Futbolera is a welcome contribution to the growing scholarship on sports in Latin America, which has only recently begun to afford attention to women's athletics. As Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel say in the book's introduction, despite clear evidence that women in the region played football and other sports for more than a century, popular memory has tended to neglect their activities. Because of the significance that Latin Americans have invested in sporting practice, this neglect has had profound consequences, not least in “serv[ing] to naturalize gender differences in society more broadly” (p. 2). Elsey and Nadel begin to provide the necessary corrective, telling the stories of many women athletes, outlining the patterns of prejudice that have marginalized women in Latin American sports history, and posing questions that scholars must take up.
The authors' approach is at once geographically broad and chronologically long; the chapters, focused on Chile, Argentina, Brazil,...
