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This chapter takes as its focus the intersection of the discourses of Mexican criminology (based on international narratives) and those of lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) spectacle. The analysis focuses on the merging of personas—the serial killer disguised as a nurse and that of La Dama del Silencio, the wrestler persona adopted by Juana Barraza, that various accounts used as evidence that she, Barraza, was indeed the serial killer. These discourses have served to criminalize La Dama del Silencio, the wrestler, more so than Juana Barraza, the woman. This chapter shows how discourses of criminality and the spectacle of lucha libre intersect to regulate and perform the parameters of mexicanidad, reinforcing the limits of Mexican masculinity and femininity, but also revealing these limits as subject to redefinition. The gendered, sexed and classed police and criminological accounts, that interpret Barraza’s wrestling practice, with “masculine” features, and “muscular” body, as proof that Barraza was “evil”, and therefore capable of killing “without remorse” are interrogated. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how this merging of personas, the serial killer and the wrestler, circulates in different popular cultural forms, including a cumbia music video, a novel, and a police video.

This chapter presents powerful images and accounts that chronicle contemporary urban life in Mexico. The images discussed were captured by the photographer Maya Goded. These photographs and narratives chronicle the desolation of death, the world of the child and the bleak world of prostitution. In addition to these, the woman’s prison, the attractions of lucha libre (masked wrestling), the national lottery and games of chance, and the mass rallies of the Zapatistas, are painted vibrantly through chronicles and accounts. In these chronicles and photographs, the theme of poverty and the failure of the government to address the needs of the marginalized people form the unifying voice of these accounts. Prostitution, wrestling and the lottery became means for the people to escape poverty and the humdrum of everyday lives marked with difficulties. And the mistreatment of children, the trafficking of the rights of women in prisons and the lack of systematic identification of the victims of death reflect the failure of the government to produce laws and services that protect its people. However, despite the bleakness of the photographs and the chronicles presented herein, they nevertheless reflect the resilience of the Mexicans in surviving the challenges of life despite the feeling of being marginalized.

This chapter discusses two venues that continued to debate the relationship between modernity, technological hybridity, and mestizaje as the postrevolutionary state began to lose credibility during the 1960s. It focuses primarily on El Santo’s Mexploitation cinema and on Carlos Olvera’s novel Mejicanos en el espacio (1968). The novel satirizes statist discourses while the movies (ironically) support mestizo nationalism. Due in part to a desire to placate the censors, the directors of lucha libre cinema validated statist ideals of mestizaje and modernity. El Santo played an authentically Mexican, mestizo superhero who defended the nation against both the threat of external empire—symbolized by aliens and foreign mad scientists—and from the specters of the indigenous past. El Santo thus asserted mestizo Mexico’s right to colonize its indigenous population while also resisting foreign attempts to meddle in the country. Olvera’s novel belongs to the countercultural onda movement, and it deconstructs and ridicules official discourses that justified internal empire. It imagines a 22nd century Centroméjico that attempts to assert its modernity by mimicking the imperial behavior of nations like the US. The novel ultimately suggests that the mestizo drive for empire validates global hierarchies of power that marginalize Mexico.

This chapter presents the reader with an entirely different formation: Mexico between the late 1950s and early 1960s, where, unlike in Italy at the time, highly speculative capital interests were at the top of government policy. The chapter traces the rise of Fernando Méndez from an obscure maker of generic films in the 1940s to one of Mexican cinema’s most prominent figures. Méndez’ rise coincided with the film industry’s integration into the Mexican state’s proto-neoliberal agenda. An analysis of Fernando Méndez’ horror films shows that the films stage dimensions of this process. Mexican film historians, in line with their country’s circumstances and dominant interests, have, as a result, always included Fernando Méndez in the history of their cinema, as an auteur of a certain kind of popular films.

To learn the game, an aspiring professional wrestler at the Johnny Rodz Unpredictable School of Professional Wrestling must do more than acquire athletic and performative skills. He must also assimilate masculine codes of behaviour to earn the right to enter and perform in the squared circle. Learning the game is an often brutal reality check, an enforced encounter with one’s own physical, intellectual, and emotional limitations experienced through the tedium of repetitive practice and the volatility of other men. It is an exercise in managing the self, as much about learning to submit as it is about dominating, and about learning to accept the demand that one lose as it is about enjoying the pleasure of winning, or at least the appearance of winning. As with many other masculine rites of passage, it is ironic that to prove their manhood wrestlers must first surrender it to the others.