- The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity
El Santo, Blue Demon, Huracán Ramirez, Dr. Wagner, Superbarrio, Casandra, Lady Apache, Muñeca Oriental, rudos, técnicos, machos, luchadoras, exoticos, minis: the wonderful world of lucha libre is an amazing manifestation of popular culture that for many represents reflections of modern Mexican society. In this regard, anthropologist Heather Levi asserts in her impressive study of the spectacular sport that lucha libre “makes sense because it is a performance genre that draws on and reproduces a series of contradictions that are broadly intelligible in the context of the shared historical and cultural background of its Mexican fans” (p. xiii).
In 1933, Texas promoter Salvador Luttheroth first showcased a series of matches in Mexico City. Events soon thereafter could be found in cities across the north and center of the country. By the 1950s, wrestling had become increasingly socially and culturally meaningful as it gained significant status in the Mexican national consciousness. [End Page 129]
Levi is on to something big here in demonstrating that professional wrestling is much more than just after-work or weekend entertainment on steroids. In her captivating study, the first headlock comes when she asserts that her research is intended as more than simply a “community study of wrestlers or of wrestling fans, but an examination of lucha libre both as a social phenomenon and . . . signifying practice” (p. xiv).
To achieve this end, the author/anthropologist rightly immersed herself in wrestling culture and an accompanying training regime. She attended over 50 matches both in Mexico City and elsewhere. She interviewed wrestlers, referees, promoters, fans, and so on, while also consulting with a variety of print and photographic materials. Somewhat like a method actor, Levi signed up with veteran wrestler Luis Jaramillo Martinez who quickly cautioned that he disapproved of the “clownshow you see on television” (p. 33). As with other top notch investigators of Mexican urban culture such as Annick Prieur and Matthew Guttmann, Levi cast herself as a keen observer, ready to soak up as much as she could from her informants.
As Levi took to disciplining her own body by learning both amateur and professional wrestling techniques in the gym, she fed on a steady diet of lucha culture and set about to render an assessment of previous interpretations of the ring-bound practice both inside and outside of Mexico. Levi interestingly revisits Roland Barthes’s influential 1957 essay “The World of Wrestling” which pointed to the essential fact that spectators acknowledged the sport’s “contrived nature” but that—following Barthes—“what matter[ed] is not what one thinks, but what one sees” (p. 18). Ensuing sign and meaning production, then, took place through the “moral and ethnic coding” of the wrestlers and their interaction with the audience. Developing this still further, Levi contemplates Barthes alleging a series of counterhegemonic meanings (as a work ethic critique, for example) to wrestling because the obvious element of fakery in the sport, irrespective of order or fairness. Could this staged artificiality be speaking to the “true nature” of social relations under capitalism? Levi also notes contrasting views that consider wrestling as a manifestation of more culturally conservative perspectives.
Yet given both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic readings of professional wrestling, the author determines that interpretation hinges largely on whether matches are viewed on television (usually eliciting a more conservative view) or live in person (prompting more alternative significations). Further, Levi goes to the mat to defend the idea that understanding the world of lucha libre depends on whether one is truly involved with the production-side aspects of wrestling and not simply an outside observer. When this is the case, Levi argues that both the construction and consumption of meaning depends on a variety of variables. With the ringing of the final bell, her contention is that “professional wrestling is a polysemic performance, capable of carrying contradictory meanings” (p. 22). With fascinating discussion of masking, gender, sexuality, and political uses of the sport...