Generations of sports fans in Mexico and the U.S. grew up enchanted by lucha libre, the Mexican professional wrestling style that became a phenomenon in the early 20th century. Children, in particular, have been enchanted with the sport, which features wrestlers with colorful, elaborate masks, acrobatic maneuvers, and rivalries between the técnicos, the sport’s heroes, and the rudos, its bad guys.
One of those young fans was Alex Espinoza, a professor at UC Riverside and its Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing. The author, who was born in Tijuana and raised in Southern California, grew up watching luchador movies, in which the masked fighters took on a wide range of villains.
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“They were these sort of comic book superheroes, the movies with El Santo and all of them, fighting zombie women and witches and wolf people,” Espinoza recalls. “We had this local Spanish language station, and we used to always watch them. They were so cheesy, but they were so entertaining.”
Espinoza was living in the Central Valley when he realized the sport could form a backdrop for a novel. “I knew that I wanted to explore the link between performance and violence,” he says. “I thought, ‘Nobody’s really taken lucha libre and given it a literary spin.’”
That was the origin for “The Sons of El Rey,” Espinoza’s third novel, and his first in 11 years. It follows Ernesto Vega, a dying luchador with a secret; his son, Freddy, who is trying in vain to save his father’s gym; and Freddy’s son, Julian, a professor who finds himself being racially fetishized by other gay men.
The novel, Espinoza says, “came about from the desire to explore the link between performance and masculinity as it relates to male toxicity. I wanted to pay homage to this rich tapestry of the art of performance, how it’s a sport that blends athleticism and script. It’s the best of everything, and it’s a metaphor for life.”
Espinoza, who will appear on the Southern California News Group webinar series Bookish with Mike Madrid on Friday, June 21 at 5 p.m., talked about his latest novel via Zoom from Los Angeles, where he lives. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q: What kind of research did you do into the lucha libre scene in 1960s-era Mexico City?
At first, I started with the movies, because that’s a really important cultural touchstone. Then I took several trips to Mexico City and actually went to the Arena México, where it started, and I watched many lucha libre matches there. I spoke to scholars, people who I knew who had studied the sport. And then on this side of the border, I attended lucha libre matches in swap meet parking lots and community centers. I interviewed some people who run a school for lucha libre, the Santino brothers, who are here in Southern California. And I tried to study as much as I could about the origins of the sport, about how it fuses Greco-Roman wrestling with freestyle wrestling, and its beginnings in terms of the first promoters, Salvador Lutteroth, who was kind of the grandfather of lucha libre.
And of course, I got into the exóticos, the drag performances of lucha libre from the early days. The first drag luchador was an individual named Gardenia Davis, and he used to come out throwing gardenias to the audience, and he was kind of considered the first exótico back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. There was a fighter named Murciélago Velázquez, whose shtick was that he would release bats into the audience. He was one of the first rudos. He would come out and everybody would boo, and he would release these bats out into the auditorium and people would scream and run. He had been a boxer, and he lost his eye in a fight, so he had a prosthetic eye. He and his opponent during a match had agreed that they were going to stage this fight to where his opponent hit him, and then the eye popped out because they wanted the audience to get really freaked out, and then the audience to think like, “Oh my God, this técnico popped his eye out.”
There’s a lot of performance, a lot of exaggeration, but also a lot of athleticism. People really do get hurt. One of the things I wanted to emphasize with the fact that this is athleticism, that it’s just as legitimate as any kind of sport. For some reason we see it as lesser, but it’s just as athletic and dangerous as any of those contact sports. I wanted to pay homage to that.
Q: Ernesto almost splits his personality into these two people, Ernesto and El Rey Coyote. What do you think he gets out of having this alter ego that he’s carefully constructed?
It’s a form of drag for Ernesto; it’s a form of escape. He’s constantly wrestling with his sexuality. And I think with that character, he gets the freedom and flexibility to really be who he wants to be, to be more alive than anything. I didn’t intend for that to happen. It just emerged throughout the process of writing it. But the more I wrote about him, the more I realized that the alter ego would really provide an opportunity for me to interrogate the character in ways that he can’t interrogate himself. He’s really struggling with his own identity and sexuality, and with the choices that he’s made in his life, the way he grew up. So he adopts this persona who is very sure of himself, who knows his role, who knows his place, and who can do and say things that Ernesto never could or do.
A lot of the men of that generation struggled a lot with expectations. I’m sure that there were people in my family who probably struggled with their sexuality but really couldn’t express it because it wasn’t socially acceptable. So they married and accepted that and had a lot of internal turmoil. I wanted for Ernesto to have an opportunity to express that, but at the same time wrestle with the decisions and know that he ultimately is a product of that culture, and his children are going to live very different lives, but at the same time, they’re still going to wrestle with their own demons.
Q: His grandson, Julian, has to deal with both racism and homophobia, this double-barreled bigotry.
Julian is trying to figure out his position as a gay man navigating this new queer world, a landscape where racism does play a part in it. You look at apps like Grindr, where men are trying to curate a kind of sexual experience, and in the same way that his father and his grandfather had to fulfill certain roles, he’s also finding himself having to fulfill certain sexual roles. And through that, he sort of loses himself a little bit and begins to question the expectations that are placed on him and the way in which men are fetishizing him the same way that they fetishized his father and his grandfather.
He is really struggling, not just with his cultural identity and the expectations that were placed on him by his father and his grandfather, but also his sexual identity, in a very different way than his grandfather did. We know his grandfather’s also gay and had this secret love affair, but there were different struggles for different eras and different times. More than anything, I wanted to express that Ernesto’s struggles as a queer man are very different from his grandson’s struggles as a queer man, because his grandson is living a very different reality.
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