It’s Time For The LA Times To Do A Feature On Lucha Libre Again

Every six months or so, it is written, the gringo must do a story on Mexican Lucha Libre. And so, today, the Los Angeles Times treats us to a very nice multi-media gallery from some people in California gathering to watched the masked ones pummel one another.  

In Mexico, the popularity of lucha libre, literally “free struggle” or “free fight,” is rivaled only by soccer. Wrestlers star not only in the ring, but in movies, comic books, commercials and magazines. Now the sport’s following in this country is beginning to swell, driven by the desire of many assimilated Mexicans to reacquaint themselves with a part of their heritage and by the nostalgia more-recent arrivals have for their homeland.

Well, actually, in Mexico, La Lucha is strictly for los nacos, but in America we have a strange love-hate relationship with Mexico. Hating the dirty Mexicans, but loving their kitsch and La Lucha holds the top spot on the list of Mexican iconography we must recycle, beaten perhaps, only by one other Latin American image–El Ché–another icon whose meaning has become, well, meaningless.

Lo and behold, it turns out the birth of masked wrestling came, not from our cousins down south, but right here in the U.S. of A. in, where else?, Texas. Seventy-six years ago, a businessman named Salvador Lutteroth Gonzales happened upon a masked wrestler at a show in Texas. He took that concept to Mexico City  and the rest is history.

Today, enter any hip, Mexican restaurant or bar outside Mexico and a Lucha Libre mask cannot be far away. And, the Times reports this month, as they have a dozen times before, that the incidence of lucha libre events in the United States is growing by leaps and bounds. Click the image below to check out some pretty awesome shots from the story.