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Basketball Trafficking

Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams

Book

Pages: 200

Illustrations: 9 illustrations

Published: November 2025

Author: Javier Wallace

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.

Praise

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

"[A] shocking and revelatory journey into what is called America’s athletic industrial complex. . . . Wallace’s study aims to counter the dominant narrative associated with Black Panamanian youths like Tito, whose labour—and humanity—has for too long been exploited and undervalued." - Gavin O'Toole, Latin American Review of Books

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Information

Author/Editor Bios

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

Table Of Contents

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Introduction  1
1. Centrobasket and English: The Importance of English in US Basketball Recruitment  23
2. Chombo: Language, Race, and Black (In)visibility in Panama  47
3. Los Becados: The Dangers of Racialized Colonial Discourse  71
4. Unregulated Relationships: The Use and Abuse of the F-1 Student Visa in US High School Basketball  91
5. Ineligible: New Rules, New Relationships  117
6. Illegal Hoop Dreams: The Il/legibility of the Il/legality of Being a Noncitizen Black Male Basketball Trafficking Victim  133
Conclusion  161
Appendix: Implications and Recommendations  169
References  175
Index 187

Rights

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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