Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre
This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@. Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas
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This post is co -authored by Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas
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“Lucharaaaaaán a dos a tres caídas sin limite de tiempoooo!“
[“They will fight two out of three falls, with no time limit!”]
Announcer at Lucha Libre, El Paso, Texas
“This ain’t no sideshow.”
George Lipsitz on the role of popular culture
The announcer’s piercing “lucharaaaaaán” cries from the middle of the ring proclaims the constitutional two-out-of-three-falls rule of lucha libre. But before the famous cry rings out to set the stage for the spectacularized acrobatic combat between costumed warriors, their theatrical entrances set the all-important emotional stakes of the battle. The entrances are loud, campy, interactive exchanges between luchadores and spectators. An entrance song itself cues the luchador’s persona: a cumbia could signal a técnico (a good guy); a heavy metal song more than likely indicates a rudo (a bad guy) typically donning black, death-themed getups. Luchadores saunter into the arena, stopping to pose, high five their fans, and verbally heckle their opponents. The storylines of good versus evil, betrayal and revenge, or humility versus arrogance are some of the more standard plots that motivate spectators to adamantly cheer for the favorite and jeer for the foe.
The sonic exchanges between luchadores’ and spectators before, during, and after the fight positions lucha libre as much more than a sport. And while the term spectators, suggests the privileged act of watching or viewing; here, we expand spectators within lucha libre arena to mean “a call to witness” (á la Chela Sandoval). Put simply, lucha libre is a cultural phenomenon where contemporary cultural, social, and political anxieties are often tapped as fodder for theatrical plots. In the U.S./Mexico’s sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the political realities of border enforcement, immigration politics, and racial tensions are loudly heard and placed on display. As part of Rebeca Riva’s ongoing research about the history of lucha libre at the border—which too often gets skipped over for Mexico City as the epicenter of the sport—we listen for the exchanges between luchadores and spectators as resonant participants in the ritual of this sport. Specifically, we tune into lucha libre and its accompanying mega-spectacle to analyze how fans scoff at lucha libre’s MAGA-spectacles. In Time Passages, George Lipsitz (2001) reminded scholars of popular culture decades ago that “this ain’t no sideshow.” In a similar vein, lucha libre directly engages in the larger social and political arena that contextualizes the sport.
In lucha libre, spectators are resonant participants in the construction of an essential “hi-fi” sonic ambiente. Like in football, as Kaj Ahisved notes, the “noise of the crowd” (building on Les Back’s concept) are essential to a “hi-fi” sound where a high degree of information exchange occurs between listeners and the sound environment.Or, as David Hendy describes Olympic arenas, “cauldrons of concentrated sound, [where] the roar of the spectators took on a collective force of its own – a volatile quality rich with cultural and political repercussions.” The crowd’s response, experienced by athletes as ambient noise, bolsters athlete’s spirits and develops an emotional plot for the contest. In certain cases, for instance in Algeria as Stephen Wilford documents, it is a venue for social critique; football stadiums served as “safe zones” where fans could dissent the Abdelaziz Bouteflika dictatorship through chanting political slogans and songs as an anonymous crowd (139).
By listening to lucha libre, we gain a deeper understanding of the embodied components of fan activism, collective identity, and political action. Visual spectacle, bodily gestures, and musical choices, coupled with verbal taunts and visceral grunts serve as interactive storytelling tools. Yet, the crowd’s noise and, importantly, the sonic memories evoked by visual parafenalia amplify a shared political consciousness and prompts the expression of their allegiance with and opposition to the symbolic representations staged.
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The following audio was captured in November 2023 at a parking lot across from El Paso City Hall during a children’s fundraiser. We hear Chris Watson, a previous college wrestler from Oklahoma, make his debut appearance in lucha libre as a white supremacist character. Wearing a clichéd U.S. flag-themed bandana and waving a Trump 2024 campaign flag, he points towards the crowd and makes swimming motions with his arms to communicate the pejorative “wetback.”
Aligning these symbols of MAGA ideologies with Watson’s role as a rudo in the match positions him as a willing vessel for the scorn of the mostly Mexican American spectators. His red-white-and-blue echoes Trump’s xenophobic statements burned into Latinx consciousness: “they’re all rapists,” “bad hombres,” from “shithole countries” as well as renewed promises to “build a great wall… and Mexico will pay” and enact the largest deportation effort in U.S. history since Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback.”
The reactions from spectators are visceral and cathartic, eliciting camaraderie, anger, or empowerment. They retaliate strongly: “Fuck you! Fuck Donald Trump!”‘ and “Fuera!”, a seemingly hateful exchange interjected with cheering and laughter. Spectators are amused by the insults and retaliations. Watson’s staged “gimmick” prompts spectators to playfully rage against the violence he embodies. Their taunting in Spanish represents both resistance as cultural pride and insider knowledge. The joke is on Watson, who (presumably) does not understand the double entendres hurled at him.
A MAGA luchador evokes the memory of violence carried out against Mexicans and African Americans in Texas since at least the mid 1800s by white enslavers, colonial settlers, Texas Rangers, border patrol, and the modern police force. White supremacist violence is not mere political rhetoric but an ongoing contemporary reality. On August 3rd, 2019 a white man motivated by the “Great Replacement” theory popular in MAGA circles, drove 9 hours from his home in Allen, Texas to a Walmart in El Paso, a majority Latino city, to carry out a mass shooting with the intent of discouraging immigration. He killed 23 people and left 22 injured. Listening and yelling at Watson and his MAGA symbols at the US/Mexico border vocalizes the cultural, political and humanitarian crisis propelled by neoliberalism, the militarized police, and the exploitation of White supremacist sentiments by a wannabe fascist dictator.
Watson comes from a line of “gringo” white supremacist luchadores such as Sam Adonis (Sam Polinsky) who sprays himself orange and waves a US flag stamped with a Trump portrait. El Migra (Gonzalo Garcia), a U.S.-born Mexican American border enforcer performed during the Bush/Clinton era, who threw tortillas while taunting “traguense estas tortillas frijoleros nopaleros” (“choke on these you cactus-eating beaners”) and growled the U.S. national anthem into the mic. Spectators jeered and threw their drink cups at him; an opportunity to retort white supremacist rhetoric.
In another instance from the 1990s, a major showdown between Love Machine (a gringo wrestler turned técnico) and Blue Panther (a tejana wearing feline-themed rudo) the crowd favor turned against the yankee when his neck-breaking illegal move prompted fans to reconsider their alliances in the context of massive Mexican emigration prompted by the devastating yoke of the country’s debt to the IMF and subsequent neoliberal economic reforms. Love Machine’s fake benevolence would seem to embody U.S. gleeful exploitation of Mexico’s expatriated campesinos while simultaneously introducing legislation to further marginalize them.
Unlike Karen Yamashita‘s staging of SUPERNAFTA vs. El Gran Mojado in her 1997 novel Tropic of Orange, or the masked Chicano poetry of the Rudo Revolutionary Front, MAGA-spectacles within lucha libre are not intentionally staged to politicize the public but tap into the raw political nerve of the moment. They allow fans to emotionally resolve social and political anxieties when excoriating the “bad guy,” be it an anti-social character or the symbols of the oppressor, even if only for dos de tres caidas.
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Featured image by Flickr User C-Monster, taken in Ontario, CA (2017) CC BY-NC 2.0
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Esther Díaz Martín is an assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Latina Radiophonic Feminisms: Sounding Gender Politics into the Digital Age, (forthcoming UT Press, Spring 2025) theorizes Chicana feminist listening attending to the political work of Latina voices in contemporary sound media.
Rebeca Rivas is a graphic artist and doctoral student in History at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research examines the lucha libre and community building in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. She is currently conducting an extensive oral history and archival project documenting this spectacular sport at the border.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and Kristian E. Vasquez
Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes
Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas
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On “The Dream Life of Voice:” A Rerecording of Bernadette Mayer Reading from The Ethics of Sleep
Welcome to Voices Carry. . . a forum meditating on the material production of human voices the social, historical, and political material freighting our voices in various contexts. What are voices? Where do they come from and how are their expressions carried? What information can voices carry? Why, how, and to what end? Today John Melillo offers us a multi-track rerecording of Bernadette Mayer reading from The Ethics of Sleep. He urges us to “value illegibility over legibility and the abstract over the figured. If we deemphasize voice, we acknowledge the ways in which voices can undo themselves in their production.” –SO! Ed. Jennifer Stoever
What separates voice from noise? At what point does a voice dissipate into the sounds that surround and, at times, threaten to overwhelm it? In “The Dream Life of Voice,” I draw special attention to the ways in which attending to voice—and its precarity—entails a heightened sensation of noise. Through my manipulation of recorded audio in this project, I argue that noise is not merely an unwanted or surprising sound: it is the material sonic trace of an unconscious listening that continues to work beneath, around, and within a conscious listening to voice.
In this audio recording, I have taken a selection from a reading by the poet Bernadette Mayer that I recorded for the Tucson-based poetry and arts organization, POG, on February 6, 2016. I used a standard SM58 microphone, a digital audio recording interface, and the software program Logic. Mayer is known as a poet who has tested the boundaries of poetic statement through poems that engage with the conscious and unconscious uses of language. In this selection, she reads a long poem from her book The Ethics of Sleep (Trembling Pillow Press, 2011) on the power of dreams and dream language. In the performance, the poem and her voice create a sense of continuous movement, with quick and unpredictable turns of phrase sutured together by a syntactic and rhythmic familiarity. In this audio project, I flatten the sonic space in this recording of Mayer in order to abstract the voice and place it within a wider frequency spectrum of noise. Just as Mayer’s words engage her book’s title, my audio project argues for the possibility of an unconscious but engaged listening to noise.
“Bernadette Mayer’s 1971 performance piece, Memory, for which she shot a roll of 35 mm film and composed a journal entry every day for a month, addresses issues of time, narrative, nostalgia, narcissism, and documentation, along with the possibilities of art and poetry in relation to perception and remembrance.” – Marcella Durand, Hyperallergic
Roland Barthes famously defined listening as “a psychological act” and hearing as a mere “physiological phenomenon” (Barthes 246). In a kind of doubling of listening’s action, the work of formulating or understanding a voice involves a selecting for sounds as a significant figure—the mark of a person or persona. Yopie Prins calls the recorded, mediated voice of 19th century poetry a “voice inverse,” a prosthetic figure composed out of its imprint by mechanical means, whether those means be metrical, print-based, or phonographic (48). Of such mechanical means—in particular, audio recording—Charles Bernstein argues, “the mechanical semblance of voice has become the signal in a medium whose material base is sonic, not vocal. In such a phonic economy, noise is sound that can’t be recuperated as voice” (110). In taking up this binary phonic economy, however, I want to hear how voice and noise interweave and interpenetrate, with the sonic figuration of voice as a threshold that opens out to other sounds not ostensibly included in its composition.
Press Play to hear “The Dream Life of Voice” by John Melillo, a rerecording of Bernadette Mayer reading from The Ethics of Sleep.
In this 12’43” audio recording, I have devised an analytic and synthetic method that allows listeners to reframe and refocus their hearing toward the trace of noise in voice, as well as the voice’s trace in noise. The final recording is composed of three simultaneous tracks, each of which represents a different “noise regime” in relation to the poet’s voice.
The first, original, track contains the “straight” recording of Mayer’s voice and speech: one hears her performance of the poem loud and clear. This is the imprint of voice on the recording mechanism in a phonic economy of voice and noise, in which voice seems to counteract and silence its opposite.
The second track contains a manipulated version of the original track, in which I have removed all the audio of Mayer’s voice and constructed a “background noise” track from what remains. In this method, I simply cut out Mayer’s voice from the audio file, keeping only the “silent” moments of the reading. I then combined and looped these fragments to create an amplified track of the background sounds—sounds of the people in the room, cars outside, a train passing, and the recording medium itself (hiss). In this way, I flip the binary toward that which is explicitly unheard in the recording.
For the third track, I manipulated the original recording by applying a Fast Fourier Transform with the software program Spear. This method breaks down the sounds into a collection of sine wave frequencies that can be graphically manipulated in the software program. I then removed the loudest frequencies (present mostly as Mayer’s voice) in order to emphasize the upper partials and continuous non-vocal frequencies masked by the force of the voice. This track marks a synthesis in which voice blends with and disappears into the frequency spectrum.
“Unsmoothed” by Flickr user Felix Morgner, CC BY-SA 2.0
I combined these three tracks and slowly adjusted the volume for each one. The track with Mayer’s voice starts off as the loudest of the three. Her comments on the noise from a train that has just passed begin the montage. This track then undergoes a long, slow diminuendo, and by the end of the piece, it is silenced. At the same time, the background noise track becomes louder and peaks in the middle, interfering with and working alongside the voice. The track of synthesized frequencies slowly crescendos so that it is loudest at the end of the piece.
By distributing the volumes in this chiasmatic way, I want to call attention to the layered listenings happening within the situation of Mayer’s reading. Just as the figure of voice arises out of the ground of noise, it also contains frequencies that are not so easily differentiated from their background. A voice is an acoustic entity figured by a body and a performance. However habitual and repetitive the action is, it takes effort to suture vocal sounds to the body, place, and apparatus that they emanate from. In this track I want to find a way to hear a drifting, unconscious meandering within that focused effort. I want to materialize listening’s paratactic wavering of attention to one thing after another.
In the production of this movement toward noise, I value illegibility over legibility and the abstract over the figured. If we deemphasize voice, we acknowledge the ways in which voices can undo themselves in their production—which is the ethics of dream life that Mayer argues for and illuminates within her poem. The outside within the voice is a frequency scatter that connects the dissipation of an emitted sound in space with all the other sounds that interfere or resonate with that sound. The strange whisper music that ends my audio project “flattens” the sonic space idealized by the division of figure and ground. By abstracting Bernadette Mayer’s performance, I seek a synthesis that brings the noisy dream life of voice into relief.
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Featured Image: “Scream” by Flickr user Josh Otis CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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John Melillo is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Arizona. His book project, Outside In: The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk, examines the ways in which poetry and performance make noise during the twentieth century. He has written and presented work on empathy in sound poetry, folk-song utopianism, the post-punk band DNA, and tape noise in Charles Olson. John performs music and sound art as Algae & Tentacles.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Instrumental: Power, Voice, and Labor at the Airport – Asa Mendelsohn
“Don’t Be Self-Conchas:” Listening to Mexican Styled Phonetics in Popular Culture – Sara Veronica Hinijos
On Sound and Pleasure: Meditations on the Human Voice – Yvon Bonenfant
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