El Deporte Rey pero sin Reinas: Government Industrial Incentives and the Dominican Baseball Industry

• In Event: Gender, Modernization, and the State in 20th Century Hispaniola

Abstract

The founding of the Cibao Summer League in 1975 laid the foundation for the baseball industry as it exists in the Dominican Republic today. By creating a summer league as an alternative to the U.S. Big Leagues, Dominicans asserted their ownership over professional baseball and promoted an industry that benefitted Dominicans socially as well as economically. The Cibao Summer League offered veteran ballplayers the opportunity to extend their careers by training as coaches, managers, trainers, and administrators. In addition to this human development, the Cibao League expanded employment for the food vendors, promoters, sportswriters, and drivers whose livelihood centered on ball games and stadiums. The Government headed by President Joaquín Balaguer supported the Cibao League through tax concessions, discounts on electricity, and construction of stadiums. This support, which mirrored the incentives provided to industries under the 1968 Industrial Incentives Law, allowed officials to apply widely accepted narratives of the social benefits of sport to their doctrine of desarrollismo, thereby promoting their development program as good for Dominican society.

The Cibao Summer League was a victory for Dominican democracy for its combination of social and economic concerns. Yet even while baseball-centered development promoted the human value of Dominican men, it confined women to stereotypical roles as sacrificing mothers, hypersexualized cheerleaders and groupies, or demure maids. My paper will examine these confines and their implications for the place of women in the Dominican nation, particularly as baseball continues to expand and merge with tourism as the nation’s most prominent industries.

Author

• April R Yoder, University of New Haven