Touchdown!

“Touchdown! goes beyond merely recounting the many ‘firsts’ of Latinos in the NFL to take a critical look at how Latino inclusion is often tied more to NFL market expansion rather than genuine acceptance of another group into the fold.”—Jorge Iber, author of The Sanchez Family: Mexican American High School and Collegiate Wrestlers from Cheyenne, Wyoming

“Touchdown! blitzes through history the NFL fumbled for decades. Aldama and González drive from pioneers like Tom Flores, Joe Kapp, and Jim Plunkett to the systemic barriers still keeping Latinos on the sidelines. For those of us who lived it, this book scores big. For everyone else, it’s a fourth-quarter wake-up call.” —Hank Olguin, Cal leading rusher, Rose Bowl ’59, and author of Who Let the Mexicans Play in the Rose Bowl?

“Rigorously researched yet accessible, Touchdown! centers the historically silenced presence of Latino players in the NFL, tracing their invisibility from the mid-twentieth century to our present-day social and legal institutions.” —Jennifer Domino Rudolph, author of Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity

An accessible, lively, and concise study of Latino participation in the NFL that is part sports history, part cultural analysis, and part love letter to those who break through color lines.

The NFL doesn’t want you to know: Latinos have been playing in the league since 1927. In Touchdown!, Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González tap interviews, archival research, and statistics to tell the story that generations of sports journalists have missed. They celebrate Cuban-born Lou Molinet’s leather-helmet debut, Steve Van Buren’s Hall of Fame rise, Tom Flores’s Lombardi trophies, and Jim Plunkett threading impossible passes. And they address those convergences of race, class, and athletic opportunity—such as pay-to-play youth leagues, housing segregation, legal exclusions to early citizenship, and racist stereotypes pushing Latino players away from “thinking” positions—that keep brown players on the sidelines. Part sports history, part cultural analysis, and part love letter to the those who break through color lines, Touchdown! fills a critical gap in sports literature and Latino studies and makes clear what the scoreboard has tried to erase: La cultura has been on the field the whole time.

Frederick Luis Aldama is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, where he founded and directs the Latinx Pop Lab. He is the author or editor of many books, including Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen and the Eisner-winning Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics.

Christopher González is Professor and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Endowed Chair in the Department of English at Southern Methodist University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV and Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature

Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Kick Off: A Century of Erasure
Chapter 2 Gains to Time-Outs: The Myth of Meritocracy
Chapter 3 Huddles to Blitzes: The Bonds That Break
Chapter 4 Offense/Defense: The White Racial Frame
Chapter 5 False Starts to Face Masks: The Illusion of Progress
Chapter 6 Turnovers to Pass Interference: War, Opportunity, and Exile
Chapter 7 Red Zones to Touchdowns: The Politics of Inclusion
Chapter 8 Safety and Gridirons: Survival and Its Costs
Chapter 9 Instant Replays to Halftimes: The Spectacle of Otherness
Chapter 10 Sacks to Moving Chains: Grinding Forward

Timeline
Works Cited and Further Reading
About the Autores
Index