I added 1940s lucha libre lineups, mostly from the cities Torreon and Gomez Palacio to the luchadb database last month. This covers every year from 1940 to 1949. They’re integrated in the different pages of this site, and they’re also just available here. This is a slow continuing project to mine the El Siglo de Torreon archive for lucha lineups and results, which is finally nearing completion.
I had been hoping to finish this in August. It is now October. It didn’t go quickly. There was a lot of lucha.
1970s: 323
1960s: 258
1950s: 909
1940s: 415
Not as bad as 1950s. It still turned out to be a lot, though it varied quite a bit per year.
1940 24 1941 15 1942 4 1943 4 1944 13 1945 23 1946 80 1947 83 1948 83 1949 86
I think the pattern is no one pays much attention if there’s only one promotion, but pay a lot more attention if there are two or more groups. (Until today, where shrinking newspapers mean no one pays attention.) There also weren’t as many sports to cover in 40s, so wrestling was covered as a way to fill up one of those eight pages they were putting out a day.
Another reason the shows might have gone up starting with 1945 is that was the year Palacio de los Depotes was opened. That building, or others with the same name, have been in use since that year.
The other thing that helpfully filled space in the paper are reports of fights around or after lucha libre shows. I suspect they were no more common here than any other decade, and it just got brought up more. There’s issues with thrown objects, a wrestler getting into fight with police (and later hauled in front of a judge), and just a general brawl outside of a show. There’s an uproar about lepers coming to a show, in a truly random bit.
There’s also a 1948 article complaining how wrestling has gotten too silly and isn’t like it was in the old days anymore. This article has a nice illustration of Japanese (?) wrestler Taro Sato.
My favorite find is buried in Casos Deportivos column, which occasionally mentioned lucha libre at this point. In 1949, there’s a mention that Salvador Lutteroth was looking to put together enough money to build a Madision Square Garden level arena in Mexico City to host boxing, lucha libre and basketball. This is the plan for Arena Mexico, which is still 7 years away from coming into existance. The story has always been the Black Shadow/El Santo mask match selling out while turning lots of people away spurred Lutteroth into building Arena Mexico. That was in 1952. It might have pushed him to finally do it, but the idea had been in his head for a few years by that point.