Mexico's fabled masked wrestlers: Viva lucha libre!

If the quiet thwack of a leather ball against a willow cricket bat in a sleepy Kentish village gives a certain insight into England, its people and its attitudes, the scream of a masked midget as he flies across a wrestling ring on to the back of a fellow grappler speaks volumes about that eternally kitsch and obsessively Catholic chunk of mercurial real estate known as Mexico. One of the most important icons in modern-day Mexican culture, both inside and outside the ring, the masked wrestler - or luchador as they are known here - comes in all shapes and sizes and there are thousands of them wriggling about sweat-stained canvases vying to be the country's top dog.

Mexican wrestling, or lucha libre ("free-style fighting") is, behind football, Mexico's second-biggest spectator sport and can be seen on any night of the week in at least 10 venues across Mexico City alone. Some of the arenas cater to more than 15,000 crazed fans, drawn from all classes, to watch what is, essentially, grown men in tights and masks rolling about the floor. Governed by the same traditions as wrestling the world over, the wrestlers, almost always tag teams, are divided into two distinct camps: the hairy and ugly, bad guys or rudos, who employ all manner of perfidy and underhandedness to succeed - maybe distracting the ref while his tag partner belts his opponent over the head with a chair; and the well turned-out good guys or tecnicos who invariably play by the rules and use honest-to-goodness wrestling skills to win. It's a veritable mad house, and fighting has been known to break out among fans of both camps as the skulduggery reaches fever pitch and each side uses everything at its disposal to distract the other.

Yet contrary to how it might appear, this is serious stuff. Earnest newspapers discuss the results of the previous night's engagements, while dozens of wrestling magazines, cartoon strips and TV programmes cash in on a seemingly insatiable interest in the activity. And such is the power of the combatants among the people that one masked wrestler - Super Barrio - stands at the forefront of a movement created to help the poor of Mexico City after the devastating earthquake of 1985. A local hero, Barrio has disrupted the Mexican Congress and led a successful demonstration in support of housing for the impoverished; he is now regarded as a respected national figure and representative of the left-wing opposition, even though he still wears his pants over his tights.

"My first impression of lucha libre was that it's a funny mix of acrobatics, the circus, and pro wrestling in America," says one fan, Jared Hess, the critically acclaimed director of Napoleon Dynamite. "It was funny and different from American wrestling. The whole aesthetic really appeals to me." Indeed, the director's latest film, the comedy Nacho Libre, stars Jack Black in the title role as a monastic priest who looks after orphaned children by day and moonlights by night as a somewhat inadequate luchador in order to earn money to feed his impoverished waifs. "It just hit me as something so strange and wild," adds Hess. "It was a story I really wanted to tell. The concept is so outrageous."

Strange and wild it certainly is, but this totally implausible story is, in fact, based on the life of one of Mexico's most beloved grapplers - the legendary Fray Tormenta (Friar Storm). A professional luchador, Tormenta fought for 23 years, until 2005, and survived 4,000 bouts while remaining incognito inside his golden cape, yellow leotard and red-and-yellow mask. But in real life, Fray Tormenta is a real priest who, like the fictional Nacho Libre, donned the leotard in order to feed the children he had found abandoned on the streets of Mexico City. "No one would have taken me seriously as a wrestler had they known I was a priest," explained the wrestler, whose real name is Father Sergio Gutierrez Benitez. "The fans, the impresarios, thought my nom de guerre was a joke, like all the other characters we impersonate in the ring."

One of 18 children born to poverty, Benitez had little chance for education and so gravitated to the port of Veracruz, fraternised with pimps and prostitutes and got heavily into drugs. "The day I hit rock bottom, I went to see a priest for help," he continued. "He chased me out of the church. I was so angry, so incensed, I thought there ought to be better priests in this world to help people like me." Soon the young man was accepted by a Spanish order and dedicated his life to God, but it wasn't until he saw a young street kid sleeping rough under a bridge in Veracruz, that Father Sergio found his path and began his orphanage at Teotihuacan, just outside Mexico City, where no child, no matter the circumstance, was ever turned away.

"I never knew where the next meal was coming from," he explained. "So I became a professional wrestler because I had a cause. If it weren't for my children, there would have been no reason to fight." Father Sergio's identity was eventually leaked when one of his colleagues, Daniel Garcia, the legendary Huracan Ramirez, attended a mass given by the good father and the news of his identity spread. "Luchadores were afraid to fight me, not because of my strength or skill but they were afraid of the fans," recalled the priest in an interview with Micahael Pazt of Slam Wrestling. "They would shout out, 'You can't fight a priest!' and they would throw tomatoes, garbage and even coins at them!"

When this remarkable figure made his last testimonial at the Arena in Mexico City, the entire Mexican wrestling fraternity turned out and applauded. And as Fray Tormenta stepped into the ring for the last time he quoted an old Mexican proverb. "Life," he said, "is but a brief masquerade. It teaches us to laugh with tears in our eyes, and to conceal our sorrow with laughter."

Indeed, the masquerade is part of a tradition that goes back centuries in Mexico. Aztec warriors would don animal masks, such as jaguars or wolves, which they hoped would enable them to fight like those creatures. Even after the Spanish conquest, the tradition continued. On saints' days peasants would construct masks out of cloth, bone and wood to represent creatures such as tigers, armadillos and monkeys, believing that, when they wore such masks, their true identities were transformed into gods who would make their harsh world a far better place, if only for one miraculous day.

Surprisingly, then, the first wrestler credited with sporting a mask in Mexico came from Chicago in 1934, his disguise a cheap gimmick imported by the ex-army colonel and wrestling entrepreneur, Salvador Lutterath, to introduce the country to this most American of sports. The identity of the wearer, dubbed El Mascadero or The Masked Man, is still not known; he was soon forgotten, his mantle usurped by an Irishman, Cyclone McKay, whose form-fitting leather mask covered the whole of his head and provided the blueprint for all masks to come. Soon McKay, who became known as El Maravilla Enmascarado, or The Masked Marvel, hit the big time as the press dubbed him "hated and mysterious" while packed audiences merrily hissed along. Masked combatants such as McKay were mere novelties in American wrestling but in Mexico, the mask took hold thoroughly and indelibly, its design employed explicitly to evoke the images of animals, gods, ancient heroes and other archetypes, whose identity the luchador takes on during a performance.

It was El Santo ("The Saint") who firmly established the mask as the identity of lucha libre and elevated the masked wrestler to the level of national superhero. Born Rodolfo Guzman Huerta on 22 September 1917, El Santo's timing was impeccable. He had learnt ju-jitsu and wrestling as a boy and by the mid-Thirties had established himself as a competent wrestler working under a number of short-lived professional aliases. Then, in 1942, inspired by the internationally successful comic-book hero The Phantom, and the Alexandre Dumas novel The Man in the Iron Mask, he became El Santo, or El Enmascarado de Plata ("The Saint", "The Man in the Silver Mask"). His distinctive silver costume and teardrop eyeholes became symbolic of the genre and he became the most famous Mexican wrestler of all time.

But even though El Santo, with his agility, grace and innovative moves, helped popularise lucha libre in the ring, it was out of the ring that he really made his name. The artist José G Cruz created a comic book based on the wrestler and Santo ran for 35 years and turned the wrestler into Mexico's favourite character in popular literature. His career as a movie star meanwhile spanned an amazing 52 films and propelled him into almost demigod status. His first films, The Evil Brain and The Infernal Men (both shot in Cuba - the productions ended the day before Castro seized power), were lacklustre affairs that failed miserably; it wasn't until his 1961 picture Santo versus the Zombies that his career really took off, only to be cemented the following year with Santo versus The Vampire Women that saw him fight off a horde of blood-hungry young girls. His movie career reached its apogee in 1970 with the massively successful money spinner The Mummies of Guanajuato. It co-starred his real-life enemy Blue Demon (who defeated him in 1953) and the flamboyant Liberace of lucha libre, Mil Mascaras (who, aged 66, is still a big name on the lucha circuit).

Santo was never seen unmasked, whether on film, at a party or on the street. Even while filming he would leave the set with his mask still on and ate in the studio restaurant wearing a mask with a hole for his chin so he could move his jaw. When a film crew travelled to Miami for a shoot, Santo flew on a different plane so nobody on the production would see his face when he removed his mask for passport control.

Sadly, El Santo's career, which lasted 49 years, came to a halt when he voluntarily removed his mask on a TV documentary in 1984, aged 67. He died just a week later, and was, of course, buried in his mask.

Nearly half a century before, Santo had put the mask at the heart of lucha libre. Other fighters, seeing his success, followed suit until, in the late 1940s, the authorities created a new set of rules that revolved entirely around the wrestler's disguise. The worst thing that can happen to a man is that he is unmasked during a bout, whereupon his name will be officially revealed. So the older the wrestler gets without being unmasked, the greater his status. Virtually all wrestlers will lose their mask during their careers and because it usually represents their final departure from the ring, the promoter will often give the loser a substantial lump sum to cushion the blow.

Today, lucha libre has, by unashamedly featuring midget wrestlers such as the three-foot-tall Tzuki, or by adding women fighters to the bill, become even more of an unashamed crowd-puller. But it is still the mask of the luchador that reigns supreme.

"Without the mask, you're nobody," explained Hijo del Santo (Son of the Saint), the legendary wrestler's real-life son who inherited the silver mask after his father's retirement. "When you put it on, you become something magic and suddenly you're an idol. Everyone likes you, they want to touch you and have you sign an autograph."

'Nacho Libre' is on general release from this Friday, 11 August. Lucha libre can be seen on the Wrestling Channel, Sky Digital 247, with increasing regularity