On a recent Sunday afternoon, hundreds gathered at a warehouse in South-Central Los Angeles to celebrate one of Mexico’s greatest cultural exports.
Curated by Mano Pesada Productions, the Lucha Libre Art Show highlighted 38 works — photographs, sculptures and paintings — inspired by the vibrant sport. The event also featured live DJ sets from a booth set atop a wrestling ring, which was used later in the evening for two matches organized by local promotion MFN Lucha.
Lucha libre has long been popular in Los Angeles and Southern California. The now defunct Grand Olympic Auditorium began hosting matches in the 1950s, and Angelenos can find countless events popping up at venues like warehouses and pool halls to local institutions like Don Quixote and the Ukrainian Culture Center. Over the decades, the acrobatic form of wrestling and its colorful masks have become among the most visible totems of Mexican and Mexican American identity in the region.
Curiously enough, the first person to wear a mask inside the ring in Mexico was actually Corbin James Massey, an Irish American wrestler who fought under the moniker La Maravilla Enmascarada (the “Masked Wonder”) in 1934 for Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre, the oldest wrestling promotion in the world that now goes by Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL).
“I wanted to focus the nostalgia lucha libre brings for me and other Latinos,” Manny Martinez, the show’s curator, said, adding that he thought the sport was “a hot topic right now too because with what is politically happening, with the ICE raids. People see [it] as a symbol of hope.”
Indeed, a yearning for the past was a recurring motif found in several of the pieces exhibited, while others employed the striking aesthetics and the good-versus-evil narrative of lucha libre matches to deliver political messages. In graphic artist Pepe Te Adoro’s “Con Mascaras Y Sin Papeles,” a masked luchador has a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in a back-bending hold as his hands grip over the agent’s eyes as his mouth twists in agony.
“There’s something freeing about lucha,” photographer Daniel Velazquez said. His displayed work was a photo of a drag queen wrestler baring her chest as her opponent looks on. “It’s storytelling and connection, and because they’re behind masks, they represent more to us. They could be fighting for whatever we can imagine.”
“I titled mine ‘A return to an organic shape,’ which to me represented [human’s] natural urge to connect,” exhibiting artist Jackie Sanchez said of her oil painting depicting a luchador mid-grapple. “As a kid watching luchadores on TV, it was an experience that I could share with my family, and to feel closer to them.”
One of the most imposing pieces was a painting titled “The Fight,” a large canvas depicting two figures in a tense embrace. Although inspired by Italian Baroque and Renaissance art, the artist veered away from Jesus and the Madonna, instead making his subjects the iconic Mexican luchadores El Santo and Blue Demon, recognizable by their respective silver and blue masks. Their covered heads lean together in pain and excitement as El Santo clasps his opponent’s neck.
“Many kids’ childhood heroes were superheroes. Ours were the luchadores,” said artist Isaac Pelayo. “It inspired me, the way the mask and the show let us escape reality for a few moments.”
Pelayo compared lucha libre to a Mexican version of ballet, one whose participants “just happen to be wearing masks, tights, boots and a cape on occasion.”
That marriage of theatricality and athletic grace was on full display hours after the event commenced. The house lights dimmed as attendees filed out of the gallery space to witness the first match of the evening between Adrian Quest and Skalibur, a heel who wore a monster-inspired mask. The main event was even campier — a Michael Jackson impersonator by the name of Santana Jackson jumped to his toes, snapped and ‘Hee-hee’-d as he leaped from the ropes onto his beefy Italian opponent, Vino Fratelli.
After watching “Mexican MJ” fly through a door before eventually emerging victorious, Iris Marlene Lupercio Lupian returned to the gallery to check in on her screen-printed design, which brandishes the luchador around the words: “Luchando por los trabajadores (Fighting for the workers).”
“UUP [United Union Professionals] is my union, which I was very involved in before being fired by my employer in retaliation,” Lupercio Lupian said. “The luchador to me represents fighting to make a difference.”
For Mexican-born artist Jacobo Ramirez, lucha libre is for everyone, noting how the sport is revered in places like Japan.
“I’ve seen lucha libre reach so many people since I was a kid in Mexico. I know people in Japan love it and it’s now trendy here… I think it’s because it crosses borders,” Mexican-born Ramirez said. His illustration “Sacred Masks” depicts a luchador wearing a kabuto, a traditional samurai warrior helmet.
“Lucha libre is a reflection of our journey as immigrants,” Ramirez said. “It’s like when I entered this country, masked, but fighting to move forward.”
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