Lucha Libre: Ladies of the Ring
Audiences are riveted by their full-contact fights. Still, though wrestlers are icons for the masses, women athletes rarely dare to step into the ring. Meet Marcela, one of the intrepid few.
She steps into the spotlight, raises her arms, beams at the crowd, descends the stairs through a roaring tor- rent of cheers, greets a few spectators, tosses back her red hair and bounds into the ring in her skin- tight suit bedecked with a flaming butterfly. This 46-year-old bundle of energy is Marcela, 1.55 m (just an inch over five feet), 62 kilos (136 pounds), long nicknamed “la Morena de fuego” (“the Fiery Brunette”). She is taking on Dalys la Caribeña, 42, an opponent she has faced many times and who stole Marcela’s world lucha libre championship title in 2016. Marcela and her team are técnicas, meaning those who are expected to fight fair, respecting the rules. In contrast, Dalys and her team are rudas, using uglier moves, capable of fighting dirty. This is how most Mexican wrestling, or lucha libre, matches are set up. In the stands, the audience ranges in age from 7 to 77, equal parts male and female. Beneath the Arena México’s metal roof in downtown Mexico City, boos, bellowing, applause and laugh- ter express the palpable excitement as the clash choreography begins. “Lucha libre is much more popular than football, even if it gets less publicity,” surmises Orlando Jiménez Ruiz, a documentary filmmaker with expert knowledge of this typical Mexican sport. “It’s part of our national identity.” “Free fighting” first appeared in the second half of the 19th century, but the first official match was not arranged until 1933 at the Arena Modelo, later renamed the Arena México. A cousin to American-style show wrestling, lucha quickly established its own style, “more acrobatic, more aerial, less a demonstration of strength,” explains Orlando. It is primarily a blend of sport and spectacle, a show for public consumption that takes place two or three nights a week and on Sunday afternoons. It has several origins beyond Greco- Roman wrestling: the sacrificial rites of the Aztecs, the corrida brought by the Spanish settlers, 19th-century European vaudeville — for in this pitiless duel parody, everything seems exaggerated, grotesque, burlesque. Just like in comic strips and car- toons, the opponents, dressed and masked like superheroes and super- heroines, dive through the air, slam into the ropes, collide with grunting drama, brutally fall, play dead, then get up and return to the fray. You hear smacking skin and cries of pain, you see sweat and blood fly, you watch as fatigue beats the combatants to exhaustion. Still, though everything is overdone, nothing is artificial in lucha libre. This evening, in the ring, Marcela leaps onto Dalys, grabs her by the hair and throws her against the ropes. “The wrestlers, both women and men, give it their all, otherwise the public wouldn’t be loyal to them,” says Orlando. “In a ‘tense’ metropolis like Mexico City, where there’s a lot of violence, the people need this catharsis.”
Two days later, Marcela meets us at the El Guerrero gym, not far from the old town. With blue-polished nails, wearing a purple mini backpack, she arrives with her companion (a wrestler himself) for her daily workout. “I’ve been doing lucha for over thirty years, I have to take good care of my body,” she says. “I exercise every day, do bodybuilding, stretching, and I work on technique and practice holds in the ring.” Her real name is María Gómez. This teacher’s daughter, raised by her mother, became a wrestling fan very early in life, but, back in the 1980s, women were not welcome in this “macho” sport, as she calls it. Her mother forbade her from taking part, so she trained in secret. In 1985, at the age of 14, María “Marcela” won her first pub- lic fight: “I got one heck of a thrash- ing when I got home,” she recalls. “The two biggest battles of my life have been to fight chauvinism and to convince my mother that women could get into the ring.” In Mexico, there are now about fifteen luchadoras enjoying fame. Marcela’s generation is the one that had to fight for a place in this sport: she believes that the battle for gender equality is far from over in Mexico, where women are frequently victims of violence and discrimination. She receives letters every week from admirers who look up to her as an example to follow: “We, the luchadoras, present a different kind of role model from the women on telenovelas, who are usually submissive. My early luchadora days were tough, but I hung in there, because I wanted to prove that women could be independent.” Marcela raised her two children, now 21 and 27, as a single mother after separating from their father. Her day-to-day life is that of a “housewife”, the woman who does her own shopping and cleaning. The rest of the time, she sweats in the white-hot spotlight at Arena México and other venues. “That’s why I have a butterfly on my suit,” she shares, smiling. “When I’m in the ring, I come out of my cocoon — I feel as free as a butterfly.” _
