Luces de Buffalo de Bisons honors Latino communities

As a teenager, she participated in the Big League World Series of softball. In 2017, she was a member of the Puerto Rico Junior National Team and her college career took her from the mound at Coastal Carolina to pitching for the University at Buffalo.

At 25 years old, all that time on the diamond this weekend boils down to, well, perhaps the biggest local win of his career.

Marcano now works as a graphic designer for the Buffalo Bisons. On Sunday – in what local baseball historian Brian Frank describes as one of the few times this has happened since the Bisons were founded in 1877 – the club will take the field again under a different name.

The team would become the “Luces of Buffalo,” wearing caps and uniforms featuring Marcano’s striking design.

Before that, to Frank’s knowledge, the only times the Bisons used another name were in their occasional, light-hearted incarnations as Buffalo Wings; during their pandemic stay in Trenton, when the Toronto Blue Jays played at Sahlen Field; and sporadically in 1901, when Jim Franklin, then the team’s owner, wanted the club to be known as the “Pan-Ams” during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

The backdrop is very different for “Luces de Buffalo” – translated from Spanish as “Lights of Buffalo”. The name is intended to evoke a deep local heritage, with special meaning to Western New York’s Latino communities.

“What it means to me is just a lot of pride in who we are as a community and who I am as a person,” said Cas Rodriguez, president of the Hispanic Heritage Council of WNY and lover of baseball whose parents were born. in Puerto Rico – settled here when Rodriguez’s father took a job at a steel mill.

The idea for “Luces” was born from the “Copa de la Diversion” of minor league baseball – in English, essentially, the “Fun Cup”. This program aims to celebrate and strengthen the bonds between local clubs and their Latino players and fans.

A big part of the initiative involves renaming local teams for a few home games — whether it’s “Los Perros Calientes d’Akron” (in English, the Hot Dogs) or, say, the “Piñata » from Erie, Pennsylvania.

Brad Bisbing, the Bisons’ assistant general manager who was involved in the planning, said conversations about the ‘Copa’ started before the pandemic in Buffalo, then picked up again once the world started opening up again.

Various concepts were discussed by an informal committee made up of team leaders and community advisors. Rodriguez was a key player, Bisbing said, as was retired University at Buffalo adviser Carlos Tejada – a 28-year season ticket holder who was the 2005 Bisons fan of the year, having attended hundreds of Bisons games with his daughters, Alicia and Gabby.

Bisbing remembers how Gabby — a savvy baseball fan, who had read about the Copa idea — would occasionally stop Bisons administrators at the ballpark in the late 2010s, asking how the plans for it all were going.

His father, the son of Colombian immigrants, grew up in Southern California, where he could walk through his door and see the “Hollywood” sign that former Buffalo architect Sidney Woodruff helped create.

“Baseball was my sanctuary,” Tejada recalled. A Dodgers fan, he spent many childhood days with his friends at Dodger Stadium. Years later, when Tejada and his family moved to Buffalo, he and his daughters became regulars for the Bisons.

Tejada and Rodriguez played a significant role in the team’s decision to adopt a “Copa” name that wasn’t just playful, but had some lasting power. For months, in discussions with Bison representatives, they considered numerous themes, some of which concerned, for example, winter weather, before finally settling on “Luces”.

One of the primary motivations for the “Buffalo Lights” was the rise of electric power in the region, where the genius of Nikola Tesla helped bring an entirely new type of light to Buffalo. The committee talked about the downtown electric tower, inspired in part by a spectacular structure from the 1901 Pan-American Exposition.

That 2024 was also the year of the total solar eclipse over the city – as well as a year with local opportunities to view the Northern Lights – was a coincidence, but one that came together nicely.

The entire project was bolstered by a baseball anniversary of special significance, in Buffalo: 70 years ago this spring, the late Roberto Clemente – born in Puerto Rico and revered for both his baseball skills and as a humanitarian – had his first professional. hit the American continent, singing for Montreal against the Bisons at the old Offermann Stadium.

All of this pointed to the possibility of doing something memorable, and that’s where Marcano comes in.

The “Luces” colors, the committee decided, would be teal — a nod to Lake Erie, but a change from the more traditional and familiar Buffalo royal blue — as well as yellow, to highlight the light pure.

Marcano said she studied those things and then talked to her father a lot about cultural traditions. She thought about what she had learned during her many visits to Puerto Rico, particularly about the Taino, an indigenous people whose influence spread throughout the Caribbean and whose symbols evoke deep and enduring themes .

For the jerseys, Marcano constructed the Buffalo skyline, focusing on the Electric Tower, originally illuminated in 1912 by W. D’Arcy Ryan, an international lighting pioneer. But her particular triumph was the cap, where she paired a Taino vision of the sun with lightning bolts inspired by the Buffalo city seal.

For me, this instantly brings me to an experience that I hope to share with many Western New Yorkers, from all eras: my childhood introduction to professional sports in Buffalo, as a child of preschool age, a long time ago, at a Bisons game – where I vividly remember the scent of cut grass and first glimpse of the old pile of stones in that vast green yard.

Thanks in large part to this fundamental connection, I’m always on the lookout for great Buffalo baseball caps, whether they’re inspired by Buffalo’s Great League Federal League team of the mid-1910s, or a cap from the Bisons influenced by the 1950s, with the old English “B”.

I’ll tell you what: this Luces cap is one of my favorites, maybe because it’s so unique, but so Buffalo.

“It’s really personal for me,” said Marcano, who wore Clemente’s No. 21 when she played for the Puerto Rico junior national team. “I live and breathe this heritage.”

The Bisons will play under the Luces name two more times, July 25 and September 6, following Sunday’s 1:05 p.m. start against St. Paul. Yet Sunday’s game, the afternoon before Memorial Day, will have special resonance for Rodriguez.

It will include an honor guard from an American Legion post named in honor of his older brother, Gabe, who committed suicide after returning from combat duty in Vietnam. Rodriguez spent years recounting memories of his brother — who once won a pony at a Bisons game — to highlight the emotional struggles of many veterans returning from war.

As for Sunday’s first pitch, the Bisons initially asked Rodriguez and Tejada to throw it together, as a thank you for all their time. Rodriguez thought about it and decided to wait: He will do the honors on Sept. 6, which will be Hispanic Heritage Night at the ballpark and the last of Luces’ appearances.

In addition, Rodriguez said, he withdrew to make way for Gabby Tejada, who so early showed interest in the “Copa” in Buffalo. Gabby will stand on the field with her sister while preparing to throw the ball to her father, who will set up behind home plate in a moment this little kid at Dodgers Stadium could never have imagined.

“It will be my most precious baseball memory,” guarantees Tejada, about a first pitch that scored for our “Luces, from Buffalo”.