Latino Boxing In Southern California

Southern California, with its burgeoning Latino population, marked the spot as the proving ground for world-class boxers from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, and El Salvador to showcase their talent with exciting and unforgettable bouts. Latino Boxing in Southern California tells the true, heartfelt stories of Latino and Mexican ring idols who did battle on the West Coast, while exploring the mythical devotion boxing purists and fans have for their boxers. This colorful tribute to the sweet science, Los Angeles-style, keeps the memory alive of when boxing in this town revolved around the beloved Olympic Auditorium, Main St. Gym, and the Forum.

Many West Coast Latino boxers have entered and departed the ring, their anecdotes left behind like another stain on the mat. Latino boxing stories have floated around for ages without the benefit of being passed down from generation to generation. Buried tales and colorful narratives of beloved Mexican ring idols such as Ruben Olivares, Mando Ramos, Carlos Zarate, Danny "Little Red" Lopez, Bobby Chacon, Carlos Palomino, and Alberto Davila are showcased in these pages, their stories revived because no champion deserves to be forgotten. Other overlooked heroes and one-hit wonders of the golden era of Southland boxing (1940s-1970s) will also be saluted, along with the bygone contenders of the barrio who never saw their name in neon lights.

Welcome to the colorful, flamboyant, and wonderful world of Mexican American boxing in Los Angeles. From the minute they stepped into the ring, Mexican American fighters have electrified fans with their explosiveness and courage. These historical images bring to life a sociological culture consisting of knockouts, the Main Street Gym, the Olympic Auditorium, neighborhood rivalries, Mexican idols, posters, and promoters. Like a winding thread, "the Golden Boy" Art Aragon bobs and weaves throughout the book. From "Mexican" Joe Rivers to Oscar De La Hoya, the true stories of their sensational ring wars are told while keeping alive the spirit and legacy of Mexican American boxing from the greater Los Angeles area.

The Mexican American boxer is one who leaves it all in the ring. They have been described as devastating punchers, fearless fighters, and tough competitors by boxing fans, sportswriters, and commentators alike. Mexican American boxers have long carried a reputation in boxing circles as being the ultimate crowd-pleasers. In continuing that tradition, the dramatic testimonies of seven distinct, valiant, and dashing warriors from the Golden State of California are presented here in intricate detail: Aurelio Herrera, Art Aragon, Mando Ramos, Bobby Chacon, "Yaqui" Lopez, Arturo Frias, and Oscar Muniz. By exposing new generations to their action-packed stories, new life is breathed into these talented and gifted boxers, ensuring their fighting spirit and heartfelt memories will never die. This volume salutes these pioneers of Mexican American boxing for opening the doors for today's boxers.

For at least a century, across the United States, Mexican American athletes have actively participated in community-based, interscholastic, and professional sports. The people of the ranchos and the barrios have used sport for recreation, leisure, and community bonding. Until now, though, relatively few historians have focused on the sports participation of Latinos, including the numerically preponderant Mexican Americans. This volume gathers an important collection of such studies, arranged in rough chronological order, spanning the period from the late 1920s through the present. They survey and analyze sporting experiences and organizations, as well as their impact on communal and individual lives. Contributions spotlight diverse fields of athletic endeavor: baseball, football, soccer, boxing, track, and softball. Mexican Americans and Sports contributes to the emerging understanding of the value of sport to minority populations in communities throughout the United States. Those interested in sports history will benefit from the book's focus on under-studied Mexican American participation, and those interested in Mexican American history will welcome the insight into this aspect of the group's social history.

This book is an interdisciplinary cultural examination of twenty-first century boxing as a professional sport, a bodily labor, a lucrative business, a popular entertainment, and an instrument of ideology. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with Latino boxers, women boxers, and boxing insiders in Texas, it discusses boxing from the vantage point of the sundry players, who are involved with it: the labor force, promoters, handlers, ringside officials, medical professionals, media, and the audiences. The various parties have multiple stakes in the sport. For some, boxing is about physical empowerment; others are in it for the money; some deploy it for ideological purposes; yet others use it to claim their 15-minutes of fame, and frequently the various interests overlap. In this book, Benita Heiskanen makes a broader connection between boxing and the spatial organization of racialized, class-based, and gendered bodies within particular urban geographies. Journeying actual sites where the sport is organized, such as the barrio, boxing gym, and competition venues, she maps the ways in which boxing insiders negotiate a variety of conflicting agendas at local, regional, and national scales. Beyond the United States, the worker-athletes conduct their labor within global socioeconomic conditions, business networks, and legal principles. Through this sporting context, Heiskanen’s discussion discloses some complex socio-historical, cultural, and political power relations between urban margins and centers, with ramifications far beyond boxing. This book will be of interest to readers in Sport Studies, Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, Labor Studies, and American Studies.

The violent sport of boxing shaped and was shaped by notions of Mexican national identity during the twentieth century. This book reveals how boxing and boxers became sources of national pride and sparked debates on what it meant to be Mexican, masculine, and modern. The success of world-champion Mexican boxers played a key role in the rise of Los Angeles as the center of pugilistic activity in the United States. This international success made the fighters potent symbols of a Mexican culture that was cosmopolitan, nationalist, and masculine. With research in archives on both sides of the border, the author uses their life stories to trace the history and meaning of Mexican boxing.

A comprehensive history reconstructs the migration patterns of Mexican laborers, connecting them to social, economic, and political developments that have shaped the American Southwest, while describing the racism and capitalist exploitation suffered by the laborers as well as the collective forms of resistance and organizing engaged in by the laborers themselves.