Mexican American experience not included

One issue the national Baseball Hall of Fame doesn’t yet address is the Mexican American baseball experience, a subject that has received a great deal of academic attention in Southern California in the last few years.

Although the Southland was a hotbed for Mexican baseball between the 1930s and late 1960s, little information had been collected until Terry Cannon of the Baseball Reliquary, a small nonprofit in Pasadena dedicated to exploring art and culture through baseball, pitched the theme to Cesar Caballero, the librarian at Cal State Los Angeles.

That led to “Latino Baseball History Project: The Mexican-American Experience,” a collection of oral histories, photographs and artifacts later displayed at Cal State L.A., L.A. Trade Tech and more than half a dozen other libraries and museums, winning a prestigious national humanities prize along the way.

Portions of those exhibitions will be on display at Cal State San Bernardino’s John M. Pfau Library this summer.

For more information on “Latino Baseball History Project: The Mexican-American Experience,” contact JoAnn Oliver at (909) 537-5118 or at jooliver@csusb.edu.

-- Kevin Baxter