"S’cuse me buddy, do you know where the Lucha Libre is?"

The security guard looks at me a little suspiciously. It’s the same sort of look I always get browsing through the racks at Victoria’s Secret. I’ve got a pretty good idea why this is the case. It’s because I’m six foot six. And white, unlike everybody browsing through the vendors’ stalls in the Anaheim Indoor Market on this given Sunday.

The security guard smiles, and points. I find it out back, in a fenced off section of parking lot. There are about two hundred beaten up folding chairs and a set of bleachers set up around a wrestling ring on the pavement, and they’re beginning to fill up. I find a seat in the front row, and watch a bunch of kids playing in the wrestling ring, reenacting past Luchas. After a few minutes, a guy comes up and shoos them off the mat. The show is about to begin.

Begin it does, in fine style. There are no lights to dim, so the announcer just hits the play button on a stereo hooked up to a couple loud speakers, and the show begins… the sounds of the theme song to 2001:Space Odyssey. Halfway through the drum section, the announcer starts in, speaking Spanish in an incredibly deep and slow voice: "Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, we are about to witness one of the most dangerous and ancient sports in the whole world…". The Spanish begins to speed up, and I miss most of the next section, until the announcer reverts to his deep voice to announce the first match, between Johnny Rage and Kid Diablo. From a blocked off area behind the Port-a-Potties runs Johnny Rage, a tall skinny white kid wearing a black t-shirt with a skull on it. He prances around the ring with his fists in the air, screaming continuously. A moment later Kid Diablo enters the ring, sporting shoulder length blond hair and red leather pants.

The crowd isn’t buying it. Johnny Rage’s War Cry isn’t helping to convince them either. As the match gets underway, a noticeable stupor sets upon the crowd. It doesn’t help that the first match is a good 25 minutes long. These are not the wrestlers that la gente came to see. After the sixth or seventh two-count fall, a chant rises up: "Fuera! Fuera! Fuera de aquí!" Johnny Rage and Kid Diablo go on oblivious, locked in the heat of combat.

Though the first match is failing to impress anyone, Lucha Libre commands the passions of much of Mexico, the second most popular sporting event behind soccer. In Mexico, the police have in the past been reluctant to arrest Lucha stars, and for forty years, a beefy man in a silver mask achieved the fame of Elvis, Batman, and Jesus all rolled into one. "El Santo" as he called himself, joined the sport in its early days under the name of Rudy Gozo. After a few years of relative anonymity, he adopted his name from Alexandre Dumas’s novel, The Man in the Iron Mask, and became a national hero. By the early 1950s, a comic book starring him was regularly selling over a million copies weekly, better than Superman could claim. Over time, El Santo publicly became the figure he was in the ring. "He didn’t have a secret identity. He wasn’t just a fictional character, he was an actual person. He wasn’t like Christopher Reeves playing Superman and making a few public appearances, he was actually El Santo," says David Wilt, an expert and a fan who runs a website on the wrestler.

It wasn’t until his film career that El Santo really made it big. He became the star of what is probably the strangest B-movie genre of all time, the Lucha Libre Horror Flick. In it, he would fight evil, usually in the form of mad scientists, vampires, and Martians, or some combination of the three. With the Martians defeated, El Santo would announce to the police "I have to go," and peel out in a red Austin Martin to go wrestle. Then, having defeated his opponent in the ring, he would hop back into the Austin Martin and rush off to battle what was invariably another round of mad scientists, vampires, and Martians. This stock plot proved to be the bread and butter of a fifty-four-movie El Santo cinematographic dynasty. Titles include Samson Vs. The Vampire Women and Samson In The Wax Museum. For over a quarter of a century, the Lucha Libre Horror Flick dominated Mexican cinema, before it was at last defeated by imported Kung Fu movies.

Even after his retirement and subsequent death in 1984, Santo remained a national hero. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, there is an unofficial holiday featuring nationwide celebrations and memorials. "He made Lucha Libre what it is today," Wilt writes.

Even with a limited Spanish vocabulary, it was obvious that one of the crowd’s favorite aspects of the sport was the talking of copious quantities of smack. In a tag team match featuring El Genio, Tornado Negro, and Karateka against The American Rebel, Power Boy, and Ghetto Matt, there was no lack of it, in either quantity or quality. It’s all in good fun, but not for the easily offended. El Genio began the match by screaming at his opponent Power Boy (a stocky black guy in a white spandex suit), "Bring it on, Gary Coleman."

The most imposing figure of the match, both in physical size and shit talking, was The American Rebel. Appearing in a silk suit he had made for him in Mexico City, he beat up on just about everyone in the ring. A relative newcomer to the sport, he made his debut appearance about a year ago, back when the matches were held at the Fox Theatre in Pomona. The American Rebel began his career as a Rudo, a wrestler who is supposed to be hated and who always breaks the rules. The first time he entered the ring, he told the entirely Latino audience that he loved Taco Bell, and threw tortillas into the crowd. They responded by pelting him with drink cups and crumpled program fliers and anything not nailed to the floor. To the shock of everyone present, he hit the Black Widow, a rare female luchador, over the head with a folding chair in what was regarded as a gratuitous breach of etiquette. When the audience booed and hissed at him, he threatened to have everybody deported. He was an instant hit with the crowd.

These days, the American Rebel is becoming more of a Tecníco, a good guy who plays by the rules. He’s still got a knack for humorously offensive racist epithets though. In between flying acrobatics and body slams, one of his opponents kept calling him "Punta," so he turned to the crowd and said in English, "Everything this wetback says is bullshit," before elaborating with a quick succession of fluent epithets in Spanish. After that, the crowd joined in and started chanting "Cabrón! Cabrón!" When the action moved outside the ring, a young mother threw an ice cream sundae at his head, and an older matron tried to beat him with her cane.

The American Rebel took as much as he gave. When he told El Indio he was going to cut off his greasy hair, El Indio grabbed a microphone and told a screaming crowd that "The American Rebel is barely American. He’s probably from Puerto Rico" (which the crowd found uproariously funny, Puerto Rico apparently being the butt of a lot of jokes) and then asked The American Rebel about his "five Mexican boyfriends." It was all in good fun–when the match ended, there was cheering for everybody, including the offensive gringo.

As the matches progressed, the quality of the wrestling improved. By the time of the headline bout, Mascara vs Cabellera, the wrestling was fun to watch even without cursing and slapstick routines. It’s a good deal more acrobatic than anything you’ve seen from the WWF.

Lucha Libre is gaining footholds outside of Mexico, with the WPW (World Power Wrestling) being the most organized of the US Lucha clubs. Lucha stars from Mexico are being brought on as sideshow acts btween the matches of well-known WWF wrestlers like "stone Cold" Steve Austin. In Southern California the sport is gaining its greatest popularity. It is possible (although perhaps a little unlikely) that every Sunday at 2pm, the future of American entertainment can be found screaming insults and doing back flips behind the Anaheim indoor marketplace.