Baseball as Mediated Latinidad

<div>In her incisive study <i>Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race Masculinity Nationalism and Performances of Identity</i> Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball's Latin/o American players-who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB-as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical political and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration crime masculinity aggression and violence. Rudolph examines the perception by media and fans of Latino baseball players and the consumption of these athletes as both social and political stand-ins for an entire culture showing how these participants in the nationalist game of baseball exemplify tensions over race nation and language for some while simultaneously revealing baseball as a practice of <i>latinidad </i>or pan-Latina/o/x identity for others. By simultaneously exploring the ways in which Latino baseball players can appear both as threats to American values and the embodiment of the American Dream and engaging with both archival research and new media representations of MLB players Rudolph sheds new light on the current ambivalence of mainstream American media and fans towards Latin/o culture.</div>