TIJUANA Mexio's wrestling icon El Santo embodied not only a mythical hero but what was good and moral in country that was profoundly changing at the time, according to a leading social researcher.
The lucha libre character of El Santo (The Saint) followed a path from the boxing ring to comic books and then the movies, a process that catapulted him to fame in Mexico.
The wrestler's career lasted more than four decades, becoming a symbol of justice for the common man.
Álvaro Reyes, a researcher at the Cinematography Studies and Research Center at the University of Guadalajara, has studied the impact the wrestler had on Mexican society. He said that it was in the movies that the character transcended the world of wrestling and became a superhero,
His talk, Pistas para desenmascarar al Santo (Clues to Unmask The Saint, is Wednesday, (Dec. 15) at 7 p.m. at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.
"The Saint forms part of our imagination, a peculiar masked man that symbolically fought for the wellbeing and morality of Mexicans who were immersed in social change," he said.
Reyes has written two books about this character, Santo el Enmascarado de Plata: mito y realidad de un héroe mexicano moderno (Saint, the Silver Masked Man: The Myth and the Reality of a Modern Mexican Hero) and Crímen y Suspenso en el cine mexicano, 1945-1955.
El Santo began his career in a boxing ring in 1942. At that time Mexico was in a nationalist mood, the product of the revolutionary process the country had lived decades earlier. That's also the year that Mexico entered the Second World War.
This wrestler is a product of the mass media of that era because his emergence coincided with the beginning of television and with the height of the Mexican film industry.
During that time, Mexican society began a demographic shift away from life on the farm to the cities. Those years also are marked by sustained development that produced the "Mexican miracle," high economic growth, low unemployment and the expansion of domestic consumption, the researcher explained.
In the early1950s, lucha libre, as well as boxing, was popular, particularly among middle-class urban dwellers. By then, television transmitted the wrestling matches.
By 1954, El Santo had become a middleweight world champion after defeating the Japanese wrestler Sugi Sito.
A little afterward, The Saint became a movie star, and a prolific one at that.
He filmed 52 movies, with such titles as Saint Against the Zombies (1961), Saint Against the Strangulator (1963), The Barón Brákola (1965), Saint Against Black Magic (1972) and Saint and the Vegeance Against Vampire Women (1970).
The researcher said El Santo's legacy will live on.
"My book tries to help us understand the hero who lived between the myth and reality of that modern Mexico, where men lived and died, but not the myth."
