Juan Manuel Vazquez
La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, September 20, 2023, p. a10
They are Amazons of Yaxunha and they are rebels. They subverted some patriarchal customs that prevented women from doing things that were considered exclusive to men. They formed a softball team in their community, about 25 minutes from Chichén Itzá, and were the first to play in the Kukulcán Park in Mérida, Yucatán. At the same time, they claimed the deepest roots of their identity, warrior Mayan women. They dress in huipils and play barefoot, because that allows them to run more lightly.
On tour in the United States, the Amazons threw the first pitch last night in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ game against the San Francisco Giants at Chase Field in Phoenix.
They arrived at the stadium with their traditional cotton huipil with blue embroidery, very encouraged by the tour and its results. Excited to represent all the women of Yucatán, said one of them while they took pictures with the Diamondbacks players and waited for the start of the Major League game.
On Monday night, the Amazonas achieved their first victory outside of Mexico, in a game against the Falcons of Phoenix Valley University, in Arizona. A historic victory that pitted the Mayan women with their light dresses to beat the Falcons 22-3.
The team was founded in 2018 in Yaxunha, a town of about 700 inhabitants that belongs to the municipality of Yaxcabá. The members are young people who are studying telebaccalaureate, but they are also housewives. One of them was the one who started this project as a way to exercise with her neighbors. On the peninsula, softball and baseball are deeply rooted sports among Yucatecans.
They had no equipment. But improvisation and ingenuity allowed them to start with some old clubs and balls. As soon as they got some money they bought a pair of bats and some gloves. Wearing the traditional dress and running barefoot was only an adaptation when they discovered that they were lighter and were also used to it, since they had done it that way since they were children.
▲ On tour in the US, the Amazonas are proud ambassadors of Yucatecan women and on Monday they defeated the Falcons of the Universidad del Valle de Phoenix. Photo courtesy of the government of Yucatán
Margarita Robleda Moguel, told in an article for The Mayan Day What were the origins of this team like? Enedina Canul Poot – she said – watched with interest the baseball that the children played in Yaxunha. Although she was not well received, she discovered that they never had balls and learned to make them with threads and so she was accepted to accompany them.
Baseball is for boys, girls stay at home, his mother and other women in the town told him. Ninia, what are you doing playing with men, your place is in your house, what, don’t you have something better to do than get in the mud? They demanded, but Enedina was persistent until she got recognition. She went from rejection to identity pride in her community.
Since then, the Amazons of Yaxunha have become a powerful symbol of the feminine in the peninsula, housewives, students and warriors who have offered abundant matches in the region, in Monterrey and now they do so in the United States.
When they played a women’s softball game for the first time at Kukulcán Park in Méri-da, the home of the Yucatán Lions, people responded out of curiosity and ended up devoted to this team of women in traditional dress.
Did softball change Yaxunah? Was it the Cultural Center? Each of the Amazons has been doing their bit to eradicate machismo in the community, as they expressed in the talk we had. Now women can go out to study, to play, to meet, she wrote in her article Robleda Moguel for The Mayan Day.
2023-09-20 12:38:07
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