21 September 2026 marks 93 years since the first Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre card, promoted by Salvador Lutteroth. The 1933 show at Arena Modelo in Mexico City is the landmark from which the institutionalisation of Mexican professional wrestling is dated, not the “invention” of wrestling in the country.

Lutteroth had seen shows in the United States and adapted the form for Mexican audiences. The organisation became Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL). This account does not treat lucha libre as conventional competitive sport, but as athletic spectacle with characters and storylines.

Masks, rivalries and bouts in which a mask is at stake carry symbolic weight. The influence runs from the arena into cinema, comics and popular culture. El Santo is one example of that passage; he was not on the 1933 card.

The Mexican Congress declared, by a decree published in 2019 in the Diario Oficial de la Federación, 21 September the “Día Nacional de la Lucha Libre y del Luchador Profesional Mexicano”. That is the official wording, not a promotion slogan.

The 1933 card, prices and ring names are read in archives and from the promotion, not from memory. A contemporary poster is not the founding show.

The source for the day’s recognition is the DOF decree. No invented list of anniversary champions.

Image: Luis Alvaz, CMLL card at Arena México, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. Not the founding 1933 show.

Source consulted: Decree: National Day of Lucha Libre and the Mexican Professional Wrestler — DOF.