#Money pro wrestling mexico professional#

I wore the tail of my sister’s quinceañera dress. “For my entrance, I wore a butterfly blouse of my mother’s. Baby Sharon was among the first, according to Armendáriz, to publicly say that, no, he was actually gay.Īt his début as an exótico, Armendáriz wore no mask. Popular exóticos insisted that it was all an act-in real life, they were straight. The exóticos made a delightful contrast with the super-masculine brutes they met in the ring. Crowds loved to hate them, screaming “ Maricón!” and “ Joto!” (“Faggot!”). As exóticos got swishier and more flirtatious, and started dressing in drag, the shtick became old-school limp-wristed gay caricature. They struck glamour-boy poses and threw flowers to the audience. At first, they were dandies, a subset of rudos with capes and valets. Exóticos have been around since the nineteen-forties. Baby Sharon was an exótico-a luchador who wrestles in drag. “It was Baby Sharon who encouraged me to step out of Mister Romano,” Armendáriz said. Working his way up the match cards in arenas along the border, he lasted less than a year. He wore a scary black-and-white mask and costume and had a wicked dropkick off the top rope. Mister Romano was a gladiator-themed rudo. That character was dreamed up by a well-known Tijuana luchador, Rey Misterio, with whom Armendáriz had, as a promising student, gone to train.

#Money pro wrestling mexico professional#

He made his professional début, at seventeen, as Mister Romano. He quit school at fifteen and apprenticed himself to a lucha trainer in Juárez. He was transforming Saúl into his lucha character, the fabulous world welterweight champion Cassandro. “But I am still so damaged.” He glued on a pair of false eyelashes. Then he gave a small sigh and started putting on lipstick-fire-engine red. He did not seem notably detached from, or perturbed by, what he was saying, but somewhere in between. “Boys in the neighborhood, including my own relatives, used me as a sex toy,” he told me.Īrmendáriz, who is forty-four, stood at a dressing-room mirror in Los Angeles, putting on green-glitter eyeshadow, while recalling these horrors.

“He did not want a gay son.” His father, a truck driver, drank he beat Saúl’s mother. His parents, particularly his father, were mortified by his effeminacy. He remembers being brutally punished, at a very young age, for playing patty-cake, a girl’s game, with a like-minded boy at school. “Being gay is a gift from God,” Armendáriz told me recently. He was not a big kid, but he was athletic and quick and in desperate need of an alter ego. He idolized the larger-than-life luchadores. Every barrio had a small arena where masked heroes ( técnicos) and villains ( rudos) grappled and whirled and tossed one another around on Sundays.

At the top of the fun list, for Saúl, was lucha libre-the flashy, popular Mexican brand of professional wrestling. The fun and the family were mostly in Juárez. “I went to school in El Paso, but on Friday my sisters and I would run over the bridge to Juárez,” he says. Born in El Paso, he lived, always, on both sides of the border. Saúl Armendáriz grew up in one of the world’s weirder double cities: El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.