Roberto Clemente was a black Puerto Rican baseball player who joined a Major League Baseball team in the 1950s. In big-league American baseball at that time, there were very few black players and almost none who were Spanish-speaking. Because of this, Americans didn’t know how to react to Clemente. Clemente’s Puerto Rican culture was unfamiliar to most Americans. Over his career, Clemente became an all-star player who led his team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, to two World Series victories. He also helped introduce his culture to America.

In this lesson, you will explore how Americans’ reaction to Clemente changed as America itself changed.

Goals
Here are the big ideas you will learn about in this lesson:

• Personal identity is shaped by the culture that people grow up in and by their life experiences.
• When people from different cultures come to live together, their cultures change over time.

Strategies
You will be using many reading and writing strategies to complete this lesson. The key strategies that you will focus on are:

• Making inferences
• Determining important information
• Comparing and contrasting ideas

• immigrate
• segregation

Baseball star Roberto Clemente led his team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, to two World Series championships in the 1960s and 1970s. This video shows one of the highlights of Clemente’s professional baseball career, when his team won in 1971.

Click "View" on the left to watch the video.

As you saw in the video, Clemente spoke in Spanish in an interview after the Pirates had won. This is what he said:

"En el día más grande de mi vida, para los nenes la bendición mia y que mis padres me echen la bendición en Puerto Rico." ("On the most important day of my life, I give blessings to my boys and ask that my parents give me their blessing in Puerto Rico.")

Why do you think it was important to Clemente to speak in Spanish? Explain your answer in two to three sentences.

In Puerto Rico, where Clemente was born, there was no legal segregation—no laws to keep blacks and whites separate. However, when Clemente moved to the United States in the 1950s, he found that racism and segregation were part of American culture, especially in the South.

As you watch the video, think about how Clemente was treated differently from his teammates at training camp in the South and while playing baseball in Pittsburgh.

Click "View" on the left to watch the video.

What challenges did Clemente face when he joined the Pittsburgh Pirates?

During the 1960s, while Clemente played baseball in Pittsburgh, civil rights laws ended legal segregation. At the same time, more and more Latinos—people from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin American—immigrated to the U.S. They brought with them their food, language, and other parts of their culture. This had a major effect on American culture.

When two cultures mix like this, rather than being kept separate, each group’s identity changes a little. Americans began to adopt parts of Latino culture—eating foods like tacos and salsa, and using Latino styles in popular music. Latinos began to learn English and adjusted to living in the United States.

Watch this video to see how the attitude of American fans toward Clemente began to change as he led the Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series victory in 1960.

Click "View" on the left to watch the video.

When he was not playing baseball, Clemente devoted his time to charity work. In December 1972, Nicaragua, a country in Central America, suffered a massive, or very large and powerful, earthquake. Clemente paid for emergency supplies to be flown there.

On December 31, he decided to fly on one of these airplanes to make sure the supplies got to earthquake victims. But the plane was so overloaded that it crashed into the ocean. No one survived.

The next year, Clemente was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Major League Baseball (MLB) created the Roberto Clemente Award, given to players who volunteer to help other people. The U.S. government awarded Clemente the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Citizens Medal, and in 2002, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2005, he was made a member of MLB's Latino Legends Team. At the 2006 All-Star Game in Pittsburgh, the players wore yellow wristbands with Clemente's initials—R.C.

Write one to two sentences about why you think Clemente was a hero.

The videos you've watched and the text you've read showed how Roberto Clemente overcame racism, and how changes in American society made Latino culture more familiar in the 1960s and 1970s.

Now show what you have learned so far about Clemente's story by answering these three questions. Be sure to save all your answers before you go to the next screen.

In this lesson, you have seen how American culture began to change when parts of Latino culture were adopted by Americans. Now you will read more about how America continued to change during the 1970s.

Click "View" on the left to open the reading passage.

After you read, write two to four sentences describing how Latino culture was becoming more familiar to Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.

You will now check your understanding of the vocabulary words for this lesson by placing them in sentences. Click "View" on the left to begin the activity.

Before moving to the next screen, choose two words from the vocabulary list and write a new sentence for each word.

Vocabulary words: adopt, culture, identity, immigrate, segregation

Think about how U.S. culture changed during the years Clemente played baseball. In this activity, you will compare how Americans reacted to Clemente before and after Latino culture became more familiar in the 1960s and 1970s.

Click "View" on the left to begin the activity. Your teacher will review the answers with you.

Then, before moving on to the final assignment, you may want to watch this lesson's videos again or reread the passage.

Roberto Clemente

Video: 1m 21s

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Early Years in America

Video: 2m 40s

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Success

Video: 2m 16s

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Bringing Latino Culture to the U.S.

Document

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In this lesson, you have learned about the journey Roberto Clemente made from unknown immigrant to baseball star. You have also learned how someone's cultural identity can change when he or she experiences a new culture. You will now write an essay that shares what you have learned and what you think about it.

Begin by reviewing your notes. Click "review my work" above and view or print out the screen that pops up.

Final Assignment Instructions

• Click Baseball and Social Change: The Story of Roberto Clemente—Final Assignment (PDF).
• Choose one of the topics in the PDF and write an essay.
• Organize your response so that it includes at least three supporting details that you have learned from the reading passage, videos, and other materials in this lesson.
• Use at least three vocabulary words (or a form of the words) as part of your supporting details. For example, for the word jump, you could use jumps, jumped, or jumping.