Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"In "The World of Lucha Libre," Heather Levi offers up a backstage pass to the scene of muscles, sweat, passion, and politics that is "lucha libre." It's a world in which performing a public secret reveals that what is deadly serious is also a sham and that what is frivolous speaks of the grit and business of living. Levi illuminates lucha libre's fractal relationship to Mexican politics and its playful and serious regulation of gender and mestizaje as a dramatic staging of embodied contradiction that brings the messy world of lived experience into brute contact with its cultural ideals." The World of Lucha Libre" is important not just for wrestling fans but for any student of popular performance and social practice."--Nicholas Sammond, editor of "Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE WORLD OF LUCHA LIBRE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations............................................................................ixPreface..........................................................................................xiAcknowledgments..................................................................................xxiPrologue.........................................................................................1CHAPTER 1 Staging Contradiction..................................................................5CHAPTER 2 Trade Secrets and Revelations..........................................................27CHAPTER 3 Of Charros and Jaguars: The Moral and Social Cosmos of Lucha Libre.....................49CHAPTER 4 The Wrestling Mask.....................................................................103CHAPTER 5 A Struggle between Two Strong Men?.....................................................137CHAPTER 6 Mediating the Mask: Lucha Libre and Circulation........................................177Conclusion.......................................................................................217Notes............................................................................................227Bibliography.....................................................................................251Index............................................................................................259

Chapter One

In the months leading up to my doctoral fieldwork, when I told people that I intended to study Mexican professional wrestling, their most common response would be to ask: "Is it totally corrupt there, like it is here?" This raised a fairly obvious question: Why did they consider professional wrestling to be corrupt? In fact, professional wrestling is often derided as simplistic, contrived, and full of gratuitous violence. Such criticism, however, is seldom extended to equally simplistic and dangerous practices like hockey, football, or rugby. Those performances are conventionally considered "real" contests of skill. While they may not be classified as high culture, they are not disparaged as "corrupt" or "false," like professional wrestling. Yet the goal of most sports-to score points-is as contrived and artificial as anything that happens in professional wrestling. Why, then, should professional wrestling be the object of more disdain than these other practices?

Perhaps it is because professional wrestling is a liminal genre, one that is closely connected with the category of "sport," but cannot be contained by it. Lucha libre, I have suggested, is a practice of staging contradictions. It is an embodied performance that communicates apparently conflicting statements about the social world. During its seventy-five-year history in Mexico, it has stood for modernity and tradition, urbanism and indigenismo, honesty and corruption, machismo and feminism. Why should lucha libre be the vehicle of such a complex and contradictory set of associations? I would suggest that its capacity to signify comes from the very fact that it occupies a space somewhere between sport, ritual, and theater and is thus capable of drawing its power from all of those genres.

PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING

Professional wrestling is a transnational performance genre that has been the object of the sporadic attention of academics since Roland Barthes's groundbreaking 1957 article "The World of Wrestling." It is a performance genre based on (but also parodying) the conventions of so-called amateur wrestling. Wrestling, in one form or another, is among the oldest and most widespread sports or games in the world. Like other sports and games, wrestling underwent a process of modernization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during which time its rules were codified and its practice organized within particular institutional contexts (such as the university or the club). At the amateur level, wrestling is divided into three main styles: Greco-Roman, Olympic, and Freestyle (or Intercollegiate). In the first two styles, a match ends when one wrestler pins the other's shoulders to the mat. Olympic rules allow leg holds, whereas Greco-Roman rules prohibit contact below the waist. In Freestyle wrestling, a match can end with a pin but can also end if the winner places the loser in an immobilizing hold.

These three forms of amateur wrestling are often called "real" wrestling and distinguished from another type of wrestling that was promoted as a popular entertainment, during the same period, in the United States and parts of Europe. Charles Wilson traces professional wrestling to a style called "collar and elbow" that was developed in Vermont in the early nineteenth century. (The name refers to the starting position, in which each wrestler grasps the other by the elbow with one hand, and the collar with the other.) Vermont soldiers brought collar and elbow wrestling to the barracks of the Civil War, where it became a favorite recreation among Union soldiers. After the army was demobilized, collar and elbow wrestling moved from the barracks to saloons in New York City where saloon owners promoted matches to draw customers.

By the end of the century, P. T. Barnum instituted wrestling as a circus "spectacular." With wrestling's transition from the barroom to the circus came an important change. In the beginning, Barnum's wrestlers would fight challenge matches against untrained marks from the audience. By the late 1890s, however, they began to fight fixed contests against shills planted in the audience instead. With this innovation, the performance changed from a contest to a representation of a contest. During the first decade of the twentieth century, this type of exhibition wrestling grew in popularity both in cities, and on the county fair circuit. The county fair circuit in turn spawned a system of intercity wrestling circuits by 1908 (Wilson 1959).

Exhibition wrestling, by then known as "professional" wrestling, grew in popularity during the first decades of the twentieth century in both the United States and Europe, reaching a peak in the 1920s. Greco-Roman wrestling was already a popular bar entertainment in late-nineteenth-century Europe, but in the early 1920s European wrestlers adopted the North American collar and elbow style (Oakley 1971). Promoters organized international tours for wrestlers from both continents. During this period individual wrestlers began to add theatrical gimmicks to their wrestling performance to mark themselves as memorable characters. In the United States, it became common for immigrants or children of immigrants (like the Italian Joe Savoldi, Jimmy "The Greek" Thepos, Polish Stanislaus "The Boxcar" Zbyszko, or Turkish Ali Baba) to stress their national origin as a gimmick in performance.

The conventions that govern professional wrestling today were fairly well established by the beginning of the 1920s. In common with amateur wrestling, the basic unit of performance in professional wrestling is the match. In contrast to amateur wrestling matches, the professional match normally takes place inside a boxing ring. A fall is defined the same way that it is in freestyle wrestling: the winner either pins the loser's shoulders to the ground for three seconds (as counted by the referee) or puts the loser in an immobilizing (and pain inducing) hold (either a...