Growing up, John Fraire remembers playing catch with his mother, who tore up the infield as the starting shortstop for the Gallinas softball team in Indiana Harbor.
She could hurl the ball much harder than he expected.
Fraire, a Harvard-educated author, historian and playwright, chronicled the little-known history of Mexican baseball and softball leagues in East Chicago in the early half of the 20th century. His new book "Mexicans Playing Baseball in an Indiana Steel Town: Baseball, Identity and the Old Timers of Indiana Harbor, Indiana, 1920–1942" documents the amateur baseball that was a popular pastime and source of identity for many Mexican Americans at the time.
"The Gallinas softball team and the boys hardball team, the Gallos, were the pride of the Mexican community at the time," he said. "They played teams from all over the Midwest. My mother, Gloria Guerrero Fraire, was their starting shortstop. The Gallinas and Gallos are a focal point in my book."
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He's been researching the book for years. It started out as a doctoral thesis while he was pursuing his Ph.D.
He initially started writing about the first Mexican residents to settle in East Chicago's Indiana Harbor neighborhood and then shifted focus to researching the men's and women's baseball teams that played in fields around town, squaring off against teams from Hammond, Whiting, Gary, Chicago's South Side and farther afield.
He collected oral histories, interviewing family members and people they played with and getting many surviving players on record before they passed away. He's the second generation of family historians to chronicle the history of East Chicago and the immigrants who flocked to the long-bustling steel town on the Lake Michigan lakeshore.
His mother worked with the Señoras of Yesteryear to publish the "Mexican American Harbor Lights" pictorial history book that's widely available at Lake County public libraries.
A Region native who grew up outside the Gary Works and Inland Steel mills, Fraire is also an educator, playwright and former university vice president who worked in enrollment and student affairs at colleges like Washington State University for more than four decades. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard University, where he was one of the first Chicanos to graduate. He got his doctorate at the Union Institute & University in Cincinnati.
He's also co-written several plays with his brother Gabriel Fraire, including "Who Will Dance With Pancho Villa?” and "Cesar Died Today," that have been produced in New York and across the country.
"Cesar Died Today" opens soon at the Raven Performing Arts Theater in California. Set in motion by the death of a patriarch of a Latino family on the same day the beloved activist Cesar Chavez dies, it concerns "a Mexican-American family hiding secrets from each other and the contradictory emotions that bind us together by blood."
"We are two brothers who have used literature and theater to promote the Region," John Fraire said.
They were raised playing baseball. Their father served as president of Little League in Gary. He and their mother shared stories of plays with Los Gallos and Las Gallinas. He often heard from family friends that his mother was a great shortstop who could throw harder than many of the boys, later discovering she was one of the first girls to play varsity sports at Washington High School in Indiana Harbor.
In his new book, he sought to document her playing days, when hundreds of people in Indiana Harbor followed the Gallos and Gallinas. They would bring folding chairs to Sunday games, picnic with their families, heckle the opposing team and cheer on their favorite players.
But it was more than just recreation that kept them entertained. The baseball games were an integral part of the culture that helped assimilate immigrants while preserving a sense of ethnic pride, Fraire said. It was a source of dual identity.
"In the period from 1925 to 1942, local baseball teams played a key role in helping the Mexican community of Indiana Harbor to develop both its Mexicanidad (Mexican identity) and its U.S./American identity. Rather than facing the choice of becoming either more U.S./American or less Mexican, members of this ethnic community could and did develop both identities (and many more)," he wrote in the book. "In the act of playing organized baseball, they made visible their multiple cultural allegiances and practices."
Baseball helped unify the urban Mexican-American culture of steelworkers in East Chicago, Fraire said. It was something any kid could pick up and play in any park and that brought people together, both as players and spectators cheering them on.
"While the players of Los Obreros, the Juvenils, and other Mexican baseball teams in Indiana Harbor no doubt faced discrimination, lived at the bottom of the economic ladder, and developed their Mexicanidad or Mexican pride in their baseball teams in response to that discrimination, they nevertheless played baseball as much for the enjoyment of taking part in a larger shared American culture as they did for the purpose of expressing their singularity as a separate community," Fraire wrote in the book. "They played baseball not as Mexican nationals, but rather as representatives of the Mexican community of Indiana Harbor—as fully participating Americans."
"Mexicans Playing Baseball in an Indiana Steel Town" is available at booksellers like Amazon.