Gravel Pitches and Borrowed Balls: Gender and Women’s Soccer in Mexico City

Women’s soccer in Latin America has a long, if obscured, history. Since the first organized games in the early 1900s, the sport has faced myriad challenges—from legal bans to cultural taboos—some of which continue to retard the game today. In Mexico, the sport experienced a meteoric rise in popularity and success in the late 1960s and early 1970s before rapidly falling back into obscurity. Even at the height of its popularity in 1970-71—when the Mexican women’s national team had back-to-back top three finishes at successive Women’s World Championships—women’s soccer received no support from the Mexican Soccer Federation and teams were reduced to competing on gravel-filled fields, using soccer balls borrowed from sporting goods stores. Indeed, Mexican soccer institutions actively sought to suppress the women’s game. Because women’s soccer and women soccer players transgressed Mexican gender norms, the sport was seen as threatening both to individual women and to the nation as a whole. Yet despite efforts to limit opportunities for women’s soccer, the game continued to spread, albeit by the force of word of mouth and volunteer organization—a situation that lasted until the 1990s when the sport began to receive official support. “Gravel Pitches and Borrowed Balls: Gender and Women’s Soccer in Mexico” examines this labored trajectory of fútbol femenil in Mexico City, excavating a history that is little known in Mexico or outside the country. It uses interviews with former players and coaches, as well as primary and secondary source documents, to examine the ways that women combatted a host of efforts to keep them off the field. In so doing the paper highlights the obstacles that women have faced in their struggle for recognition and respect on the pitch and in Mexican society more broadly.