louis castro applies for U.S. citizenship

Here’s an application for U.S. citizenship by Louis Castro, the longtime minor league infielder who in 1902 became the first native of a Latin American country to play major league baseball since Esteban Bellán.  It shows “Louis Michael Castro” (rather than “Luis Manuel Castro” as we get from other sources), “Professional Ball Player,” age 41, born November 25, 1876 in Medellín, “U.S. of Colombia So. America.”  Here he states that he arrived in New York from Colombia on April 15, 1880, rather than October 14, 1885.

Although the document isn’t dated, from the age given for Castro it would have been in 1917 or 1918.  The document is dated July 10, 1917.  Just four years later, in 1922, he applied for a U.S. passport as a native-born citizen, claiming to have been born in New York, and leaving questions about naturalization blank.  A guess would be that his application for citizenship had been turned down, though I have no idea why that would have happened.