Virtual Brown Bag Colloquium: "A Catcher's Mask: Vincent Nava, Baseball's Color Line, and Mexican American Racialization"

Alex Nuñez, Ph.D. Student, Department of History at UArizona

August 28, 2020, at 12:30 PM

This year marks the centennial of the establishment of the Negro Leagues, a historical celebration of players of color in resisting baseball’s color barrier. Well before the Negro Leagues, however, a Mexican American named Vincent Nava sought to turn professional, forcing the sport to question if an ethnically Latin player could participate in a game designed for white men and complicating the sport’s understanding of racial logic. For Nava, baseball was a way to demonstrate belonging through the projection of ideal forms of masculinity, social mobility, and other characteristics associated with whiteness, a goal shared with many other Mexican Americans in their pursuit of equality.