Barefoot and in huipiles, the Diablillas de Hondzonot fell 7 to 4 in Tihosuco

Bravas de Santa Rosa won the Tihosuco final 7 to 4. The team they beat, the Diablillas Mestizas de Hondzonot, plays barefoot and in huipiles, and travels in from the Maya zone of Tulum.

Four teams played the women's softball tournament at the Jacinto Pat sports complex in Tihosuco, staged as part of the program marking the 179th anniversary of the Guerra Social Maya. Gladiadoras Tepich, Bravas de Santa Rosa, Leonas de Tihosuco, and the Diablillas filled the bracket. The stands and the ground around the field stayed packed through the day, with families arriving from across the region.

For readers in Tulum, the trophy is the least interesting part. The Diablillas come from Hondzonot, a Maya community inside this municipality, and they are the most widely known women's softball team in Quintana Roo by a distance no other roster comes close to. A short film about them won silver at Cannes Lions in 2023. On Sunday's kind of field, against a village team, they lost by three runs.

Bravas win the final 7 to 4

The Diablillas reached the championship game by beating Gladiadoras Tepich. Bravas de Santa Rosa got there by knocking out the host side, Leonas de Tihosuco. The final held its shape until the last out, close enough that either team could have taken it, and when it ended dozens of spectators stayed inside the grounds to talk with the players and take photographs. Long lines formed to congratulate them.

The Tihosuco alcaldía organized the tournament through its sports coordination office.

Why the Diablillas de Hondzonot play barefoot

The huipil and the bare feet are not a costume assembled for cameras. The players say they run faster without shoes, and the embroidered dress is what they wear the rest of the week anyway. Most of the roster are mothers. It also carries girls between eight and 12 years old, who train alongside the adults.

The name came from the neighbors, and it was not meant kindly. Before the team existed, women in Hondzonot who left the house to go play were called the bossy ones of the village, the ones who did not obey their husbands, the ones who went out into the street. Fabiola May Chulim, a founder and the team's captain, has said in interviews that they chose "Diablillas" precisely to take that language and keep it. The insult ended up on the jersey.

A 1,500 peso prize started it

There was no softball in Hondzonot at the beginning. There were two loose groups of women hitting tennis balls with wooden sticks on the community field, something closer to backyard baseball than to a sport with rules. They entered a municipal tournament where the prize for the winners was 1,500 pesos, roughly 75 dollars, and afterward decided to merge into one real team.

Then they asked local authorities for an instructor. That is the point where it became softball, played their way.

May Chulim told the Spanish news agency EFE in December 2024 that when they started, seven years earlier, they were shouted at and told to go home and look after their husbands and children. She said the same men who criticized them then now give their own wives permission to play. Hondzonot has two women's teams today, and women in nearby communities have begun organizing their own.

Fabiola May Chulim took the story to the Palacio Nacional

In 2021, she traveled to Mexico City as captain and appeared at the morning press conference at the Palacio Nacional alongside then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. A village most of Quintana Roo could not have located on a map got named on national television.

Major League Baseball produced a documentary about the team for Hispanic Heritage Month in 2022. The year after that, a short film titled "Las Diablillas," directed by Yupi Segura and produced by Remezcla for MLB, won a Silver Lion in the sports entertainment category at Cannes Lions. In August 2024, the federal government handed the players an official distinction in Mexico City. This January, a French magazine ran their story. Manuel Jiménez, the team's manager, told local media in December 2024 that Netflix had announced a feature film about the team the previous December.

None of that changes what a Sunday looks like in the Maya zone. They still play on village fields, against village teams, for trophies worth less than the gas to get there.

Tepich, July 30, and the war that began there

The complex where all of this happened carries the name of Jacinto Pat, the Maya leader from Tihosuco who helped launch the 1847 uprising. Tihosuco is a town INAH has declared a site of historic monuments, with more than 30 colonial buildings in its center, and the front of its Templo del Niño Jesús has stood partly collapsed since the first combats of that war. Residents have resisted restoring it.

The conflict ran from 1847 to 1901. It started four days after the Maya cacique Manuel Antonio Ay was executed in Valladolid, when Cecilio Chi's men took Tepich in the hours before dawn.

Gladiadoras Tepich played this bracket and went home without the trophy. So did the Diablillas. The anniversary the whole tournament belongs to falls on Thursday, 179 years after the town those players come from became the place where it all began.

Should Quintana Roo be putting real money behind women's community sports in the Maya zone, or is the Diablillas' story being used more than it is being supported? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.