Lucha libre

For a good long time while I was growing up, Sundays in the Sabaka household had a standard routine: mass at OLA (in the uncomfortable pews, before the renovations), followed by breakfast at Country Kitchen (hamburger with mustard), a browse through the toy aisles at ShopKo (just looking), and the culminating event: watching a couple of hours of pure family entertainment, WWF style. My interest in professional wrestling may have diminished since the retirement of Randy Macho Man Savage (my heart be still) and the untimely death of lovely Elizabeth (RIP), but that doesn´t mean I was any less excited when I was invited by some friends to attend a lucha libre match, Mexico´s answer to WWF. Now, people will tell you that lucha libre is very different from US "wrassling," that it´s an art form and has important cultural significance. I´m more than willing to believe them, but, to be honest, to the untrained eye, it looked quite a bit like what my brother and I would watch from the couch on those Sunday afternoons. Beefy, costumed men riling up the crowd, athletically delivering choreographed kicks and flips. And the crowd itself? A lot of kids and grown up kids wearing the mask of their favorite luchador. We gringos boisterously chanted right along with them when some underhanded side-ring ruckus was taking place or when the underdog seemed to be down and out. There was one match that featured luchadoras, women wrestlers, who were just as tough as the guys. While I certainly don´t have the physique or the strength to make lucha libre my next career move, there is something inviting about putting on a a sparkly mask for awhile and trying on a new persona, maybe someone who´s a little braver, a little more flamboyant, or at least someone who can deliver a mean moonsault double foot stomp off the top rope.

(Special thanks to Matt Mochel for the wrestling fact-checking for this post.)

Stayed tuned: Independencia