El Santo and the Anti-Fascism of Lucha Libre
In my last post, I looked at one of the worst men to ever wrestle, a Masked Marvel who turned out to be a masked monster. Perhaps, as a palate cleanser, we should take a look at a masked wrestler of more saintly credentials, and at one of the more interesting periods of his career.
The city of Tulancingo is home to the Huapalcalco archaeological site - I'm loathe to refer to pre-Colombian civilisations and structures as "mysterious" lest I inadvertently light the Graham Hancock Signal, but in many ways Huapalcalco fits the bill; the remaining pyramid betrays Teotihuacan influence, but is not believed to have been built by the people of Teotihuacan themselves, but an unknown related culture that had subsequent influence across the Gulf Coast, while other features suggest the influence of Mayan architecture. The question of influence is a matter of degrees of separation - I'm not invoking the worst excesses of pseudo-history by suggesting any grander "lost civilisation" - but the fact remains that it was a site of cultural and likely religious significance, the precise meaning of which is now largely lost to time.
Just a ten minute drive away from Huapalcalco, there stands a more recent monument of perhaps equal cultural import, a statue of Tulancingo's most famous son, the masked luchadore El Santo. There, hidden away behind the railway museum, you will even find the Museum of El Santo.
Before being canonized as a near-mythical symbol of Mexicana, El Santo was born Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta in 1917, the same year that Mexico's constitution was written, marking - by some reckonings - the formal end of the Mexican Revolution. Fortuitous beginnings indeed.
The young Rodolfo was an athletic and active child, dabbling in amateur wrestling, jiu-jitsu, baseball and American football, but it was the Lucha Libre boom of the 1930s that really captured his imagination. Lucha Libre has its origins in the mid 19th Century when, during the Second French Intervention in Mexico, French soldiers held Greco-Roman tournaments, and spread their knowledge of the sport to the locals who, in subsequent years, held wrestling matches and strongman exhibitions in travelling circuses and carnivals across the country. Wrestling remained a sideshow attraction, an adjunct to feats of strength and boxing matches, until self-proclaimed "Mexico's Strongest Man" Enrique Ugartechea combined Greco-Roman with Olympic-style amateur wrestling and Judo, beginning the development of Lucha Libre into its own unique form of professional wrestling.
While pioneers like Ugartechea laid the foundations, it was Salvador Lutteroth who built the house, creating much of what we now recognise as uniquely "Lucha" when he founded EMLL (now CMLL) in 1933. It was under Lutteroth's stewardship that masked wrestlers and colourful characters were brought to the forefront, and that Lucha evolved as both a distinct style of professional wrestling, and a spectacular live show. The following year, bitten as so many were by the Lucha Libre bug, Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta made his debut.
While wearing a mask, it wasn't initially the iconic silver mask of El Santo - he wrestled for several years under a variety of names, most notably "El Murcielago II", or The Bat II, in honour of a true Lucha Libre pioneer. The original Murcielago was a vicious Rudo (heel or villain) who embraced the showmanship and pageantry of Lucha, wearing a jet black mask and entrance vest, which he would open on his way to the ring to release live bats that he had hidden on his person. Murcielago had a long, storied and influential career, wrestling in Mexico's first ever Hair vs. Mask match, and serving as the head of Mexico's wrestling and boxing commission after his retirement. That same commission had earlier stepped in to prevent young Rudy Guzmán from using the Murcielago II name, ruling that it belonged to the original wrestler, then competing unmasked as Murcielago Velazquez.
Guzmán needed a new name, and when his manager, looking to put together a trio of silver-masked wrestlers, gave him the choice of El Diablo, El Angel, or El Santo, he opted for the latter. It proved to be a pretty lucrative decision, and he made his first appearance under the now iconic silver mask in Arena Mexico on June 26th, 1942.
Santo's rise to super-stardom and folk hero status was far from an overnight success, though. In those early days, Santo remained a rule-breaking rudo. It was the unlikely intervention of a comic book artist, Jose G. Cruz, in 1952 that took the newly tecnico (babyface, or "good guy") El Santo to unimagined heights. With a shortage of American comic books on Mexican shelves, there was a market for homegrown heroes, and Cruz pioneered a unique form of comic book art with Santo as his subject. Cruz's work was a combination of photomontage and hand-drawn backgrounds, giving a striking depth and a surreal air to still photographs of Santo and his counterparts juxtaposed against elaborate and fantastical backgrounds. In the pages of Cruz's comic books, Santo battled zombies, vampires, aliens, spies, mobsters, demons, and mad scientists, and never found a pop culture trend they couldn't tag on to - as late as the 1970s, by which point Santo himself had stopped endorsing or posing for Cruz's work, replaced by a generic bodybuilder in a white mask with an "S" logo emblazoned on it, the character appeared alongside Star Wars' Princess Leia, Christopher Lee as Dracula, and the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth.
The success of El Santo comics meant that the Mexican film industry came calling. Filmmakers had recognised the appeal of Lucha Libre to the movie-going public since 1953, with the movie Huracán Ramírez, about a luchadore of the same name. The movie was so popular that the luchadore who performed the wrestling sequences in place of lead actor David Silva, was also contracted to wrestle as Ramirez on lucha shows all over Mexico, and any number of imitators took the name or variations of it. The "original" Ramírez soon tired of hiding behind a mask, and handed over the persona to Daniel Garcia (not, it probably goes without saying, the 24 year old currently wrestling in AEW) in 1954, and Garcia continued wrestling under the name until 1988. He innovated the Huracánrana, a move now synonymous with Lucha Libre, and anglicized as the Hurricanrana - though the name is often mistakenly given to almost any form of headscissors takedown, the "Rana" (Spanish for "frog") aspect of the name refers specifically to a double leg cradle pin, so any variation not ending in that position is not a true Huracánrana. Lucha pedantry over.
Already becoming a household name thanks to his comic book superhero stardom, El Santo was a natural fit for the emerging genre of lucha cinema, and the comics provided more than ample source material. While Huracán Ramírez was a movie still very much grounded in the world of lucha libre, the movies of El Santo took him away from the ring, and into conflict with all manner of enemies, from the everyday to the supernatural. In a career that spanned 53 films in 24 years (!!!!), El Santo battled vampire women, mummies, Frankenstein's daughter, martians, mobsters, wolfmen, and Nazis in Atlantis. The format was invariably the same - a wrestling match, an extended musical sequence (the films were spectacularly low budget, and a reliable way to cover costs was to allow record labels a space to showcase their latest signings at excruciating length), the kidnapping of a young damsel in distress, and Santo called into action to save the day by a friendly scientist, police chief, or other non-specific authority figure. The movies are high camp nonsense, and incredible fun.
The first of El Santo's movies, however, don't quite get that formula right. Santo vs. The Evil Brain, and Santo vs. Infernal Men are effectively interchangeable. Filmed back-to-back, with the same cast, the two movies repeat many of the same scenes and set-pieces, despite on paper drastically different plots ("a mad scientist frames Santo as part of an ill-defined world domination plot" vs. "Santo attempts to rescue an undercover cop from a drug ring"). El Santo's character goes unnamed in either film, nor is he depicted as a professional wrestler, merely a masked police agent, though one described in the identical endings of both films as "a citizen of the world", "without borders". Less El Santo the living superhero, and more El Santo, agent of extrajudicial international justice.
Those early movies miss the essential note that makes lucha movies great, and which helped them make El Santo box office gold - they cast El Santo in a non-descript role, when the appeal was to see him as El Santo. American fans might read Superman comics, and watch Batman on TV, but they can't go down to their local arena for a front row seat and watch their heroes fend off villains in the flesh - that was the appeal of El Santo, and his first two films neglect to ground their hero in that tangible reality.
It's not just their low budget and untrained leading man (though Santo is largely sidelined in both films) that led Evil Brain and Infernal Men to cut corners, recycle footage, and maybe even miss out some vital plot points, though, as there were greater things afoot. Despite the Mexican production crew, and unwittingly launching a Mexican cultural phenomenon, the movies were filmed in Cuba. In December 1958.
Already working on a shoestring budget and to a tight schedule, the film crew and El Santo also found themselves having to deal with the consequences of shooting during the ongoing collapse of Fulgencio Batista's brutal dictatorship. Scenes were paused and crew members and actors alike instructed to duck down whenever the sound of gunfire was heard. Filming on both films was abruptly cut short upon the news that Fidel Castro had entered Havana mere hours earlier - the filmmakers quite reasonably believing that continuing to run around the city firing prop guns, and with extras dressed in the uniforms of Batista's oppressive police force, while the city was besieged by revolutionaries would be detrimental to their health, they fled the country, smuggling the unfinished 35mm negative of both movies out inside a coffin. There is, one can't help but think, a better film in that story than in anything the filmmakers actually produced.
Back in Mexico, despite rocky beginnings, El Santo's film career was off and running, and he was well on his path to becoming a national institution. Once again, politics reared its ugly head and impacted on the career of El Santo, and the Mexican institution of Lucha Libre in general, but perhaps unintentionally working to Santo's benefit...but first, a slight detour.
It wasn't the first time that Lucha Libre had been an unlikely staging ground for political battles. The Mexican writer Salvador Novo - who claimed that "luchas libre resist all academic critique" - wrote extensively about Lucha Libre as a space for transgression of conventional class, gender, racial, and sexual roles, in a 1940 essay that he cheekily called Mi Lucha (Libre), the bracketed "(Libre)" affixed to the Spanish title of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
The allusion to Nazism was not unfounded; as author Esther Gabara explained in Vol. 26 of The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, in an article titled "Fighting It Out: Being 'Naco' In The Global 'Lucha Libre'", coverage of Lucha Libre in the weekly news magazine Todo disappeared when the magazine took a sharp rightward turn, abandoning its calls for indigenous rights and representation, and began taking an explicitly pro-Nazi and pro-fascist editorial stance. That there was no place for Lucha Libre in a fascist publication suggests that the sport was associated with a class of people that Nazis did not want to associate with - Lucha Libre's antifascist bonafides persist to this day, thanks to characters like Superbarrio, a masked activist who emerged following the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and fought to save families from eviction, and campaign against corrupt politicians, slumlords, and has continued to support protest and labour movements in the years since. The success of Superbarrio has inspired activists like Supergay, Pedestrianito, and the pro-union Superluz, who went viral some years ago thanks to an undeniably bad-ass photograph of him in full luchadore attire atop a Harley Davidson bedecked with the logos of a banned electrical union, as riot police advance upon him. Lucha Libre is anti-fascism - spread the word.
In the 1950s, at the birth of lucha cinema and the height of El Santo's career, Mexico City was under the control of the appointed "regent" Ernesto Uruchurtu, a modernist and moralist who saw the two as inextricably linked - his efforts to gentrify and restructure the city, introducing more green space and cleaner streets, went hand-in-hand with strict enforcement of traditional gender roles, bans and fines directed towards art and performances he found distasteful, and the forced closure of bars, restaurants, theatres and cabarets that he felt undermined his vision of a new, moral Mexico. Lucha Libre was just one of the many intended victims of Uruchurtu's campaigns, and despite its popularity, it was banned from television.
For the middle classes, unless they were willing to leave the newly minted estates, suburbs and gated communities that Uruchurtu's urban planning had laid out for them and head to the rougher parts of town to watch a Lucha Libre show in its entirety, Luchadores were stars of the silver screen and nothing more. To the working classes who couldn't afford television, the likes of El Santo had the dual role of big screen superhero, and in-the-flesh Luchadore, visible from the cheap seats at Arena Mexico.
Luchadores tend to have long careers. Despite the high-flying and death-defying acrobatics that most associate with the genre, it's a style that doesn't wear down the body as quickly and as severely as the American style - due to its roots in Greco-Roman, and the stiffness of many Lucha Libre rings (unlike in most of the world, where wrestling rings are specially constructed, with plenty of give and a central spring, many Lucha shows are still held in hard, unforgiving boxing rings), Lucha Libre relies less on repetitive bumps and slams than American wrestling, instead it is built around rolls, escapes, and exchanges of momentum. This, combined with its predominantly working class audience, and the anonymity and symbolism of the mask, affords luchadores a sense of agelessness that I believe was helped, not hindered, by the television ban that lasted from the 1950s until 1991. With the primary way to see luchadores outside of the arena being in the more fantastical realm of cinema, battling zombies and martians, rather than a sports-like weekly TV presentation, wrestlers like El Santo took on even more mythic, and ceremonial, roles to their audience. With El Santo's last match coming in 1982, but the mask rendering him unchanged from the superhero of the movies, audiences could watch him on film or video fighting evil, then that weekend witness the whole thing in person, oblivious to the decades that had perhaps passed between the two. Parents and grandparents could sit with children and grandchildren in the arenas, and tell stories of when they first watched this luchadore compete, so many years earlier. The passing down of masks and personae - as El Santo did following his retirement, to his son El Hijo del Santo - only extends that legacy further, elevating the likes of El Santo to the position of the truly immortal.
El Santo passed away on 5th February 1984, aged just 66 years old, after a wrestling career that spanned more than 50 years. He had briefly unmasked, revealing his face for just a moment, weeks before his death, on the television show Contrapunto, during a debate on Lucha Libre, and was buried in his mask and cape. His death, fittingly, has something of the mythic about it too - reinventing himself as an all-round showman in his retirement, he suffered a heart attack while attempting a Houdini-esque escape routine.
In many ways, it was Rudolfo Guzmán who died that day, and El Santo has never gone away. His name still adorned comic books and cartoons well into the 21st century, his statue still looks down upon his hometown of Tulancingo just as the pyramids of Huapalcalco have done for centuries, and his iconic silver mask is a ubiquitous symbol of Mexicana - appearing at football games, in graffiti, on sale in street markets, and on the walls of Mexican restaurants everywhere from Los Angeles to Lewisham (shout-out to Taco Queer).
In movies and in the ring, El Santo was a hero to the underdog and the downtrodden, and so he was in life, a tireless activist to improve the lives of Mexico's poor, and a supporter of countless charities. His son, El Hijo del Santo, wrestles to this day and, like his father, has appeared in movies and comic books, but also in reality TV, most recently on Netflix's Piñata Masters. Just like dad, El Hijo del Santo has his pet causes too, and has been a long-time spokesman and campaigner for Wildcoast, campaigning for marine conservation and clean oceans. There have been legal disputes, even within the Guzman family, over the rights and licensing to the Santo name, and both Santo and El Hijo del Santo have faced the ignominy of attempting to defend their identity in the courtroom, but the Man In The Silver Mask has put Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Nazis of Atlantis down for the count, so a few lawsuits and injunctions are nothing to him.
I'll leave you with a simple rule to live by: Be More Santo - help those who need it, succeed in the face of adversity and censure, leave a legacy that lives on beyond you, inspire activists and heroes of all stripes, and dropkick any Nazis that get in your way, Atlantean or otherwise.
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