Enedina Canul wanted to play softball, but the 47-year-old didn’t have a bat—and that was the least of her problems. Her simple desire to play sports was also a major fight for women’s rights as she fought against the conservative social mores of her rural Mexican village, captured in the film “Las Amazonas de Yaxunah,” premiering at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival on Sunday. The documentary focuses on Canul and the softball team she formed in her small, Indigenous hamlet—and their push against the stifling machismo culture that saw their participation in sports as an affront.
On a makeshift field, Canul and her team played with a baseball she took from her husband, ditching their sandals to run faster barefoot and carving a bat from a tree. “My husband told us it’s not okay for women to go out and play—what will people say?” Canul told AFP. “I told him that doesn’t matter to me.
” As a young child she had a passion for baseball, a hugely popular sport in Latin America. But in her teenage years, her desire to play sports ran up against a culture that considered a woman’s proper place to be in the house, the mother of four said. So she gave up the idea of playing sports, until years later, in 2017, when a government program helping to fight against obesity organized Zumba lessons in her jungle town.
The softball team became so controversial that some of the players’ marriages fell apart. Canul ran into her own roadblocks—such a.