The World of Lucha Libre

Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity American Encounters/Global Interactions

25 cm, 265 pages

English language

Published July 30, 2008 by Duke University Press.

ISBN:
9780822342144
OCLC Number:
226361814

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5 stars (1 review)

The World of Lucha Libre is an insider's account of lucha libre, the popular Mexican form of professional wrestling. Heather Levi spent more than a year immersed in the world of wrestling in Mexico City. Not only did she observe live events and interview wrestlers, referees, officials, promoters, and reporters; she also apprenticed with a retired luchador (wrestler). Drawing on her insider's perspective, she explores lucha libre as a cultural performance, an occupational subculture, and a set of symbols that circulate through Mexican culture and politics. Levi argues that the broad appeal of lucha libre lies in its capacity to stage contradictions at the heart of Mexican national identity: between the rural and the urban, tradition and modernity, ritual and parody, machismo and feminism, politics and spectacle. Levi considers lucha libre in light of scholarship about sport, modernization, and the formation of the Mexican nation-state, and in connection to professional …

1 edition

A fantastic academic work on Lucha Libre

5 stars

I found this book absolutely wonderful. Levi looks a wrestling from a whole new angle. Granted occasionally I felt she was seeing things that weren't there, but that is true of almost any academic work.

Much of the book is based on her experience, as an American Sociological Academic, training to be a luchadora in Mexico City. Its the way she really get to see how training happens gets to actually have real conversations with Luchadores.

I found it incredibly serprising how Lucha Libre had developed quite differently from its American counterpart primarily because it had been banned from being on TV for almost 40 years.

Her take on the class struggle was interesting and how it relates to various characters and takes on this sport. Her emphasis on the sport of lucha, not sport-like, not sports entertainment was also interesting, always while acknowledging the match outcome is pre-determined still …

Subjects

  • Mexico Social life and customs
  • Wrestling Mexico. Social aspects
  • Nonfiction, Sports, Individual Sports, Wrestling
  • Nonfiction, History, Americas, Mexico
  • Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Anthropology