Ask 411 Wrestling: Was the El Generico Gimmick Racist?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 Wrestling. I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling.

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M.N.M.N.B. is here for a question that I imagine nobody will have strong feelings about at all:

A friend and I were talking recently about American wrestlers putting on masks and pretending to be luchadors. He thought it would be fun to have a whole show of people like Cody and Bryan Danielson pretending to be luchadors.

I thought it would be cultural appropriation. My reasoning was, “high flying” is a wrestling style, but luchadors have a rich history in Mexico, and white people playing luchador is appropriation.

What do you think? Is it cultural appropriation if non-Mexican wrestlers portray luchadors (as opposed to just being masked wrestlers, like Mr Wrestling II and Kane)?

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Luchasaurus and El Generico, and am not trying to cancel them, but just because I enjoy something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not problematic.

I will kick things off by saying that, as a white dude, I am not the best arbiter of what is and is not cultural appropriation, and I will gladly defer to the comments of people whose cultures are more subject to this sort of issue.

However, I’m the one whose opinion was asked, so I’ll do my best here . . .

Ultimately, I think the answer is “It depends,” because there are quite a few things that could be meant by the phrase “white people playing luchador.”

First off, let’s start by clarifying that “luchador” is really just the Spanish word for “professional wrestler.” In that sense of the term, Sheamus is just as much a luchador as L.A. Park and referring to him as such isn’t appropriation. It’s just speaking another language.

It should also be noted that there are circumstances in which non-Mexican wrestlers go to Mexico, train in lucha libre, adopt the lucha style, and don masks or other gear typically associated with wrestling south of the border. Art Barr is one example of that. He was a white guy from Oregon who started wrestling in Mexico and was put under a mask as the Love Machine. Ultimo Dragon is another. Considered too small to be a wrestler in his native Japan, he traveled to Mexico for further training and had his famous gimmick bestowed upon him, adopting many elements of lucha in his in-ring performance.

Often in these cases, though the wrestlers look and work like luchadors, it is usually expressly acknowledged that they are not Mexican or at the very least their country of origin is left ambiguous.

I would again say that this practice is not cultural appropriation, because these competitors are working within the framework of lucha, usually with the full knowledge and consent of Mexican luchadors. I would even say that, when these wrestlers take their acts on the road back to their home countries, it is still not a problem because it originated with the blessing of the Mexican luchadors.

Then we get to the situation that really forms the nucleus of this letter. What about a non-Mexican performer pretending to be a Mexican luchador outside of a lucha libre promotion?

I should first note that there is a long history of professional wrestlers pretending to be part of a racial or ethnic group other than their own. You’ve got the non-Latino Scott Hall pretending to be the Cuban Razor Ramon, the very white Gorilla Monsoon parading around as a Manchurian, the Iraqi Adnan Al-Kaissie adopting the supposedly Native American name Billy White Wolf, British World of Sport star Peter Thornley putting on a mask to become the Japanese Kendo Nagasaki, and many, many, many more.

However, a practice being prevalent doesn’t mean that it’s right. There are at least two problems with a wrestler portraying a gimmick in which he pretends to be part of a different ethnic group. The first is that, when you’re dealing in a country where members of that ethnic group have been historically marginalized and found it difficult to get work, a job opportunity is being taken away from a member of that marginalized group. For example, if you’ve got a white dude pretending to be a Latino in a U.S. promotion, you’re eliminating a chance for honest work that a Latino could have had in a country where our treatment of Latinx people has not always been the greatest. The other problem is that, if you have somebody from outside a particular ethnic group pretending to be part of that ethnic group, their lack of experience with the group’s history and background is more likely to lead to a portrayal with racist overtones. In other words, Savio Vega playing a Japanese marital artist probably is not going to give you as authentic a portrayal of a Japanese person as a real Japanese person playing the same role would – and that gives rise to reliance on stereotypes.

And that’s why I do have an issue with a white guy pretending to be a Mexican lucador, whether you would call it cultural appropriation or something else. If you want a lucha libre show, there are hundreds of legitimate luchadors out there that you can hire to give you an authentic product that does not veer into anything problematic.

I also feel compelled to address the two specific gimmicks that M.N.M.N.B. mentioned in his question. I’ve never considered Luchasaurus to present any of the issues that I described above, because, even though he wears a mask and has the word “lucha” in his ring name, I’ve never understood the character to be a white guy pretending to be Mexican. I’ve always taken it to be a white guy pretending to be a lizard, which granted is silly but is not racially insensitive.

Then there’s El Generico. If I’m being totally honest, Generico always made me a bit uncomfortable. I’ve seen others criticize the gimmick in the past, and its defenders will usually say that it’s not meant to be a non-Mexican wrestler making fun of Mexicans or Mexican culture but rather a wrestler making fun of the fact that, during a certain era in wrestling history, there always seemed to be “generic” masked wrestlers on independent shows pretending to be Mexicans.

That may well be how the character started, and it may well have worked when the character was an in-joke only appearing on the lower-level independent shows that it was parodying, but in my opinion, problems started to arise when you divorced the gimmick from that context. When Generico started appearing on the shows of more and more prominent promotions, you all of a sudden had a Syrian-Canadian guy speaking in faux Spanish and making jokes that, to an outsider, appeared to all the world to be taking cheap shots at an important part of Mexican culture.

In other words, El Generico may have been a funny joke once or twice in the appropriate setting, but it should not have gone any further than that, because even though it may not have begun as something problematic, it eventually became difficult for those watching to distinguish what it was intended to be from actual racist portrayals of Mexicans by people wearing brownface. If the typical outside observer will see something as being a racist portrayal, it may as well be an actual racist portrayal, because it can cause the same degree of hurt and misunderstanding.

Speaking of masked wrestlers, Greg has recently challenged me to determine the identities of several somewhat obscure hooded men. Here’s another one:

Who was Hiptoss Hank in CHIKARA?

First, a little background. For those not familiar, in 2016 and 2017, CHIKARA used a series of masked enhancement wrestlers who had alliterative names that consisted of a common wrestling hold and then a man’s first name. One of those competitors was Hiptoss Hank, who had eleven matches under that name between November 2016 and November 2017.

According to Cagematch, Hank was actually a wrestler who has been known elsewhere on the indy circuit as Jixx and Prince Magod Ali.

In addition to Hank, he had a couple of other masked gimmicks for CHIKARA, including wrestling as Arctic Rescue Ant, who was part of the heel “Colony: Xtreme Force” that feuded with the original Colony in 2013. ARA was eventually repackaged on camera as Bullet Ant, when he turned babyface and was taken in by the mainline Colony during King of Trios 2016.

(Side note: Cagematch lists Arctic Rescue Ant as a completely separate wrestler from Jixx/Ali/Bullet Ant, even though ARA was rechristened as Bullet Ant as part of a storyline in the company. This may be because there is some message board scuttlebutt about ARA initially having been a different wrestler with Jixx/Ali taking it over later.)

After Bullet Ant was killed off in storyline, Jixx/Ali took up the Hiptoss Hank persona until the debut of the art-themed trio The Nouveau Aesthetic, in which he briefly played the role of Ursa Minor in the Night Sky. He departed CHIKARA in 2018 after seven months in the Ursa Minor gimmick.

Night Wolf the Wise is on the road with his buddies:

1. In 1993, the Rock N Roll Express engaged in a feud with the Heavenly Bodies (Stan Lane and Dr Prichard). They feuded for over a year across Smokey Mountain Wrestling, WCW and WWF. My question is how many tag matches were so long going and intense that they carried over into other promotions?

There have been quite a few over the years, particularly back in the day when tag team partners were much more likely to travel from promotion to promotion with one another as opposed to the teams being the creation and property of one company.

The most prominent example that I can think of – which ties into Night Wolf’s question – is the Rock n’ Roll Express and the Midnight Express. The very first encounter between some version of those teams occurred in the Memphis territory on January 18, 1982 when the Midnights, consisting of Dennis Condrey, Norvell Austin, & Randy Rose, defeated Ricky Morton, Robert Gibson, and Robert’s brother Ricky Gibson in a six-man tag match. In 1984, the Rock n’ Rolls had transferred to Mid-South Wrestling, where they feuded with a revised Midnight Express consisting of Condrey and Bobby Eaton. While working for Mid-South, the two teams were occasionally loaned out to the Houston territory and World Class Championship Wrestling to show off what they could do. In 1985, both teams moved to WCCW and continued to feud, which lasted through January 1987. In May of the same year, Condrey left the promotion, ultimately being replaced by Stan Lane, who allowed the Midnight/RnR rivalry to pick back up in May ’87. The teams wrestled each other on and off for years, with another extended run beginning in 1990, after Crockett sold to Ted Turner and JCP was rechristened World Championship Wrestling. Various combinations of the teams reunited on various indies to have nostalgia matches with each other as recently as 2008, and you could even argue that the feud spilled over into the WWF thanks to the “New Midnight Express” of Bart Gunn and Bob Holly who wrestled Morton and Gibson in the Fed. That’s probably as prolific a tag team feud as you’re ever going to have.

Similarly, you had the rivalry between the Midnight Express and the Fantastics, which started in World Class and spilled over into Crockett, with the WCCW version of the feud involving Condrey and the JCP version involving Lane.

Also, though not nearly as famous as the Midnight Express feuds mentioned above, it’s worth noting that the Steiner Brothers faced Fatu and Samu in both WCW and the WWF, with the latter team being referred to as the Samoan Swat Team and the Headshrinkers respectively in each of those promotions. However, even though Samu was in the mix for a time, the Swat Team combination that the Steiners wrestled most frequently in WCW was Fatu and the Samoan Savage, a.k.a. the Tonga Kid.

Perhaps even more forgettable still is the fact that Rick & Scott Steiner wrestled the team of Jacques Rougeau and Pierre Carl Ouellet in both the WWF and WCW. They traded the WWF Tag Team Titles when Jacque & Pierre were known as the Quebecers and then faced off again in WCW, where the Quebecers were called the Amazing French Canadians.

There are no doubt many more examples, but I think that’s enough to establish that this is not exactly a unique phenomenon.

2. Speaking of 1993, the Rock N Roll Express fought the Heavenly Bodies at Superbrawl 3 and then later that year at the ’93 Survivor Series. How did those matches come about. Was there some sort of agreement with SMW, WCW, and WWF?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onMaYiXglu8

There was an agreement between SMW and WCW that came to an end, followed almost immediately by an agreement between SMW and the WWF that came to an end. WWF and WCW were never working together, and the two companies were not working with SMW simultaneously. It’s just a situation in which the SMW/WCW relationship terminated somewhat abruptly and there was no sort of formal contractual non-compete that prohibited them from collaborating with the WWF right away.

Jeremy is spiking it all the goal line or something. I don’t really understand football:

Does Vince McMahon even like football? It’s interesting that he’s created two pro football leagues, yet in between the past two decades, he hasn’t exactly been seen in boxes, sidelines, doing media, rooting for teams, etc.

Earlier this month, an episode of Jim Ross’s podcast Grilling JR was released in which Ross and co-host/Ric Flair son-in-law Conrad Thompson did a watch-along of the Raw Bowl, a football-themed episode of the WWF’s flagship show which aired on January 1, 1996. During the episode, Thompson asked the man under the black Resistol hat whether Vince McMahon was a sports fan and whether Ross had to help him with some of the football references that McMahon made as the show’s lead play-by-play announcer. Though he did not go into great detail, JR’s comment was that he was in Vinnie Mac’s ear during the broadcast feeding him lines.

Though not as direct a confirmation as Jeremy may like, this would tend to indicate that, as of 1996, Vince was not the sort of guy you’d guess would open his own professional football league just five years later.

(Also, thinking about where the WWF was in 1996 and where it was in 2001, the products feel like they are separated by centuries as opposed to half a decade.)

That will do it for this week’s installment of the column. We’ll return in seven-ish days, and, as always, you can contribute your questions by emailing [email protected]. You can also leave questions in the comments below, but please note that I do not monitor the comments as closely as I do the email account, so emailing is the better way to get things answered.