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  • The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity
  • Tabea Huth
The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity. Duke University Press, 2008. By Heather Levi.

In her first book “The World of Lucha Libre. Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity” US-American anthropologist Heather Levi shares the results of her long-term ethnographic work on Mexican professional wrestling and provides the reader with a piece of pioneer work on a significant aspect of Mexican culture and society that has been neglected by scholars for a surprisingly long time. As Levi suggests, lucha libre can be understood as “a liminal performance that sits on the border between sports, theater, and ritual” that is analyzed within this beautifully written monography as “both a social phenomenon and a signifying practice” in twentieth-century Mexico (xvi). Understanding lucha libre as a “ritual drama in which good and evil (or at least bad) struggle for domination”—that is, a conflict between moral actors—Levi suggests that asking “what kinds of characters circulate in lucha libre is to ask what kind of social actors are thought possible, who can have agency in the Mexican context” (50). Stating that the significant use of lucha libre in Mexican political discourse could not be understood without understanding the genre itself and vice versa, during her both dedicated and extensive fieldwork in Mexico City that featured multiple field trips between 1996 and 2001, Heather Levi combined a wide set of qualitative research methods. This included the observation of wrestling events and various training sessions, the realization of personal qualitative interviews with a heterogeneous group of people involved in the ambient, and the analysis of representations of lucha libre in mass media such as film and television, for instance. Similar to Loic Wacquant in his famous study on black working class boxers in Chicago, she additionally took lucha libre-classes with a retired professional wrestler in Mexico City, gaining insider knowledge that otherwise would have been most difficult to obtain.

Seeking a better understanding of lucha libre as a cultural practice and in order to reconstruct its rather contradictory history, the author focusses on three main dimensions of Mexican professional wrestling: lucha libre as a life performance, as a subculture, and —last but not least—as a symbol circulating in cultural politics as well as political culture in Mexico. As a consequence, this rather ambitious study is structured into six chapters shaped by the objective to not only understand lucha libre as a staging of contradictions, but also to track its changes and developments throughout its eventful history. After introducing lucha libre as her object of research and providing an overview on the general structure and history of Mexican wrestling as a practice of staging contradictions, Levi continues with some reflections on the power of secrecy as [End Page 224] an integral part of the genre’s multiple dimensions. On that note, Levi pursues her analysis by paying some close looks on the relation between the wrestlers and the characters they incarnate by focussing on three dimensions which include the wrestlers’ lifeworld, the complex set of oppositions and alliances between the socially marked characters involved as well as the manichean opposition between good and evil that is so central to lucha libre. Subsequently to these reflections, the following chapter is dedicated to the mask in its various integral functions, that include not only the rather obvious dramatic one within the performance itself, but also the one of a metonym for the genre—and therefore, occasionally also for what is perceived to be Mexican national culture itself. The fifth chapter, however, is dedicated to the contradictory and ever-changing representations of gender and sexuality in lucha libre, which on one hand could be understood as a “struggle for physical and psychological domination between two machos,” but that also functions as a “laboratory of gender experimentation, that . . . parodies and problematizes the standard description of machismo as hegemonic masculinity” (176). Closing “The World of Lucha Libre,” Levi dedicates her last chapter to the circulation of lucha libre by focusing on the dissemination of the performances through mass media (that is, film and television) and the appropriation...

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