Photo courtesy of Bolivian wrestler, Mr. Atlas
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Lucha libre, or freestyle/exhibition wrestling in Bolivia is similar to "exhibition-style" or professional in much of Latin America, including Mexico. 

As part of this increased visibility of Mexican wrestling in the 1950s, luchadores began traveling throughout Latin America putting on events. Huracán Ramirez and Rayo de Jalisco were among those who spent time in Bolivia. They also trained new wrestlers in the cities they visited. Some early Bolivian wrestlers included: Mr. Atlas, Principe [The Prince], SI Montes, Medico Loco [Crazy Doctor], and Diablo Rojo [Red Devil].

During the 1960s lucha libre events took place in the Perez Velasco, a commercial area just outside of central La Paz, popular among working class and middle class people. Luchadores usually wrestled in a makeshift ring and set up seating in a fútbol field. The costumes during this time were not particularly flashy and almost everything was improvised. But by the mid-1970s, the Coliseo Olimpico [Olympic Coliseum], a 7500 seat sports arena, was built in the central neighborhood of San Pedro, leading to more visibility.

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 Coliseo Olimpico, 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, in a more peripheral neighborhood of La Paz, and was an immediate success. 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 not all were highly skilled, and Paco was undiscerning. This caused bitter arguments among the wrestlers. By 1999, Furia de Titanes had split in two. Those who kept the name Furia de Titanes remained on ATB, while others adopted the name Lucha de Campeones [Champions’ Wrestling] and began wrestling on the Uno network, channel 11. The rupture ultimately resulted in smaller audiences, in response to which sponsors terminated 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. In the year 2000, several luchadores complained to Paco that they had never received the health insurance he had promised them. Paco ignored their requests and in retaliation, the luchadores refused to put on their event the next Sunday. They never appeared on television again. However, 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 includes a number of groups in La Paz: Titanes del Ring, LIDER, and Super Catch, among them. Each of these groups also include "cholitas luchadoras," otherwise known as "cholitas luchadoras" [fighting cholitas].
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I had a few days that were emotionally rough last week, and on Saturday afternoon I decided the best thing to do was go to the beach for a head-clearing walk. As I hopped off the bus at Playa Cavancha, I felt a buzz in my pocket. I sat down on a bench and looked at my phone.

Edgar, my former lucha libre trainer had sent me a message using his usual method-facebook. In all caps (which I will not replicate here, to save your eyes), he wrote:

     Nell, el evento grande es el 28 de octubre. Puedes estar aqui para esa fecha? Entraras conmigo.

     Nell, the big event is October 28. Can you be here for that day? You’ll wrestle with me.

As it happens, 28 October is my birthday and I had been trying to come up with an excuse to go to La Paz around then anyway. So I replied with an immediate yes. Edgar and I then set about making plans in terms of training, publicity, costumes, and the event, which will be a benefit show to raise funds for children in La Paz with cancer. 

But none of that really mattered. I couldn’t sit still. I started walking along the beach while continuing to send facebook messages with my phone. In the midst of the conversation with Edgar I was sending messages to my best friends in La Paz and New York. I sent messages to colleagues in Washington, DC and Chicago. I sent messages to my parents and sister. I sent a message to my favorite bartender who is a huge WWE fan.

I tried to sit again. Edgar had taken his leave from the internet café where he had been writing me. I needed to talk to someone. I needed to gush. I pulled out a book to distract myself, but I couldn’t pay attention to the words. My legs were shaking. My fingers couldn’t stop tapping. I wanted to be in the ring. RIGHT NOW!

I suppose, in a way, I see this as evidence of the success of my dissertation fieldwork. Not in an academic sense. Not even that the people I learned from like me enough to want me to come back for a visit. But it was successful because it’s in my body. Every time I return to La Paz a sudden wave of excitement comes over me. On the June day that I woke up in Lima, ready for a two hour flight to Bolivia, I couldn’t stop smiling. Arriving in La Paz makes my body feel different. A certain hard to attain comfort. It feels like going home.

Wrestling, in a way, is the opposite of that comfort. Wrestling hurts. Muscles are sore, joints feel out of place. Necks are stiff, and just walking down stairs is nearly impossible the day after. Not to mention the dehydration and oxygen deprivation that go along with physical activity in the altiplano. But wrestling also does something else. It gives a jolt of adrenaline. It hurts, but it’s playful. It’s fun. But the kinda of fun that can’t be replicated alone. You need a partner. One you can trust. And for all the tension that may exist outside the ring, I trust Edgar 100% when I’m about to do tijeras.

But then I started to worry. I won’t be able to arrive until the day before. It’s been almost a year since I even trained in the ring. Will my body remember how to do it? Will twists feel awkward or come naturally. Is this like riding a bike or speaking a language? I can only hope the muscle memory remains. 

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.

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].

On my first day of training, when Edgar asked if I’d rather my traje have pants or a pollera, I immediately knew pants made more sense. Perhaps they would not provide the visual beauty of a pollera swirling through the air, but they certainly would be easier to wrestle in. And Edgar was not the only person who suggested I wrestle in a pollera. The LIDER luchadoras, Juanita and Benita were constantly trying to get me into one. On a Friday afternoon while we sipped coffee at a stall in Mercado Lanza, the two giggled trying to decide what color pollera would look best on me. Juanita was wearing a blue sparkly shawl and Benita’s was white. They took turns holding them up to my fact to see what color would look nice on a gringa. Even at my dissertation defense, I was asked why I didn’t wear a pollera to wrestle. 

during my dissertation defense, I explain-oh so eloquently-why I do not wear a pollera to wrestle 

My answer, simply, is that I have no right to wear a pollera. The pollera is often considered to be the most visible symbol of Bolivian indigeneity, which is not just a racial category, but a class-based subjectivity and a political identification. The pollera has a long history, from being institutionalized dress for hacienda workers to a visible symbol of working-class women’s political protest throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Wearing the pollera is not just a clothing choice, but is a performance of identification with these histories and contemporary associations. As a gringa with no stake in any of these categories associated with the pollera, it seemed that for me to wrestle in one would appear as a farce.

Sure, seeing a gringa in a pollera might be just as amusing for Bolivians as the “cholitas luchadoras” are for the foreigners that flock to their shows. But that doesn’t mean that I have a right to wear one. As Jaya Bedi writes so eloquently, “The political context in which cultural symbols exist is important. Cultural appropriation happens — and the unquestioned sense of entitlement that white Americans display towards the artifacts and rituals of people of color exists too. All ‘appropriation’ is not merely an example of cultural sharing, an exchange between friends that takes place on a level playing field.”

And I think my position is actually strengthened by the time I did wear a pollera (outside of the ring). When I appeared at Shirley’s party in a pollera and Gonz shouted “cholita punk.” My friends were amused because my representation was ironic. As I write in my dissertation (I think it’s still in there, but Cholita Punk was sadly cut), “Irony often functions as a ‘frame shifting’ mechanism (Coulson 2001) in order to express humor. When I entered the party wearing a pollera, Gonz shouting ‘cholita punk’ shifted the frame from the representation of cholitas as traditional and thoroughly Bolivian icons, to something integrated with the international youth culture of punk rock. Even my own laughter at wearing the pollera and braids played on the disjuncture of a U.S. gringa in clothing with cultural meaning in the Andes. And most certainly, when Luis suggested I wrestle, irony was used to disrupt the usual interpretation of a mujer de pollera.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the ways cholitas are no longer merely a form of local subject, but now are globally active citizens (I have 2 chapters on that). But the point remains that for a gringa to appear in public (versus the private party) in a pollera most certainly degrades the rich history of the skirt and the complex ways of identifying employed by the women who wear them daily. And we must not forget that ways of identifying are not neutral. The “chola,” the mujer de pollera, the indígena are marginalized and historically stigmatized categories in Bolivia. And the “Bolivian woman” in general is discriminated against all over the hemisphere, from Buenos Aires to Phoenix. 

Again I refer to Bedi, who writes, “If the use of the bindi by mainstream pop stars made it easier for South Asian women to wear it, I’d be all for its proliferation — but it doesn’t. They lend the bindi an aura of cool that a Desi woman simply can’t compete with, often with the privilege of automatic acceptance in a society when many non-white women must fight for it.” To paraphrase her, what makes a white woman’s use of the pollera problematic is the fact that a gringa wearing one is guaranteed to be better received than if a Bolivian woman were to step out of the house rocking one. On me, it would be a bold new look (sure to catch lots of stares, but no one’s going to shew me away from a fancy restaurant). On a Bolivian woman it’s yet another marker of her Otherness. A symbol of her failure at whiteness, at cosmopolitanism, to participate in a global citizenship. 

Dina, Juanita, and Claudina (from LIDER) show off their bad, cosmopolitan selves

Of course the cholitas luchadoras work hard to combat this image of the mujer de pollera as local not global, stigmatized not empowered, marginalized not powerful. And they have made excellent advances. But we’re not there yet. Despite the mujeres de pollera that have been elected or appointed to high profile government positions, it is still an Other form of dress. One worth celebrating. But not yet ready to be paraded in public as the funny thing the gringa’s wearing. Maybe some day…..but for now my beautiful pollera will stay in a closet in Illinois. 

Though almost every veteran luchador in Bolivia tells the story a little differently, it was during the time of nationalism in the decade following the 1952 Revolution that lucha libre made its first appearance in Bolivia. The form of wrestling that developed in Bolivia already had a long history. Charles Wilson (1959) has traced exhibition wrestling to army men in Vermont in the early 19th century. During the civil war organized bouts became popular among Union troops. After the war, saloons in New York City began promoting matches to draw customers. By the end of the 19th century PT Barnum was using wrestling “spectaculars” in his circus. At first, wrestlers would fight untrained “marks” from the audience, but by the 1890s they began to fight trained wrestlers planted in the audience. It was then that it changed from a “contest” to a “representation of a contest.” These spectaculars were very popular and were replicated at county fairs, which eventually resulted in intercity circuits by 1908 (Wilson 1959). By the 1920s, promoters began to add gimmicks to make characters more memorable.

In 1933, after character development, rules, and other conventions had been established, a promoter named Salvador Lutteroth brought exhibition wrestling to Mexico. He and his partner Francisco Ahumado set up their first wrestling event in Arena Nacional in Mexico City on September 21, 1933. The next year they began the Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre (Levi 2008:22). In the next few years, innovations in costuming, character, and technique further “Mexicanized” the genre. Levi argues that at this time the audience was likely made up of both popular classes as well as elites (2008:23). By the 1940s, lucha libre spectators were more from the popular classes, but it still retained a sense of urbanism and modernity (2008:23). In the 1950s, it began to attract a middle class audience on television, but it only remained broadcast for a few years. It was also during this time that it became a popular subject for hundreds of Mexican films (2008:23).

During this era, exhibition wrestling arrived in Bolivia. Most wrestlers suggest that lucha libre was first performed in Bolivia sometime between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, as Mexican wrestlers traveled to South America, performing and then training the first generation of Bolivian luchadores. Many of the most veteran Bolivian wrestlers who are still active in lucha libre identify these Mexican luchadores as their childhood inspiration. Rocky Aliaga, a Bolivian who currently wrestles in Spain told reporter Marizela Vazquez, “From my childhood I was fan of wrestling and what excited me most was to attend events…of Mexican characters such as Huracán Ramirez, Rayo de Jalisco, and Lizmark.” In particular, Huracán Ramirez is often mentioned as one of the most important influences. Mr. Atlas, a veteran La Paz wrestler recalls, "I ​​started fighting when I was 13 in 1965, when the greats of Mexican wrestling arrived in La Paz. Particularly I remember Huracán Ramirez, the man who fathered me."

Younger wrestlers, like Anarquista from Santa Cruz, also note that the reputation of lucha libre in neighboring Perú was important to the formation and popularity of Bolivian wrestling. Mexican wrestlers toured South America, but it was the periodic visits by Peruvian wrestlers to La Paz that gained a hold in the 1960s. (7-23-2011). 

Today, there are four major wrestling organizations currently operating in La Paz: LIDER (Luchadores Independientes de Enorme Riesgo), LFX (Lucha Fuerza Extrema), Super Catch, and Titanes del Ring. LIDER, LFX, and Super Catch are smaller than Titanes del Ring, and only Titanes and LIDER have permanent places of performance. These two groups host foreign tourists in their El Alto performance venues each week, though Titanes del Ring boasts a much larger crowd and much larger group of travelers than LIDER. Super Catch usually produces shows in neighborhoods such as Villa Victoria (nicknamed Villa Balazos because of the frequency of shootings in the area), Villa Copacabana, or Villa Armonía—all working class neighborhoods of La Paz. However their schedule is somewhat sporadic. They have also recently opened a training program for young wrestlers that remains small. LFX is the smallest and least known of the operations with rare performances. Titanes del Ring, conversely, consistently attracts 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). 

My favorite example of the ironic appreciation of lucha libre, which I saw live on Friday night, is the band Surfin Wagner. I first heard of them because the lead singer was a friend of a friend, but quickly discovered they had quite a following of Paceños. The band’s name is derived from a famous Mexican luchador, Dr. Wagner, otherwise known as Manuel González Rivera. He began wrestling in the 1960s as a rudo, but by the early 1980s—when the members of Surfin Wagner and my friends were young children—he had become a technico. In 1985 he lost his match in a well-publicized event and essentially retired. 

The band, like my friends who I wrote about here, creates humor using a frame shifting strategy by combining lucha libre aesthetics with surf music. The band members use lucha libre inspired names (Pedro Wagner, Médiko Loko—a misspelling of famous Mexican luchador Médico Loco, Roy Fucker—after a Japanese anime character later used in Mexican wrestling, El Momia, and Comando—both popular characters in Bolivian wrestling), and wear lucha libre head-masks along with their Hawai'ian print shirts. They describe their music as “el Garage, el punk y principalmente el Surf, siempre con un toque de sátira e ironía” [garage rock, punk, and principally surf, always with a touch of satire and irony]. The “biography” of the band on their website suggests that the band members are legitimate luchadores (again with irony), and they point out the incongruity of a surf band in a country without access to the sea. Clearly their use of the lucha libre aesthetic is meant to evoke laughter rather than contribute to a serious musical appreciation. 

So, over these last three posts, I've tried to give a sense that for many Paceños lucha libre in general, and the cholitas luchadoras’ participation specifically, are a light-hearted representation of Latin American culture. In a sense, lucha libre is positioned as authentically Latin American in a now-globalized world. As they combine cholas with punk culture or classic Mexican luchadores with surf rock, they reterritorialize these “traditional” icons by merging them with global symbols.
 

When Super Catch wrestlers made appearances on morning and evening national talk shows, another kind of irony was present. Granted, Latin American talk show hosts are not known for being subtle, but the overacted excitement, fear, and horror these hosts communicated verged on the clowning Edgar was always so adamantly against. 

When Super Catch wrestlers made appearances on morning and evening national talk shows, another kind of irony was present. Granted, Latin American talk show hosts are not known for being subtle, but the overacted excitement, fear, and horror these hosts communicated verged on the clowning Edgar was always so adamantly against. 

In March and April of this year, Super Catch luchadores (including myself) appeared on the Univision morning program, Revista, five times. Though the show has four hosts, it was always Tony Melo who interviewed us, and sometimes even donned a luchador mask acting as a mark for the luchadores. The segment always featured a brawl between wrestlers, and often Tony would be pulled into the grappling. The peleas always ended with Super Catch luchadores ganging up on Tony, as he was flung around the sound stage and mock kicked after being thrown to the floor. He very much acted as the clown figure in these situations, flailing arms, and making exaggerated faces for the camera. He always wore a curly wig, and t-shirt that said “Soy No. 1.” 

In contrast, the luchadores seemed more serious. Our costumes were clearly better constructed. Our moves were more practiced and more effective in contrast to Tony’s. But much like Edgar’s worries about the cholitas luchadoras, Tony’s clownish acting gave an air of farce to the wrestling that happened on television. 

No luchadores ever commented on this except to roll their eyes occasionally when Tony was mentioned in the backstage area. Nor did I have a chance to ask Tony or the program producers what their intentions were with the way they presented lucha libre. But the audience for Revista is much larger and far more varied than the in-person audiences which actually attend events. There were viewers that phoned in to win free entry to the event, often saying they hailed from working class neighborhoods like Villa Armonía in La Paz or Villa Esperanza in El Alto. But this is also a television program which professional Paceños watch as they prepare in the morning for work as managers in banks, universities, and international organizations. Thus, the fact that Tony’s acting on the program reflects the ironic appreciation of lucha libre is not surprising. Though TV interviewers always treated all the luchadores with respect, their over-acted treatment of the segments seemed to stem not only from their television personalities, but from a deeper sense of irony they were communicating to viewers.

One of the peer reviewers for my JLACA article suggested that I include more information about what “elite” Paceños think of lucha libre. I didn’t think this fit well into the article, but I do think the general public’s reactions to lucha libre are something interesting to be considered. This is part one of a short series on middle class interpretations of lucha libre.

The luchadoras are “un orgullo Paceño en La Paz y El Alto” [A Paceño pride in La Paz and El Alto] David, a local LGBT activist told me. “Es una pasion de multitudes…la gente burguesa y popular” [It’s a passion of the multitudes. The elite and popular classes]. It was not exactly my experience that they were the “passion” of middle class people, but they were certainly within the realm of popular discussion topic. As I wrote about here, one night at a party I put on a pollera and braided my hair. Gonz was the only one there who knew my secret, so when Luis, shouted “Tienes que luchar! Como las cholitas en la lucha libre” I was caught off guard. Amidst much laughter we all started pretending to wrestle.

To my friends at the party, the luchadoras are something of a joke that carries classed inflection. Like a monster truck rally or square dance might be viewed by urban elites in the United States, lucha libre is not disparaged outright, but seen with a certain sense of dismissal or ironic appreciation. Here they express an understanding of the preference for the genres of excess that has often been classed. As Linda Williams explains of film genres, those that have a particularly low cultural status—horror, pornography, and melodrama—are ones in which “the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen” (1991:4). These films, rather than appealing to elite classes as “high art” are seen to be for the less educated, less “cultured” masses. 

And indeed, lucha libre combines aspects of all three of these film types. The enacted violence of the ring reflects the gratuitous violence of horror films. The intimate contact of bodies, and sometimes explicit sexually charged scenarios can be read as pornographic (see Messner, et. al 2003, Rahilly 2005). And several scholars have pointed to the melodramatic nature of the extreme good and evil portrayed in exhibition wrestling (Jenkins 2007, Levi 2008). Thus, for many of my friends lucha libre lies squarely within the bounds of that which is not to be appreciated—at least on an artistic or serious level. 

However, like North American young people, young Paceños sometimes have ironic appreciation for degraded cultural symbols like lucha libre. Irony often functions as a “frame shifting” mechanism (Coulson 2001) in order to express humor. When I entered the party wearing a pollera, Gonz shouting “cholita punk” shifted the frame from the representation of cholitas as traditional and thoroughly Bolivian icons, to something integrated with the international youth culture of punk rock. Even my own laughter at wearing the pollera and braids played on the disjuncture of a U.S. gringa in clothing with cultural meaning in the Andes. And most certainly, when Luis suggested I wrestle, irony was used to disrupt the usual interpretation of a mujer de pollera.

Coulson, Seana
2001  Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Jenkins, Henry
2007  The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: New York University Press.

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

Messner, Michael A,, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Cheryl Cooky
2003 Silence, Sports Bras, And Wrestling Porn : Women in Televised Sports News and Highlights Shows. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 27:38-51.

Rahilly, Lucia
2005  Is RAW War?: Professional Wrestling as Popular S/M Narrative. In Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling. Nicholas Sammond, ed.  Durham: Duke University Press.

Williams, Linda
2001  Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess. Film Quarterly 44(4):2-13.