Fight club

If the new Jack Black comedy ``Nacho Libre," from ``Napoleon Dynamite" director Jared Hess, does nothing else, it will serve to remind moviegoers that bulky heroes once walked the earth, at least south of the border.

These noble men fought evil, which appeared to them in the form of vampires, mummies, and mad scientists. They fought this evil wearing masks. And tights. And sometimes capes. They spoke Spanish, except when their voices were dubbed into English.

Whichever language they spoke, their real language was the Esperanto of flying kicks and choke holds. In Mexico it's called ``lucha libre." Lucha: fight, struggle, strife -- wrestling. Libre: loose, brash -- free.

In Mexican films from the early 1950s through the late 1970s, these luchadores proved that professional wrestling, like the movies, was an international language able to communicate an essential truth: Good kicks evil's butt.

Its corollary was that it can be done by showman-athletes in crazy outfits. In stating it so ingenuously, Mexican wrestlers such as Santo became Latin-American icons who, as ``Nacho Libre" shows, resonate north of the border 30 years after their heyday.

Mexican wrestlers fight criminals and monsters, but they are not superheroes in the North American sense. They don't have superpowers. They rely on hard-won (if dubious) skills gained from years in the ring. In a wrestling movie, when Santo, called ``the Man in the Silver Mask," jumps to climb a wall, and not a very high wall, he does it for real, with no stunt double, no special effects, and no cuts. We feel his effort.

Nor does Santo have a secret identity. He is not a Clark Kent who becomes Superman in a phone booth. When his mask is torn off, he has an identical one underneath. He wears his mask when he takes a date out for a spin in his Aston Martin convertible. Sometimes he wears his cape, if the date is more formal. Even when he's dressed in a blazer or a turtleneck, the mask stays on. The man and the movie wrestler are one.

In a mid-1950s essay called ``The World of Wrestling," the French critic Roland Barthes equated wrestling with suffering and justice. Does it stretch credibility too far to claim the suffering of Mexico and its hope for justice found a subconscious outlet in cheap, popular movies aimed at the Mexican mass audience?

They may be juvenile and campy -- not to mention glaringly, even preposterously, psychosexual -- but Mexican wrestling movies are where Mexican folklore and mass entertainment collide. In movies where masked wrestlers smash into Aztec mummies, the collision can be literal. Santo, like Godzilla in Japan, is where a pop culture version of his country's soul resides.

So who was Santo? Asking that in Latin America is like asking ``Who was Elvis?" in Tennessee. Santo's career is a history of lucha libre. Like Elvis, his success in his chosen field led to a second career in movies.

Born Rodolfo Guzman Huerta in Hidalgo in 1917, El Santo (``The Saint") began wrestling in his teens, first as a rudo, a wrestling villain, then as a técnico, the lucha libre term for a good guy. After appearing in a series of photo-comic books in the 1950s, Santo made the leap to feature films. His first movies were shot in Cuba right before the revolution.

Over the next two decades Santo dominated lucha libre films despite competition from colorful luchadores such as Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras. He occasionally teamed with them but, in close to 60 films, mostly fought criminals, spies, vampire women, and Martians on his own.

Santo retired in 1982. He took off his mask in public for the first time on a Mexican talk show in 1984. He had a heart attack a week later and died, leaving 11 children, and was buried in Mexico City wearing his mask.

Santo died a genuine phenomenon in Latin America; thousands attended his funeral. He owes his notoriety in North America to a man named K. Gordon Murray, a carnival sharpster turned film distributor who in the 1960s bought armloads of Mexican genre movies, dubbed them into English, and released them to the drive-in market and TV.

For three decades they played on the fringes of American pop culture, on UHF stations and in kiddie matinees. Slowly they worked their way into the more subterranean eddies of the American consciousness. A collectors' market developed in Mexican cinematic ephemera, movie posters, and lobby cards. By the late 1980s, with the availability of the Murray releases on VHS, lucha libre began to influence the demimondes of alternative comics and garage rock.

``Love & Rockets," an alternative comic book series by Los Angeles-based brothers Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, inserted luchador and luchadora characters into the recognizably real life of its teenage punk protagonists and enjoyed aboveground success. Los Straitjackets, a Nashville surf band, wore wrestling masks when they performed. They tour the US to this day and last year played to large crowds in Mexico City, where they've influenced the burgeoning Mexican surf-rock scene.

The cartoon series ``¡Mucha Lucha!" caters to tykes whose parents grew up in the indie crowd reading ``Love & Rockets" and listening to bands like Los Straitjackets. ``¡Mucha Lucha!," the brainchild of animators Eddie Mort and Lili Chin, premiered on the WB network in 2002 and began appearing on the Cartoon Network in 2004. The show, the first on TV done in Flash animation, takes place in a town called Lucha Libre, where its kiddie protagonists, Rikochet, Buena Girl, and The Flea, attend a wrestling school. Like the Spy Kids or the teenagers in last year's ``Sky High," the trio is learning the rudiments of superheroics from parents raised on pop culture.

In Mexico, lucha libre isn't just sandbox fun. Its preeminence in Mexican pop culture has led to Santo studies in Mexican universities. While lucha libre is undoubtedly a rich field for academic inquiry, digging into it calls to mind the way a Hollywood producer upbraids a New York screenwriter in the Coen brothers' 1991 movie ``Barton Fink":

``This is a wrestling picture," he barks. ``The audience wants to see action, drama -- wrestling, and plenty of it! These are big movies. About big men. In tights. Both mentally and physically. But especially physically."