The History Of The Luchador Mask In Wrestling, Explained

WrestleTalk

Who is your favourite luchador of all time? WATCH NEXT: Sting vs WWE, Explained: https://bit.ly/2ONbTwc  The Luchador Mask In Wrestling, Explained  SUPPORT US ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/wrestletalk SUBSCRIBE TO partsFUNknown: https://bit.ly/2J2Hl6q TWITTER: https://twitter.com/partsfunknown FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/partsfunknown/  The masks of luchadores might be the the most iconic symbol of Mexican Wrestling and seemingly can be traced back thousands of years to the warriors, priests and peoples of the Aztec and Maya. The origins are a little more mundane than that, but part fo the magic and mystery of a mask is that you can apply meaning to it, and they traditionally have been used to evoke myths and legends through history. Here's Laurie to Explain.  #luchalibre #lucahdormask #wrestling #wwe #reymysterio #maskedwrestler

Transcript

00:00 I don't know about you, but when I was a kid the sight of a masked man leaping through

00:15 the air doing seemingly impossible stunts spoke directly to some lizard part of my brain.

00:22 The folk-tongue whispers of wrestling, the well-told lie of good vs evil would always

00:27 capture my imagination, but there was something about a luchador that had an extra magnetism.

00:34 Maybe it was the insane aerobatics because I'm sorry Mr. Cornette, but flips is cool,

00:39 but I think it fundamentally came down to the mystique of the mask.

00:44 Because masks are worn by everyone who's anyone in geekdom.

00:48 "That's correct Wendy, we all wear masks, metaphorically speaking."

00:52 Yeah, but also, like, literally, because you've got masked up superheroes, swashbuckling adventures,

01:00 ninja turtles, which is a lizard brain bingo, masks confer mighty powers that can save the

01:06 day and no one knows what lies behind the masquerade.

01:12 Which means it can be anyone under the face covering, even you.

01:16 And for kids especially, that's a pretty neat feeling, pop on a mask and suddenly you

01:21 are Rey Mysterio.

01:23 But as masks are synonymous symbols of lucha libre, it's worth noting where they come

01:29 from.

01:30 Are they some sacred tradition that has been passed down through thousands of years?

01:34 What do they stand for?

01:36 What powers do they confer?

01:38 I'm Laurie hailing from partsFUNknown and this is Lucha Masks Explained.

01:48 Before we uncover the truth about luchador masks, please do consider giving this channel

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02:09 So ipso facto, you'd be doing us a really massive favour and Adam is going to handwrite

02:14 all of you letters of thanks.

02:23 Lucha masks feel steeped in Latin American mysticism.

02:27 They conjure images of ancient masked warriors taking on totemic powers associated with the

02:32 spiritual figures the masks depict, giving the wearing of a mask this feeling of a ritual,

02:39 a tradition that can be traced back thousands of years.

02:42 And many promotions and wrestlers have been perfectly happy to lean into this lie.

02:55 Much like we discovered when we looked at the creation of Green Mist, Lucha Masks actually

03:00 started life as a US export.

03:04 Masks have been used in wrestling for over 150 years if reports of a masked wrestler

03:09 appearing at the 1865 World's Fair in Porto, Portugal are to be believed.

03:14 It was Frenchman Theobald Bauer who was said to don his disguise as he toured France as

03:19 a member of the circus.

03:21 But the man credited with popularising the gimmick was Mort Henderson.

03:25 The story goes that at the 1915 New York International Wrestling Tournament the crowd had grown bored

03:31 with the action and attendance was dropping until a masked man strode through the audience,

03:37 seated himself near the stage and issued a challenge to the wrestlers.

03:42 News of this mysterious figure circulated through the papers and suddenly the Manhattan

03:46 Opera House was full to bursting.

03:49 This masked marvel, as he came to be known, became the centre of a storm of speculation.

03:55 And all the while under the mask was humble Mort Henderson, a journeyman performer whose

04:01 own star had faded somewhat in recent years.

04:04 And Henderson would fade back into relative obscurity, but the masked marvel would endure.

04:10 Meanwhile to the south, Mexico was embroiled in a bloody revolution that would span the

04:16 1910s and two Italian businessmen, Giovanni Raselevich and Antonio Fournier, seized the

04:22 opportunity to offer the beleaguered people a distraction.

04:26 They began to organise matches between fighters.

04:29 These were bare knuckled and with no weapons, it became known as lucha libre or free fighting.

04:35 The Mexican wrestling scene relied heavily on imports from the US for many years until

04:41 Salvador Luteroff Gonzalez, the so-called 'father' of lucha libre, formed the first

04:47 Mexican-owned promotion, the Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre or the EMLL in 1933.

04:55 Within a year they were selling out their home base, the previously run down Arena Modelo,

04:59 and gathering crowds of 5,000 paying fans.

05:04 In those early days though, the EMLL also had to rely on American talent and it was

05:08 one of those bookings that changed everything.

05:12 Corbin James Massey had been working throughout Texas in the early 1930s as Cyclone McKee

05:19 and caught the eye of Luteroff who brought him to the EMLL.

05:23 Cyclone McKee wrestled the very first show, but a year later he would don a mask to become

05:29 La Maravilla Enmascarada or the Masked Marvel.

05:33 Where have I heard that before?

05:36 La Maravilla Enmascarada was an outsized hit with the Mexican crowd drawing way above the

05:41 midcard expectations of his contemporaries in the US.

05:44 So much so that Luteroff began to introduce more and more masked characters to the EMLL

05:50 known as Enmascarados.

05:52 This allowed the promotion to focus more on their homegrown talent, which in turn let

05:57 them expand across Mexico and at the same time cemented the idea that the mask was part

06:03 of what defined a luchador.

06:07 But the masks had no meaning, no actual significance beyond their ability to draw.

06:18 So as with all mysteries, people, promoters, wrestlers, the fans began to fill in that

06:24 significance.

06:25 The Maya wore masks for many occasions, they wore protective but intimidating masks to

06:31 war, they were buried in death masks that would shield them on their journey to the

06:35 afterlife and for religious ceremonies would wear masks that represented different animals

06:40 whose spirits were entwined with the gods and conferred a portion of their power onto

06:46 the wearer.

06:47 Sort of like a strong king might be in a jaguar mask, or you might get a sort of prince puma.

06:55 The Aztecs too believed masks had an intrinsic power, as described by Dr. Celia F. Klein,

07:01 an art history professor at UCLA, who said "Masks were valuable because they were thought

07:06 to be powerful.

07:08 They derived some of their power from the materials used to make them.

07:12 The most powerful and prestigious masks were made of the rarest, most costly materials."

07:18 So to even own a mask was a status symbol, which is something that can really easily

07:23 be brought forward to tie into the sort of luchador honour system.

07:27 You lose your mask, you lose your status.

07:30 This is kind of the crazy thing here because none of this is why lucha masks exist, but

07:34 the parallels throughout history just keep cropping up.

07:38 Another Mesoamerican society known as the Olmecs had these pretty gross masks with disfigured

07:42 faces that suggested a kind of transformation into birds, lizards and felines, which was

07:48 bringing the human and the natural together in a way that would come to define their cosmology.

07:53 They also apparently produced this very famous sculpture that has come to be known as the

07:58 Wrestler.

07:59 While it's widely debated as to its authenticity and its subject matter as it's likely not

08:04 about a wrestler, you can see how all of these myths can muddy the true origin of something

08:09 as simple as a mask, especially when the veil of kayfabe is drawn across it too.

08:15 And masks afford a really serious firewall of kayfabe for luchadors, right?

08:20 Because at the end of the show it comes off and the wrestler gets to walk down the street

08:24 completely anonymous, no one the wiser that this man, who admittedly is built like a brick

08:30 shithouse, is the high-flying performer they just saw.

08:37 But he's not wearing glasses.

08:39 Except I don't even think that the masks in Lucha Libre are really meant to be read

08:44 as masks, these are the characters' faces, right?

08:47 Theatrical performance dating back to ancient Greece used masks to bring to life beings

08:52 of immense power.

08:54 It started with the worship of Dionysus, who you may know as the lounge lizard god of wine

08:59 from Hades.

09:00 "Hey there, Zagman, how's it going?"

09:02 "Hello, sir, I'm drunk, drunk on horny."

09:05 As part of these 6th century rituals, communicants would impersonate the deity through disguise,

09:12 kind of making the god manifest.

09:15 Which also inspired them to speak as the god, to speak in first person, which essentially

09:20 invented the art of drama.

09:23 Ritual dramas then commonly began to use masks to represent the gods, demons and even concepts,

09:29 like sin, and they continue to do that throughout history.

09:32 I'd argue that Lucha Libre is part of that global tradition, because what is wrestling

09:38 if not one big, really bloody weird morality play?

09:44 The masks of Luchadors, though they started out in simple block colours so they could

09:48 be seen from the back of an arena, still became the face, the symbol of the blue demon.

09:54 Or the phantom.

09:55 Or Spider-Man.

09:56 That one works less well, thanks Ray.

10:00 But generally they invoke creatures of myth, benevolent deities or creeping darkness, kind

10:05 of aspects the performer takes on during the match.

10:08 Even the idea of high-flying and improbable stunts feels like something more than human.

10:15 It's definitely about more than a bloke who doesn't want to be recognised when he's

10:21 out buying protein powder.

10:22 You can get a hat and sunglasses for that.

10:25 Masks are totems of power, so when Luchadors lose them in the kind of dreaded mask vs mask

10:31 match it's a disgrace, a dishonour and disempowering.

10:35 That's why when the mask comes off it's usually as part of a retirement, or at least

10:39 a retirement of that character, because the mask at that point has lost its power.

10:45 It's the same reason Samson didn't go scooping up his offcuts after Delilah gave

10:49 him legend's first lockdown mullet.

10:51 And this process of wagering masks can be linked back to the Aztecs, as Dr Klein of

10:55 UCLA says.

10:56 In Aztec society, a warrior who killed his first captive was said to assume another face.

11:03 Regardless of whether this expression referred literally to a trophy mask or was simply a

11:07 figure of speech, it implies that the youth's new face represented a new social identity

11:14 or status.

11:16 In Lucha, if you conquer a fierce rival, you can take their face, their status as your

11:23 own.

11:24 Just not in the skin flay way of the Aztecs.

11:28 Maybe they do that at ECW.

11:30 Think about how Kevin Nash unmasked Rey Mysterio Jr in WCW, which led him to inherit the gimmick

11:36 of his uncle Rey Mysterio with an I, now spelled with a Y in WWE.

11:42 These are two separate, nearly indistinguishable gimmicks.

11:46 Or how one of the most famous luchadors of all time, El Santo, never removed his mask

11:51 during his 40 year career, even being buried in his trademark silver face covering.

11:57 And it's some of Rodolfo Guzman, the man beneath the masks, reverence for his character

12:02 that informs some of the myth of Lucha Libre today.

12:11 But I hear you screaming in the comments, you said none of this myth stuff has anything

12:16 to do with Lucha masks.

12:18 And it doesn't really, because masks were adopted in Mexico for one reason alone, money.

12:25 But it also has everything to do with the myth stuff.

12:29 Dr. Klein described the Aztecs like this.

12:33 Like many Mesoamerican peoples, the Aztecs made extensive use of masks.

12:38 They were, in other words, what the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss termed a mask culture.

12:45 In his book The Way of the Mask, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss posited that mythical

12:50 representations cannot be understood as isolated objects.

12:53 This was specifically referring to the masks of the Northwest Pacific Coast tribes, saying

12:58 they cannot be interpreted in and by themselves as separate objects.

13:04 He instead tried to draw parallels between the masks of one group and the masks of another

13:09 people, saying they all informed and transformed each other, creating this greater pantheon

13:16 for the region.

13:17 He said, "They are parts of a system within which they transform each other.

13:22 As in the case with myths, masks, with their origin myths and the rites in which they appear,

13:27 become intelligible only through the relationships which unite them."

13:32 And Lucha Libre, through its masks, creates this pantheon of figures who represent gods,

13:38 animals, forces of nature, bloody Wolverine, and each interrelation between your technicos

13:45 and your rudos, your goodies and your baddies, your lineages, your El Eo del Fantasma, your

13:50 Rey Mysterio Jr, your tag team mask coordination.

13:54 All of this has fundamentally created the myth of masks, where there wasn't actually

13:59 a myth before.

14:01 It is very literally a mask culture.

14:04 And every little clod of meaning that lucha masks have gathered as they've rolled through

14:08 their existence, be it links to the Maya or the Aztecs, to the divine, to superheroes,

14:14 changes our understanding of them.

14:16 It's all part of an ongoing, ever-evolving dialogue.

14:20 We all wear masks, metaphorically speaking.

14:25 But luchadors literally wear masks, and metaphorically, they keep morphing and changing meaning as

14:31 more and more wrestlers add to the tradition and as fans continue to draw parallels with

14:37 myth.

14:47 Thank you so much for watching this video, if you liked it please leave a like, a comment

14:51 with your thoughts on lucha masks, and if you haven't already and you never want to

14:54 miss a video in this series or any of the other great ones we've got here on PFK,

14:59 you have to subscribe to the channel.

15:01 As I said earlier, your letters of thanks from Adam Blampied are in the post.

15:04 Now if you enjoyed this video on masks, why not check out this video on Sting, because

15:10 it's sort of about face paint, which is sort of like masks, but it's mostly about

15:14 how the Icon has been a figure that stands against WWE for all of his career.

15:19 There was also this one where Luke asks, "Is Edge actually good?"

15:23 The short answer is yes, the long answer is the video.

15:27 I will see you next time, Jam That Jam.

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