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Home Lifestyle Arts

Lucha libre and leather: Latinos rule the L.A. goth scene

August 28, 2025
in Arts, Entertainment, Music, News
Lucha libre and leather: Latinos rule the L.A. goth scene
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On a recent Saturday in July, as the sun set behind East L.A. club Don Quixote, a line of black-clothed and face-pierced youths chattered excitedly outside the venue.

Inside, luchadores were raring to wrestle, as alternative musicians touched up their eyeliner in anticipation of their performances at the Lucha Goth Haus — a recurring variety show in which the iconic Mexican sport of lucha libre meets the sounds of dark wave and industrial music.

The crowd’s alternative style was imbued with Latin flair: Latinos in black vaquero boots clicked their heels against the concrete, while lace veils flowed above their carefully teased hair. Many of their faces, painted a ghostly white, were framed by embroidered Tejano hats — and one massive mariachi sombrero.

Among the city’s Latino community, a gothic renaissance is growing. In the music, fashion and expression that incorporates post-punk rebellion into Latin American culture, Angelenos are reviving a decades-long countercultural tradition, while redefining outdated ideas of what goth can be.

In recent pop culture, goth Latinos were placed firmly in the foreground of Tim Burton’s hit Netflix series “Wednesday.” Inspired by the classic television-turned-film series “The Addams Family,” Jenna Ortega plays the beloved character Wednesday Addams, who dresses only in black and wields a brooding stare.

Ortega, who is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, sparked a fashion movement among her young fans, who dressed in the character’s signature dark, macabre style. Ortega’s role as Wednesday has helped expand a renewed interest in goth culture.

Luis Guzmán, the actor continuing the legacy of fellow Puerto Rican performer Raul Julia as Gomez Addams, said that “Wednesday” represents an embracing of the weird and unusual: “Our show shows people that it’s OK to be who you are no matter what,” the actor told The Times in July. “It’s not about fitting in — it’s just about living your life, and it’s OK to be how you are.”

As Ortega and Guzmán’s characters have placed “unusual” Latinos in the mainstream, L.A.’s goth Latino community is thriving more than ever.

“I wouldn’t say Latinos are ‘taking over’ the goth scene in L.A.,” said Francisco Saenz, drummer for L.A. goth band Deceits. “I would say we are the scene.”

On any given night, roaming bands of proud Latino alternative kids can find each other in the streets and music venues of L.A., seeking a sense of gothic sanctuary and community solidarity.

The L.A.-born community collective LosGothsCo has made a name for itself by hosting events that celebrate Latino culture in tandem with the spirit of alternative experimentation that defines the goth community.

Eddie Escalante, a Salvadoran American artist who fuses Latin urban sounds with atmospheric rock, performed at the collective’s Lucha Goth Haus show in a purple-lit wrestler’s cage, with silver paint glinting from his neck and his guitar strings.

“The newer musicians like me, we’re uniting those old and new, who feel like reggaetón isn’t the only genre Latinos can love and be represented by,” said Escalante. “But it can be alternative too.”

In an alleyway outside his performance, the post-punk two-piece band Deceits echoed Escalante’s sentiments.

“We might love goth, but we also love to have fun — puro desmadre,” said Kevin Moreno, Deceits’ lead vocalist. “When you think of goth, you think of brooding. But we’re all just people who love the music. We’re embracing those musical roots but we add our own flavor to it.”

Goth, as its known today, is marked by a love for the macabre. Gothic art, architecture and literature are defined by a dark romanticism and otherworldliness, from the famous raven at Edgar Allen Poe’s door to the stony Gothic cathedrals of Europe, hallmarked by their ornate, archways pointed toward the heavens.

Musically, goth formed from the ashes of England’s punk scene. The jagged guitar riffs of the 1970s were refined by shadowy post-punk bands like Joy Division and Bauhaus, which then paired well with the mystical echoes of synths deployed by the Cure, the Smiths and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Outside the U.K., African American blues singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was leaving spellbinding impressions on an Australian avant-gardist named Nick Cave.

Meanwhile, in Latin America, the mournful tones of traditional boleros and rancheras gave way to more alternative expressions of heartache, influenced by anglophone artists and accented with distinctly Latino flourishes of romance. As rock en español acts like Los Prisioneros and Soda Stereo swept South America with their takes on new wave, Mexican rock band Caifanes blended post-punk melancholia with folk tradition in their 1988 cover of the Cuban cumbia song “La Negra Tomasa” — a perfect marriage of Latin American and goth sensibilities.

“The goth scene in L.A. is definitely having a renaissance right now,” said Carla Carrillo, a local nurse and longtime goth. “I’ve been goth for years, and now there’s so many new bands coming out … events, clubs and people entering the scene. And L.A. is where it’s happening.”

Latino goths in the local music and event space also use their platforms for more than representing a subculture — they also show support for immigrants, especially as ICE continues targeting communities across Southern California, fueled by Trump’s promise of the “largest mass deportation operation” in American history.

Deceits drummer Saenz is a teacher in a neighborhood made up almost entirely of children of immigrants. For Moreno and Saenz, who are children of immigrants themselves, speaking up just made sense.

Their latest performance, which took place at a newer goth night at Hollywood’s Knucklehead Club called SexBeat, raised funds for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

Rey Garcia, organizer of SexBeat, is another mainstay of the scene. Having amassed a following online using the nickname “Goth Tio,” Garcia inspires young goths to dance unabashedly — in his videos, he swings his own body to industrial and funk music, while wearing a signature black vaquero hat.

Garcia believes that helping immigrants is an essential tenet of the L.A. goth philosophy.

“This is just kind of how the goth community operates. Let’s get together, let’s listen to the music we love and still support the people that are being directly impacted by these issues,” Garcia said. “There’s a whole resurgence from people just discovering goth for the first time, and I want them to feel that acceptance that I felt.”

Andres Martinez, co-founder of events collective LosGothsCo, still remembers the significance of helping to organize what would become the group’s signature event: Gothicumbia. (Imagine a late-night carne asada, but with more haunting music.)

“It was one of those nights where you just felt like something cool was about to happen,” Martinez said. “Even for that first time, it felt familiar, like a family party of some sort. At the end of the night, when the dance floor’s poppin’ and you’re looking around … you’re like, man, it feels so cool to be part of this. People were relating to the event, to each other.”

From its humble beginnings at downtown dive bar La Cita, Gothicumbia has drawn black sheep from all over the city — and has since traveled from Riverside to San Francisco.

LosGothsCo held its Gothicumbia homecoming party on Aug. 15 at the Regent in downtown L.A., where a grimly fiendish procession of DJs spinning the sounds of cumbia, new Latin alternative, post-punk and rock en español.

As leather-clad Latinos entered the theater, they were greeted with giant skeletons, handheld rave lights and a packed dance floor.

“I grew up [in] a time where there weren’t nightclubs like this for us,” Martinez said. “It was either being the black sheep at the Latin clubs or going to the goth club that was always playing the same music. Gothicumbia was something I wish I had when I first started out in the scene.”

Besides its musical offerings, Gothicumbia has developed a reputation for harboring the most inventive Latin goth fashion. Women arrive adorned with black lace hairpieces and painted tears a la Virgencita, as men blend dark accents with their Chicano workwear and vaquero boots.

Daisy Linsangan is a familiar face at local goth nights — most recently found dancing at Gothicumbia in August, lost in the sounds of the Cure and Anecito Molina. Best known by her online and go-go dancing moniker, hell_fairy, she twirls in lace and leather, both on and offstage.

“I feel like with any fashion, it is a tool to express yourself, and when you express yourself, you show your most true authentic self,” Linsangan said.

“When I go to my nine-to-five [job], I don’t have my white face paint on. I have to speak in a certain way, kind of white-coded. When I can go out on these nights, I feel like I can truly be myself.”

After another LosGothsCo event came to a close, there was an aura of joy that radiated from the crowd and permeated the East L.A. night air.

“Awesome,” said one hair-sprayed and corseted Chicana to another. “What’s next?”

The post Lucha libre and leather: Latinos rule the L.A. goth scene appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

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