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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“Ich kann nicht”: Hearing Racialized Language in Josh Inocéncio’s Purple Eyes (Ojos Violetas)
In Spring 2017, I brought Houston-based playwright/performer Josh Inocéncio to my campus—the University of Houston—to perform his solo show Purple Eyes (for more on the event, see “Campus Organizing, or How I Use Theatre to Resist”). Purple Eyes is what Inocéncio calls an “ancestral auto/biographical” performance piece which explores his upbringing as a closeted gay Chicano living in the midst of the cultural heritage of machismo. Following a legacy of solo performance storytelling aesthetics seen in John Leguizamo’s Freak and Luis Alfaro’s Downtown, Inocéncio plays with memory to understand how the United States and Mexico have influenced his family and his own identity formation. Moreover, Purple Eyes explores the intersections of queerness and Chican@ identity alongside the legacy of machismo in his family (For more on the play, see “Queering Machismo from Michoacán to Montrose”).
Still from Purple Eyes (Ojos Violetas), with permission from Josh Inocencio who retains copyright.
During my Intro to LGBT Studies course following the performance, students discussed issues of representation and how many of them had never seen a queer Latin@/x play or performance, with some of them having never seen a live play. Many students picked up on how Purple Eyes foregrounds the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. While these discussions were indeed fruitful, what struck me most was how both classes harped on Inocéncio’s use of different linguistic registers. Put simply, what stayed with them was how the performance sounded. My students obsessed over the Spanish in the play, leading me to question why this group of students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution in a city that is over 40% Latin@ had so much trouble whenever Inocéncio spoke Spanish, or the sounds of Latinidad.
In what follows, I discuss how my students heard Purple Eyes. While the play is predominately in English, Inocéncio often code-switches into Spanish and German to more accurately embody particular family members. This blog adds to previous research by Dolores Inés Casillas, Sara V. Hinojos, Marci R. McMahon, Liana Silva, and Jennifer Stoever on the relationship between the Spanish language and non-Spanish speaking Americans. Indeed, my students racialized the Spanish in Purple Eyes while completely disregarding the German in the play. Why?
Drawing from sociology, racialization is the process of imposing racial identities to a social practice or group that might not have identified in such a way. Typically, the dominant group racializes the marginalized group; i.e. Latin@s in the U.S. become racialized by the mainstream. Even so, Latin@s are not a race, but are an ethnic group. Yet, I argue that non-Latin@ Americans view Latin@s through a lens of race which often becomes a sonic one, in which language becomes one of the most overt identity markers. In terms of Spanish, while many races and ethnicities speak the language, in the United States it is often viewed as a way to mark Spanish-speaking Latin@s as Other. In this way, language plays a fundamental role in shaping mainstream ideas about race. According to Dolores Inés Casillas, “For unfamiliar ears, the sounds of Spanish, the mariachi ensemble, and/or accented karaoke all work together to signal brownness, working-class,” and as Jennifer Stoever argues, the sounds of Latinidad indicate “illegality” in the U.S.
Drawing from the intersections of race, language, and racism, the relatively new academic field Raciolinguistics has emerged as a means to explain how people use language to shape their identity (For more, see Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race). Branching off from Raciolinguistics, I am most interested in exploring how the mainstream hears languages and racializes what they are hearing. The result is that Spanish is seen as Other, meaning that monolingual U.S. listeners hear Spanish-speakers as inherently different and a threat to a mainstream United States cultural and, more importantly, national identity.
Still from Purple Eyes (Ojos Violetas), with permission from Josh Inocencio who retains copyright.
Reflecting Inocéncio’s cultural multiplicity, Purple Eyes features English, Spanish, and German strategically used at different moments in the play to reflect the temporality, positionality, and relationship to language of each character that Inocéncio inhabits. While the chapter on his father is entirely in English, the final chapter focusing on Josh himself opens with a monologue in Spanish in which the performer narrates the events of the FIFA World Cup before finally announcing to the crowd that the epilogue is Inocéncio’s journey of young love and heartbreak on his journey of queer discovery. This moment features the longest extended use of Spanish in the play. The remaining Spanish is sprinkled in as Josh code-switches between the two languages for added cultural specificity.
While some of my Spanish-speaking students appreciated hearing a play that reflected their linguistic identities, monolingual English speakers in my class claimed that the Spanish confused them and made it difficult for them to follow certain parts of the play. After several students echoed these thoughts, a student from Mexico without full fluency in English comprehension told others about how her experiences were the exact opposite. She had trouble following some of the parts in English since she is still learning the language. I then pivoted the conversation to discuss how my English-dominant students approached the play with the assumption that English is the norm and a performance on a university campus should reflect this. Case in point: several told me that the show should have been subtitled.
But what was most telling was the following exchange. After several expressed confusion over the Spanish, one particularly woke student from Nigeria raised her hand and said: “I haven’t heard anyone say anything about the German in the play and not being able to follow the play during the German part.” She then noted how, in the United States, Spanish is racialized whereas German is not. In fact, most of the students did not even recall German in the play. Admittedly, the play features far more Spanish than German, but the scene in which Inocéncio speaks German occurs while dramatizing his Austrian grandmother’s abortion. As Inocéncio (as Oma) frantically repeated “Ich kann nicht” (I can’t), my students had no trouble; to use some Millennial vernacular, it was with Spanish that they “couldn’t even.” Arguably, this is the most intense scene in the performance and one that my students wanted to discuss. That the majority of them understood this scene without fully registering the German, coupled with their confusion over lines spoken in Spanish, speaks to not only how race and ethnicity impact how languages are heard in the United States. German is viewed as familiar and accessible whereas Spanish is immediately heard as foreign, i.e. undesirable, not welcome here.
As the Latin@ population continues to grow and the Spanish language becomes an increasingly present reality in U.S. everyday life, audiences must consider possibilities not grounded in an English-only narrative. My experiences with Purple Eyes are not unique. I have witnessed and heard many stories about audiences at mainstream theatre companies who have struggled whenever a play included Spanish. While I don’t claim to have the answers to address this across the nation, as an educator, I question what tools I can give my students to help prepare them for sonic experiences outside of their comfort zone and, specifically, how they become aware of subconscious racialization practices. What will they hear? And, more importantly, how will they react?
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Featured Image: Still from Purple Eyes (Ojos Violetas), with permission from Josh Inocencio who retains copyright.
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Trevor Boffone is a Houston-based scholar, educator, writer, dramaturg, producer, and the founder of the 50 Playwrights Project. He is a member of the National Steering Committee for the Latinx Theatre Commons and the Café Onda Editorial Board. Trevor has a Ph.D. in Latin@ Theatre and Literature from the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston where he holds a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. He holds an MA in Hispanic Studies from Villanova University and a BA in Spanish from Loyola University New Orleans. Trevor researches the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and community in Chican@ and Latin@ theater and performance. His first book project, Eastside Latinidad: Josefina López, Community, and Social Change in Los Angeles, examines the textual and performative strategies of contemporary Latin@ theatermakers based in Boyle Heights that use performance as a tool to expand notions of Latinidad and (re)build a community that reflects this diverse and fluid identity. He is co-editing (with Teresa Marrero and Chantal Rodriguez) an anthology of Latinx plays from the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Encuentro 2014 (under contract with Northwestern University Press).
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Don’t Be Self-Conchas”: Listening to Mexican Styled Phonetics in Popular Culture*–Sara V. Hinojos and Dolores Inés Casillas
Deaf Latin@ Performance: Listening with the Third Ear–Trevor Boffone
Moonlight’s Orchestral Manoeuvers: A duet by Shakira Holt and Christopher Chien
If La Llorona Was a Punk Rocker: Detonguing The Off-Key Caos and Screams of Alice Bag–Marlen Rios-Hernández
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