Basketball Trafficking

Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams

By: Javier Wallace

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Paperback | 11 November 2025

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200 Pages

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Tito is a Black Panamanian teenager with dreams of 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 NCAA 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 not just as bodies for entertainment, but as human beings whose dreams, struggles, and lives matter.

Industry 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

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