ABOUT THIS BOOK

Tito is a Black Panamanian teenager whose hoop dreams include playing in the NBA. When a private high school in Texas recruits him under the guise of an athletic scholarship, he believes he’s one step closer. Instead, he becomes entangled in a system that exploits young Black athletes through the F-1 student visa program. In Basketball Trafficking, Javier Wallace follows Tito’s journey from international tournaments and high school to his near deportation, exposing the underbelly of the basketball pipeline that stretches across borders. Wallace situates Tito’s experience within a broader framework of anti-Blackness, labor exploitation, and the unchecked power of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and US immigration system. Tito’s story is more than a sports story—it is an urgent account of the policing and manipulation of Black male athletic labor for institutional profit. Prompting readers to consider how the global athletic industrial complex extracts and discards Black labor, Wallace demands that readers see young Black athletes like Tito not just as bodies for entertainment but as human beings whose dreams, struggles, and lives matter.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Javier Wallace is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program of Education at Duke University.

REVIEWS

“Basketball Trafficking provides an intimate look at the complex relationship between basketball players, coaches, parents, and mentors in the highs and lows of creating pipelines of opportunities for young Black men in Panama seeking to pursue their hoop dreams in the United States. It also powerfully sounds the alarm on the need to protect young international student athletes who due to anti-Black citizenship and immigration policies are too often viewed as disposable players rather than young people vulnerable to victimization and abuse.”
-- Kaysha Corinealdi, author of Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century

“With writing that is illuminating and incisive, Javier Wallace tells the story of the ‘Athletic Industrial Complex’ through the lens of a young Panamanian man, who only dreamed of a better future. Basketball Trafficking, is a major contribution to Global Black Studies and scholarship on race and sports.”
-- Mark Anthony Neal, author of Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinity

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chombo

Los Becados

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.