Basketball,Zapatistas,and Other Racial Subjects

Abstract

This essay, in struggling to account for the twisted intersections of sport and race across the US-Mexico border, argues that the cultural critic must account for not only hybridity and transnational flows of labor and capital but also for structures of feeling and structures of interaction. In this framework, basketball reveals a postmodern emotional self for the indigenous Mexican that is at once gendered, racialized, resistant and complicit, flexible, and strategic. Examining the pleasures of basketball for indigenous Mexicans in both Mexico and Los Angeles, the author asserts that while playing this game with so much passion, the players are devising their own sets of racial and ethnic premises, authoring, as it were, their own theories of difference and identity.