Latin America Roundup -- April 15

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Kevin Baxter reports on baseball scouts in the Dominican Republic. With more than $84 million a year pouring in from Major League Baseball, seemingly everyone is getting into the talent procurement act, bringing a jolt of free-market competition to an economic backwater.

U.S. scouts are no longer the only game in town. Local independents, who don’t face age-limit rules and set their own prices, are changing the economics of finding baseball prospects.

Christopher Knight, Times Art Critic, reviews the ‘Phantom Sightings’ exhibition of Chicano art, currently at LACMA.

What’s passing into history is an aesthetic that matured in the 1970s, produced by Mexican American artists with an eye toward articulation of Mexican American experience, Knight writes.

A full generation later, what has arrived on the scene is something different -- an aesthetic produced by Mexican American artists with an eye toward articulating whatever they darn well please.

Even if Special Order 40 were modified, says author and political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson in this op-ed column, ‘there’s no guarantee that Jamiel [Shaw] would still be alive, but to a community convinced that Latino-on-black racial violence is on the upswing, it’s still a matter of simple justice.’

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City