Lucha Libre Isn’t quaint, It’s 50 films of Cool

This is what happens when they don’t get it.

Seattlepi.com posted a story about lucha libre that was done in Phoenix by the Associated Press. None of it is unusual. US news consumers don’t follow the dots so news stories bought and sold as commodities have been the norm for a long time. More so now that Seattlepi.com is no longer just in Seattle but at the end of every Internet connection; as is every other .com, including NewsTaco.

The story is well written and well reported. It’s publication in a Seattle website intuits that it was important enough to flow in the AP distribution stream. And that underlies what we already know, that the Latino culture has arrived. In fact we’re well past ubiquitous.

What the story does inadvertently, though, is perpetuate a point of view. As ubiquitous as Latinos may be, we’re still written about in main stream press as a quaint corner of the American landscape.  The look-what-I-found attitude leaves the reader with an open ended question: what are we to make of this?

Here is a main point of the piece: “Little kids can swear and flash the middle finger during what are sometimes violent matches. Mothers typically have one eye on a fight and the other on a stroller.”

And later: “The profanity and pummeling might appall non-Hispanic families. But anyone familiar with lucha libre would know it’s part of the spectacle.
“When you’re at lucha libre, you shout obscenities, insult people, act in ways that wouldn’t necessarily be acceptable elsewhere,” said Heather Levi, an assistant professor in anthropology at Temple University. “I remember the time I was sitting in front of woman who was teaching a 3-year-old to do it. It was like ‘OK now you say…'”

Interesting specimen, these Latinos and their pedestrian ways…

Until it becomes a multi-billion dollar industry like the WWE, et al. At which point it’s legitimate, replete with merchandising and reality shows.

But I’ll tell you what the WWE doesn’t have. 50 films filled with cool:

El Santo Contra las Momias de Guanajuato, (ca. 1972).