Abstract
Hugo Ceron-Anaya has written one of the few scholarly monographs to take golf seriously, examining elite Mexican golfer’s practices of privilege. Adopting the strategy of “studying up,” the author takes the reader on a journey into Mexico’s expanding elite golf culture to explore the different and interrelated avenues of inequality. Golf is a global sport primarily played by white male power elites, yet it tends to be an understudied terrain in the field of leisure studies. Although golf has strong ties to the expansion of capitalism and links with multiple forms of imperialism, a few scholars have turned a critical eye to understand how inequalities are reproduced “on the green.” Ceron-Anaya excels at weaving rich narratives to illuminate the various ways Mexico’s ruling class reifies race, class, and gender relations in their daily lives. His work contributes to a growing body of literature reexamining traditional understandings of race in Mexico by offering a “shift in focus of the dispute from the meaning and accuracy of the term to its effects on everyday life, by examining the racialization of ordinary relations and the influence of the class system on this process” (p. 15). By using golf as a lens to examine the multiple layers that constitute power relations among Mexico’s ruling class, Ceron-Anaya presents a complex and complicated narrative of privilege.
Privilege at Play centers its focus on Mexico’s power elites, illustrating how structures of privilege become embedded in everyday practices as well as the arrangement of space. Ceron-Anaya uses golf as a case study to examine the intersections of class, race, and gender to showcase how powerful groups of individuals produce dynamics of domination and subordination. Adopting an intersectional approach to studying the sport, he demonstrates the multilayered condition of power, displaying how the golf course is a site shaped by class, race, and gender relations. Since golf is an exclusive and elite sport primarily played by wealthy groups of people, it creates a dense site to analyze the interwoven layers of upper-class tastes, racialized narratives, and unequal gender dynamics across varied spatial and social contexts in Mexico. Findings are based on ethnographic research conducted in exclusive golf clubs as well as in-depth interviews with club members and lower-class employees, in particular, caddies. Wealthy female golfers are far less common, but a chapter is devoted to understanding their experiences. Women golfers occupied a higher class position and white(r) racial identity than most lower-class men and women, however, the class-based hegemonic masculinity prevailing in golf produced a myriad of mechanisms relegating them to a lower status. Choosing to focus on the upper-class club members’ privileged lives, the book offers detailed data and empirical analyses from an often-overlooked perspective by focusing on power elites.
Ceron-Anaya successfully draws out rich narratives to show the ways in which hierarchies in Mexico are reinforced and produced in the game of golf. Throughout the book, he meticulously highlights how space and spatial dynamics are highly productive ways to display and unearth racialized and gendered hierarchies. It provides a much needed and appreciated analysis of the development of golf in Mexico, including an overview of the history of golf to show how contemporary relations of privilege stem from long-term power relations. By focusing on an understudied terrain in the field of leisure, Ceron-Anaya capitalizes on the stories of wealthy Mexican elites to underscore how inequalities are maintained and created by structures of power. This book offers new insight into critical inquiries of Mexican sport culture and eloquently details the intersections of leisure, affluence, racial hierarchies and gender inequalities in modern Mexico City. Ceron-Anaya’s book is a must-read for scholars interested in the complexities and intersections of race, gender, class, and space in sports. This is certain to be a generative study of golf and a great addition to the body of literature taking sports seriously in the academy. Privilege at Play is a realistic and successful stab at conducting intersectional research without losing the reader’s attention or academic rigor.