Museo Soumaya and Lucha Libre

Museo Soumaya

| Rodin's "Wrestlers," photo by Gary Enns |

We crammed shoulder to shoulder with strangers in the Metro train at Chilpancingo, our backs against the door. Line 9 to Tacubaya and then a transfer to 7 and San Joaquin, then on to a tiny regional bus through haggard store fronts and apartment buildings and into glistening glass highrises. A short walk on a bike path, and we were there, at the Museo Soumaya, a massive rotated rhomboid of steel panels glistening in the morning sun.

Inside, marble floors and gentle ramps skirt the perimeter of each level. We took the elevator to the fifth floor, then walked up a ramp the rest of the way to the top level—an expansive gallery under a delicately girdered dome ceiling with one large central skylight letting in a soft indirect morning light. This is the home of the museum’s massive Rodin collection—marbles and bronze casts of muscular Greek fighters, slender nudes, the severed heads of saints, pirouetting dancers, and caricatures of too-proud officials. Some are smooth-skinnned, but more feature Rodin’s impressionistic texture of dabs and pulls. In the center, I sat on the bench and studied the highlight of the exhibit, a giant bronze of Rodin’s “Three Shades at the Gates of Hell,” their heads bent down toward each other, fists together, pointing to the gates’ unseen message.

Lucha Libre

| Lucha Libre Masks, photo by C. Enns |

In the night, we took a taxi into the Doctores neighborhood for a night of lucha libre. The driver pressed his car into the bottleneck of traffic. LIttle kid fans in back seat windows wore lucha libre masks.

Our driver could get us no closer, so we got out and walked for two blocks through the tight crowd of partiers and wrestling fans, past street merchant booths with lucha libre masks hung tightly together in a gaudy tapestry of faces, sequins, faux patent leather. Abuelas and hombres called out prices, “!Trescientos cinquenta!”

We get the obligatory pat down at the gate, then climb the stairs to the GRADA, the nosebleed section—narrow concrete benches packed together tightly and rising precipitously to the top landing directly under the roof. 

Just in time. Behind the stage, flames and sparks shoot up from cannons, drum-heavy music blares, and in come the luchadores, first the lady wrestlers, and then a build-up to big names like El Desperado and El Satanico. They dance their fight, grabbing shoulders and hands, readying each other for throwing or being thrown across the ring, or worse—out of the ring entirely. Someone takes to the top rope, then launches into an insane corkscrew of a leap through the air to flatten the opponent once and for all.

Soon, KeMonito appears outside the ropes, a dwarf man in a head-to-toe blue monkey suit. He’s the manager of one of the luchadores in the ring, and he’s very attentive, hopping and pacing along the bottom rope. Then the disrespectful opponent is out of the ring, and it’s Kemonito’s chance to play dirty. He climbs the ropes, then leaps and twists through the air to land with the full weight of a dwarf on the luchador to take him down. With cheers from fans, Kemonito is carried away on the shoulders of a handler.

More fights, more dances, sparks, fire, chants, and ear-piercing screams of fans.

We exit the way we came, browsing through the merch booths, the t-shirts, masks, pins, stickers. It’s late. We head home for the night.