Literature Review

one method, ‘…relies on pleasure in recognition, […] galleries summon their visitors

to convert archival memory into repertoire through their own affective responses,

triggering re-performance in the spectator of what once was experienced live if

not by them, then by others’.7 As museum visitors and lucha libre fans of varying

ages visited the museum on opening night, clad in t-shirts and face coverings

referencing their favorite luchadores, they arrived with an expectation of reliving

experiences through the archive. Performances also leave physical traces, like the

items in the museum’s exhibition. Objects in these collections, including costumes,

awards, photographs, and even fan memorabilia, are valuable evidence of the

environmental factors that make performances possible. While lucha libre is perhaps

most identifiable for its material culture through masks, few pieces of academic

study on the subject take an object-based approach. This project uses case studies

and objects to examine how contemporary luchadores in El Paso engage with

materiality. I propose that luchadores performing within specialized areas, as an

exótico and luchadora, exert agency through character design while navigating

constraints from performance tradition and gendered conventions. Using elements

that span the hair, body, and face, they also develop recognizable visual character

design traits that can be simplified and disseminated through other media with

reference to individuals rather than generic iconography.

First, it is important to note that, while some Spanish sources are part of

this study, most of the secondary literature used is in English or offered through

translation. Perhaps due to lucha libre’s growing international market, a significant

number of articles and books are offered in both English and Spanish, often with

texts in both languages presented side-by-side. In a 2015 special issue of Artes

de México on lucha libre, published in both English and Spanish, anthropologist

7 Susan Bennett, Theatre & Museums (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Adela Santana wrote: ‘Up until now, academics and intellectuals have approached

wrestling in much the same way they approach art: they identify symbols that they

first interpret and then classify. This process tends to clash with the way in which the

actual agents of a given field see or understand themselves’.8 Because of the ease

with which objects become distilled into iconography, Santana recognizes lucha

libre as performance that is fodder for creative possibility but prone to stereotyping.

Writers examining lucha libre through an academic lens often draw on a series of

tropes: as a representation of the larger political landscape, the justice system’s

symbolic distillation into good vs. evil, an offshoot of a violent society preoccupied

with ritual, primitive entertainment suitable for rural and working-class Mexican

people, or other ideas that work to characterize both wrestlers and audiences

through stereotype.

Santana points to glaring issues within this framing, particularly the use of

generalization and distance assumed between academics and audiences:

‘We have seen how important wrestling is for cultural producers, but if we are looking for studies on the topic, the only thing we will find are works that are extremely analytical and shroud the phenomenon in bombastic language. […] In order to truly gain a better understanding of lucha libre, we must begin with an exhaustive description of its reality and allow the performers to speak for themselves’.9

Material culture, especially the history of design, seeks to scrutinize objects and their

details to replace and re-perform historical context through people, addressing the

issues Santana describes. A material culture approach can bring the agency back

to luchadores within academic work through the objects they use. This notion is the

basis for this project’s approach, not as a history of lucha libre and the production

of meaning but as an investigation into how material culture contextualizes

8 Margarita de Orellana and others, ‘Lucha Libre: Stories with No Time Limit’, Artes de México, 119, 2015, 65–80 (p. 80) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/45228163> [accessed 9 May 2021]. 9 de Orellana and others, p. 80.

performance and agency.

One of the most dominant voices in lucha libre study is anthropologist

Heather Levi. Along with several articles in collections on professional wrestling,

Levi’s seven-month ethnographic study on lucha libre, with firsthand experience

training, interviewing, and competing as a luchadora, is recorded in the 2008 book

The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity. 10

Levi’s work is significant for its extensive collection of personal interviews and oral

histories, allowing fundamental forces in Mexico’s lucha libre landscape to speak for

themselves. Oral histories bring challenges, especially when speaking to interviewees

about events that occurred years or decades before the interview. In this case, there

may also be gatekeeping around parts of the industry that are not part of public

consumption. Levi is transparent with interviewees that the information they provide

may become part of a published study. She suspects, due to her role as a researcher,

interviewees possibly withhold information to safeguard industry secrets, especially

when discussing the mechanics behind match outcomes.11 She addresses this issue

by confirming information through other sources and providing commentary that

contextualizes the interviews.

Levi divides the book into six chapters that examine lucha libre’s placement

within theatre and sport, the secretive and protective atmosphere around

production, wrestlers and their personae, use of masks, representations of gender,

and the dissemination of lucha libre throughout Mexico and beyond. Notably, the

book interrogates lucha libre’s engagement with television and the internal politics

that kept the sport off Mexican airwaves from 1954 to 1991, especially the effect

on live performances and fears that athleticism would become overshadowed by

the theatrical aspects of the matches when broadcast.12 Furthermore, the move to

10 Heather Levi, Gilbert M. Joseph, and Emily S. Rosenberg, The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity (North Carolina, United States: Duke University Press, 2008). 11 Levi, Joseph, and Rosenberg, p. 33. 12 Levi, Joseph, and Rosenberg, p. 234.

television led to a divide among wrestlers pre- and post-broadcasting, with a split

between amateur and professional participation. The tension between mediated

and live performance is not limited to lucha libre, becoming heightened in many

different areas of creative practice as new media become accessible. This factor is

consequential to this study for the effect broadcasting had on costume. With cameras

around to capture their matches, luchadores sought out mask embellishments like

beaks, horns, and fringe to distinguish them from their opponents for television

audiences.13 New design elements also indicate a willingness to break from traditional

costumes to build a performance reputation through visual elements.

Levi’s work is a monumental contribution to the field, cited in English and

Spanish studies that engage with lucha libre and other issues through gender,

immigration, cinema, boxing, literature, journalism, politics, professional wrestling

in American, British and Japanese settings, and performance at large. However,

because Levi’s work is dominant, it creates a central narrative that includes

inaccurate information. Levi’s book bridges a gap in research around lucha libre,

but it also perpetuates points that deserve clarification, especially in relation to this

project. For example, when describing lucha libre’s origins, Levi writes that Salvador

Lutteroth viewed and attended matches in Eagle Pass, Texas.14 Newspapers from

1928 place Lutteroth in the El Paso/Juarez area as a representative to the Mexican

government with a delegation of El Pasoans from the city’s Chamber of Commerce,

indicating regular residence in the area.15 While Lutteroth may have conducted

business in Eagle Pass, which borders Piedras Negras in Coahuila, Mexico, the city

is also 471 miles (758 km) away from Juarez using modern roads. It is more likely

that Lutteroth attended matches in nearby El Paso during his leisure time before

returning to Mexico City and founding the Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre (EMLL).

13 Levi, Joseph, and Rosenberg, p. 111. 14 Levi, Joseph, and Rosenberg, p. 22. 15 ‘El Pasoans Will Fly to Mexico Ceremonies’, El Paso Evening Post (El Paso, Texas, 28 November 1928), p. 12 (p. 1), Newspapers.com <http://www.newspapers.com/ image/44351976/?terms=lutteroth&match=1> [accessed 28 August 2021].

It is possible Levi interpolated Eagle Pass for El Paso, a small detail but repeated in

other sources that use Levi’s work as a foundational material.

Furthermore, Levi makes a small but impactful error when discussing

Cassandro. Levi mentions Cassandro three times in her book but calls him ‘Cassandra’.

For example, Levi writes, ‘Adrian and Cassandra performed a style of wrestling that

shifted the role of exótico away from Gardenia Davis knockoffs toward a potentially

more subversive presentation’.16 Unfortunately, this detail undercuts the sentence’s

impact. While detailing the lineage of his current name, Cassandro, the subject of

the first case study, explains that his lucha libre moniker is a tribute to a woman

named Cassandra, but he was adamant about his gender identity and insisted on

changing the name to Cassandro.17 The mistake is as tiny as three letters within the

entire text, but these three are consequential for scholars looking at Levi’s book as

an entry point into lucha libre and Cassandro’s impact. Levi briefly engages with

object histories, specifically mask design and construction, helpful to this study.

However, her project is primarily phenomenological rather than object-focused.

Film director, artist, and researcher Nina Hoechtl also contributes an article that

includes Cassandro in 2017’s Performance and Professional Wrestling, a collection of

essays edited by Broderick Chow, Eero J. Laine, and Claire Warden. Hoechtl’s essay,

‘Wrestling with burlesque, burlesquing lucha libre’ features Cassandro and Lucha

VaVoom events, which combine lucha libre with Burlesque and comedy, playing

to audiences worldwide. Hoechtl’s article takes place in Los Angeles at the Mayan

Theatre. After the initial event, Hoechtl returns six more times to experience the

‘celebration of the entire spectrum’: bodies, ethnicities, sexualities, and genders.18

Like Levi, Hoechtl frames the article around personal experience but then analyzes

Karis and Cassandro’s performances through José Esteban Muñoz’s work on

16 Levi, Joseph, and Rosenberg, pp. 153–54. 17 William Finnegan, ‘The Man Without a Mask’, The New Yorker <https://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2014/09/01/man-without-mask> [accessed 5 May 2021]. 18 Broderick Chow, Eero J Laine, and Claire Warden, Performance and Professional Wrestling (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 73.

disidentification. The analysis emphasizes the performances as reflections of the

audience’s ‘role in the performance of gender and race/ethnicity as a constant state

of becoming’.19 Though Hoechtl’s study is not rooted in object study, it provides a

valuable theoretical perspective on Cassandro’s movement style and the production

of meaning around exótico, or drag, performance while describing lucha libre’s

connection to other performance disciplines.

In a 2015 Ph.D. thesis for University of the Arts London, ‘Resituating the Cultural

Meanings of Lucha Libre Mexicana: A Practice-Based Exploration of Diasporic

Mexicanness’, artist Marcela Montoya Ortega uses lucha libre iconography in her art

practice alongside contextual research around the items and images used.20 While

Ortega’s work comes in the form of an unpublished Ph.D. thesis, it is part of the

research landscape for this project because of her perspective as a Mexican citizen

working within a UK university and her research on materiality in lucha libre. Ortega

also includes several interviews that illuminate the state of academic research on

lucha libre in Mexico and are essential to consider in a historiographic study. Ortega

identifies a common sentiment among interviewees and invested parties: the need

for ‘formal recognition of Lucha Libre Mexicana as a legitimate representation of

popular urban culture, in the form of a dedicated museum and research center’.21 One

of the academics Ortega interviews, Orlando Jiménez Ruiz, also provides a piece for

the Artes de México issue that includes Adela Santana’s essay. Jiménez Ruiz offers a

unique perspective as a historian and lucha libre referee and provides a brief history

of lucha libre in Mexico.22 While Ortega uses an interpretation-classification model

that favors semiotics, it is vital to remember that her goal is not to provide historical

analysis but the context for her art. The work engages with materials but focuses on

19 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Cultural Studies of the Americas, v. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Chow, Laine, and Warden, p. 78. 20 Marcela Montoya Ortega, ‘Resituating the Cultural Meanings of Lucha Libre Mexicana: A Practice Based Exploration of Diasporic Mexicanness’ (University of the Arts London, 2015) <http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/8728/>. 21 Ortega, p. 193. 22 de Orellana and others, pp. 66–69.

symbolism rather than the process or production of objects.

As a result, the scope of significant literature for review extends beyond lucha

libre and into other performance areas that offer useful approaches. Lucha libre falls

under the umbrella of performance studies alongside drag and drama, which include

studies that offer compelling models for engaging with materiality in performance.

Rosslyn Prosser contributes an essay to Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories:

Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2 (2021) on Adelaide-based showgirl Vonni Diva.

Prosser compares older showgirls like Vonni, whose career started in the 1960s,

with younger drag queens through costume and performance style. The latter half

of Prosser’s chapter uses an exhibition featuring Vonni’s costumes to explore the

relationship between performer and costumer, the context behind each garment,

and the advantages and disadvantages of viewing garments in an exhibition rather

than the site of performance. Prosser describes, ‘The costumes provide a visual and

material documentation of the many years that Vonni has spent performing and

present through their changing styles an appreciation of the artform of costume’.23

This text offers an approach that considers multiple garments and changes over time

through a single performer’s history. This model is especially suited for investigating

a figure like Cassandro and approaching garments in an exhibition separated from

the performer and their original context.

The essay also considers other aspects of performance required to develop

a drag identity, like gesture, choreography, hair, and comedic style. While it does

not explore these components in detail, the text offers a blueprint for working with

persona and drag costume. Prosser writes, ‘Costumes can be read as part of a wider

framework of thinking about material and material culture, however drag costume

produces a set of meanings that circulate both through and within drag and non-drag

23 Mark Edward and others, Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2 (London, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2021), p. 105 <http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rcauk/detail.action?docID=6458981> [accessed 23 June 2021].