ACROSS THE COUNTRY
WrestleMania? In Los Angeles, It’s LuchaMania.
Lucha libre, the Mexican version of professional wrestling, is thriving in Los Angeles, where the action and the masks draw fans to venues big and small.
WHY WE’RE HERE
We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. Wrestling rings across Los Angeles are where masked luchadores and luchadoras come to make their mark in the United States.
Photographs by Zaydee Sanchez
Reporting from Los Angeles
Amazona wrapped her legs and arms around Lady Lee like a pretzel, and then slammed her face first into the canvas. Amazona, with her thick red hair flowing from the back of a red mask, and her sequin suit glistening like the shine of her black high-laced boots, raised her arms in victory.
Amid the crackling of wooden noisemakers and scattered shouts from the crowd, one voice screaming “Amazona! Amazona!” stuck out. It belonged to her 6-year-old son. Amazona, who when she’s not sitting behind a desk at a logistics firm is elbow-smashing and body-slamming unfortunate souls, couldn’t line up a sitter.
You never know what’ll happen on lucha libre night.
Lucha libre is Mexican-style professional wrestling, with masked wrestlers, high-flying acrobatics and a mystical aura. In Mexico, the sport is both a national pastime and a showy vehicle for collective catharsis: For legions of fans, the fight inside the ring represents the real-life battles outside it. Lucha libre was lucha libre before Hulk Hogan was Hulk Hogan.
People in Los Angeles don’t have to go to Mexico to see lucha libre in action. Lucha libre comes to them.
The Los Angeles area is the beating, sweating heart of the pastime in America. Mexican wrestlers crisscross the region, performing at the nightclub Don Quixote, the Ukrainian Cultural Center and other venues from Boyle Heights to Carson to Irvine.
Millions of people will watch the Super Bowl of professional wrestling on Saturday and Sunday — the global extravaganza in Las Vegas known as WrestleMania. It’s John Cena and Cody Rhodes and Rey Mysterio at WrestleMania. But on a typical weekend in Los Angeles, it’s Psyco Clown and Doble Cara and Datura at the lower-budget lucha libre spectacles, whose mania is more working-class, more Spanish-inflected and less crowded.
Lucha libre in Los Angeles would be nothing without the luchadora, Spanish for female wrestler. Women often headline lucha libre cards, a popular counterpoint in an otherwise hypermasculine domain. Amazona and Lady Lee are from the Mexican border city of Tijuana. For them and other female wrestlers who cross the border to perform, Los Angeles presents a lifeline, providing economic opportunity and competition unparalleled at home.
“The pay is better, but apart from that there are more opportunities over here, more women wrestlers,” Amazona said. “In Tijuana, there are six of us. So there are very few of us and sometimes we don’t have enough for consistent work.”
Both Amazona and Lady Lee asked that their real names not be used, citing the importance of anonymity to their professional identities. The obscurity, they and other wrestlers said, helps the mythmaking and the marketing of their masked alter egos.
Years ago, women’s participation in lucha libre spawned a conservative backlash. For a long time, women were effectively banished from the sport in Mexico. When Lady Lee began competing professionally as a teenager, she wrestled almost exclusively against men. There was hardly a female competition pool in Tijuana. And despite progress over the years, sexism can still shape the sport.
Lady Lee recalled fighting on a card in Los Mochis in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, where the commissioner had to be persuaded at the last minute to allow her match to be the main event. “I thought he was joking,” Lady Lee said in Spanish. “We really felt that it was very sexist that he didn’t want to let us fight.”
At a small event hall in South Central Los Angeles one Sunday evening, no more than about 24 fans filled a few rows of classroom-style, hard-backed chairs around a tattered ring.
On other nights, the place hosts quinceñeras. Now, DJ-style lights swirled around, shining not on 15-year-olds in suits and dresses but on wrestling die-hards. One man with a noisemaker wore a vest covered with patches of lucha libre masks. Next to him was his girlfriend, who had a mask tattooed on her arm.
The show was unfolding in a pastel-colored building next to a small junkyard on Florence Avenue, with a card featuring both American wrestlers and masked luchadores. The promoter, Lucha Pro, started holding fights there in 2011.
Amazona, 32, and Lady Lee, 36, were the night’s main event. There was a smaller turnout than usual for the two women, both of whom made the two-hour drive from Tijuana. Fans were split between several wrestling events in the area that night, and word was that none achieved a full house.
Both fighters arrived late, wearing their masks. They had just come from fighting each other at another event across town. Some of their most loyal fans have never seen their unmasked faces.
“A big round of applause for Amazona,” the ring announcer said as she strode through the door, holding her duffel bag and her son by her side.
Amazona and Lady Lee laid out their merchandise on a table near the entrance: T-shirts, posters and masks. Lady Lee set out homemade cookies imprinted with her edible portrait.
Then they greeted a few fans before darting to the dressing room. It wasn’t an actual room, but a small corner of the room sectioned off by a purple curtain.
Gilberto Pérez, 51, munched chips from a bag as he took in the opening matches.
Mr. Pérez immigrated from Mexico to the Los Angeles area more than 20 years ago, and soon found that the sport he had enjoyed in his native town of Izúcar de Matamoros, in the state of Puebla, existed in the United States, too.
“I never imagined that there would be lucha libre here,” Mr. Pérez said. “But living here, I realized that there were a lot of really talented wrestlers with Mexican pedigree.”
Lucha libre started to take off in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, as Mexican immigration into the United States opened up new markets.
“Los Angeles’s place in the history of Mexican wrestling is huge, because it’s the first market where Mexicans become international, where Mexican superstars start fighting wrestlers from other countries,” said Javier Robles, who manages lucha libre wrestlers and owns Republic of Lucha, a lucha libre clothing brand. “And the American press loved it,” he added.
Back on Florence Avenue, a wrestler named Kayam made his ring entrance with a swagger to the sound of mariachi music. He’s lucha libre royalty, a Los Angeles-based luchador whose father was an acclaimed wrestler in Mexico known as El Chivo.
Kayam, 63, was getting ready to put up his mask. His South Central match was the second-to-last before his retirement. He still remembers what his father taught him about the ways of the luchador.
“He says, you have to understand that once you’re a pro wrestler, you’re different from the ordinary citizen walking on the street,” Kayam said. “You’re a performer. You’re something very, very special.” He said his father told him, “You have to always have that mask. You never walk out without your mask because you’re disrespecting the tradition.”
The night culminated with the two stars from Tijuana: Amazona vs. Lady Lee.
Amazona has masks for each occasion. She walked into the building wearing a black mask, but she stepped into the ring wearing a red one.
She was the protagonist of the match, or técnica in Spanish. Lady Lee played the role of the villain, or ruda. Between dizzying moves, Lady Lee taunted members of the crowd and picked on the referee.
The hall reverberated with loud slams, grunts and heckles. When Amazona finally emerged from the ring victorious, she was met with one final lunge — this time from her son, who jumped into her arms.
Zaydee Sanchez contributed reporting.
The photography for this story was supported by a grant from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Orlando Mayorquín is a Times reporter covering California. He is based in Los Angeles.
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