Photo by Jack GouldA diminutive, withered lady in the front row of the wrestling ring is shouting, her neck muscles standing out like ropes, forehead veins a-poppin', gunmetal-gray hair tied back in a ponytail as stiff as a nightstick. She is screaming so loudly that her voice hits that high note just above painful, and you figure there's got to be permanent vocal-cord damage. She's directing the wrestlers—or, rather, just one wrestler.
“I want you to kick that fucking white boy's ass for me!”
She says this in Spanish.
It is 2 p.m. on Sunday—the Lord's Day—on the northwest corner of the Anaheim Indoor Marketplace. Located between an indoor soccer arena, a playground and a junkyard, the wrestling ring serves as a valve for the release of simmering Anglo-Mexican tensions in Orange County.
The Indoor is the home of World Power Wrestling (WPW), a league that specializes in lucha libre, the Mexican version of wrestling known for its masked fighters and acrobatic moves. Aside from a few fanatics who would attend any sort of grappling event or curious Japanese tourists drawn to exotica (lucha libre is wildly popular in Japan), the WPW's core fan base is overwhelmingly Mexican and Central American immigrants —recent immigrants, not your assimilated pochos who have forgotten the ways of the motherland. The men are blue-collar workers, sunburned laborers taking a break from mowing suburban lawns, hauling drywall into a new South County housing tract, or digging ditches. They wear ball caps or T-shirts that advertise the names of their businesses—landscape firms, hardware stores, construction companies. They dress in tattered jeans and construction boots; a few belong to unions. They've got fingers like driftwood, and when you shake hands with them, it's as if there's sandpaper pressed between your palms. They stand in stark contrast to the pretty boys, all younger than 25, employed in the service sector—busboys, valets or dishwashers—as evidenced by their smooth hands, clean-shaven faces and overall natty appearance. Most of the latter come dressed in their Sunday best: a tejana or Stetson hat, cowboy boots, tight jeans, silk shirt and girl in tow. The women seem uniformly tired—not bored, but fatigued. They work in markets, as baby sitters in exchange for under-table cash, as seamstresses and janitors. Children are fans, too, and they are everywhere, running around the ring in a kind of prepubescent whirlpool or climbing into the ring between matches to bounce off the ropes.
José Luis Aldaco of Santa Ana brings his entire family—wife, two sons, two daughters—”to let a little steam out by yelling a lot.” A landscaper by trade and a native of the Mexican state of Jalisco, he has no fear of exposing his children to the violence of the matches. “It's entertainment for the entire family,” he says. “They can tell the difference between right and wrong.”
His 16-year-old son, José Jr., offers a more pointed explanation for the family obsession. “We like to yell at the white wrestlers,” he says candidly. “They're American; we're Mexican. It's a whole racial thing.”
The wrestlers reflect the fears and biases of their fans. Besides the usual técnicos (good guys) and rudos (bad guys), there are two “gang members,” Cholo and Li'l Cholo, whose finishing moves are “The Raza Bomb” and “The Drive-By.” There's a transvestite, Rosa Salvaje (Wild Rose), whose grappling technique —kissing wrestlers and getting into sexually suggestive positions with them—seems designed to play off the homophobia of the Mexican men and fighters.
There are also the cardboard Anglo stand-ins. Looking like a hardcore Vanilla Ice, American Rebel appeared before his match on Sunday and riled up the crowd with the following pleasantries:
And the crowd goes wild.
Photo by Jack Gould
“You half-baked beaners should learn English, damn it! You fat, piss-drunk, chicharrón-eating wabs! None of you belong here! I see a lot of wasted space in my country [gesturing at his own muscular chest] occupied by you wabs [jabbing his finger at the audience]! All of you Mexicans can kiss my great white ass!”
By this point, the capacity crowd is in an uproar, hurling insults back at Rebel in both English and Spanish. Grandmothers scream, “Fuck you, asshole!” Little kids throw food into the ring. At one point, a boy who appears no older than 7 yells, “Vete a la madre, pinché pendejo!” (“Go to hell, fucking asshole!”)
Rebel, wearing a mask of incredulity, points directly at the kid and yells, “I'll call la migra on you, you little piece of shit!”
This is not the World Wrestling Federation. If the punches are pulled, the rhetoric is not. Rebel's attacks are guttural, pornographic, anatomical, disturbing, gynecological, violent, epidemiological, racial, scatological, even culinary; and the crowd holds nothing back in return. When Rebel grabs his crotch and shouts, “Aqui esta tu México, culeros!” (“Here is your Mexico, assholes!”), it's as if he has dropped a match into pool of gasoline. The crowd is aflame. He leaves the ring shouting, “Arriba América!“
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If there is any irony in a racist American hurling his insults in Spanish, nobody seems to notice. Nor do they mind when Rebel appears later in a tag-team match with—of all people—a Mexican fighter, Maldad Satánica (Satanic Damnation). But Maldad is an obvious bad guy, a traitor in this otherwise unlikely alliance; wearing red, white and blue tights, he is the assimilated Hispanic; the tag team is the tenuous U.S.-Mexico partnership. The crowd boos Maldad lustily. Someone calls him “vendido“—a sellout. Someone else predicts that Rebel will betray Maldad. He is right: their opponents blindfold Rebel and fool him into pinning Maldad. Maldad becomes infuriated with Rebel and attacks him. Suddenly, another Latino—Rebel's partner in Los Nuevos Gringos Locos (The New Crazy White Guys)—wearing army fatigues and shades, enters the ring and, assisted by Rebel, begins pummeling Maldad with a nightstick. It's all there: assimilation, treachery, betrayal, police brutality.
But the spectators do not hate all gringos. Consider the other white wrestler in WPW, Ghetto Matt. Hailing “from the ghettos of Disneyland, where he was a member of Mickey's gang” (as the ring announcer puts it), Matt's Dickensian street urchin is the white counterpart of the struggling immigrants. The crowd cheers him, applauding his overenunciated attempts at Spanish and playfully calling him Bolillo (White Bread). After his victory, Matt acknowledges his fans by yelling, “Bolillo power!”
“It's a lot harder for me to get a response from the audience without falling back on my white skin,” says Ghetto, in reality Matt Martlaco, a senior at Chapman University. “Besides the fact that my gimmick is something the fans can relate to, it's funny when a white person talks in Spanish—they don't expect it. That's why they like me.”
WPW is a 5-year-old business—a family business, no less, run by the Marín clan of Costa Mesa. Father Martín, a native of Mexico City, is not only the CEO but also a wrestler—El Genio (The Genie). A little over 6 feet tall, he weighs close to 300 pounds, all of it lean muscle.
Martín is a choreographer, carefully designing scenarios and wrestler personas to appeal to the crowd. He introduces ethnic and racial tensions in the matches the way a screenwriter contrives plot points. “Once you've been in this business for a while, you get a knack for what type of characters and storylines get a rise from the crowd,” he says. “The people get entertained, and they get to express themselves on things they are passionate about in an open way in which they will not get in trouble. They can relieve the stress they accumulate during the week with us.”
Martín guides his wrestlers to specifically play off the crowd's antagonisms but leaves it to them to add their own spin. “When I create a character, I know where I want to go with it. I look to create some sort of controversy with the gimmick, but after I explain it to the wrestlers, they can do whatever they want with it, as long as they stay within the boundaries.”
“Take the case of Rebel,” Martin says, referring to his most infamous wrestler. “Obviously, he is supposed to represent racist white people, but he turns it into much more.”
El Genio's wife, Michelle, keeps the books and sells tickets. Their son Martín Jr. is the DJ, and the youngest child, Christina, sells merchandise.
But next to its masked patriarch, the most visible member of the Marín family has to be the Maríns' 14-year-old son, Joseph. Two years ago, Joseph became the youngest professional wrestler in the world when he made his debut in WPW. He's no longer the youngest, but Joseph still wrestles under the moniker El Hijo de Genio (The Genie's Son) and trains wrestlers in WPW's wrestling school. “I make them run a lot and do a lot of push-ups,” he says. El Hijo is also part of Los Soldados de WPW (The WPW Soldiers), a trio of teenagers drawn from the wrestling school whose sole purpose is to make sure ringside fans are taken care of. “We love our fans,” Joseph states proudly. “If it wasn't for the fans, we wouldn't be anything.”
A Marxist observer among these fans might think this spectacle, this cheering for Matt and the condemnation of the two “traitor” Hispanics evinces a kind of new class solidarity. The booing and cheering are not so much about race as they are class, as Ghetto Matt and the ringside fans find community in a common enemy. Cobbled together by four-letter words, there is hope of friendship across ethnic borders.
The postmodern WWF is no match for this WPW. Its fans and wrestlers trade quips built out of something more firm than mere theater. They call one another oaxacos (the Mexican-Spanish equivalent of “nigger,” which used to refer to Mexico's indigenous population) and revel in the heightened polemics of race and class.
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What the wrestlers and the crowd in WPW say might cause a riot anywhere else. But here it serves theater's oldest purpose: catharsis. During a mundane match, when there is no obvious political overtone or even discourse, a man in the crowd sums up the crowd's aesthetics: “Get fighting! This is lucha fucking libre, not American wrestling!”
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