Hoops and “Education”: Latino Males,Fugitivity,and Basketball in the City

Abstract

Latinxs have a long history of participation in basketball, yet links to education scholarship are for the most part non-existent. In a context of ongoing subtractive policies around curriculum, teaching, toxic immigration policies and other sociopolitical realities, Latinxs have long used “hoops” as a space for identity formation, “education,” and refuge. Working through the aforementioned gap in education scholarship, I make connections to Latino males research, work on fugitivity, and draw implications for decolonizing forms of education/schooling.

From city to city, Latinx youth work on their midrange game, dribble around their backs, and wear Spurs, Lakers, Rockets, and Knicks jerseys. Urbanized spaces have a strong contingency of Latinxs playing basketball. Also, many Latinxs attend schools that are more segregated than they were a generation ago (Fuller et. al., 2019) and peer bonds, discussions about coming age, and other important identity markers come to the fore via sports. Interestingly, there is a dearth of sports related scholarship as it relates to Latinxs. This gap is also found in Latino males scholarship and generally, in education research that focuses on Latinxs that are raised in urbanized spaces. Further, a basketball connection is pretty much non-existent. Latinxs are passionate about the game, as there is a huge fan base for NBA teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, San Antonio Spurs, and Miami Heat, and Latinxs play a formidable role in the nomenclature of hoopin’ at the parks and elementary schools as kids come of age. In fact, former and current NBA players of Latin American descent include Manu Ginoboli (Argentina), Carlos Arroyo (Puerto Rico), Eduardo Najera (Mexico), Al Horton (Dominican Republic) and Brazilians such as Tiago Splitter and Leandro Barbosa. There are NBA stars that have some Latin American heritage, these include the Puerto Rican lineage of Carmelo Anthony and the Mexican heritage of Devin Booker. This also is true of the WNBA, as Diana Taurasi, one the greatest players to ever play the game, is a Californian, a native Spanish speaker, and has Argentinian roots. Further, Latinxs make up 17 percent of the US NBA fan base and 2.3 percent of NBA players are Latinxs as of last season (Bustillos, 2019).

In this conceptual paper, I examine how basketball can serve as a metaphor to understand fugitive consciousness (Harney & Moten, 2013). As such, the concept of fugitive status is framed as a dynamic process of resistance, agency, and “success.” I use basketball as the literal and conceptual space of joy, refuge, refusal, and even “innocent” dreaming that eventually faces dystopic elements of identity production in the context of fantasy and Capitalist pain. The writing in this piece is conceptual, experimental, and at times embedded in a wonderland: how 1 day I am sitting on Greyhound bus with a young man that just got out of jail as I was searching for how to get to get out of my ‘jail’(the restlessness of my 19th year of my life), followed by a summer as a fellow at Princeton University, followed by leaning on a tree as I watch kids play basketball in San Juan, Puerto Rico or: I reflect on getting to play hoops on a humid evening in Cancún (Mexico) until the lights decided to not give me a clear enough view of the rim. Similar things happened on a sleepy day in Oaxaca, Mexico, I found the court where I would shoot the ball for a bit or I would play with friends in the border town of Ciudád Juarez, Mexico. Also, I recall the many days in Los Angeles barrios where I played until dusk. This positionality of the border crossing fugitive is often uncomfortable for institutions, while in contrast youth are able to find moments of joy—engaging in a project where “no-wheres” become “homes.” The fugitive, the escape, the mismatch and the match, the pink sky over the Caribbean, the Macaws flying in Costa Rica, the stressors and joys of city life in the U.S.—this piece explores scoring and not scoring, and the ways in which things change and are lived in the playground that is more than just about basketball.

Finally, I provide a conceptual link between sports, specifically basketball, and tools that may be useful for critical forms of achievement and identity construction inclusive of a praxis of of continuous reinvention. I will make specific connections to Latino males scholarship. The love for the game transverses social class and often, the role of the game is much more than winning and losing. Instead this love is the abject form for addressing anxieties, intergenerational trauma, pain, family stress, racism, critical forms of hope and other forces of self-realization (see for instance, the documentary, Basketball: A love story, Klores, 2018).

My Hoop Dreams

In this section I share some background information about my own connection to basketball. Further, this provides context based on my own lived experiences and the ways in which they inform my interest in this work.

What is lost by trying to acquire “legitimate competences?” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 83). In some of my work (Carrillo, 2016), I discussed the pain of the “winner,” outlining various gains and social, cultural, and psychic stressors that the process of social class mobility may inflict on working-class Latino males. Similarly, in my own journey, the alienation germane to the process that is “making it” has provided the opportunity to name, reflect, reorganize, move, shift, negate, “control,” and be simultaneously clear and confused. I was born to working-class Mexican immigrant parents, raised in the streets of working-class Los Angeles. Here, or there I should say, my hoop dreams aided in making sense of the irresolution, dehistoricizing, and agency-laden ways of identity-making to build up the self in a painful process of “symbolic imposition” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 212). As an adolescent, I did not know anything about yoga, never made it to a coffee shop to “process” and “think things.” In fact, being “busy” was one of the biggest threats, as I had to find ways to escape to make sense of what was happening to me and how to find myself. These escapes often involved sitting with my father at parking lots, eating hamburgers and talking about “life” as I looked out the window. Sometimes he would walk over to his hidden stash of beer in the car’s trunk, figuring out how he would get it in the house. Sometimes his quiet desperation came across at 4 am as he woke us up to get going and make it over the swap meet where he hoped to sell shoes. In this context, shoes, and specifically basketball shoes also became a beautiful project that helped me pace my coming of age with the realities of Capitalism, instability, and stirred the process of looking for options, not alternatives to modernity (drawing from Mignolo, 2011). Mignolo (2011) further explains:

That is why my argument is built on “options” and not on “alternatives.” If you look for alternatives you accept a point of reference instead of a set of existing options among which the decolonial enters claiming its legitimacy to sit at the table when global futures are being discussed. For that reason, the first decolonial step is delinking from coloniality and not looking for alternative modernities but for alternatives to modernity (p. xxvii).

As a kid, I used to watch the Lakers play in Los Angeles. Only now, I reflect on what that connection to basketball may mean to education scholarship and beyond. At a very early age, maybe 7 years old, I got a basketball and even got “basketball shoes,” some of the first Air Jordans (swapmeet version) and the Reebok Pump shoes. It was emotional and inspiring, an aesthetic of concrete, shoes, and the attempt to defy things while up in the air or while running around seeking to do something special with the ball in the megalopolis I called home. This was the 1980’s and the 1990’s, and my city was going through challenges around social class and race. In L.A., this played out in the uprising after the Rodney King verdict. Around 18 and 19 years of age, I read about the “riot” in the university libraries. Later, these libraries became part of my life and somehow never left. In this context, I became politicized—or maybe I got access to the ambivalent airwaves of it all, as Harney and Moten (2013) contend:

We’re just anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics booming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent and disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to it’s actual area, we got politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented (p. 20).

All this is why I am writing about basketball as a place of becoming within and beyond the shot clock. In this writing, I kind of know what I am doing and I kind of do not. The romantic childhood and hoop dreams that faded are replaced by a more complex story of family support and addiction, of memories that heal and irritate. But these elements— my hoop dream metaphor for what I did not become, how I became “something,” how the themes from this conceptual piece are not solutions or finality—they are movements or movidas (Urrieta, 2009) in the hyperbole that is the linear timeline of achievement that goes in dark contrast to environmental health, personal wellbeing, and community nurture. Further, in this paper, I use memory and reflections based on years of teaching in K-12 and higher education to address how we always face polemics around the idea that “. . .the only genuine and authentic mode of living in the world is to be recognizable within the terms of order” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 125).

In sum, my hoops dreams were constructed in the city. Desperation, liminality, friendships, and the evolution of my own questions came to the fore after dribbling, making a certain pass, or just daydreaming while sitting on top of a basketball as the southern California day turned to night.

Theoretical Grounding

Below, I situate the aims of this paper within scholarship in the areas of: (1) Urban Education, (2) Latino males in U.S. schools, (3) the politics of home, (4) the undercommons, and research on (5) race and sports.

Urban Education

As Milner (2012) contends, “urban” can mean many things to many people, often not always layered with asset driven connotations. U.S. urban public schools are becoming more and more diverse and opportunity gaps continue to be an issue (Howard, 2010), teacher attrition remains a concern (Darling-Hammond, 2010), and many have sought for changes in teacher education (Cochran-Smith, 1995, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 1999). Further, some scholars have addressed the central role of race via Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Solórzano & Bernal, 2001) and important work on men of color (Conchas & Vigil, 2012; Douglas, 2016; Howard, 2013; Noguera et al., 2012; Sáenz & Ponjuan, 2009) that provide theoretical tools for crtically examining schooling in a context of racial profiling, police abuse, and various other in-school and outside of school factors that further alienate the prospects of dignity and ‘healthy” learning outcomes. To this end, some scholars have engaged the prospects of students as social change agents via a praxis and overall action-based model of agency and critical reflection and positionalities (Cammarota, 2008; Duncan-Andrade, 2004, 2005, 2007; Nieto et al., 2002; Picower, 2007). All things considered, for Latinxs and in relation to basketball, this scholarship points to how the “city” and schooling ecosystems are often hit and miss, a road to some kind of life or a mirror of historical and current, systemic conditions that crack even when driven by the most ardent hopes. To that end, hoops often nurture strategy, release, resistance, and various possibilities for collectively opening the prospects of counter-narratives.

Finally, another relevant link comes in terms of youth development. Ginwright and Cammarota (2002) address the need of going from blaming youth and their families and communities for their “problems” versus taking a more asset-based approach. In this context, they highlight the potential of developing critical consciousness through a model of the self (centers active identity development), social (community action model, organizing, solutions to social problems), and global (larger struggle, macro connections to the struggles of others). This is important when thinking of basketball, and sports in general, because the “limits of current youth development models are bound by an inability to examine the complex social, economic, and political forces that bear on the lives of urban youth” (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2002). Basketball is one additional clue into understanding the social context of education in urbanized spaces and educators can play an active role in unpacking the multiplicity of factors that drive change and possibilities.

Latino Males in U.S. Schools

In my previous work (Carrillo, 2016), I discussed the various tools working-class Latino males use to navigate multiple cultural worlds, all while seeking to “keep their souls.” In my scholarship, I also push back against deficit narratives and bounded notions of academic success. My work is grounded in the politics of working-class identity development and the dynamic ways in which achievement, disillusionments, and moments of critical hope challenge clean victory narratives. However, I have not yet made explicit the links between working-class, high-achieving Latino males and basketball. This effort is my attempt to theorize on the borderlands of turning sport into reflexive praxis, a process of engaging ideas between courts and games with its contradictions, and even, the critical possibilities present in these spaces. I humbly enter into this space of conversation, recognizing the messiness of the journey.

Latino male education scholarship has addressed issues such as college access, gangs, identity, mentorship, navigational strategies and additive perspectives on Latinx families, social class and academic achievement pre-college (Harper, 2015; Huerta & Rios-Aguilar, 2018, Johnson, 2018; Noguera et al. 2012; Pérez II, 2017; Sáenz & Ponjuan, 2009; Strayhorn, 2010). Similarly, work on friendship (Way, 2011) is relevant in that many Latino males seek vulnerable and tight bonds that are often hard to come by in adolescence. Basketball, in many ways, is love, and provides a link to community, history, activism, and agency within peer-group communities and imagined communities. These links come from following the sport and loving its aesthetic, its drama, and its stories. Further, Ortega (2019) studied the experiences of Latino male student athletes and found that three core themes came to the fore: racial remarks, peer stigmas, and cultural obligations. Ortega (2019) also points out that Latinxs are the fastest growing group in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) while coaches and the NCAA organization remain largely white and Latinx student athletes are understudied in higher education. Finally, Barajas and Pierce’s (2001) study of Latinx high school and college students illuminates the psychological costs of Latino males adhering to individualistic and meritocracy-oriented perspectives, which often are drawn by how these narratives play out in sports.

As previously stated, education scholarship has largely omitted the study of basketball as a conceptual tool for understanding so-called success, dissent, and identity production. Interestingly, activism by athletes is on the rise in recent years (Coombs & Cassilo, 2017). Basketball is sometimes a space of activism. Recent examples include NBA players showing solidarity with Black Lives Matter and similar involvement by the Minnesota Lynx of the WNBA. In particular, I find basketball as a place of refuge for many youth of color, a place to work out “problems,” make friends, engage introspective questions, and work-out. In this paper, these intersections are explored, as activism and various positionalities engrained in border-crossing are shown to nurture both creative and subversive identity production.

Achievement within a fugitive consciousness elicits various identities for Latino males. High-achieving Latino males often move between worlds, “annoying” the system while sometimes getting rewarded and sometimes sanctioned. The ideas of labor in the academy, of “freedom,” the polemics of the Neoliberal university, overpriced homes in our major cities, the scarcity of “quality time” when work and tech combine to take over our lives, the sporadic notion of community as one becomes a professional; these become more and more a point of entry into isolation away from support systems that we once took for granted. The debates between nihilism and innocence within the child that once lived in a working-class home might be too romanticized; but what if Latino males that get multiple academic degrees eventually figure out that you never really ‘make it?’ In other words, the Latinx “Walden Pond” is irresolution and fragmentation, the rush, the schedule, the issues that people of color have to fix in the Whitestream University; there are always inconsistent humanities. However, in this reality there may also be beauty and a “three-point shot to win the game.” I add basketball to the conceptual conversation of Latino male scholarship, and really, I add it to larger discussion of polemics around consciousness when a people have their loved ones under attack by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, anti-immigrant policies, and screaming folk at Walmart who say: “Go back to your country.”

The Politics of Home

In this piece, home is a key concept. I draw a lot from my own scholarship on home (Carrillo, 2016) to understand the political project of fugitive consciousness. These are attempts at disrupting, naming, remembering and dismembering while also looking back. It is also a feeling, looking back at the “block,” the corner, the places where flow happened in classed and even sometimes painful ways. It is an ontological and epistemological positionality—a sense of lucid madness, a wondering anxiety, and spiritual praxis—that is in some ways content in its irresolution. It is an identity that does not attempt to save anybody, but instead sits in a professional meeting in a tragicomedic trance and has to walk out for breaks of sanity. It is what is used when a deadline is missed on purpose. At moments, it is difficult to lean “back” like this, but this is not a zero-sum game. The night allows for long drives, phone calls, and moments with those that are going through a similar journey. Alleys in some ways reflect the liminal notion of home, as a Latinx students walk the in-between spaces of arrival and walking, lured by an unease and not sure if safety is available anywhere.

I remember playing basketball with graduate students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill during my first years as an assistant professor. Those conversations, in our shoot-arounds, made academia more humane and linked to “home.” In hoops, we named how our bodies and psyches and spirits were consumed by the Capitalist modes of production in academia. In the sweat, in the wait for the next game, in the wisdom of the stories of home that we shared, we had a dialectical memory apparatus with the past. A relevant point is made by Harvey (2010):

One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you’re likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians (p. 12).

In the fetish of ‘fixing’ the ‘other’ or funding and mentoring their ‘success,’ we have the missing irony of the cultural production of a dominant narrative that may become fixed in its inability to question itself, to grow and change. Fugitive consciousness, in this paper at least, is embedded in the tensions of engaging home and how it provides a glimpse into the “geography of insight and ignorance” (Bhabha, 2008). When I hear sounds in my mind at mid-life, as family joins us, as some pass away, as I realize that there are things that I just can’t let go, I run into another meeting and initiative, still searching for the green light. I still mourn away from the cemetery, rooted more in the basketball court at the park across the street from my home, winning is replaced by an audit of childhood, fatherhood, errors made, and sweat lures me into a quick jump shot.

As in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), there is a spiritual activism embedded in home that embraces ambiguity, loss, gain, and contradictions. Within the in-between nepantla space, there is a social justice narrative that informs and nurtures ways of knowing in the toughest of circumstances. As I write this this article, I feel this very tension as I navigate the conceptual space and history that I embody, and the constraints that come when attempting to engage in theoretical spaces that are not clean and clear-cut.

The Undercommons

For the central theorizing section of this paper (Fugitivity and Basketball), I draw primarily from Harney and Moten (2013). Drawing from these scholars, I theorize fugitivity as a form of homelessness that becomes home, an undercommons as possibly a place or non-place, a convening of ideas and people engaged in the work of demystification and eradication. Something new may be around the corner. The undercommons is in some ways place and/or a non-place. Within this construct of fugitivity there is also an understanding that their notion of debt is embedded in a history of Capitalism, that it is sometimes stuck in the often polemic constraints of recognition.

Experimentally, I draw links to Latinx students, as the Latinx community faces mass shootings layered with the realities of white supremacy and children are put in cages in the context of settler colonialism and the historical realities germane to violence and displacement. I joined the college ranks as college organizations blew-up my phone while I sat at home in Compton, California, trying to decide where to go to college. The story for some of us is that we never visited the college campus before we arrived for the move-in day. The truth is that in my undercommons, I was trying to figure who to trust, with whom I could unpack the “game,” and looking to find out how this fugitive nature of my decision to leave “home” would interact with my fugitive desires of deinstitutionalization as I was about to become institutionalized. Coupled with the college administrator’s desire to “cultivate” or use us and “integrate” us into the state, the memories of working-class Chicano aesthetics came to face-to-face with the expectations to be “happy” in the “success” world of higher education.

As previously stated, this theoretical project draws from the idea of being part of the university and its collective worlds, but also of not necessarily being of the university (drawing from Harney & Moten, 2013). As summer in some places may reach 110-degrees, I think of Latino males and the other folk who navigate community college transfer stress, the “semester off” to “save some money,” the restless prospects of just being in youth spaces containing ambiguity and possibilities. In fugitivity, the school year starts with a decolonial project in mind. Further, fugitivity is historical and fantasy yearning for a Latinx presence in modes that navigate the migration of deinstitutionalization. De Lissovoy (2010) shares his take on this:

A decolonial conceptualization of ethics in the global context offers more than an alternative to Eurocentric ones; importantly, it exposes the several dimensions of a constitutive contradiction and hypocrisy in the Western traditions of political and ethical philosophy, and in the concrete projects of democracy-building that have been informed by them. In the first place, the enlightenment humanism of Europe developed together with a systematic refusal of the humanity of the ‘periphery’. . . (p. 282).

Fugitivity is a long road home where the ‘crossroads’ of prayer is at a beat-up parking lot near 7-Eleven that opens late. In front of the store, the crossroads have the scent of all the places we try to hide in the role of “professionals.” We talk and talk late into the night. We lace the shoes up and shock the body into steps towards the gates. We are lonely among friends. What else is 4th grade going to do for you? So much of the curriculum project nurtures adult loneliness and dependent economies. The final grade is not about you, it’s consent to them.

For Latinxs it’s always why you and why here, the sense of why versus hi. And if we ‘get in,’ there is also ‘here is the philosophy I see you fitting into.’ In classrooms, across high-stakes testing surveillance systems, it is a taken for granted group. Also, it is 115 degrees but the roofing work and building of cities will be done by someone who speaks Spanish; yet they do not get a museum in their honor. “Pioneers and Innovators: denied.”

For me, basketball and fugitivity gives the chance to get the cardio in, but more so, to travel from court to court and make new feelings possible and even get good enough to disappear and to not forget why spirit matters. There are moments of invention/creation even when you can’t afford basketball shoes. It’s a process of getting and letting go, the fugitive hopes of not having access to innocence that is denied—but one may get another run. Stories get written. Reflection. Action. And the walk home means a lot.

Race and Sports

Before addressing Latinxs and sport, I first foreground this work in the critical sociology of sport. I draw heavily from Carrington (2013) as he outlines two paradigms in his review of the critical sociology of race and sport, the critical and the functionalist-evolutionary. The critical approach “understands Western capitalist societies as defined in relation to colonial expansion and exploitation” (Carrington, 2013, pp. 383–384) and in the functionalist perspective, “society is understood as essentially harmonious and cohesive” (Carrington, 2013, p. 383). Further, Carrington (2013) points out that there are limited publications on sport (I presume in reference to the field of sociology, he mentions a total of 24 articles in the aforementioned, 2013 publication while also acknowledging some growth in the concluding part of the article) and very few take an in-depth look into the role of race in sport. From the critical perspective, one of the first analyses of race and sport is Harry Edward’s, The Revolt of the Black Athlete (1969) which delves into activism, race, resistance, and sport. Other work that links race and sport include, Thangaraj’s (2015) book on Asian Americans, masculinities, and basketball, additional scholarship on how sport serves as a vehicle for social and institutional change (Boyd, 1997; Hartmann, 2016) and the intersections of popular culture, black masculinity, and power (Boyd, 1997). Hartmann’s (2016) work on the midnight basketball initiative also illuminates the role of basketball as a form of Neoliberal social policy in attempts to address social issues such as crime in urbanized communities. On a somewhat similar vein, Hughes (2004) argues that the NBA feared the role of the street in the game, engaging in racial politics that were under the guise of colorblindness under Commissioner David Stern and the league then moved towards product messaging around racial uplift while also still managing and controlling behavior. The agency of individual athletes in the midst of corporate control is always at play and social justice has played out in different ways. Maya Moore, a superstar WNBA player for instance, took some time off from her professional career to advocate for criminal justice reform and in the peak of Michael Jordan’s glory, players like Craig Hodges sought activist pursuits while ultimately dealing with the politics of losing a shot at a stable career.

Research on African American college athletes also examines how their identities are informed by an emphasis on masculinity attributes that they define as character, integrity, and honesty (Fuller et al., 2020) as well using critical race theory in efforts to examine implications for fostering academic and black male student athlete identities (Bimper et al., 2013). Similarly, research using in-depth ethnographic interviews, has examined African American college athletes and their athletic identities, unpacking the challenges that manifested in their lives after they transition out of athletics (Beamon, 2012). Also, scholars have used critical race theory as a theoretical tool to move away from epistemological racism and center emancipatory race-based research in sports management research (Singer, 2005, 2016). Similarly, Armstrong (2011) pushes for the centering of race and ethnicity in sports management and in terms of shaping epistemological and pedagogical approaches in academia. Recruitment in college sports is also a racialized context. Qualitative research by Harrison (2008) unpacked the role of the “athleticated” versus educated dichotomy, in terms of recruitment of African American athletes via the showing to students (white and African American) of the film, The Program (1994). Students perceived the African American athletes in the recruitment scene of the film as more athleticated versus educated. Adeyemo (2019) also used critical race theory and Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth to unpack the experiences of African American students that play sports, showing the important role of family in navigating sports and academics. Finally, using CRT and incorporating, Bourdieu’s ideas on habitus, Smith et al. (2017) unpack their concept of “expected racial habitus” to examine the polemics around Jackie Robinson’s integration narrative while drawing implications for black males.

When it comes to Latinxs, finding scholarship on sports is very difficult with even more of a gap when it comes to links to education/schooling. Yet, some of my key guidance for this section, came from reading Ignacio’s M. Garcia’s (2013) book, When Mexicans could play ball: Basketball, Race, and identity in San Antonio, 1928-1945. There are many relevant themes from this book in terms of the focus on a Mexican American basketball team from working-class origins (Lanier High School) in San Antonio that excelled in terms of “wins” on the court (they earned two state titles) and faced off-the-court sociopolitical realities. These victories and playing of the game were situated in a context of white supremacy, deficit and racist attitudes towards Mexican origin communities, and issues of segregation, as well as the important dimensions of agency, belonging, “ethnic pride,” and community solidarity. Players from Lanier High School often beat white schools on the court and dealt with external issues related to identity and discrimination. Further, Garcia points out that there is a dearth of scholarship on Latinxs with links to basketball. This article is aimed at addressing some of this gap.

Similarly, In Latinos in U.S. Sport: A History of Isolation, Cultural Identity, and Acceptance (Iber et al., 2011), there is historical context, information on activism, and the emergence of Latinxs in multiple sports, including but not limited to, football, baseball, running, and basketball. Specifically, in terms of basketball, Juan “Panchin” Vicéns is mentioned as a Puerto Rican player that went on to be named the top player in the 1959 FIBA World Championship in Chile. Further, in 2004, the book mentions how Puerto Rico went on to upset the U.S. “Dream Team” by winning with the score of 93-74. Another relevant connection was how the YMCA played a key role in linking the Mexican community across the U.S. to basketball in the early 1900’s. The book further outlines the intersections of how the YMCA promoted religious pursuits and assimilationist tendencies while at the same time promoting basketball with Mexicans in the U.S.

A reading of Dr. Christine Marin’s (the founder of the Chicano/a Research Collection and archives at Arizona State University) dissertation, Always a Struggle: Mexican Americans in Miami, Arizona, 1909-1951 (2005), also outlines the role of basketball in the community of Miami, Arizona. Further, the success oN the court (1951 state champion with eight Mexican Americans on the team) was in the context of a larger set of struggles over equity, evictions, de facto segregation, racism, and the development of labor activism.

It should also be noted that basketball, or similar type of games have a long history with indigenous communities in places like Oaxaca, Mexico and among many Native Americans communities in the U.S. Archaeologists have found courts amongst the Mexica and in Arizona and California (going back to about 1000 BC) (Iber et al., 2011). Further, “Rez Ball,” or reservation ball, is an up-tempo type of basketball that is very popular among Native American communities in states such as Arizona and New Mexico. As Bain (2016) points out, “It’s not uncommon to see crowds near 10,000 for state-level championship games between two reservation high schools, and with 7,200 seats, Chinle High’s Wildcat Den in Apache County is the largest high school sports arena in Arizona” (‘Rez Ball’ Providing Opportunities for Kids, Arizona Republic). Similarly, Powell (2019) states the following regarding Rez Ball amongst Navajos:

Hoops genealogists trace the game back through generations from parents to grandparents to basketball-playing great-grandparents without settling on anything like an Ur-game, that moment when a Navajo kid picked up a basketball and ran off dribbling. There’s no real mystery, though. For a century, Navajo boys and girls were packed off to Anglo-run Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools where to speak their native language was to risk getting mouths washed out with soap. Basketball became a way to pass the hours, combining a millennia-long native passion for endurance running with a cultural emphasis on group rather than individual accomplishment. Hoop became a harmonizing force in this most immense of native nations. (The Undefeated, n.p.)

Overall, what is evident in this limited research area is still salient and crucial for understanding why basketball is an important space of refuge and identity development for Latinxs: displacement, detention of youth and immigration raids, gentrification, racism, and white supremacy continue to shape their lives to this day, and hoops serve as a space to sometimes “win” and also grow-up, destress, and leverage dialogue around resistance and self-affirmation and agency. Also, in the context of all this, I am reminded of Eduardo Galeano and his analyses of sports. Galeano (1998) wrote about his passion for soccer. I am taken back to a particularly poignant point that he makes: “the history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty” (Galeano, 1998, p. 2). Still he suggests, “Luckily, on the field, you can still see, if only once in a long while, some insolent rascal who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom” (Galeano, 1998, p. 2). As we live through the Instagram generation of attention addiction and players and even some academics becoming brands, the NBA faces the prospects of finishing the 2020 NBA season at Walt Disney World. In this surreal ecology of sport, Capitalism may remove what it may deem as ‘unnecessary’ and unprofitable activities as not worthy of mass media attention and glorification, yet basketball, for me at least, remains a venue with moments of beauty, collective action, resistance, and prospects for agency and collaboration in “private” and public space. In this contradictory space, even in this writing, what am I daring to write or not write is attached to the technocratic dimensions of approval as we build within the subjectivities of power and the gaze, all while imagining liberatory moments. As such, the game goes on, even in this literature review, as I dribble with a referee in close proximity and in many ways, that is “existence” and sport provides a powerful venue into these interactions.

Methods

This is a conceptual paper, yet, I do use elements of testimonios (Beverley, 2000; Cervantes-Soon, 2012; The Latina Feminist Group, 2001), as this gives the power of witnessing and exercising collective voice to address social injustice concerns. Testimonios are also places where the undercommons can come to life through those who play the role of subversive intellectuals. Further, at different points, I share my own memories and testimonio, while making links to basketball. Testimonios also show how basketball impacted my politics, the role of agency and identity in my own life, and the mechanisms by which I sometimes learned about speaking and drawing from my social location, in the “urban” barrios of south Los Angeles, California. Also, I concur with Tuhiwai (2012) that “research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized. It is regulated through the formal rules of individual scholarly disciplines and scientific paradigms, and the institutions that support them (including the state) (p. 8).” Thus, working from this decolonizing context concerning methods, this work is not intended to fit some generalizability metric or fit some methods gold standard, but nonetheless, I hope that this article may provide connections, understanding, or insight to researchers, communities, educators, and others that may be able to find elements of this work that may apply to their context.

I recognize the opportunity and challenges of the experimental aspects of this article. My humble desire is to conceptualize, enter an area of limited research and theorization, and provide opportunities for other scholars to engage their related questions and ideas. I am further anchored in Giroux’s (2019) contention that what often is the case is that “methods contain a kind of silence on the side of the worst forms of repression, because they deny the very notion that students are alive. They can be aliveto themselves, to particular forms of knowledge, particular social experiences and particular values” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCMXKt5vRQk). There is in a sense, a fugitivity process at play in the methods engaging this writing, an interplay of agency, a recognition of voice on the “court,” a dissent, play, and wondering that may or may not have a chance to be read.

Finally, it sounds good to me. I share this sentiment in this section because my parents sold my baseball cards in a garage sale when I was around 19 years of age. As a working-class student, I went off to college as my parents struggled to pay their bills. I took on the long road to college. I cannot get those baseball cards back and I understand. In my opinion, if we are truly about critical approaches and decolonizing possibilities, the closer my writing and this section engages the feeling of what may be relatable to baseball cards and a garage sale, it sounds good to me. Similarly, Denzin (2017) reminds us that “We must create our own standards of evaluation, our own measures of quality, influence, excellence, and social justice impact. These are moral criteria. They celebrate resistance, experimentation, and empowerment” (p. 9). I work through these ideas as I evoke the possibilities of sharing from where I stand.

In the next section, I theorize on fugitivity and basketball.

Fugitivity and Basketball

Fugitive Basketball

The process in writing this paper in many ways resembles the hopes and struggles in my own journey about whether or not I gave too much to academia, the journey to find spaces of revelation, attempting to write the work I wish I would have found during my schooling, and also bridging the worlds of joy and pain. I draw themes from Harney and Moten (2013), adding basketball related topics. These themes connect with a fugitive consciousness that is playful, as well as a freedom-driven process of student identity that is aware of injustice in their own bodies as they get “mentored” and institutionalized. The idea is as literal as it is messy, the process of fugitivity and my links to basketball are linked in the context of models, metaphors, incompleteness, and even “mystery” as schooling takes time, focus, as well as both appearance and disappearance acts. Finally, as a thread of analysis, I discuss and introduce the concept of the second backpack which I also discuss in the final section of this paper. The second backpack serves as the role of learning outside of hegemonic constraints, outside of mandated readings, outside of the mandated control of time, linking back to what or how that may be possible within the fugitivity elements of basketball. I am reminded of how many young people cannot turn around sometimes, and have to run away, run, not in the sense of never returning “home,” but running so that the edge is an informant, but the not the place of their disappearance. They go somewhere, sometimes dribbling a basketball.

Politics Surrounded: Dribbling

The settler, having settled for politics, arms himself in the name of civilization while critique initiates the self-defense of those of us who see hostility in the civil union of settlement and enclosure (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 18)

In the anti-policy body, you dribble out of bounds. Dribbling is liberating something. In the enclosure of the settler, in the metaphors of the dominant group, in the stories of the power group that frames our role in “their” institution(s) we dribble in and out of danger as we realize that “. . .the enemy we face also is illusory” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 19). It is in part the isolation and the smell of the ball, the dream, the time on the court, in the classroom, reflecting and making sense of what is to come and how to get through the trapping defense. In a brown body, we know that we have to release the jawbone and stretch the back against those that do not wonder like us. . .drifting. Between schools, classes, study, in opening the second backpack, a yearning for being academically successful in fugitivity means that nobody knows where you went, you have a mastery of a non-place where the politics of the gaze do not have full access to an x-ray of your humanity and thus “making-it” is not theirs to give. In the Mexico City neighborhood where I was told not to go, I am part of everyone, I hear kids playing basketball and I recognize the language that goes through the rim. Nowhere near a hospital, but I did not die. I will cross back to the United States and have access to anxiety, loss, and the opportunity to be schooled in the consumption of rituals that make souls call 911.

After the middle school graduation of my niece and nephew, I was invited to the Golden Corral restaurant to celebrate. Near the end of our meal, the son of a family friend, a 17-year-old Latino male, said that he plays basketball and noted that he had a very high GPA and was interested in attending college, naming a few schools of interest: among them, UCLA, Berkeley, and his favorite, the University of Michigan. I was excited by his passion, but wanted to dig, to share what it means to have a fugitive consciousness and to “make it” on the fugitive basketball court. These hoop conversations are in progress, but I hope to further unpack these elements and bridge how this dialectic of reorganizing the achievement relationship may take form for working-class students from multiple backgrounds. I am reminded of a friend, a working-class Latino male, who recently earned a doctorate in education after working on his degree for more than 12 years who said, “My greatest accomplishment in this process is that I came out whole” (personal communication, May 20, 2019).

Planning and Policy: A Court on the Door

They need hope. They need to have their sights lifted above the furtive plans and night launches of their despairing lives. They need vision. Because from the perspective of policy it is too dark in there, in the black heart of the undercommons, to see. You can hear something, can feel something present at its own making. But the deputies can bring hope, and hope can lift planners and their plans, the means of social reproduction, above ground into the light, out of the shadows, away from these dark senses. Deputies fix others, not in an imposition upon but in the imposition of selves, as objects of control and command, whether one is posited as being capable of self-hood or not. Whether they lack of consciousness or politics, utopianism or common sense, hope has arrived (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 79).

For high achieving Latino males, the energy that comes in with the settler’s lens often results in soul wounds that do not heal (Carrillo, 2016). It is in many ways a battle with an occupation force, making an emancipatory consciousness less possible—because, after all, they claim some humanities are failures. While I acknowledge the threat of the binary in any analysis as some worlds may merge in creative and healing ways or some “space elements” may need to be rejected, playing basketball on my door as kid was part of the undercommons where many things made sense.

The court on the door was purchased at local store, maybe the swapmeet: the door was never painted. This “court” was in what is often referred to as a “bad neighborhood.” I will not give a bounded, static, reflection on this town nor that court on a beat-up door in a beat-up house with multiple paint jobs. These were the visible outlines of a model of agency and rasquachismo (see as an example, work on rasquachismo by Monreal, 2019), a policy that made something of out of the scraps of everyday life.

The court is on the door, a Latinx student shifts in between parallel and conversing universes. The pain of the “winners” among some working-class Latino male youth has them looking for the “court on the door.” There is almost like a whisper among those that understand as they try to get through the often-draining rites of passage and rituals. Militant preservation (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 76) kicks in, a planning of how to preserve some of the elements of “home” and how to shape the steps that follow, dribble after dribble, hoping to make a shot without losing it all. There is a deep love, my cousin Sulema tells me at a Golden Corral located in far western part of the metropolis where I now live, about the old high school days in L.A. We gather evidence and plan and remember, we take count and reflect if our family is still here, who went where, who lost a child, who became an engineer. They look into my eyes, they say I am still here, so we eat and celebrate the middle school graduates, my niece and nephew. I want to buy them new shoes, and my nephew says, “I’m not picky,” but systemic violence is picky and rude at times. As my family members “graduate,” the hope process comes to the fore, and they become part of a plan and policy, a gaze of racialized and classed subconscious order enters their life, and I wonder how busy they will now be in that place, new problems and new tastes and desires. New markets. They will see the trees with new theories and basketball will have to be organized around new roles, responsibilities, and the damage that is a result of “success” may require the cardio and letting go. As high school looms close, the second backpack will require a planning that centers dignity since adults will say there is only time for their notions of rigor and place-making.

Home and Fugitive Consciousness

In the bounded contract of arrival, the undercommons has ways of drawing from “home,” the languages, the sounds, the physical flow, the programmatic commitments to family members and friends that are not with you in the air-conditioned building that is so grey and centered in the name of modernity and efficiency. You open the windows. In urban spaces, in spaces of epistemological dissent, bonds develop that do not fit traditional interpretations from scholarship that desires the token or the fetish. Some educators may interpret these epistemological moments and movements that draw from home as “bad behavior,” attitudes and styles that are not in “order.”

In home, there are contradictions, movement, strategy or maybe not, there is a sense of reminiscing in fugitive ways outside of the inside space that now has accepted the credentials “success.” There will be moments of study. There will be moments of reminiscing, stories will be exchanged with friends. To be a student, professor, and wonderer is encompassed in fugitive everywhere and nowhere, instrumentals without words, a concert by John Cage, in the irresolution and “chance” is its own destination. When dribbling and shooting the ball on the court, planning the homes that will come to life provide texture of place and space. Meaning and various other prospects of how to engage the learning process, the game of it all, the joy and misery, and the in-betweenness and the process of labeling and stages and deadlines.

Home, in its physical and metaphorical dimensions is a curriculum in the flesh that positions efforts for change and community. Home is a process for engaging the various possibilities that has anxiety early in the day because it traverses the hopes for knowing places deemed “uncivilized.” Basketball is one home, one way to engage fugitive stories of self as education and schooling debate between themselves. The long road to entry, the long journey of nurture and disagreement, all develop spaces for engaging a pedagogy and philosophy of being; even when it is uncomfortable.

The process for nurturing home is part of what makes its fugitive aspect possible, as it is seeking separation and “going back,” even while inside the institutional machinery. There are opportunities to engage the various dimensions of new worlds that provide healing, or moments of curiosity, change, and dignity. This works in non-linear ways, the messy spaces of this process engages narratives of creation in the middle passage of looking back, while being grounded in today and seeing around the cul-de-sac.

Basketball is a 5-hour energy drink from the gas stations before the big meeting. It is the crossroads of non-linear negotiations of toxicity and “success” as a deeper truth in our souls, informed by home, where spaces like basketball courts help us to not forget. In writing this piece, there is time that needs to be spent sitting down, time away from phone calls, from work, negotiations with the hope.

In the second backpack, you get space, time, and a reframing of how learning happens. There is music in the way the dribbling happens. There is a social location that has all sorts of contradictions, release and frustration, education after school without a program to tame feelings that are becoming, in-progress. Like the parameters police, in the undercommons where I am trying to be nice, I get invited by my sister to recount L.A. stories of how our ambition has us in the opportunity mirror, cracks and all, feeling the pressure of noticing the colonial metaphors that have us not believing, but yet still living in the hype. The ego has a warranty that does not want to expire and renews automatically. But, what exactly is this thing where we share? The dribbling, the missed shots, the walk to the local court, the shoe laces, the jerseys, the idols, the late evening lonely games against time—these things rears toward love for ambiguity and other worlds that may or may not be possible, ideas, feelings, and wonder is there being made. It is there. And of course, we remember this, as the professionalization of achievement and the logic of “mastery” and production is so far removed from the hanging clothing line in the backyard, where “solar power” dries our clothes.

Final Thoughts

Imagining the Second Backpack Curriculum

As previously stated, there is a dearth of education scholarship on Latinxs with connections to basketball. Fugitivity, basketball, and Latinxs are often sites that are “happening” but not documented nor leveraged as sites of critical consciousness, community building, friendships, and “study.” While Latinxs continue to make up large numbers of participating youth in basketball leagues and informal get togethers across U.S. cities, very little has been theorized in the areas of cultural production of identity, agency, resistance, and other areas. This paper is one such contribution and is a humble attempt at extending current education scholarship focused on Latino males. Further with a historical context of displacement for Latinxs, I wonder about basketball and its curriculum of place. The ways in which I think of basketball also combines the body, the soul, the alternative schedules and regimes and how ‘sweat’ helps to remember and dismember, as we engage immigration, deportations, colonization, language restrictions, the stories of grandpa and grandma in Latin America-it all raised the prospects of how ‘work’ and starvation have a dystopic sound and melancholy, as it all comes face-to-face with ‘success’ and ‘achievement’ and its set of mythologies that may or may not be closer to me.

When I think about Latino male students and Latinxs in general, I am moved to theorize on the second backpack for this concluding section. The first backpack has your homework, full of assignments, the overt curriculum often layered in hegemonic constraints. Some may be relevant; many others engage in a certain form of violence and/or erasure. The second backpack has a decolonizing process. Mignolo (2000) makes a relevant argument: “Our goals are not salvation but decolonization, and transformations of the rigidity of epistemic and territorial frontiers established and controlled by the coloniality of power in the process of building the modern colonial/colonial world system” (p. 12). The myth wakes up early or never goes to bed. Society is organized a certain way, says the stray cat in the alley. Lego blocks get knocked over by the early morning earthquake or the anxiety of assessment. Even over there, near the frog that came out on a humid Costa Rican night, there was a sense of knowing that the second backpack is the second option, the literacy of the undercommons, the non-place, a region that is not there and does not need hope as it has arrived.

Moving beyond binaries, there are messy realities on all fronts. Basketball and schooling are linked in most U.S. schools: you see the basketball courts out back. You play at recess. The game may be “exercise” or part of a goal oriented “team” process. And in that midst, there are youth that play for that and/or other epistemological yearnings. There are bonds, with space, with friends. There is a theorizing of the soul that finds its ways into our spirit and psyche. This game comes in, after we eat free and reduced lunches, after we take high-stakes tests, after we face low expectations in the school day, after environmental racism gets us sick. The water has lead. I do not quite understand how I even got to the point to be able to write to this article.

In the second backpack, there is a move away from value in the context of Eurocentrism and the white gaze. Policy cannot “fix it,” this sense of self, because it does not have Wi-Fi signal that is strong enough to link up to the narrative that attempts to monitor it constantly. In this backpack, a doctor may live in the neighborhood that his colleagues are afraid to live in. It is also a place that allows for the use of “no” in efforts to preserve “home.”

In the second backpack, the curiosity innate to life is not part of a high stakes test. You can kick the ball up the air if you are frustrated. You can pick your journey, the adventure and consequence, the love is back after all the abuse that has scared you from the even reading in the first place. There is a manufacturing plant near this type of student. Typically. There are smoke stacks nearby. Possibly. You learn how to swim without a class.

In this second backpack, there are books and readings about a rejection of the pace of linear consumption and mobility on the terms of the policymaker. This spot has a hustle that clarifies time, scale, and “efficiency.” Some know how to be human together before policy tries to share its fish pond in the middle of summer, you cannot breathe in there, you are locked in. For Latino males, for the hoopers, the second backpack can be the place that is pre- and post-education reform and planning. Shooting a fadeaway shot, dribbling, all can be part of a second backpack- it is the detox and water.

So, as I walk my neighborhood and dribble a ball to the park, I am reminded of the 10:00 pm closure and how much more will we all have left after we navigate the tax of “excellence.” Melancholy and joy are cousins. This article, in thinking about fugitivity and basketball, was not a bounded link to “misery” or full acceptance. Narrative of deadlines and memories and nostalgia are still being worked out. A translanguaging resistance emerges over hoops, layered by the wind at dusk and a dynamic set of lifeworlds transform a situation.

In fugitivity, at the crossroads of social death, agency, and what may or may not be possible, I write this sentence knowing that the summer heat is brutal where I live and Latinxs were massacred in El Paso (in 2019), a region where I have family. When you are a target, when your body and soul is attacked by white supremacy and when my seven-year-old asks: “Is Donald Trump coming to Phoenix, Arizona? He kills people,” arrival into merely dominant notions of “success” is morphed by enacting humanity at various points of disappearance.

It is the fugitive consciousness process of the second backpack process that learns and grows and adjusts. This type of identity is engaged in ontological and epistemological mobility, all while recognizing how the rent is always late on this side of the tracks too. Finally, in places like El Paso’s Segundo Barrio, there is an annual summer camp in barrio that allots space for Latinx youth to learn about the game within the context of also learning about border culture-in some ways this reminds me of the second backpack curriculum. More theorization and research can push along what the city and basketball means for Latinxs, its varieties in meaning, its epistemological possibilities. In the end, hoops, may be one place that gets us closer to Harney and Moten’s (2013) contention that, “We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate.” (p. 20).