Big feature story on Lucha Libre in today’s Los Angeles Times:

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind and you don’t — under any circumstances — pull the mask off Blue Demon Jr.

In a flash, Demon vaults off the top of the turnbuckle, scissoring one foe with his powerful legs and flipping him to the mat with an acrobatic twist. The other wrestler, in a glistening gold mask, cowardly climbs between the ropes and dashes into the grandstands of the Pico Rivera Sports Arena.

But Demon quickly gives chase, catching him from behind and knocking him silly with a plastic garbage can as the crowd goes wild, with some joining in on the pummeling.

Welcome to lucha libre wrestling, where villains and superheroes, most in trademark masks, fight two-out-of-three-fall battles that are part gymnastics, part vaudeville.

In Mexico, the popularity of lucha libre, literally “free struggle” or “free fight,” is rivaled only by soccer. Wrestlers star not only in the ring, but in movies, comic books, commercials and magazines. Now the sport’s following in this country is beginning to swell, driven by the desire of many assimilated Mexicans to reacquaint themselves with a part of their heritage and by the nostalgia more-recent arrivals have for their homeland.

“This is part of the culture. It’s the fiesta of the people,” says Donovan Garcia, a Whittier warehouse worker several border crossings removed from a Mexico City neighborhood where lucha was among the few distractions from crushing poverty

The fiesta of the people @ Los Angeles Times