Katharsis! Mexican Wrestling Images, 1940–2007

Introduced into popular entertainment during the 1930s, wrestling became something more than a mere diversion for sports fans. The modern practitioners of a tradition that echoes the gladiatorial combats of ancient Rome and Aztec warriors draw on the collaboration of audiences who refuse to conform to the role of mere spectators. The wrestling arena is transformed into places of complex and rambunctious theatricality.

On wrestling posters and programs is always present–either in its abbreviated or implicit form–the word versus, a term of Latin origin which, and not only in that particular sports spectacle, names the confrontation of two sides. Some etymology scholars of Spanish have described as a barbarism the derivation of an etymon that originally meant the action of moving or displacement –verso: go towards–, and blame the English for setting it into circulation.

Among the many war simulacra that compete for the free time of the Mexicans, there is no versus of greater versatility, colorfulness, and allegoric potential as the one raised and solved, only to be raised again in infinite combinatorials, on the wrestling stage. On the ring and its surroundings not only the bodies of fierce combatants are braided; but also the symbols, characters and powers they
represent are confronted.

Subduings, locks, blows, acrobatics, flights and drops of the gladiators are the alphabet of wrestling as a body language. The graphic reporters in charge of the journalistic chronicles of the events on the ring learned to decipher and foresee the evolutions of such dance.

Just as plays performed by actors, dancers and circus artists, those embodied by wrestlers are also ephemeral and unrepeatable. Only through images as those taken by such skillful and well-trained photographers like Rosalío Vera, official chronicler of today presentations held at the Arena Mexico, it is possible to appreciate those moments when the athletes become Icari.

At the same time that Mexican wrestling was establishing itself as a show between the 1930s and 1950s, the reincarnations of gladiators became transformed into material suitable for specialized publications. That process resembled what other sports went through whose fans were transformed into consumers of images, news, reportage, and trivia concerning the events and championships.

The gladiators are very well aware that without those images, a basis for other types of replicas, silhouettes, and montages, the splitting of personality that converts them into mythological figures is impossible.

Debtor and beneficiary of that collective taste for disguise and splitting personality, Mexican wrestling has made the mask one of the most colorful forms of expression. The experts still discuss the genealogy of the masked wrestlers. They place the first gladiators to enter the ring with the face hidden in New York in 1933: Jim Atts and Masked Marvel.

From the old days when El Murciélago Velásquez terrified the public with flying bats that accompanied his appearance, to the present day when Místico can be seen in the ring as well as in sitcoms, the masks that revived Mexican wrestling constitute a story to be read at various levels.

Just like their male colleagues, women wrestlers were a subject for photographic portraiture and the cameras of reporters who supplied the specialized publications with graphic material. The photographer Hans Gutmann, of German descent—who changed his name to Juan Guzmán—was a correspondent in Mexico of Life and Time who covered the appearances of outstanding US women wrestlers, Mildred Burke, among others, in Mexico City.

Forty years later, Lourdes Grobet photographed La Briosa in her dual status of wrestler and mother. These and other images of female wrestling matches should not be regarded simply as documents relative to the evolution of a sporting spectacle. They become even more significant when accepted as evidence of the positive and transgressive activity of femininity not to be characterized in accordance with traditional standards.

Since the middle of the 20th century, there is a place reserved on Mexico’s Olympus for the glittering of a silvery mask. Few civilian or military heroes, athletes, movie stars, or other deservedly renowned personalities have attained the mythological heights of the wrestler who fought in such a hood and under a name with an explicit religious connotation: Santo: El Enmascarado de Plata.

Once retired from wrestling, Santo devoted himself to escapist pursuits. His death on February 5, 1984 deeply moved the Mexicans who had seen in the silver mask the emblem of a guardian angel. One of Rodolfo Guzmán’s sons, El Hijo de El Santo [Son of El Santo], has followed the footsteps of The Man in the Silver Mask into the real and fictitious worlds in which the adventures of wrestling take place.

Because of the intimacy, almost familial, between idols and fans, part of the wrestling show takes place at the seats and in the galleries. Collaborating in the creation of the mystique of wrestling are all those present in the arena: the souvenir vendor, a boy wearing the mask of a favorite wrestler, the woman inexhaustibly screaming insults, the photographers hovering around the ring.

“I really admired El Santo. I, Chilicas, wanted to be him. I’d mimic his gestures, I’d stand like him. One day I went up to him and said: <<Look, Santo, I really admire you —you see how I hold my hands like you, stand like you?>>. Little by little I won him over. He gave me a camera and told me: <<Look, Chilicas, I’m giving you a top-notch camera, a first-class Retinette model 1>>. It’s thanks to El Santo that I became a photographer."