A Norita, Betty, Tere & las noritas
Alongside the conventional chants of “Memory, Truth, and Justice” that are expected to be heard in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo as the country commemorates 50 years since its last military coup will be a surprising sight to less informed onlookers: a soccer ball. Norita Fútbol Club (Norita F.C.), a club founded ten years ago by a small group of women and LGBTIQNB+ militants will turn the street into a potrero—a stretch of pavement that becomes a fútbol field once the ball starts rolling.
The commemoration is an obvious venue to organize for a team whose politics are anchored both in its advocacy for a feminist vision of fútbol, widely viewed as a “men’s sport,” as well as democratic memory. Indeed, at a time when both gender equality and truth and justice are under threat by far-right President Javier Milei, these battles have never felt more important—or intertwined. The club’s choice to name itself “Norita” attests to how these struggles overlap.
Norita, the affectionate nickname for Nora Morales de Cortiñas in progressive and leftist circles, co-founded the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a legendary human rights group that bravely protested against the country’s last dictatorship (1976–1983). Before her passing in 2024, she built a relationship with these younger activists who, like her, see themselves as historical agents who aim to challenge injustices towards women and LGBITQNB+ people in fútbol. The team’s admiration for Norita’s long-standing commitment to the politics of democratic memory converged with a vibrant Latin American feminist tide that placed gender violence at the center of national debate.
A New Club is Born
The roots of Norita F.C. date back to 2016, when a small group of women and LGBTIQNB+ militants from a progressive political party began playing fútbol in local tournaments. After rotating through the names of several renowned Latin American feminist activists, the club landed on “Norita” to pay homage to the legendary activist. Today, the club has around 30 players, including Norita’s granddaughter, Lucía Cortiñas.
The team’s admiration for Norita’s long-standing commitment to the politics of democratic memory converged with a vibrant Latin American feminist tide that placed gender violence at the center of national debate.
From its inception, the club sought to take to the field in a feminist way, challenging fútbol as a masculine territory. By playing a sport many were discouraged from embracing since childhood, they carve out time within women’s and LGBTIQNB+ people’s weekday schedules—an act that implies a redistribution of everyday domestic labor. Simultaneously, they revisit the sport’s national history, which gravitates toward men’s achievements, and call attention to the little-known trajectories of those long pushed to the margins. In this vein, they recently began working to improve the housing conditions of former women players who lacked access to retirement benefits, since fútbol was not professionalized at the time. Accordingly, feminist fútbol militants consider the professionalization process incomplete and therefore refer to it as “semi-professionalization,” as women’s conditions remain markedly unequal to men’s in major fútbol clubs.
In addition to fighting for a more just future, the club also performs crucial memory work, much of it dedicated to reclaiming the contributions of under-appreciated fútbol legends of the past. During the 2019 celebration of Día de la Futbolista (Women Fútbol Player Day), a sprawling genealogy stretched across one of the venue’s walls: photographs of the 1971 players stood alongside more recent teams, with the names of each player handwritten beneath their images. This date had just been officially recognized by the legislature to commemorate the 1971 Women’s Soccer World Championship match in which Argentina’s national team defeated England at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City—nearly two decades before FIFA organized the Women’s World Cup. Norita members were deeply involved in turning this initiative into law, a small but significant reparation and one of many conquests to come.
Years later, in the summer of 2025, I encountered those same photographs again while visiting Tamara Haber, or Tami, Norita F.C.’s president. One afternoon after finishing her work shift, Tami pulled out a stack of wrinkled, printed images and pressed them with a hot iron onto the kitchen table, preparing them for that year’s Día de la Futbolista commemoration. Her quick, precise movements embodied what Argentine militants often call hacer las cosas a pulmón—literally, “doing things by lung”: carrying out political work with scarce resources, in brief intervals carved out of daily life, sustained by sheer commitment. That carefully assembled lineage is, then, the collective product of sustained feminist fútbol militant labor. Scrolling through Norita F.C.’s Instagram, one encounters an unintentional yet powerful archive of organizing in the making, a record of often hidden and unrecognized memory work. In short, it’s a record of a feminist doing things by lung.
The club’s social activism and memory work, which has also includes the writing of multiple books by members who have sought to reclaim the experiences of forgotten futboleras, is a crucial fit with the work of Norita. Indeed, like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, once dismissed by the national press as “crazy women” and now recognized worldwide as exemplars of politicized motherhood under authoritarianism, these once reviled pioneer futboleras are now acknowledged as groundbreaking figures for younger generations of women and LGBTIQNB+’s fútbol players.
Members of the team first met with Norita in 2018 at a barbecue, after she found that out a team bore her name. The shared dimension of their struggles made the connection seamless: younger feminists drew bridges between the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’s white headscarves and the green handkerchiefs symbolizing the struggle to decriminalize abortion—a link Norita publicly embraced, even wearing the green handkerchief herself.
A Legacy of Struggle
The team’s relationship with Norita has long been intertwined with practices of memory and continuity. In March 2025, they gathered at Norita’s house to commemorate her birthday after her passing in 2024. The players reflected on how Norita introduced them to militancy’s many struggles as she brought them together. For this reason, many call her “the mother of all the battles.”
Indeed, Norita lived a legendary life. Along with other women, she stood on the frontlines of resistance against the dictatorship. She joined the walking rounds in the Plaza de Mayo, wearing a white handkerchief embroidered with her son’s name tied around her head at a time when gatherings of three or more people were prohibited. She and her compañeras were vilified by a military regime that tortured, raped, abducted, and disappeared thousands, including systematically kidnapping babies. Moreover, they played a crucial role in the transition to democracy, contributing the information they had gathered to the trials against the military junta—the first of their kind in the region—and facilitating DNA tests for those who questioned their identity and family ties, in the search for children who had been kidnapped. Beyond this activism, Norita also supported a wide range of causes, including cannabis decriminalization, environmental struggles against the expropriation of common goods, and the demands of women and LGBTIQNB+ communities.
The legacy of that history is more important now than ever, as the right-wing government of Javier Milei wages war on that historical memory, which, even though it has been embraced by progressist governments, has mostly been built through community labor.
The legacy of that history is more important now than ever, as the right-wing government of Javier Milei wages war on that historical memory.
Javier Milei’s government embraces negationism through the dissemination of the so-called “theory of the two demons,” which asserts that two sides—the state and militants—committed violent “excesses.” What makes this theory negationist is its relativization of the state’s actions during the last military dictatorship—systematic massacres, abductions, tortures, rapes, and the kidnapping of babies—by equating them with political participation, including, but not limited to, left-wing armed struggle. In a nutshell, it presents these forms of violence as if they emerged from the same conditions. While negationism predates the Milei administration, his government legitimizes it.
This year, on the 50th anniversary of the military coup, Argentine human rights organizations, including the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, called on protesters to bring a picture of a disappeared person, along with their name and the phrase “Que Digan Dónde Están” (“Tell us where they are”). In doing so, they invoked the figure of the 30,000 disappeared—a number that carries profound symbolic weight. As the writer and University of Buenos Aires literature professor Martín Kohan pointed out in response to a negationist right-wing politician who questioned the number’s accuracy, asserting it was lower, 30,000 works as an open symbolic cipher: while not all bodies have been found, it represents a collective search for truth and an enduring claim to the state in the context of clandestine repression aimed at suppressing all political opposition.
A House of Memory
Norita F.C.’s ongoing project is Casa Norita Cortiñas, developed alongside Norita’s close relatives, the association Seré por la Igualdad y la Vida Civil (I’ll Be for Equality and Life Civil ), and human rights grassroots organizations. This initiative aims to transform her former house into a museum that preserves and shelters the struggles she supported, spanning memory, truth, and justice, labor rights, feminism, and anti-extractivism, among others. Norita F.C. is responsible for curating the section dedicated to sports and gender equity. The current stage of the project focuses on restoring the house, and the club has begun selling team shirts to contribute to crowdfunding to build the first museum ever dedicated to a Mother of Plaza de Mayo.
For Norita F.C., building the Casa Norita Cortiñas will activate Norita’s legacy in a place that hosted countless joys, militancy encounters, and asados (barbecues). Therefore, sostener su casa (“to hold together this house”), as Tami emphasizes, is a gesture that transforms not only the present but also the future.
Moreover, it constitutes a collective act of resistance against Milei’s pedagogy of cruelty—a term the South American anthropologist Rita Segato uses to describe the normalization of acts that threaten life and desensitize us to the suffering of others—which the current government promotes across multiple fronts, including a recently approved labor reform bill.
Building the Casa Norita Cortiñas museum under a government that endorses negationism means transforming what might otherwise be a pessimistic vision of a fractured democratic memory into an active struggle for remembrance—one that has always existed, but now unfolds under some of the most hostile political conditions since the end of the last military dictatorship. At the heart of this effort lies a feminist principle that collapses the assumption of the house as a “private” space: Norita once had to leave her home, where she worked as a housewife, to march alongside the other Mothers through the Plaza de Mayo. Today, it is that same house to which people return, bringing, almost as an offering, a little of what Norita sowed throughout her boundless life and, as Norita F.C. demonstrates, of her unpredictable legacy.
María Mónica Sosa Vásquez is a doctoral student in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on fintech, socialities, and economic exchange in Argentina. Previously, her work centered on historical memories and feminist movements, specifically feminist fútbol (soccer).