When I began doing fieldwork for my dissertation in the spring of 2011, I met several luchadores and luchadoras for interviews. Most were between 20 and 35 and almost every one of them asked me at some point if I had “face.” Using the English word within otherwise purely Spanish dialogue, “tienes face?” they were asking if I used facebook. I quickly became “friends” with all of them on the social networking site as a way to stay in touch, especially during the four months that I returned to the United States at the end of 2011.

And I quickly learned that for the luchadores of SuperCatch, facebook functioned as a way to stay in touch with many people abroad. My fellow Super Catch wrestlers saw the connections they were able to make on the internet as one of the most important ways of achieving international exposure. Whether inviting foreign luchadores to perform in La Paz or organizing their own trips to perform in Lima, Santiago, or Buenos Aires, Facebook was a primary way of connecting with different international groups of wrestlers. Often after a long afternoon of training in Don Mauricio’s ring, we would walk back to Avenida 16 de Julio and stop in one of the small restaurants for the daily special. After shoveling giant plates of silpancho, pique macho, or falso conejo into our mouths and washing them down with mocochinchi (a peach flavored drink), we would walk a block further to the small shop with several computers set up as an internet café.

For just 50 centavos an hour we would sit in a row at the computers, and everyone had a browser tab open with Facebook. Of course the luchadores would look at their Paceño friends’ pictures and send birthday wishes to cousins or schoolmates, but they spent most of their time connecting with wrestlers from other countries. All of the luchadores were members of online virtual Facebook groups of South American and international wrestlers. Occasionally these groups would have scheduled discussions, and the Super Catch luchadores always made a point to participate. Discussions ranged from the latest WWE pay-per-view program to moves wrestlers were working on. But the most important were discussions about travel and the arrival of visiting wrestlers.

I often would finish sending emails to friends in the U.S. and exhausting everything I could think of to look at on Facebook long before they finished their conversations with Peruvian, Mexican, and Spanish wrestlers. Sometimes I was relieved to be asked to translate an English language message that someone received from a U.S. wrestler just because it gave me something to do. We would stay at the internet shop sometimes for almost two hours, as I silently whined in my head that it was already 9pm and I just wanted to go home and sleep. But I slowly understood the importance of these interactions. For just 0.50 Bolivianos an hour (about $0.07) the luchadores were actively participating in what they saw as an international “community” of which they wanted to be a part. 

This global networking online can be understood as a kind of imagined cosmopolitanism in which the SuperCatch luchadores’ desires to connect with other wrestlers overcome spatial constraints, allowing them to feel a sense of “worldliness through engagement, in whatever form, with the world’s goods and lifestyles” (Schein 1999:359).  Here, the “lifestyle” of international wrestling legitimacy was practiced using the internet and membership in international groups. Shein draws on Anderson, using the notion of imagining to demonstrate the ways participants in cosmopolitanism may not necessarily meet face-to-face, but nonetheless fashion communities that are just as genuine as those created by people who share physical space. Though it is possible no all participants in these facebook interactions saw this form of sociality as a community, the SuperCatch luchadores were precisely interested in participating in what they understood as a community. They felt that being part of online communities would grant them more legitimacy than would simply being a part of local lucha libre circles. In many ways, they valued their international connections more highly, because they saw them as legitimizing, while they understood the local as degrading.

As Schein point outs, it is electronic media that allows this sort of “supralocal transmission” to occur. The interactive nature of the internet (even if it was infuriatingly slow at times), allowed for a horizontal exchange that unlike media of television and film, “brings into possibility an imagining of community on the scale of the globe” (Schein 1999:359). Within these new communities identifications may be refashioned. For the luchadores, their involvement with wrestlers outside of Bolivia allowed them to see themselves and the group as part of “international lucha libre” despite the fact that they rarely if ever traveled to perform outside of Bolivia, and visits by foreign wrestling groups were only occasional. These connections allowed them to imagine the eradication of economic exclusions, and restrictions imposed by state borders that their own particular citizenship determined. Yet, even as cosmopolitan exchange allowed for the imagining of mobility, it was also conditioned by the endurance of relative physical immobility (Schein 1999:269) that the luchadores knew was part of their reality. Appadurai writes that “Fantasy is now a social practice” (1996:7) and many people long for horizontality described by Anderson (Appadurai 1983:7), without global differentials of power and wealth (Schein 1999:369). For the luchadores, these differentials were manifested in their desire for legitimacy.

Yet legitimacy continued to be fleeting for the Super Catch luchadores. Clearly the reputation of Bolivian lucha libre among wrestlers outside of Bolivia was part of a global dynamic in which Bolivia either appeared invisible or was understood as derivative of better established wrestling traditions in Mexico or the United States. As Rocky Aliaga, a Bolivian who now wrestles professionally in Spain explained to me, people in other countries only knew what they saw of Bolivian lucha libre on the internet. “Aqui llega informacion de monstruos, momias, hombrelobos...En Bolivia hay talento y nuevos valores, pero sin dar oportunidad. Cada una lucha hasta tres veces para no dar oportunidad a jóvenes. Por eso se disfrazan de monstruos” [Here they find information about monsters, mummies, wolfmen…In Bolivia there is talent and new values, but without opportunity. Each match of three falls doesn’t give the opportunity to young wrestlers. That’s why they costume themselves as monsters]. Rocky confirms here what those luchadores still in Bolivia suspect: that in the larger world of exhibition wrestling they are seen either as a joke or as underdeveloped. But the luchadores often attribute this formation to the local dynamics of clowning rather than global processes

Over the course of my year of training as a luchadora, Edgar consistently used the feminine form of clowns, “payasas,” when referring to wrestlers that he felt had a low skill level. For several of the SuperCatch luchadores, the cholitas stood in as emblematic of the “problem.” In September of 2011, while in the United States for a few months, I posted some pictures of cholitas luchadoras from Titanes del Ring on facebook. Two days later, I noticed that Edgar had written in the comments section, “Por que muestras estas payasas de El Alto si tu hablaste con los mejores luchadores de Bolivia y los más antiguos? Si hasta criticabas a estos bueyes por que los promocionas? Hay grandes profesionales que puedes mostrar como LFX, Halcones del Ring, Super Catch…Que mal!” [Why do you show these female clowns from El Alto if you have talked with the best and oldest Bolivian wrestlers? Until you criticize these oxen, why do you promote them? There are great professionals you can show like LFX, Halcones del Ring, Super Catch…How awful!]. Anarkista, a luchador from GLLP in Santa Cruz, Bolivia agreed, “Bien dicho.... Sabemos que hay mejores luchadores que estas cosas.” [Well said…We know there are better wrestlers than these things]. I eventually removed the pictures, but the conversation they had evoked stuck with me. As a foreigner, putting pictures of the cholitas luchadoras on a website only exacerbated the “problem” male luchadores were working so hard to “correct.” To Edgar and Anarkista I was reinforcing the image of Bolivian lucha libre that they were constantly working against in front of an international audience. The luchadoras were the most visible example of Bolivian lucha libre outside of the country, but as Edgar explained to me many times, to the wrestlers of Super Catch they were not representative of the true talent within Bolivia. Thus, facebook became both a subject of study and an (accidental) methodological tool for further understanding the ways that imagined cosmopolitanism was at work among my wrestling partners.

It has been exactly 10 years since I first attended the Iowa State Fair. It has been 7 years since I last attended. I am still adamantly in love with the ISF to a fault. Ten years ago the film crew I worked with spent hot, sweaty august days lugging cameras into refrigerated rooms filled with molding butter and accompanying Norma Duffy Lyons to her daily lunch of state fair Chinese food. We spend the nights sipping Stroh’s beer around a campfire and listening the The Hawk radio station 97.3. And by the end of the summer we had over 40 hours of tape (which, as far as I know is still unlogged and unedited). I joined this crew because I had loved the Buttercow in Illinois as a child, but by August 20, 2003 I was a true believer in the Buttercow of Iowa.

So you can imagine my horror when I learned yesterday that an animal welfare group poured red paint on the Buttercow in protest (read the story via NPR). 

I was at a baseball game with my parents when I received word via email on my phone. “Oh no!” I gasped, and my mother thought I had read that a friend was in some sort of trouble. I told her the news and my honest first commentary was “don’t they know they reuse the butter for four years?”

I think it’s important to contextualize my comments here and note that at the time of documentary making, I had been vegetarian for seven years. I was never vegan for more than a month (yogurt! goat cheese! honey! beautiful leather frye boots!), but I made it a full twelve years of vegetarianism before giving up during fieldwork in Bolivia. I now quite enjoy fried chicken, pork chicharones, cuy (roasted guinea pig), and anticuchos (grilled beef heart), among many other forms of meat. But I also still truly believe that vegetarianism is far more environmentally friendly and sustainable than regular meat-eating. That said, I ultimately recognize that one’s ability and desire to eat meat or not are substantially culturally influenced. Things like purchasing power, national location, regional location, local location, racial identity, gender, religion, subcultural affiliation or identification, and who knows what else profoundly structure not only what we perceive as desirable food but also what we are physically able to eat.

So my reaction is more complicated than it may appear. Though I don’t generally condone destructive practices as protest, I also don’t wholly disagree with the protestors’ intentions. Helping to thaw 600 pounds of overly cooled butter by running my hands through it may have improved it’s consistency for sculpting but also made me shun the stuff for more than a month. There is something foul and inedible about massive amounts of dairy product. But in the end, with my apologies to anti-speciesist friends, I have to conclude that the protestors’ actions were misguided. 

Back in 2007 I argued that the Buttercow was a symbol of citizenship in the sense that in it’s iconicity it represented pride and intimate knowledge, moving beyond citizenship as simply claims to rights and responsibilities. I returned to this argument when writing for the Food Culture Index blog, suggesting that Minnesota Dairy Princess Katie Miron connects butter art to Midwestern values using words like “hard work,” “dedication,” “wholesome,” and “nutritious.” Butter art for her is a way to both reinscribe these values within the community, and communicate the values to outsiders. Like the colonial map, it demarcates “us” from “them,” and acts as a logo, and becomes a “pure sign” or emblem for a certain kind of community affiliation.

And, like all icons, the Buttercow adapts to symbolize prevailing social issues and political perspectives. What was once a symbol of progress, now has come to be a nostalgic representation of a disappearing way of life. As family farms disappear and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations replace them, the Buttercow stands as a testament to the value placed on farmers who practice true animal husbandry and forms of agriculture that stand in opposition to the CFO’s that have become so ubiquitous. The 600 pounds of butter used in Illinois’s Buttercow comes from Prairie Farms, which is a farmer owned cooperative whose cows are free range and 100% hormone free. Put simply, to it's supporters, the Buttercow is a symbol of family farmers who intimately know and care for their animals, and is seen as oppositional to the forms of industrialized agriculture that exploit animals to their breaking point before discarding them.

Of course, many animal liberation groups see no distinction between large scale animal exploitation and that which is family owned. But that is precisely my point. In ignoring or misunderstanding the distinction, I believe such protestors are alienating those who could be powerful allies. And besides, pouring red paint on the butter only means that instead of reusing it next year, they’ll have to get a brand new 600 pound batch.


see my writing at food culture index or hit the "butter" tag to the right to see my earlier fieldnotes

The end of lucha libre on Bolivian television was quickly followed by the beginning of what might be considered the current era of Bolivian lucha libre, which Roberto characterized as the “aparicion de los luchadores enanos y por supuesto la lucha de cholitas” [the appearance of midget wrestlers, and of course the cholitas’ wrestling]. The most visible group promoting both “midget wrestlers” and the cholitas luchadoras has been Titanes del Ring [Titans of the Ring], which Roberto says existed under a different name prior to when they added these two spectacles to their events. When I began my fieldwork Titanes del Ring was the only group with a set schedule and permanent venue. The group consistently attracted hundreds of audience members each Sunday at their show in the Multifuncional de la Ceja de El Alto (the multifunctional arena located in the Ceja market area of El Alto). They also were the first to cater to tourists, with the help of local tourism company Secretos Andenos [Andean Secrets].

In 2009, when I first met LIDER wrestlers, the group was managed by Kid Simonini and Jaider Lee, the sons of Medico Loco. They performed in a much smaller arena in the neighborhood of Villa Victoria, a working class area sometimes referred to as Villa Balazos (Bullet Town) given its high crime rates. They did not have a permanent weekly schedule, and the wrestlers often traveled to put on shows in nearby small altiplano towns. They did not market themselves to tourists specifically, and when I attended their shows I was the only visibly non-Bolivian in the audience. However, by the time I left La Paz at the end of 2012, the group was starting to work more like Titanes del Ring with shows every Sunday in the Coloseo 12 de Octubre in El Alto, and several different tour companies helping them to attract foreign tourists to their shows. However, while Titanes del Ring usually garnered between 150-200 foreign tourists per week, LIDER only had about 20.

Lucha Fuerza Extrema (LFX) was another group, started in 2005 by the sons of Sombra Vengadora: Sombra Jr., and Vampiro Uno. During the time of my fieldwork, LFX was a growing group, focused on “extreme” wrestling, in which they used items like chairs, tables, ladders, light bulbs, thumb tacks, and anything else that was breakable or hard enough to hit with. Like the schedule of LIDER when I first began fieldwork, LFX performed sporadically and at different locations around La Paz and El Alto. Roberto attributed their lack of events to internal arguments.

Super Catch is the fourth lucha libre group in La Paz and the one with which I worked most closely. The group was formed in 2010, and I joined them in January of 2012. Between January and November of that year I trained with them a few times a week, appeared on local and national television talk shows about 15 times to promote the group, and wrestled in 5 live events.  Much of my dissertation is based on what I learned learned from that experience.

Each of these groups—LIDER, LFX, Super Catch, and Titanes del Ring—perform in the coloseos of La Paz and El Alto, though some more regularly than others. These venues, sometimes called arenas, do not appear like gynasiums of the United States. They are made almost entirely from concrete and are covered by a roof, but there is space between the tops of the walls and roof structure. The buildings are drafty and cold, especially after dark. Audience members who sit along the wall on concrete bleachers or on plastic chairs around the ring, usually wear heavy coats and sometimes bring a blanket to cover their legs.

For most of my time in La Paz Super Catch wrestlers moved around different venues, putting on shows once or twice per month—usually on a Friday night. Some venues, like the Coloseo de Villa Victoria (the same location where most LIDER shows took place from 2009-2011) were quite large and well known, but the group also put on shows in neighborhood parks or recreation centers. At the time I was finishing fieldwork, Super Catch was trying to negotiate for their events to be televised on the local television station, Palenque TV, in weekly shows under the name Tigres del Ring. 

Last October I wrote about the early history of lucha libre in Bolivia. In my dissertation I trace the history through the 1970s & 1980s through the present. Below I give you the 70s & 80s. The early history can be found here, and a description of the most recent "era" of lucha libre can be found here. 

Much of the information I learned about the history of lucha libre since the 1970s came from Roberto, a wrestler in the Super Catch group. Though he was only 24, he explained to me that “Yo era fanatico! Me metía dentro de los vestidores, escuchaba todo de los luchadores. Es por eso que sé casi toda la historia de la lucha libre en Bolivia.” [I was a fanatic [when I was a kid]. I snuck into the dressing rooms, I listened to all the wrestlers. That’s why I know almost all the history of lucha libre in Bolivia]. He explained to me that during the 1960s lucha libre events took place in the Perez Velasco, a commercial area just outside of central La Paz that is a popular market for working class and middle class people. Luchadores usually wrestled in a makeshift ring and set up seating in a fútbol field. As Roberto told me, the costumes of the luchadores were not as “llamativos” [flashy] then, and almost everything was improvised. But by the mid-seventies, the Olimpic Ring was built in the neighborhood of San Pedro, and with its opening began what Roberto suggests many refer to as the “epoca dorada de la lucha libre boliviana” [golden age of Bolivian wrestling]. 

By the 1980s however, imitation of Mexican luchadores was becoming more prevalent, with both names and costumes being “borrowed.” But this was also the period when some of the legendary figures of Bolivian lucha libre began. Roberto named two in particular: Sombra Vengadora and Medico Loco. Sombra Vengadora continues to wrestle to this day but Medico Loco passed away in 2010. 

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, interest in lucha libre waned in La Paz. But in the late 1990s, a major shift occurred when Bolivian lucha libre first appeared on television. In 1998, a group of luchadores calling themselves Furia de Titanes [Fury of Titans] who were regularly putting on shows at the Olimipic Ring noticed TV personality Adolfo Paco in the audience. They approached him about beginning a lucha libre program on Asociación Televisión Boliviana (ATB) channel 9, and he agreed. The program was filmed in the Coloseo de Villa Victoria, and was an immediate success, which Roberto attributed to the fact that the wrestlers were highly skilled. In addition to large television audiences, the group began attracting long lines of people hoping to see the shows taped live. Luchadores gained notoriety and were featured in local newspapers and magazines. With the addition of several corporate sponsors, luchadores earned about $200 per event. 

But this success was fleeting, because luchadores that Roberto characterized as less-skilled also offered their performances to Paco, he accepted, causing bitter arguments between the groups. By 1999, Furia de Titanes had split in two. Those on one side of the argument kept the name Furia de Titanes and remained on ATB, while others adopted the name Lucha de Campeones and began wrestling on the Uno network, channel 11. The rupture ultimately resulted in smaller audiences, which caused the sponsors to terminate their support and thus luchadores in both groups took home significantly less pay. Lucha de Campeones, for example, offered free entrance to their live shows to encourage larger audiences, but as a result luchadores made only 250 to 350 Bolivianos ($35-50 US) per event. The final problem, as Roberto explained, was that in the year 2000, several luchadores complained to Paco that they had never received the health insurance they had been promised. Paco ignored their requests and in retaliation, the luchadores refused to put on their event the next Sunday. “Y fue lo último. Ni siquiera pudieron despedirse de su público como se debe” [And that was the end. They couldn’t even say goodbye to their audience as they should have. “Desde entonces la lucha libre estuvo casi muerta en Bolivia” [Since then lucha libre has been almost dead in Bolivia].