Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia: The Socioeconomic Origins of Machismo and the Macho

The luchadores fit into one of two categories: rudos, the bad guys, and técnicos or científicos, the good guys. The folkloric aspect of the lucha libre is apparent — Barthes’s forays into the study of wrestling as a social phenomenon led him to treat it as a “demystified cultural form” (Levi 58). The rudos, who win the matches as often if not more often than the técnicos, are characterized by their gusto and passion and their willingness to break the traditional rules of the fair fight. Técnicos, on the other hand, tend to be seen training at the gym more often and defer to the authority of the referees. (The terms técnicos and científicos, when not applied to wrestling, are loaded with meaning; the former is a term for members of the technocratic wing of the PRI, the ruling governmental party in Mexico, and the latter refers to the “antinationalist villains” of standard Mexican history texts.)

Despite the ostensible civility of the técnicos, Levi says that the Mexican middle class is more likely to scoff at the melodrama of lucha libre than to be absorbed in its folkloric framework. “As representatives of the bourgeoisie,” she writes, “scholars and journalists alike refuse to recognize wrestling for what it is for the same reason they cannot afford to recognize the labor process in all its brutality” (60). However, Mexican laborers certainly understand the brutal nature of the labor process and thus are much more likely to respond to the violence, physical and verbal, of the wrestling ring. The gruff version of machismo is more readily available in wrestling than the smooth, womanizing type of the silver screen; the middle-class macho of Paredes and Mendoza simply does not understand the vulgarity of Peña’s working-class macho.

The connection to the mythology of machismo is apparent in the tenets of lucha libre: a folkloric battle of good against bad, posturing an exaggerated and extreme masculinity, and following a prescribed script are requirements of the luchadores as well as the charros and of Mexican men displaying their own overripe masculinity for friend, foe, woman and nation to see. The tension of the melodrama, and the tension between Mendoza’s two warring types of machismo, the authentic and the fake, comes from a classist assumption of a culture-wide inferiority complex. “In Latin America … the devaluating of melodrama is explicitly class-based rather than primarily gendered,” writes Levi (61). “The pleasure for the audience lies not in the triumph of good but in the representation of their worldview” (62-63).

So it follows from Levi’s and Barthes’s suggestions that if the status quo of the Mexican and/or Mexican-American labor and social systems are corrupt, those affected — especially machos — enjoy a fantastical representation of their world as opposed to an escapist view on entertainment. In other words, the Mexican concepts of lucha libre and machismo include an inversion of reality, but not in the way Americans and Europeans are used to seeing. While the higher-class intellectuals of America are praised when they create reality out of fiction (recall any movie, TV show or play that forms “reality” out of a scripted situation, such as the gamut of so-called reality TV shows), the luchadores create fiction out of reality, taking the class struggles of everyday Mexican men and fictionalizing them to a script only slightly more overt than that of a game of the dozens played by the most macho men in all of Mexico.

Even the men most representative of authentic machismo, whether the sophisticated middle-class type or the brutish working-class version, are wracked with a loneliness Octavio Paz and other researchers have elaborated all too eloquently. “[T]he distinguishing characteristic of machismo is not violence but intransigence. … he may, of course, have to resort to violence to impose his criterion. But men customarily take precautions against this eventuality by avoiding intimacy with others, abstaining from discussion controversial matters and leading a rather lonely life” (Stevens 849).

Men, and in particular macho Mexican men, are lost in the labyrinth of solitude, a ripple effect they must endure as victims of struggle between socioeconomic classes and between nationhoods decades after the Mexican Revolution and centuries after Spanish conquest. But why continue with the cycle of scripted machismo if the script is not true to the ideal Mexican man? Simply because the complex social world of men dictates that such scripts be played out for all to witness and judge. Machismo, like lucha libre, is a sport and a melodrama. “I believe one does it all for the sake of machismo,” states a working-class Mexican man who, in addition to working to sustain his family, must sustain himself in the constantly competitive sociopolitical world of men and nations. (Peña 43). “[It is] as if we have to prove that we are men.” And — through their everyday battles to be the best men they possibly can — they prove that they are not only men, but machos.

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