the spirit of our upcoming Latino sports spotlight, I decided to look into Lucha Libre a bit more.

American Pro Wrestling is dominated by WWE and "Sports Entertainment"-- the emphasis of the wrestling that I grew up watching was always on storylines, character-building, and other showbiz glitz.  This breed of pro wrestling rose to prominence in the 1980's, but the tradition of pro wrestling goes back much further.

Lucha Libre became a national phenomenon in Mexico during the 1940's when a mysterious wrestler in a silver mask called "El Santo" (The Saint) turned up in the ring.  He became a cultural icon, being featured in comic books, toys, and cartoons, perhaps setting the precedent for all the wrestling personalities that would emerge later on.  Luchadores (that's the spanish word for Lucha Libre wrestlers) also pioneered a number of the more spectacular moves that viewers have come to love watching.  In general, the style of wrestling practiced by Luchadores is far more acrobatic than the slow fighting styles of more 'traditional' North American wrestlers, and a number of the 'high-flying' wrestlers that have found success in American wrestling were highly influenced by Lucha Libre.  So next time you see a spectacular aerial maneuver on cable televesion, thank El Santo.