The Guardian: World Cup spotlights Brazil’s great players – and their single mothers
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Round the corner from a gang member with a pistol in his waistband and an automatic rifle in his hands, the Women’s Bar in Rio’s Complexo do Alemão favela was showing the World Cup on a big TV.
Among the crowd watching the Brazil-Serbia game, women in team shirts outnumbered men, while children bounced on a trampoline or queued to have Brazilian flags painted on their cheeks.
“You meet everyone here. There’s a great vibe,” said Maira Quirino, 26 – who like many of those at the bar – is a single mother.
The Seleção has so far had a successful if unspectacular World Cup.
But away from the pitch, this tournament has thrown the spotlight on the player’s mothers whose hard-luck life stories appear to resonate with ordinary Brazilians in a way that the team’s more glamorous wives and girlfriends do not.
According to government figures, women are the head of the household in 40% of Brazilian families, even where they have a conjugal partner – up from 23% two decades earlier. But single mothers are often overlooked in popular culture.
Many of Brazil’s great players have come from backgrounds of crushing poverty.
And their mothers connect with ordinary Brazilian women because they have lived similar lives, said Debora Diniz, a professor of anthropology at the University of Brasília. That contrasts with the upscale lifestyle enjoyed by of players’ wives and girlfriends – who in many cases are lighter-skinned, unlike the team which is a typically Brazilian racial mix.
