Rethinking Baseball in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

This paper examines how the sport of baseball mediates the relationship between the United States and Dominican Republic. In part based on Walter Mignolo’s idea of “decolonial thinking,” which undoes the power structures of knowledge in our Western-centric world, the aim of this paper is to examine baseball through this decolonial lens of delinking the world from colonial matrices of power (2009). This colonial matrix of power is institutionalized in our inherent biases, where the United States dictates to Latin America what the United States think is best for them, not taking into account what the country and its people themselves have to say. While it is virtually impossible to fully undo our deeply embedded biases, as colonialities of power invade all aspects of our epistemology and language, it is important to understand this fundamental truth in order to challenge our way of knowing and thinking. [From Introduction]