WCW had, a few years earlier, hired Scott Hall, a white man from Maryland who had been playing Razor Ramon, a Cubano gangster modelled on Scarface. It is true that Latino wrestlers were underrepresented in the North American market. Eddie claimed that the disrespect Bischoff offered forced Eddie to form Latino World Order. The story goes that Bischoff threw coffee at Eddie.
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I’m going to focus on his roles in his birthplace: the USA, where he was able to work within and around white society’s biases against Mexican-Americans.ĭuring his time in World Championship Wrestling, Eddie Guerrero allegedly confronted Eric Bischoff, the company president, over Eddie and other Latino performers not being offered enough opportunities in the company – no main events or pay per view shows. In Mexico, he was part of a villainous faction called Los Gringos Locos – the Crazy Americans, where he wore red, white and blue and played up his birthplace. In Japan, he was Black Tiger, the masked enemy of anime hero Tiger Mask. The way Eddie Guerrero handled this in all his markets was to lean in. If you’re a black, Latino, or Asian wrestler in a North American wrestling ring, you fight against a majority white audience’s expectations as well as your opponents. Diversity has only recently arrived in wrestling, and only very inconsistently. There have, over the years, been many wrestlers claiming a race or nationality they weren’t – Abdullah the Sudanese Butcher was actually Lawrence Shreve from Ontario George Gray, a white man, played Akeem the African Dream for two years – because wrestling needs heels and it’s easy to make a heel who is other. Blackface, brownface and yellowface all happen in wrestling.
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The convenient shorthand of racial stereotypes have always had currency in wrestling. Wrestling is haunted and one of the things it’s haunted by is racism.