1930s Coahuila/Durango lineups added to the luchadb

I added 1930s lucha libre lineups, mostly from the cities Torreon and Gomez Palacio to the luchadb database in the last few days. This covers every year from 1930 to 1939. They’re integrated into 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. The project is done! I can move onto other equally futile endeavors.

Really, it’s all done. I couldn’t find a reference of lucha libre prior to 1934. The Guadalajara newspaper had lucha libre mentions pre-Salvador Lutteroth. Torreon didn’t get it until a few months after EMLL was founded, or at least it didn’t come up. The lineups resemble the cards of the early days in Mexico City in style if not the same talent, with just one or two singles matches on early cards. It starts to expand to about four matches with the occasional tag match or battle royal by the end of the decade. With no more than 8 people per show, it was quicker to go thru a month of lineups than it is to do one card today, so this was quick to finish.

Shows added by year that include some link to El Siglo de Torreon

193X  255
194X  414
195X  979
196X  133
197X  268
198X 1169
199X 1730
200X 1575
201X   23
     6546 events total

This was very much a still figuring out how lucha libre worked period. There are only a couple title matches, there were no real apuesta matches, the shows are in venues which would quickly disappear. The posters would show up more days in advance than later years, probably because there was more space needing to be filled.

There also isn’t much news on lucha libre outside of lineups and results. There are occasional stories about lucha libre in Mexico City and the odd wire story from New York slips through. Even in the 1930s, there were recaps of shows complaining about how silly things had become.

I got a lot of lineups in this project. I didn’t get many results, but the lineups alone were helpful in getting a sense of what lucha libre looked like in Torreon and Gomez Palacio during different points of time. This has always been a busy area for lucha libre, and the newspapers gave indications when the business was going up and down. I felt like I learned some, and also learned that I, even more, wish there was a public newspaper archive like this for a Mexico City or Monterrey paper that covered lucha libre. I do have plenty of magazines which did so, and I should go back to figuring those out.