The World of Lucha Libre is an insider’s account of lucha libre , the popular Mexican form of professional wrestling. Heather Levi spent more than a year immersed in the world of wrestling in Mexico City. Not only did she observe live events and interview wrestlers, referees, officials, promoters, and reporters; she also apprenticed with a retired luchador (wrestler). Drawing on her insider’s perspective, she explores lucha libre as a cultural performance, an occupational subculture, and a set of symbols that circulate through Mexican culture and politics. Levi argues that the broad appeal of lucha libre lies in its capacity to stage contradictions at the heart of Mexican national identity: between the rural and the urban, tradition and modernity, ritual and parody, machismo and feminism, politics and spectacle. Levi considers lucha libre in light of scholarship about sport, modernization, and the formation of the Mexican nation-state, and in connection to professional wrestling in the United States. She examines the role of secrecy in wrestling, the relationship between wrestlers and the characters they embody, and the meanings of the masks worn by luchadors. She discusses male wrestlers who perform masculine roles, those who cross-dress and perform feminine roles, and female wrestlers who wrestle each other. Investigating the relationship between lucha libre and the mass media, she highlights the history of the sport’s engagement with television: it was televised briefly in the early 1950s, but not again until 1991. Finally, Levi traces the circulation of lucha libre symbols in avant-garde artistic movements and its appropriation in left-wing political discourse. The World of Lucha Libre shows how a sport imported from the United States in the 1930s came to be an iconic symbol of Mexican cultural authenticity.

Before returning to the Old World after World War II, Sybille Bedford resolved to see something more of the New. "I had a great longing to move," she said, "to hear another language, eat new food, to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past and as little present history as possible." And so she set out for Mexico - and, incidentally, to write what Bruce Chatwin called the best travel book of the twentieth century, "a book of marvels, to be read again and again and again."

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Jewish Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Antena. The narrator of TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH travels to Bulgaria, searching for traces of her Sephardic heritage. Her journey becomes an autobiographical and imagined exploration of childhood, diaspora, and the possibilities of her family language: Ladino or Judeo- Spanish, the living tongue spoken by descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Memoir, poetry, storytelling, songs, and dreams are interwoven in this visionary text--this tela or cloth that brings the past to life, if only for a moment, and that looks at the present though the lens of history. In 2012, TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH was awarded one of Mexico's most prestigious literary prizes, the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, whose previous winners include Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Bellatin. "TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH is an absolutely extraordinary text... it successfully joins past and present, life and death, memory and imagination."--Juan Gelman "Readers will find, through this tale of the relationship between a girl and her embittered grandmother, an entirely singular world narrated from the point of view of an 'I' whose range exceeds the territory of any private life."--Mario Bellatin