irony pt 1, cholita punk again

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. 

A luchador's son performs as "Chucky" at the 30 March 2012 Super Catch Event

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.