From Brecht to Beck: Performances of Xenophobia in Professional Wrestling

Although professional wrestling is generally overlooked by rigorous cultural studies criticism, the exaggerated storylines and the characters that are portrayed can be highly meaningful dimensions of culture. Wrestling's staged performances present aspects of culture in their most saturated forms to increase the entertainment value of the event, while at the same time often undermining and satirizing those aspects of culture. Because professional wrestling is populist in nature, more often than not, it uses negative stereotypes which reaffirm racism and xenophobia in order to stage a spectacle that entices an audience. This seems to be the case with the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) tag team, Los Matadores, who perform exaggerated stereotypes of Latino culture to a predominantly Anglo-American audience. However, the storyline and characterization of The Real Americans, led by their manager and spokesman, Zeb Colter, appear to undermine the negative stereotyping of Latinos in the United States and of groups such as Los Matadores. Particularly, by engaging what Leo R. Chavez calls the “Latino Threat Narrative,”—a set of media tropes that portray Latinos as invaders—The Real Americans satirize the hegemony of nationalism and patriotism in the United States that produces such xenophobic anti-immigration rhetoric as is generally seen in right wing politics.1 Keeping in mind, again, that professional wrestling works to engage a mostly white-dominated nativist audience, it is interesting to see this satire as a gauge for how times have changed—that perhaps a populist American society is ready for this hegemony to be openly mocked. This essay will look at how professional wrestling normalizes xenophobic attitudes in regards to Latinos. The work of Gerald W. Morton and George M. O'Brien will provide the foundation for how wrestlers engage their audience by performing exaggerations of socially recognizable characters, for example, the U.S. patriot and the “evil” foreigner. These staged performances are always tied to real social conditions; they must be, generally speaking, in order for the wrestlers' performances to evoke a reaction from the crowd. I will then examine the social forces that surround Latino angles of representation in professional wrestling, such as the Latino Threat Narrative, and analyze their prevalence in professional wrestling, and how the performances of these social forces work to reaffirm the logic of xenophobic hegemony in the United States. However, this discussion will also explore the possibilities for how professional wrestling disrupts or resists the logic of xenophobia. Camp studies will be useful in contextualizing how professional wrestling presents an exaggerated demonstration of hegemony which the audience recognizes as an absurdity. The absurdity of wrestling works to defamiliarize the representations of white nativism and xenophobia, becoming both entertaining and instructive to the audience. Understood particularly via a mode of exaggerated performances of social gestures akin to Brechtian theater and camp performances, the wrestling stage can become a form of resistance against hegemonic forces in the United States. Most importantly, however, this form of resistance, although rooted in the aesthetics of the wrestling performance, is germinated by the audience, not the wrestlers. In order to see the wide spectrum of the audience's role in interpreting the performances of professional wrestling, this essay will conclude with an anecdote from the polarizing and infamous right-wing commentator, Glenn Beck, who became (perhaps unintentionally) an audience member for whom Zeb Colter and The Real Americans' mocking performance of U.S. patriotism elicited a jarringly bitter response. Glenn Beck's response, in my opinion, affirms the effectiveness of The Real Americans' performance in disrupting the logic of xenophobia. In the United States, the populist genre of professional wrestling often serves as a means to gauge the sensibilities of mass culture. In this discussion, particularly, I will be analyzing professional wrestling's representations of Latinos in order to gauge the exclusion of Latinos in mass society, with the exception of their conflicted inclusion based only on commodified stereotypes. What is mass culture? The term seems to signify the act of consumption in contemporary capitalist society, but becomes trickier to pin down when discussing race and gender. The dominant culture in the United States is produced with an image of American whiteness, an image that the dominant culture must constantly disseminate and consume in order to maintain its dominance. Professional wrestling stages a demonstration of a public debate, both in live performances and on television. It is an art form that, I would say, is rich in exhibition value. What wrestling puts on exhibition, though, is not just a staged sporting event, but also the sensibilities of white American nativism. In their book-length analysis of professional wrestling, Wrestling To Rasslin: Ancient Sport to American Spectacle, Morton and O'Brien emphasize this point by stating, “[wrestling] is low drama, drama for the masses, and the masses want to see villains they can recognize and therefore more easily hate” (128). The spectacles that professional wrestling stage must be relevant to the widest mainstream U.S. audience, shaped by the same socioeconomic and political ideologies that constitute and reinforce the white status quo. In order to be successful, professional wrestlers need to be more than just ordinary individuals. Wrestlers use exaggerated means of portraying their character's personality, oftentimes using specifically recognizable ideologies. For example, Morton and O'Brien state, “[t]he most distinctive of the villains is the evil foreigner & represent[ing] a justification of American distrust of foreigners” (130). Although this essay won't be focusing on examples of “evil foreigners” in wrestling, this is an important point, in that it shows that wrestling has a strong tradition in using xenophobia and patriotism to mark its audience. [W]restling and boxing as immediately intelligible contests quickly attracted the immigrant hordes as participants and spectators. The new arrivals were changing both the ethnic mix and the labor force in America. For these reasons, the ruling set saw wrestling and boxing as manifestations of forces in America they disliked, feared and could no longer control. (32) By recent example, Zeb Colter's Real Americans tap into this same exact social condition, using politically right wing anti-immigration rhetoric against their opponents, Los Matadores, who perform exaggerated stereotypes of Latino culture to a predominantly Anglo-American audience. In order to stage a spectacle that entices a white populist audience, professional wrestling traditionally uses negative stereotypes which reaffirm and legitimize xenophobia. The Real Americans tag team, led by their politically-outspoken conservative manager, Zeb Colter, align themselves with staunch anti-immigration rhetoric in order to instigate their feuds with Latino opponents, stating continuously in their promos that, “people from other countries are sneaking across our borders, and stealing jobs from real Americans,” and so they believe that “if you're in our country illegally, then you should leave” [my transcription, italics added for emphasis]“ (Meltzer). All this occurs while a Gadsden flag hangs in the background, and white text that reads ”The First Amendment“ flashes across the bottom of the screen, both signifiers of white American sovereignty and solidarity. Colter's speech uses an exclusionary rhetoric that divides Latinos from ”real“ Americans via terms of the U.S.-Mexico border. In The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Chavez describes how the social construction of Latinos in the United States is shaped by irrational fear and racism. Chavez points out that “Latinos are not like previous immigrant groups, who ultimately became part of the nation,” but instead are demonized as an “invading force” that is “unwilling or incapable of integrating, of becoming part of the national community” (4). Colter's use of the term “illegal” represents a dimension of the Latino Threat Narrative, in which Latinos, but particularly Mexicans, are “represented as the quintessential ‘illegal aliens,‘ which distinguishes them from other immigrant groups” (5). The term “illegal” works to recast Latino attempts of integration as acts of moral transgression. Colter believes that “illegal” immigrants are bankrupting the U.S. “both financially and morally” (Meltzer). The repetition of this term, “illegal,” throughout public discourse, to paraphrase Chavez, works to continuously reaffirm the social identity of Latinos as criminals who are unfit for citizenship (5). Colter's performance stages this narrative very accurately—because a promo angle in professional wrestling generally happens more than once, it is repeated several times on many separate occasions, in order to help solidify that wrestler's or manager's character angle. Colter might give a similar version of this promo several times a week, repeating the same rhetoric in the same way that the Latino Threat Narrative uses repetition to continuously reaffirm itself. Colter reconstructs Latinos as racialized Others not only by performing anti-immigration rhetoric, but by intertwining this rhetoric with symbols of American nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism and patriotism are common tropes in professional wrestling, used to affirm allegiances with the crowd and other wrestlers as either heroes or villains. In the 1980s and 1990s, hero wrestlers would often enter the ring waving an American flag, while the villainous heels waved either Japanese, Iranian or Canadian flags. These portrayals help to reinforce the ties between America's national identity and citizenship on a moral level. If you were a wrestler who wore a pattern of stars and stripes, you were essentially an automatic hero in the eyes of the crowd. Regardless if this may still be the case in many current WWE storylines, it is not consistent with regards to The Real Americans, who are villain characters. Interestingly, they are able to use patriotic symbols like the Gadsden flag and allusions to the Constitution as vehicles to undermine their racist views. 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