The Laguna baseball game and its conflicted aftermath occurred in two key overlapping contexts; the Pueblo’s feast day itself and the broader national context of the United States’ federal policy of Indian assimilation. The Pueblo’s feast day at Laguna Pueblo was an event of local, religious, and regional celebration. The event attracted local Lagunas, as well as surrounding Indians, including other Pueblo peoples, Navajo, and Hopi; neighboring Spanish-speaking residents; white government officials; and neighboring white traders and customers to the Pueblo’s main village in Central New Mexico.

The diversity of the attendees reflected the long history of the region where many different groups lived together in a somewhat fluid and often changing social and political environment. Pueblo Indians were living in settled villages in Laguna when Spanish colonists arrived in the sixteenth century. In the following centuries, control of this area changed from the Spanish crown, to the newly independent Mexican government, to the U.S. government in 1846 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. With the signing of this treaty, the United States acquired the northern third of Mexico and its inhabitants, which included the Puebloan people of Laguna. Under the treaty’s stipulations, Laguna came under the jurisdiction of the U.S. federal government, and Laguna’s formerly Mexican neighbors became American citizens. The blending of peoples and cultures that occurred in Laguna proved particularly troublesome for the United States in enforcing its Indian policies in the early twentieth century.

In 1920, the cultural traditions and multiple racial identities developed over Laguna’s long and diverse past persisted, even as the area’s residents took part in another cultural tradition: the great American pastime of baseball. The game on September 19 of that year took place at a time when U.S. federal Indian policy focused on assimilating Indian peoples to dominant white society norms, a process that relied on Indians’ status as “government wards.” The ward status specifically of Pueblo Indians had been recently reasserted in the 1913 U.S. Supreme Court Sandoval decision. Government agents, like the author of several documents in this unit, Leo Crane, were charged with administering federal policy. Agents’ tasks involved a difficult balancing act as it was their responsibility to both facilitate Indian assimilation and also protect Indian “wards” from an outside society deemed predatory. Crane, then, sought to establish the racial identity of individuals who lived in an extremely diverse racial environment, one where racial identity was hardly clear-cut.

The documents in this unit show the difficulty of establishing a racial identity for some in the Laguna community, as well as the power that individuals stood to gain or lose depending on the racial identities that they determined for themselves and others, an indication that race as a social construction had a real material effect on people’s everyday lives.