CDMX Diaries: Mexican therapy

Lycra and a little bit of misogyny on the streets of Mexico City

When I think of therapy I think of long couches, men with white pointy beards, of opening up. When the Mexicans think of therapy - or at least when the two Mexicans standing in front of me think of it - they think of lycra and abuse.

I’m on a night out in the Roma neighbourhood of Mexico City, and one of the best nights out in Roma, if you ask, well, anybody, is a night at the lucha libre.

Lucha libre is Mexican professional wrestling. It’s not quite WWE, John Cena and The Undertaker, but the idea is the same. People get in a ring and beat the living shit out of each other, or at least act like they’re are. Some of the punches look a bit soft and the landings a bit choreographed, the ring a little too springy to really hurt, but lucha libre is a Mexican institution, and so while in Mexico City it’s a must-go.

It’s such an institution that you don’t have to sort all the admin yourself, you can take a tour! A tour that includes mezcal and tacos and sorts all of the details out for you, which is my kind of tour. It starts with the mezcal, the drinks before the food, oddly. A sensible way around things would be to eat at least one taco before you start necking shots of mezcal. This is too sensible for a night at the lucha libre and too sensible for the party-loving American named Gus who sits across from me. “Hoo-hoo,” he crows as he watches me drink my first shot, “the Brits are getting lit!” This particular Brit is already starving so this shot begins to do interesting things to my brain.

This drinks before food situation, normally the bastion of a good old fashioned freshers night out, is possibly to make everyone more amenable to the slightly questionable rules and etiquette speech we receive before we head over to Arena Mexico for the show.

Lucha libre, according to our two guides Manu and Eduardo, is Mexican therapy. People scream, they shout, they do whatever they like. The people of Buenos Aires are famous for spending half of their lives on the couches of psychoanalysts. The people of Mexico City go and scream at some men in lycra instead.

Only today is special, since it is International Women’s Day, and so we won’t be screaming at men in lycra but women. And, as we are frequently reminded by Manu and Eduardo, this is Mexican therapy, so anything goes.

“Anything” includes the charming phrase “sit on my face!” which is screamed by Eduardo across the chasm between our seats and the ring, out there in the centre of Arena Mexico. Within this chasm sit rows of American college students, spring breakers who have a a grasp of Spanish and, once they have translated Eduardo’s filth, appalled expressions.

Manu joins Eduardo in the screaming, but it is noticeable that not many others do. A large chunk of the crowd are tourists, here not necessarily to participate in this great Mexican tradition (the insults, that is, not the wrestling) but to observe. Most are far too self-conscious to ask a woman forty feet away, in lycra, with arm muscles bigger than their calves, to sit on their face. Also, their Spanish just really isn’t up to it.

Other Mexicans don’t seem to take it up with quite as much gusto, either. I begin to have a sneaking suspicion that lucha libre might not be therapy for the whole of Mexico, but it definitely is for Manu and Eduardo.

I try and take it all in. The wrestling moves at pace. No sooner have you got used to the three or four characters in the ring (and there are often three or four, the Mexicans seem to love group brawls and the odd tag-team contest) than one of them has been finally pinned to the canvas and they are led away so that the next contest can start. Some often reappear, looking none the worse for wear and actually now warmed up. They’re ready for even more pretend punches.

We arrived later in the evening, for the “premier contests” according to Manu, but each bout looks largely the same to me. Two-to-four women enter the ring, do some acrobatics and a spot of light brawling, and one or two of them emerge as the victors.

While this is going on vendors buzz around like flies selling beers, spritzes, wine. These are practically thrown at me as soon as I’ve handed over some limp pesos. The beer is enormous and so I spend most of the evening either sitting and watching the women hurling themselves at each other, and running to the toilets, a nightclub-like set-up complete with a man who does nothing but hand you toilet paper and ask for tips.

The final match of the evening is another group affair, and Manu and Eduardo are continuously vocal. Shouts of “vaffanculo!” (go fuck yourself, or some other variant of this particularly nice expression) echo around the emptying seats.

I suppose the expression “go fuck yourself!” has been screamed from a therapist’s couch at one time or another. I’m not sure though that the recipient will have been an enormous woman dressed entirely in lycra, who’s about to leap off the side of a wrestling ring and elbow someone in the unmentionables.

But I could be wrong.

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