In case you do not know it, Angélica Lazoya, part of the personnel of the Mission Area Federal Credit celebrated her birthday July 7. A little late to dedicate a Happy Birthday, but it is never late to remember someone so special.

Mother of the wonderful months-old baby, Christian, Angelica makes feel the customers at credit union, like at home.

Angélica Lazoya

The personnel of El Reportero wishes her a lots of congratulations and to celebrate many more birthdays to come.

­by Elisabeth Pinio

Carmen Milagros

A San Francisco native, singer Carmen Milagro will be touring the Bay Area through September for several performances. Be sure to catch at least one!

Milagro will perform August 11, from 12:45 to 2 p.m. at the 1st Annual Latin Music Festival, at Jack London Square in Oakland.

Additional shows include: August 11 at Little Fox Theatre in Redwood City, at 7 p.m., opening for La Ventana for $16 presale ticket, call (415) 215-2433; August 16 at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley, at 8 p.m., admission $10 ($8 for students); August 17 at San Mateo County Fair, International Stage, from 4 to 5 p.m. Visit www.sanmateocountyfair.com for more information.

For additional information and tour dates, visit www.milagromusic.com/home.html.

Hunters Point Shipyard homeowners workshop Lennar/BVHP and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency will be hosting a community workshop to inform residents of exciting new homeownership opportunities at the Hunters Point Shipyard. Those possessing a SFRA Residential Certificate of Preference will have priority in the sale of these new homes. The workshop will feature a presentation on market rates and limited equity. Refreshments will be provided.

The workshop will take place Wednesday, August 15 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., at Lennar Trailers in Hunters Point Shipyard. To RSVP, call the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Site Office at (415) 822-4847, extension 201. For more information, visit www.sfraaffordablehousing.org.

San Francisco City College Board of Trustees to meet

The San Francisco Community College District Board of Trustees will hold its monthly meetings August 9 and 23. Its study session will be held Thursday, August 9 at 4 p.m. in the Auditorium at the College’s 33 Gough Street facility. The Board’s action meeting will take place Thursday, August 23 at 6 p.m. These meetings are both open to the public.

For meeting agendas and information on the Board of Trustees, visit www.ccsf.edu.

San Francisco Symphony to perform free concert at Yerba Buena Gardens

The San Francisco Symphony ­and Music Director Michael tilson Thomas will perform a free outdoor concert at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. Sponsored by the PG&E Corporation, the free concert is an annual tradition and part of SFS’ campaign to make music accessible to the community.

The public is welcome to lunch and listen in the serene beauty of the park. The program includes music by Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, and Tchaikovsky.

The free concert will take place Friday, August 24 at noon. For the Love of Dance at the Metronome The Metronome Dance Center is proud to present an exciting night of dance, “For the Love of Dance.” The event will feature a cast of Metronome students performing in a variety of styles, including latin, swing, salsa, Argentina tango, modern, tap, and much more.

“For the Love of Dance” will take place August 24 and 25 at 8 p.m., at Cowell Theater, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now, $30 advance pricing, $35 day of show. Youth, senior, and group discounts are available. For more information, call 415-252-9000.

­by Robert Heuer

Robert Heuer

Latinos were not part of the conversation last April when baseball honored the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league debut. But a new book shows Latin America played an indispensable role in this black man’s triumph over prejudice.

In “Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line,” Adrian Burgos Jr. shows why it’s wrong to treat integration as solely an interplay between people white and black. Same goes for the conventional wisdom that baseball suddenly changed in 1947 when this grandson of a Georgia sharecropper took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In fact, a collaboration of whites, blacks and Latinos fostered integration over a long period of time before and after 1947. The seeds for change were planted in the latter 19th century as a transnational circuit took shape linking New York, San Francisco and Chicago with Havana, San Juan and Santo Domingo.

Whites and blacks played against each other in Latin America for the many decades when such exchanges were prohibited on U.S. soil. Two generations of Spanish-speaking major leaguers “tested the limits of racial tolerance” during the 40-year pre-Robinson era. Numerous black and Latino “integration pioneers” endured racist abuse for many years before the battle for equality was finally won.

These topics have been alluded to before, but never as the theme of a book. Burgos — a U.S. Latino History professor at the University of Illinois — is the first baseball historian to tell the integration story in its truly multicultural dimension.

This New York-born Puerto Rican became interested in writing a doctoral dissertation on the subject about 15 years ago when he was a University of Michigan graduate student.

What convinced him was a conversation with a T-shirt vendor at the Society of American Baseball Researchers’ (SABR) first Negro League Conference in 1995. SABR members are hardcore fans with a serious analytical bent. After listening to a number of presentations, Burgos wandered into the market area.

Looking over a T-shirt with logos of Negro League teams, he asked why the New York Cubans were missing. The African-American vendor said the team wasn’t significant.

The Cubans won the 1947 Negro League World Series. And, as Burgos had begun to discover, it was the first team to maximize talents of Latinos whose skin color barred them from the majors.

“The truth is the exact opposite of what this vendor was saying,” Burgos recalls. “The New York Cubans are, in fact, one of the most important Negro League teams. I began to wonder about the criteria by which we remember the Negro Leagues.”

His inquiry unfolded as the Baseball Hall of Fame also researched Negro Leagues. Cooperstown museum offi cials appointed Burgos to a committee set up to determine whether this new information would prove that previously overlooked individuals should qualify for a plaque among the game’s immortals. In 2006, this committee considered a list of 39 people and voted in favor of 17.

Among the inductees were early 20th century Cubans José de la Caridad Méndez and Cristóbal Torriente, as well as Alex Pompez who had been owner of the New York Cubans.

Burgos failed to persuade fellow committee members to induct Orestes “Minnie” Minoso. They said their charge was to consider performance in the Negro Leagues. Minoso’s career began in the Negro Leagues, but his greatest success came in the major leagues.

A two-time All-Star during three Negro League seasons, Minoso became the fi rst “Latin Negro” major leaguer when joining the Cleveland Indians in 1949. The slow pace of integration left him languishing in the minors. After almost winning the 1951 Rookie of the Year award, Minoso became a seven-time All-Star and one of the most popular players in Chicago White Sox history.

Burgos was incredulous this spring to read After Jackie — a new book on integration — that fails to recognize the Cuba-born Minoso as a Chicago team’s first “black” major leaguer. Burgos’ advocacy for the elderly Minoso continues with an upcoming article for a White Sox publication. The title will be “Pioneering Latino Still Awaits Call to Cooperstown.”

A misunderstanding of Minoso’s historical importance is one of myriad examples Burgos finds showing how the baseball media treat Latinos as “perpetual foreigners” with “only a recent history in the game.”Playing America’s Game provides an authoritative account of baseball’s failure to come to terms with the roots of its multicultural future.

You don’t have to read 44 pages of footnotes to know Burgos is onto something. In June, the webzine Black Athlete Sports Network named Playing America’s Game Book of the Month. San Diego Padre vice president Dave Winfield recently invited Burgos to speak at a luncheon highlighting the Latino/African American Negro League connection. Winfield, a Hall of Famer and author of a newly published baseball critique Dropping the Ball, had underlined many passages of Burgos’ book. Burgos recalls: “He told me the book illuminated a history of common struggles that are rarely discussed.”

(Robert Heuer, of Evanston, Ill., has written about baseball’s Latinos for Hispanic Link News Service since 1983. Reach him at rjheuer@comcast.net.) © 2007

by John Flórez

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – Some years ago through a newspaper ad, I found a roofing contractor to put a tar roof on an addition to my home. It was a sweltering July day. When I arrived from work, I found the roofing crew, all Mexicans, spreading the hot tar on the flat roof.Seeing them toil in the blazing sun, I climbed the ladder to offer them some cold drinks, and we struck up a conversation. I asked the crew leader how long he had been doing this kind of work. For ten years, he said.

“Ten years? Why don’t you start your own roofing company?”

He replied without hesitation, “Oh no, then I would have to compete with the owner. He gave me this job.”

That’s true loyalty, and an example of the values of a different culture. In previous eras of life in the United States, such loyalty was a value widely upheld.Newcomers help us renew some values we let slip away. In earlier times, we cherished loyalty in relationships, work, neighborhoods — even brand loyalty. No matter where the big market was located, folks shopped at the neighborhood store. In those days, a handshake was all that was needed.

We had neighbors who came from different cultures. We managed not only to accommodate them, but to allow their traditions to enrich our lives.Successful societies such as ours are able to incorporate customs, artifacts and foods from other cultures that please and benefit us while rejecting those we find less enjoyable or detrimental to our way of life. Now IKEA is promoting Swedish meatballs. Many of us will garnish them with salsa instead of ketchup.Besides loyalty, the value so many Mexicans treasure is family. In the United States, oftentimes when we meet people, the first thing we ask is, “What do you do?”

Cultures define what is valued. In the USA, knowing what a person does for a living somehow is important. It seems to be so not only to define who we are, but for our own sense of personal worth.

In the Mexican culture that I know, you aren’t defined by what you do. Rather, the moral person is defined by his or her family and community relationships.

Being somebody is not valued; belonging to something greater than yourself is. While working with the U.S. Department of Labor, I once visited an orange-packing plant in Florida. When I saw all the white men working on permanent jobs running machines and Mexican migrant men and women were hand-packing orange crates, I asked the owner why the Mexicans were not on the steady jobs.

His reply said it all, “We offer the Mexican workers those jobs. It would mean staying here all year, and that would break up the family that has to move on to pick the crops in other states.”

Being part of family can be more important than being somebody.

The United States has prospered because it has been able to take what fi ts into our way of life and reject what does not. To those who fret about losing our way of life because other cultures dilute ours, fear not. History has shown we grow stronger and better.

(John Flórez, the founder of several Hispanic civil rights organizations writes a weekly column for The Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City. E-mail him at jdfl orez@comcast.net.)