iPLEIBOL!(EXHIBIT) (iPleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues)

• Author: Boehm, Eric

Baseball traces its roots to upstate New York and a man with one of the whitest names in American history: Abner Doubleday, who allegedly invented the game in a cow pasture in 1839. The modern sport, however, is a fusion of cultural influences-Caribbean, Latino, Japanese, and more. Like America as a whole, it has been both adopted and altered by successive waves of engaged immigrants.

Those influences take the mound at "iPleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues," a bilingual exhibit that opened last summer at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

As always, cultural exchange is not a one-way street. It was Cuban student visitors to the U.S. in the 1860s who brought an early version of baseball to the Caribbean. A century later, after professional baseball's color barrier was broken, Latino stars...