LA Times Reports Guatemalan Women In Los Angeles Don’t Mind Gettin’ Dirty On The Soccer Field

We love soccer on this here site. It’s our lingua franca connecting us to the rest of the world. But we’re dudes. And we’re included in soccer discourse whether we approve it or not. But what about women who want to be included? Outside of America, playing sports is as distant an option for women as voting. In Iran, women aren’t allowed to enter soccer stadiums alongside their husbands, but instead peer into the world’s pastime through cracks in walls and steel bars. In Latin America, there is a parallel. But for a few Guatemalan women that have emigrated to the United States from their motherland, soccer provides a new sense of freedom. Because in the States, Mia Hamm and the chick who showed her sports bra during the women’s World Cup Brandi Chastain are household names as big as Landon Donovan and Brian Ching. From The Los Angeles Times:

On any given weekend, scores of immigrants line the hills of the bowl-shaped field where Celestina and her sisters play in MacArthur Park. Vendors with strollers full of Gatorade and Cheetos compete for territory closest to the field, bickering in Spanish. Men stand in clusters on the sidelines, following the action. Mothers dressed in heels and glitter-dusted jeans watch with babies hoisted on their hips. Boys and girls roam nearby, passing soccer balls.
Daniel Morales started the league, Youth Empowerment Through Scholastic Sports Service, for low-income, mostly immigrant children seven years ago. It has grown to about 1,200 players, including a dozen women’s teams he refers to as “the ladies.”
Annual dues are about $12. Games are usually on Saturdays, with optional practices during the week, and a season that effectively runs all year. Uniformed referees have whistles and carry penalty cards in their pockets, but in some ways the league is still informal.
The medic is an elderly Mexican cowboy who watches games from a folding chair on the sidelines. At the end of the winter and summer seasons, everyone receives a trophy.

Ah, yes. McCarthur Park. It’s always been about elotes con chile, limon, mantequilla y queso, and now women’s soccer. And don’t think that these gals aren’t scared to fle their muscle. Because when you’re in the heart of Los Angeles, there’s really no other way, right?

“Don’t be afraid of the big ones,” said the 40-year-old mother of two, shoulders thrust back, head as high as she could manage on a 5-foot frame.
Her sisters, Francisca, 34, and Elda, 30, walked with her.
“Be like the men — aggressive,” Elda called out. During the week, the sisters spend their days like scores of other illegal immigrant women in Los Angeles: Wedged behind Singer sewing machines, they feed pants and shirts under the needle until their shoulders grow stiff.
But on the weekends they play a game that was off-limits to them in Guatemala. It is on the soccer fields that the Lopez sisters feel like American women.

Ku-fucking-dos, ladies.

Guatemalan women kick aside constraints in the U.S. [LA Times]
Image [LA Times]