In Foreign Fields: The Politics and Experiences of Transnational Sport Migration

In Foreign Fields

Anthropology, Culture and Society

Series Editors:

Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University

and

Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex

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IN FOREIGN FIELDS

The Politics and Experiences of

Transnational Sport Migration

Thomas F. Carter

First published 2011 by Pluto Press

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Contents

Series Preface

Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places. This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research.

We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.’

By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of ‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements, occupational or class groups, among youth, development agencies, and nationalist movements; but also work that is more thematically based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume: ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemical essays.

We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world.

Professor Vered Amit

Dr Jon P. Mitchell

Acknowledgements

This project has taken more than decade to complete and there are so many people to thank for their support that it is hard to know where to begin. I am certain that I will forget to mention someone important; for that I apologize in advance.

All the material presented in this book would have been impossible to obtain without the express help of a vast range of individuals. There have been numerous officials, sport and others, journalists, athletes, coaches and families that have given time, access and knowledge to assist me, including members of the Ulster Branch of the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU), Belfast Giants, Sports Council for Northern Ireland, Sport Wales, Ice Hockey UK (IHUK), CubaDeportes, Instituto Nacional de Deportes Educación Física y Recreación (INDER), dozens of clubs and teams, and several different media organizations in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland. I also have to thank the ‘pirates’ of a couple of boats in the Caribbean who provided unquestioned access and logistical support. You know who you are.

While some ancillary field data from another ethnographic project suggested that transnational sport migration might be an interesting avenue for enquiry, the real beginnings of this project emerged out of a growing local concern about sport in Northern Ireland. I have to thank Dr Shaun Ogle, Director of Research for the then Sports Council for Northern Ireland for the opportunity to come to Northern Ireland and conduct commissioned research into the impacts that transnational sport migrants were having on the local infrastructure. Those two years of fieldwork were made all the more productive and fruitful through the partnership with Professor Hastings Donnan of Queen’s University of Belfast. Several other members of the then School of Anthropological Studies provided encouragement, advice, contacts, and occasional pints, and their help is gratefully acknowledged, most especially, Tracey Heatherington, Huon Wardle, Harvey Whitehouse and Lisette Josephides. Others outside the School of Anthropological Studies, such as John Fleck, Thomas Wilson, Dominic Bryan, Neil Jarman and Martin Bruhns, provided advice, contacts and other forms of assistance, including reading very early drafts of some of the material in this book. A special warm thank you must also go to David and his bookshop, No Alibis. It and he provided a welcoming circle of camaraderie, great coffee and laughter, plus you never knew who would wander in. It was where Alan Bairner and I first met and his advice on studying sport in Northern Ireland also proved invaluable.

Financial support came from the Sports Council for Northern Ireland, the Institute of Iberian and Latin American Studies at the University of New Mexico, the British Academy and the University of Brighton, where I continue to work.

Colleagues at the Chelsea School at the University of Brighton have been vital for their encouragement, support and criticism of the material in this book. Dan Burdsey, Alan Tomlinson, John Sugden and Paul Gilchrist all read parts of the manuscript in rough forms. Marc Keech’s knowledge and expertise about South African sport was instrumental. Other Chelsea School colleagues also provided comments and support through innumerable conversations. Further invaluable criticism came from panel members and conference participants over the previous ten years, starting in 1999 at a symposium at the University of New Mexico. Fully developed analyses were first presented at the 2005 Society for the Anthropology of North America meetings at the Universidad de Yucatán in Mérida, México, and the Sport and the Quality of Life conference at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic that same year. Additional crucial feedback on Cuban transnational migration came from participants at the Cuba in Transition? conference held at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City in 2006. Additional feedback came from papers presented at the Political Studies Association meetings held at the University of Wales in 2007, the British Sociological Association annual conference in 2009 and the American Anthropological Association annual conference in 2009.

My doctoral student, Kathy Riley, provided stimulating challenges to some material and support as we worked on very different projects located in the same part of the world. Lauren Smith and Ollie Miller provided editorial support. Will Viney and his associates at Pluto have been outstanding and supportive considering the interruptions that delayed the initial submission of this manuscript. Lastly, my gratitude to Jane knows no bounds. She has been instrumental through it all, accepting lengthy absences, reading numerous drafts, and providing essential emotional and moral support at those moments when it all seemed about to come crashing down. I cannot thank her enough.

Preface

The purposes of ethnography do not include a search for universal truth; rather ethnographic enquiries are attempts to reveal certain truths about ways of life that cut across various boundaries. Those boundaries may be disciplinary: ethnography can produce results that other disciplines find simply implausible. It can also cut across social boundaries by providing a critical vantage point for examining contemporary life in that ethnography has the potential to pull asunder the curtain obscuring the political machinations and manoeuvring of everyday life. The power of contemporary ethnography can, as David Westbrook argues (2008), articulate the contexts in which politics takes place, the spaces where collective consciousness is formed, and force us to confront the possibility that our version of the world is not the only possible one. It can sunder and reveal boundaries that subjects themselves construct and then use to make sense of their worlds. Simply put, ethnography can produce insights that otherwise would remain unseen. It is ideal for destabilizing conceptual categories, not to dismiss them, but to establish their operative parameters.

In Foreign Fields is so named for two interrelated reasons. The first is that it is literally what transnational sport migrants do. They ply their trade in foreign localities where the outward form appears the same but cultural nuances ensure that the ‘taken-for-granted’ ways of playing a game become problematic. The second is that anthropology is a foreign field when it comes to sport. This is something I have never quite understood given the pervasive presence of various sports practices, forms and institutions around the world. Therefore, this book is written in the hope that it will push a somewhat redolent discipline into a little more recognition of one of the predominant institutional practices of the modern world. Given the continued grip that religious faiths and belief systems have on anthropological studies, it should only be fitting that a most prominent secular faith and collective formation of modern consciousness should become a more prevalent topic for consideration. Nevertheless, sport remains a foreign anthropological field despite the continued, reflexive concern over anthropologists’ own constructions of fields, a concern which I further elaborate here.

When this project began, it did not really have any parameters. The field as I first imagined it was that the political borders of Northern Ireland circumscribed the field. My consultants were coming to me instead of me to them. But it quickly became apparent that the transnational sport migrants coming to Northern Ireland in 2001 were not simply stepping on a plane and landing at Aldergrove International Airport. They had life histories, multiple journeys, myriad experiences and intersecting social forces that accompanied them all as they travelled, shaping their journeys, disciplining their mobilities and contouring their initial encounters with people in Northern Ireland. These insights led me to realize that fieldwork was not the investigation of social encounters within a clearly defined space but momentary encounters while moving. This contradicts the traditional pictures of fieldwork that have tended to naturalize the field as a place where the Other dwells in which distance rather than interconnectedness and contact shape ethnographic experience (Clifford 1997b: 198). Fieldwork thus ‘takes place’. But it does not take place in controlled sites of research but in worldly, contingent relations of mobility. Those very encounters upon which this ethnographic project is based are themselves contingent upon my consultants’ and my own ability to produce our mobilities. Mobility is, as the reader shall see, a condition that requires specific forms of capital that only a privileged set of people in the world can produce.

That mobility is what produces the field in this ethnographic study. The field is a contact space produced by local, national and transnational forces that shape and discipline both migratory movements and disciplinary assumptions. Having said that, this in no way dissolves the disciplinary injunction to dwell intensively, learn local language(s) and produce ‘deep’ interpretations. Yet the notion that the ethnographer or the ethnographic subjects are stationary is a distinction that no longer serves to address the dialectical negotiations involved in constructing social differences and cultural distinctions. Fieldwork still requires that one must do something more than passing observation, conduct interviews or compose journalistic reports. Multi-sited fieldwork – a term James Clifford calls oxymoronic (1997b: 190) – necessitates alternative considerations; ones that challenge the historically specific range of boundaries, distances and modes of anthropological enquiry (Rabinow et al. 2008). For it is by challenging notions of ‘the field’ that the boundaries of the central presumptions of our own worlds are laid bare. How one conceives of the field enables certain forms of knowledge but blocks awareness of others. Fieldwork is certainly ‘not what it used to be’ (Faubion and Marcus 2009).

FIELDWORK PRACTICALITIES AND ETHNOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION

Fieldwork for this book, then, took on many forms. It entailed observations made during impassioned moments amongst a crowd of spectators, in the quiet dark of moonless nights on boats, introspective moments of self-flagellation and physical punishment shared with others training their bodies, and while screaming epithets and insults at the top of one’s lungs. The depth of participant observations was not so much linked to archaeological layers of geophysical space as it was to the sedimentary relations built up over years, over meals, and over tears and laughter. In short, the observational depth is based on relationships and not on singularities of place, event or sport.

This particular project also made great use of interviews. Two kinds of interviews in particular served different yet related purposes. Ethnographic interviews, encounters that occurred repeatedly, sometimes on a regular basis, sometimes more haphazardly, that nonetheless constituted an ongoing conversational relationship with consultants were absolutely vital. They allowed for the gradual emergence of important themes, an accretion of trust and a depth of personal relation. Ethnographic interviews built upon weeks of observations and ethnographic encounters and served to ensure a greater complexity to the various forms of observation undertaken, informing encounters and events, and knowledge that was produced more dialogically than from a solitary narrative viewpoint. The other prominent form of interview was the multitudes of life histories conducted in which migrants could create and narrate their own stories of who they thought they were, how they got to where they were at that moment in time, and what it all meant. Several laughed self-consciously at first. A few argued that they were quite young and felt as if they hadn’t really done anything yet. But once they began to recollect, (re) construct and narrate, each individual invariably began to get excited at ‘telling their story’, providing commentary asides about how they had ‘forgotten that’, or explicitly expressed their pleasure at recounting things that they hadn’t thought about before. Surprisingly, this was true for virtually every person, despite the significant number of migrants who faced challenges, physical, mental and emotional, brought about by separation, loss and distance. Because of the highly personal nature of much of the material, the sometimes questionable circumstances of their own mobility, and general concern for their welfare, the names of all migrants who are part of this study have been changed.

Overall, over 200 migrants have been interviewed in more than eight different sports. Obviously not all of them could be included here. Some of the ones who are not included have absolutely heart-wrenching stories. Others are much more straightforward and succinct. The individuals come from over 35 different countries as their places of origin and involve nearly as many in terms of points of arrival. Some are well-known figures; others have never attracted a whiff of celebrity. The vast majority do not ever garner any attention beyond their own field of expertise, whatever the sport. Whatever their degree of visibility, if they are a part of this study they are given a pseudonym, in part to protect their own anonymity, but more so to protect those others included in the study who rarely, if ever, become part of the spotlight: family members, colleagues and others. If a migrant has been interviewed, that also means colleagues, family members and friends are often part of the study as well because of the ethnographic work I conducted. Therefore, in general, people’s names have been changed, as have some organizations’ names. Occasionally, I also change a location’s name or simply move an individual from one locality to another.

Some names, however, will be immediately recognizable. In those instances, those individuals are examples drawn from international media coverage and were not part of any ethnographic fieldwork. Those examples are ones in which the individuals’ quotes and information have been taken from multiple media sources and synthesized to produce a more coherent account of events. Consequently, this study was informed by a vast array of media sources. Those sources were used to inform and fill gaps in primary fieldwork and interviews. In many instances, they also allowed me to provide a broader social context and greater details of the events being analysed. Media sources included multiple national presses in over eight different countries and the use of three international wire services. For the most part, I do not identify specific sources when the stories in question are directly related to one of the consultants in this book. On occasion, I do specifically identify where media-sourced information has originated. I do this when that source is not directly identifying an individual who took part in this study. Hence, there are a couple of instances in which identities are not made anonymous because that information is a matter of public record.

Overall, In Foreign Fields produces certain kinds of truths. They may be ones that are not readily repeatable, in a scientific, positivistic sense. But they are truths as individuals experienced them. They are truths about how people deal with difficult circumstances, challenge powerful structures shaping their lives and make choices. Over the years, and this study comprises twelve years of work, some migrants have moved on and we’ve lost touch. Others remain in touch although it is a rare, maybe annual, communication. Others have become good friends and stay in regular contact. Some have left sport altogether. Others are working in sport but in a different profession. Some remain in their same career although they could be changing careers soon. The point here is that eventually, we all move into some form of a foreign field. I only hope I conveyed the grace and steel that these transnational professionals exhibit while part of an industry that makes it common practice to discard damaged bodies without any further consideration.

Introduction:

Sowing Transnational Sport Fields

The three older men stepped over the white line, crossed the infield grass and stopped at the mound in the centre of the baseball diamond. They congregated in the early morning sun, before the heat of Havana’s strong sun really began to dominate the air, and took in the empty stadium that would reverberate with chanting and singing fans later that evening. All three had spent much of their youth on diamonds like this one. Two had actually played in this particular stadium when they and the stadium were much younger. Standing on the damp infield grass, they quietly discussed their playing days from their youth, forging relationships that they had not had until a few days ago on similar experiences. Now in their 60s, all three men, Jack, Victor and Juan, conferred about the future atmosphere of the place. They linked the anticipated night game with their memories of games played in the United States and Cuba. They passed several minutes discussing their contemporaries – athletes, like them, who as young men had followed a horse-hide sphere to pursue their dreams – who played in the Cuban stadium known then as El Cerro Stadium. Victor, a large, black man with a deep, rumbling voice, suggested they continue the tour of the facility before going to lunch at a nearby restaurant he knew.¹

Over lunch, they talked in more detail about their motivations, fears and experiences of playing baseball. Jack, an American visiting Cuba for the first time, talked about not just playing in the small farm towns of the upper Midwest but about the emotional, economic and physical challenges he endured when he left his hometown, a small mining community, for the playing fields in another state.

You know, the first time I left, I had a contract to play in Iowa. Not too far from home, really, a few hours. But it was too much for me. I only lasted three weeks before I had to go home. I was too homesick. I was only 18 and had never been away from home before. It took a couple more years, then I could handle it.

Jack had played baseball for a military team during his service and he credited that experience for enabling him to be able to handle the rigors of professional baseball. Turning to Victor, he shook his head, ‘I just don’t know how guys like you did it.’ Victor nodded and chuckled. He had played in various small towns throughout the United States in the Minor Leagues – the feeder leagues controlled by the owners of ‘The Show’, the Major Leagues, which he never quite made. That Victor was black only accentuated the difficulties he must have faced. Not only did he play in the 1950s United States, a country with different cultural mores and values, Victor did not speak English at the time he played in small rural towns like Raton, New Mexico and Helena, Montana. Chuckling, he added, ‘About as far from Cuba as you could get.’ Still playing when the Cuban Revolution came, Victor decided that he would return to Cuba instead of staying in the United States as the political situation deteriorated between the two countries. ‘Not all Cuban players chose to go, you know,’ he said, pointing a finger at his close friend Juan, a silver-haired, slight, mustachioed man whose skin had yellowed with age, ‘That there was the best third baseman in Cuba.’ Juan denied Victor’s praise but elaborated. ‘I played for Electrónico. It was an amateur club but one of the best in the country. I had offers to go. I thought about them carefully. I even signed one. But I didn’t go.’

Incredulously, Jack asked, ‘What? Why didn’t you go?’

Juan explained:

Well, I had a good job here. I was an electrician and there was lots of construction going on then. The numbers on the contract were basically the same as what I was making. The construction business was stable but the baseball … that was another question.

The lunchtime conversation between these three men encapsulates many of the issues that this book examines. As young men, all three men pursued highly skilled professions in sport. They did not do so merely because they thoroughly enjoyed playing baseball, although they did, without question, love playing the game. Their very conscious choices in pursuing baseball as an early career, choices that included considerations over the ramifications of engaging in economic migration to pursue those career ambitions, were taken in local social and economic contexts. Baseball existed as an opportunity for each yet a variety of social, economic and political dynamics informed their personal social circumstances. Those particular circumstances affected each man’s choice to pursue a baseball career or not.

The individual decisions each made as young men were informed by and continue to illustrate the long, historical dynamic of transnational sport migration in professional sport. As the younger son of a miner and barman, Jack saw sport as an opportunity to leave his small hometown and eventually used his talent to parlay a university scholarship. As hard as it was for him to leave home initially, his stint in the military helped brace him for future movements. While Jack never actually left the United States during his playing career, he did come into contact with other players who were not US citizens. As a white American man in the middle of the twentieth century, those contacts with others not like him, both racially and culturally, opened his world to additional possibilities. His professional career became the starting point for a life away from the mines and rural Wisconsin.

Victor, like Jack, came from a working-class family, but that was the only similarity between the two men. As the black son of sugar-cane cutters on the outskirts of Havana, Victor’s marginalization was accentuated by the racial hierarchy of Cuban society. Although baseball in Cuba was integrated to some extent, Cuban society nonetheless maintained a definite racial hierarchy that placed Victor near the bottom. His playing ability provided him with the economic opportunity to earn significantly more money playing a game in foreign fields, where the competitive animosity of his opponents was also fuelled by social attitudes amongst spectators, officials and occasionally his own teammates towards his race. Yet he decided this was better than a life on a plantation. Victor was not alone in this regard. He, like many Cubans and other Latin American professionals, left his home country to ply his trade overseas. Latin American baseball players have been coming to the United States since the early 1900s (Bjarkman 1994; Burgos 2007; Oleksak and Oleksak 1996; Regalado 1998). American ballplayers similarly have followed the others south in the autumn, migrating to Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in the winter months, for additional employment. The seasonal migration of baseball professionals down the East Coast into the Caribbean and down the West Coast into Mexico has continued for generations.

The myth of this circular migration pattern is that Cubans and other Latin Americans were desperate to play in the United States, that they have a ‘special hunger’ (Regalado 1998). There is no denying that Latin American baseball players are dedicated and driven, but that does not make them unique. The growth of a Latin American presence in the professional leagues in the United States is not simply because they are more desperate than others competing for those few, cherished jobs. Rather, the emergence of a growing domination of the sport by Spanish-speaking athletes and coaches is the culmination of shifting historical processes in an industry that has always preyed upon the economically disadvantaged for its labour force to keep costs down and maximize profits (Helyar 1994; Miller 1991). Professional baseball is by no means unique in this regard as several labour histories of various sports make all too clear (Collins 1998; Conn 1997; Feinstein 1992; Marqusee 1998; Wyatt 1995). The owners of professional sports organizations, wherever practised, have always sought to keep athletes’ salaries as low as possible while maximizing profits. In the only remaining industry in which members of the workforce can be legally bought and sold, it is striking the degree to which governments protect this industry. The transnational character of the global sports industry, combined with governmental protections of industry leaders and organizations, make it all too easy for abuses to quietly occur in the countries that are now providing an increasing percentage of the labour: abuses that would in no way be tolerated in the countries where the dominant leagues exist (see Marcano Guevara and Fidler 2002). Trumpeted publicly as multicultural tolerance, the burgeoning presence of Latin American athletes in professional baseball in the US, Asian and African athletes in professional football in Europe, and Latin American, African and Eastern European athletes in the National Basketball Association (NBA), as just three examples, has more to do with the international economics of sports labour than any enlightenment on the part of the industry’s leaders. Their presence in the professional leagues is not a case of more talented athletes, or even more driven ones (although there is no denying their talent or ambition),