FIFA hadn’t noticed them yet, but they were already there. They dominated the ball with a skill that only a woman with the strength of her youth and the drive of adversity can have. Or they would save at the goal, jumping over the height of their European opponents, with the shudder in their bodies injected by the 110,000 souls that packed the Azteca Stadium to see them play. It was 1971, in one of the largest cities in the world, in its most emblematic soccer venue. The final of the second Women’s World Cup in history was being played, and they, the Mexican players, were there. Despite the fact that the World Cup match was not —and is not— officially recognized by the highest football body, the story they wrote marked a before and after in their country.
Few remember it and another handful know what happened. A young team of Mexican players played in the women’s world championships in Italy, in 1970, and in Mexico, in 1971. In the first tournament they reached third place; in the second, they were runners-up to the Danish team with a score of 3-0 in an Azteca Stadium that, on the day of the final, on September 5, broke its attendance record to see a game played exclusively by women. The Jalisco Stadium, in Guadalajara, was the other venue for that World Cup. Those were not easy years for anyone: the echo of the 1968 student massacre in Tlatelolco was still heard, and the call hawkthat other massacre of students perpetrated by paramilitaries called hawks. The Mexican government did everything to wash its face and hands, and dedicated enormous efforts to show the world that it was a country that was debuting in modernity and development.
The country had also hosted the 1968 Olympic Games —in the midst of a silenced scandal because they were not canceled despite the student tragedy— and then, in June 1970, hosted the FIFA World Cup, in which the The whole world was moved to see players like Pelé, then crowned the greatest figure in world football.
The boil for sport expanded. Mexicans were attentive and enthusiastic that their country was the epicenter of international competitions that were as important as they were symbolic. This push served as fuel for the International and European Federation of Women’s Soccer, a private body, outside and unrelated to FIFA —which did not recognize women’s sport as a professional activity— agreed to bring together, in 1970 and 1971, the first two international matches between women’s soccer teams.
The forgotten pioneers of Mexican soccer
Alicia Vargas was baptized by the Italian press as The Pele. A reporter who had witnessed the matches of the Mexican team in the seventies referred to her that way in one of his articles, after admiring the technique, speed and ability to score goals from the Mexican. Alicia Vargas, La Pele, she was the top scorer in that first World Cup match, with five goals, and is currently recognized as the third best soccer player of the 20th century in the Confederation of North American, Central American and Caribbean Soccer (CONCACAF).
She was born in Ciudad Manuel Doblado, in the State of Guanajuato, and participated in both the women’s world championships when she was 16 and 17 years old, since she and her family had moved to Mexico City. “When we arrived in Italy and saw the physical constitution of the opponents, we were scared, but we also said: ‘It doesn’t matter, we’re not going to carry them, we’re going to play,'” she recalls in an interview with this newspaper. He also remembers how, without support or resources, they made their debut in Europe carrying an improvised flag that a priest helped them create by cutting out an Aztec shield and gluing it to an Italian flag, so they could go out into the field and sing their national anthem. “We all shared the same ideology of doing everything we could, giving it our all,” she recalls.
Unlike Vargas, who had played with her brothers since she was little, Elvira Aracén had no idea she would end up on a women’s soccer team. She was an athlete, she ran and jumped, she practiced various disciplines. She was born in Chontla, in the State of Veracruz. She already had training in education and fitness, and she thought that soccer was only for men. She served as a center forward and was a goalscorer during her preparations prior to the 1970 World Cup. She initially joined as a physical trainer, was also a goalkeeper and fought for the starting position for the team that would go to Italy: “I thought then: if you’re already here, You have to be good,” she says.
Aracén played only a few minutes in that first World Cup, but when he returned, he set out to win a place in the new team that would play the following tournament, now at home. The road was full of challenges. “My family always supported me, but there was very strong criticism. What I remember most was that they yelled at us, and that I considered the most aggressive, which was “fugitives from the metate”; They told us to go to the kitchen, to wash the dishes, they told us to leave that space, ”he recalls. “I really think if we hadn’t been young and rebellious, we wouldn’t have put up with it.”
Lourdes de la Rosa was a passionate admirer of that women’s team that she saw play on television in the seventies. She lived in a neighborhood with many boys and girls in Mexico City, and from a very young age she masterfully dominated the ball with both feet. At the age of 15 she began to play in women’s teams, soccer has always been her greatest passion. She remembers that while she was watching the 1968 Olympic Games on television, she told her mother that she would be important to the sport of her country, just like those who appeared on the screen. Her father was her fan bigger, and her mom refused that she wanted to play a sport she didn’t consider suitable for women.
When he found out that the women’s team was returning from a tour of South America to try out more players who would join the 1971 World Cup, he jumped in without thinking. From a selection that brought together some 300 women, only a dozen finished, from which she was selected to pass the last tests. De la Rosa still remembers that previous week, of taking public transport, metro and bus, and arriving at the place of the concentrations. She doesn’t forget how on the last day of testing, a Sunday night, she came home late. She took a minibus and inside, on the radio, the names of the players selected for the new team that would play in the World Cup in a matter of days began to be heard.
Lulú de la Rosa, as her friends and family call her, fondly relives that journey: “The moment I get on the pesero, the driver had the radio giving out the names of the chosen ones and began to say: ‘Now even the old ones are going to be in a selection, in a World Cup, who is going to see them?’ A woman who was next to him answered him and they began to argue. Lulu commented excitedly that her name was on the list they had just heard. All the people who travel on the same transport to Iztapalapa congratulated her. When she finally got home, the driver didn’t charge her and from a distance wished her luck with a conciliatory look.
Decades passed before the Mexican players who played in both matches received recognition beyond what they received from the fans during the matches and from the love and hugs of their family and friends who accompanied them along their way. Antonio Moreno, director of the International Soccer Hall of Fame, located in the State of Hidalgo, says that the first two generations chosen to enter the institution ―inaugurated in 2011― were only made up of men.
There is a committee made up of women and men from Mexico City and the interior of the country that votes and rewards those who are suitable, according to their criteria. Until 2013 it was the women of the commission who proposed to start putting female names on the list. “For 2013, a woman was elected: the first to enter was the American Mia Ham by majority vote. The second year it was decided that we would try to get someone from Mexico to enter. Strangely, no woman entered. Leonardo Cuéllar was chosen as the winner of the women’s sector, who was the promoter and pioneer and the only one who cared about Mexico having a women’s team ”, he says.
After several consecutive years, women from different countries were elected until 2018, when the Hall of Fame decided that, from now on, they would award an international soccer woman, but also a Mexican one. There entered, for the first time in a public recognition, María Eugenia the little one Rubio, one of those selected for that 1970 World Cup that represented Mexico in Italy. And it was not until 2019 when the Brazilian Sisleide Lima do Amor, known as sissyentered the shortlist together with Alicia La Pele Vargas. It was one of the first and very few official recognitions that were given to players from the practically forgotten teams in Mexico. Only until 2017 did the country have a women’s league.
The defeat against Denmark: a destructive rumor and a hiatus of almost 50 years
A week before the final match at the Estadio Azteca, against the Danish team, a rumor began to spread in the media that the Mexican players were asking for two million pesos (almost $120,000) —partly as a protest against the lack of support, to go out and play the final. None of the players found out who was responsible for spreading the echo of that false protest, but what happened from then on influenced the team’s mood.
During several nights prior to the final match, at the hotel where they were staying, they received calls from people supporting or complaining about them; also from the media that sought to clarify, deny or confirm what was already known. “The press was saying it and the same press was on top of us. They told us how we asked for that, if we were amateur. And I said: if we are amateur, that the entries return. So why do they charge? The ones in the show are us, the ones who play are us, the ones who represent Mexico are us. Let the tickets come back!” recalls Alicia Vargas, still not knowing how something like this could happen to them just a few hours after playing the final at the Azteca.
They played a difficult match, “we did everything we shouldn’t have done”, they reflect several decades after that match in which they lost 3 goals. However, the public, they say, never abandoned them. In other scenarios, people would have slowly left the stadium, but the Mexican fans stayed until the end, when the tall, blonde Danes became champions for the second time. The Mexicans, despite their physical and moral defeat, were always clear that they had gone as far as any women’s team in the country had ever done before. They were sure that this could only mean the beginning of a new form of victory for national women’s football.
In 2022, the Mexican Senate awarded a recognition to the women who made up the teams that played in the two World Cups. Elvira Aracén said then: “We are grateful that after more than 50 years, the Senate of the Republic gives us this recognition, because we move with dignity, courage and good will in a sport that was considered only for men.” And it was not just a journey through a sport that excluded them in so many possible ways. In the memory of extraordinary women like Alicia Vargas, Elvira Aracén or Lulú de la Rosa, there are still memories of the desire they had to play soccer despite the shortcomings and lack of support. They were young and had everything ahead of them and little to lose. So it was.
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