El Santo vs. Mystery Science Theater 3000: Lucha Libre's Transnational Journey into American Popular Culture

Foreign cinemas have often been positioned as higher-brow alternatives to Hollywood fare, yet every national cinema has some manner of skeleton in the closet. For Mexico, the mass-produced Santo films—starring masked luchador El Santo, who fought off a bevy of monsters in over fifty films throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies—epitomized the divide between beloved popular culture artifact and shameful counterpoint to national cinematic narrative. Due to the films' lowbrow status in Mexico, they traveled easily into new, similarly lowbrow international spaces, including American drive-ins, late-night television, and Mystery Science Theater 3000. Yet, while the films appeared in these new formats with their nationality largely deemphasized, their Mexicanness was in fact an essential component of the infantilization through which most audiences in the United States and Canada approached them. Drawing on Jeffrey Sconce's work on paracinema; Ella Shohat's and Dolores Tierney's notions of racial and colonialist cinematic readings; and Heather Levi's, Andrew Syder's, and Tierney's histories of El Santo, this article identifies the imperialist attitudes that characterized initial transnational encounters between North Americans and the Santo films, as well as how those frameworks influenced later depictions of lucha libre outside of Mexico even decades later.