In a League of Her Own

Undeterred, when her school announced it was forming a coed baseball team, Rosalina brought home another paper for her dad to sign, even though she had never picked up a bat, never known anyone who played baseball. Salvadorans, as her father notes, are not infielders or outfielders or cleanup hitters. "We play soccer," he says. "Baseball is not in our blood."

But determination is. In his Petworth living room, the couches slipcovered in green, the walls a deep yellow and the floor tiled a glossy moss, he speaks in Spanish about his youngest child. Rosalina listens, wide-eyed and dwarfed, like Lily Tomlin in an old comedy skit, in the oversize chair next to him.

"I couldn't talk her out of being interested in this sport," he says, still in the boots and sweatshirt he wore to work 14 hours ago, at 6 a.m. "What was I going to do?"

So he signed.

The children go to William B. Powell Elementary School, at 14th and Upshur NW, in the changing Petworth neighborhood. Ninety percent of the school's families make $10,000 to $20,000 less than Washington's $45,000 median household income. Eighty percent speak a language other than English at home. Their playground is asphalt, and many of the students' elbows sport bright red gashes and scars from falls taken at recess.

In the summer of 2003, Rosalina's principal, Lucia Vega, arrived from a school in San Jose and was horrified by the graffiti shellacking Powell's swing sets and slide. She was furious with the gang members who hung out on the hill across the street, just above the grassy baseball field that doubles as a neighborhood dog park, waiting for nightfall.

Vega organized a cleanup of the playground and locked its gate at night, and then was "shocked," she says, to discover that "some of our children did not know how to bounce a ball and how to catch it." So she got Field of Dreams, the organization sponsoring Powell's baseball team, to donate 100 red kickballs and 50 jump-ropes last year. Within weeks, nearly every ball and rope had disappeared, secreted home by children bewitched by the exotic equipment.

Rosalina lives a few blocks from school, in a brick rowhouse she shares with her mom, dad, grandmother, grandfather, three older siblings and a blue-and-yellow parrot named Saroya who drinks coffee and snores when she sleeps. Two German shepherds, Rocky and Chacal, guard the front and side yards.

Neither of her older brothers plays sports: The oldest, Ruben, is 16 and looks constantly alert and thoughtful. If he's near the ballfield when practice ends, he swings by to escort Rosalina home. (She's never allowed to walk home alone.) He carries a heavy chemistry text under his arm and talks about the Frederick Douglass memoir he is reading for school.

"He studies all the time," their father says. "He doesn't want to be like me, dirty, going to work at 6 a.m. until 4 in the afternoon. He wants to become a lawyer, or a teacher."

The second-oldest, Luis, is 14 and more amenable to working with their dad -- because it earns him money to buy video games, the only games he plays.

Rosalina shares a room with her sister, Graciela, a seventh-grader who plays basketball and dreams of becoming an artist. On their door hangs a sign: "GIRLS ROOM. NO BOYS/CHICOS ALLOWED. ONLY FATHER ALLOWED."