Who is the most important woman wrestler that you can think of? Perhaps if you’re a WWE fan, you might name Wendi Ritcher. Maybe if you’re a Joshi fan, you might name Aja Kong or Chigusa Nagayo. If you’re a wrestling history fan, you might name Mildred Burke or even Cora Livingston. Let me introduce you to a name that few might think of and deserves some consideration, Irma Gonzalez.
Today Irma Gonzalez, real name Irma Morales Muñoz, is 84 years old. At first glance, you wouldn’t be able to tell her apart from any other grandmother in Mexico. She’s not rich or a celebrity. She’s just a nice normal old lady. You couldn’t tell that she has a unique and remarkable life story. In 2014 PBS Indie did a short documentary on the current life of Irma Gonzalez titled Irma. 21 seconds into the documentary, you see a Japanese wrestling poster with a younger Irma on it. This is a clue. The poster includes a wrestler named Mami Kumano, who happens to be my favorite 1970’s wrestler. One half of the tag team known as Black Pair. This would date the poster somewhere between 1978 and 1981. In the background, the poster features the most important title in women’s history, the WWWA Singles title. The AJW red belt was held by every legend that you could possibly name from Japan, from Chigusa Nagayo to Manami Toyota. The other person on the poster is Jackie Sato, late 1970’s AJW Ace. Jackie was the face of Women’s wrestling in Japan for a generation of fans. She had millions of fans, had multiple music albums, and was a guest on mainstream television for years. The old lady was special.
Officially, Women’s Wrestling in Mexico starts with familiar names, Mildred Burke and Billy Wolfe. The exact details are disputed, but the most widely accepted story is that the first card with Women in Mexico took place July 12, 1935, in the original Arena Mexico. Mildred and a troop of women managed by Wolfe worked a card for the father of CMLL Salvador Lutteroth. That group of women included a Mexican wrestler who worked in the USA, Natalia Vazquez. Making Natalia officially the first Mexican Women’s wrestler in Lucha Libre history. Through the mid-1930s to early 1950s, Mildred toured Mexico every few years, but these tours did not lead to mainstream women’s wrestling in Mexico. Local Women’s wrestling officially started in the mid-1950s when an EMLL wrestler named Jack O’Brian trained a group of women. Unofficially, women were wrestling in Mexico years before the mid-1950s. For example, a newspaper archived from 1948 Guadalajara has an ad for a women’s match with a billed masked Mexican woman. The real exact origins of women’s wrestling in Mexico have been lost to time, as far as I know.
Irma Gonzalez enters the picture sometime in the late 1940s-early 1950s. As a child, she worked in her family’s circus in the state of Zacatecas, in the northern part of Mexico. This made her a natural fit for professional wrestling. Irma’s family fell on hard times when their circus burned down, so they moved to Mexico City to find work. By happenstance, Irma befriended a woman who was a wrestler and was looking to find more training partners. Irma jumped on the opportunity as a way to make money. According to an interview that Irma gave in 2014, she made her debut at 13 years old. Assuming that Irma was born in 1936, that would mean that she started wrestling in 1949.
After a few years in wrestling, Irma found herself a part of the first official wave of Mexican women wrestlers trained by Jack O’Brien. Other first wave wrestlers include Chabela Romero, La Dama Enmascarada, and Rosita Williams. It was a great time to be a trainee in Lucha Libre. The 1950s may have had the largest collection of Lucha Libre legends active at the same time in their prime. Names like Black Shadow, Blue Demon, Gory Guerrero, and of course, El Santo. The women of this era trained alongside the men and learned a lot from them. While their style is dated by today’s standards, the first wave of Mexican women wrestlers was on par with the era’s best American women wrestlers.
Irma and El Santo became good friends in the mid-1950s. They bonded over music during long bus trips to wrestling shows. At one point, Irma came up with the idea of wrestling under a mask. If she was going to be a masked wrestler, she wanted to be the biggest masked wrestler possible. So she asked El Santo if she could create the gimmick of “La Novia Del Santo”(El Santo’s bride/Girlfriend). The gimmick was very successful. Irma first wrestled outside of Mexico as La Novia Del Santo in tours to Central America. Eventually, the gimmick became a problem when Irma took a break from wrestling to get married and have a baby. Promoters wanted to keep using La Novia Del Santo, and they didn’t care who was under the mask. They even put men under the gimmick at times. El Santo took his image very seriously and shut everything related to La Novia Del Santo down.
Starting from July 1954, under the authority of city officials Ernesto Peralta Uruchurtu and Jose Fernandez Bustamante, Women were banned from Wrestling within Mexico city limits. This put a very heavy glass ceiling on Women in Lucha Libre. No matter how good they were or how popular they were, they couldn’t work for EMLL Arena Mexico, the top of the Lucha Libre world. They were limited to smaller cards outside of Mexico City and taking bookings outside of Mexico. This became Irma’s wrestling career for the next 40 years. If you do a search, you’ll see that from the 1950s to the 1980s, she pops up in many different American territories, various parts of Mexico, Japan, and other places. The exact number of regions where Irma worked is unknown, but it’s a vast number. There are even traces of her in areas as remote as Indonesia. Through a lot of these international tours, Irma Gonzalez faced her biggest career rival, Chabela Romero. She was a fellow first-wave powerhouse with a similar background Irma. Chabela Romero passed away on October 4, 1985, at the age of 48.
Of all the places where Irma Gonzalez wrestled in her career, she may have had the most significant impact in Japan. Her first tour of Japan started in September 1975, and overall she had 10 tours of Japan. The experience that well-traveled wrestlers from Mexico brought to the young AJW roster was priceless. While Irma didn’t win any titles in Japan, she was involved in some major matches with all the big names of the era: Mach Fumiake, Beauty Pair, Jaguar Yokota, The Crush Gals, Bull Nakano, and more. She challenged for the WWWA Singles and tag titles on various occasions.
In the footage that we have from Joshi’s early days, we see that originally Joshi was more or less like a basic version of American territorial women’s wrestling worked at a quicker pace. This changed from the mid to late 1970s as the tours from Mexican women wrestlers became more common. Wrestlers like Rimi Yokota(Jaguar Yokota), Black Pair, Queen Angels, and others were incorporating more of the style that veteran Mexican wrestlers were showcasing. This can be seen in part in how movesets started expanding to feature more athletic and creative moves. More importantly, it can be seen in some of the larger theatrics and pacing quirks that come from Lucha Libre. The Chemical X that makes Joshi just a bit different from American Women’s wrestling was introduced by wrestlers like Irma Gonzalez and her peers.
Things started to change for women in Mexico in the early 1980s. UWA was the main alternative to EMLL at the time. Their business was built around freelance wrestlers that weren’t committed to EMLL, and they were based out of El Toreo De Cuatro Caminos. It was a former bullfighting stadium that was situated just outside the city limits of Mexico City. It wasn’t illegal for Women to wrestle there. At the end of 1979, UWA introduced its Women’s title. Before that, the main women’s title in Mexico was the Mexican National Women’s title. A lot of that belt’s history has been lost, but Irma Gonzalez is the woman who is most closely associated with that title. Irma Gonzalez became the 3rd woman to hold the UWA Women’s title in May 1980.
In 1975, Irma Gonzalez’s daughter, Irma Aguilar jumped in professional wrestling. We don’t know a lot about Irma Gonzalez’s personal life outside of wrestling. We know that she separated from her husband early in their marriage, and Irma Gonzalez raised her daughter as a single mother. Irma Aguilar went on to have a noteworthy career in her own right. She also won the UWA Women’s title in 1983. She was one of the most featured women when the ban on Women’s wrestling in Mexico city was finally lifted in 1986. Together, the two Irmas were a popular featured attraction as Mexico’s only mother-daughter tag team. Irma Aguilar didn’t travel as much outside of Mexico as her mother, but they did tour Japan together several times. They even challenged for the WWWA Tag Team titles together on a 1979 tour. The two Irmas became the first Mexican National Women’s Tag team champions on April 10, 1990.
Besides wrestling, Irma Gonzalez also had a music career. She performed live shows for years and released a full album in 1984 called “La Campeona.”
Irma Gonzalez had her last confirmed match on April 13, 1996. She left behind a legacy that is hard to properly gauge. Even in Mexico, the current generation of wrestlers isn’t fully aware of her history. Like many Lucha Libre legends, her prime years don’t have footage because they weren’t televised. By the time she started appearing in AJW in late 1975, she was 39 years old and over a 20-year veteran. Some classic wrestling fans may have seen her wrestle in American territories. It would have been in an era when women’s wrestling was treated like a complete afterthought. Still, there are some significant accomplishments that we can point to that make her one of the all-time great women to ever wrestle. She likely holds the record for the most matches in any woman in history since she was active full time for most years between the early 1950s and the mid-1990s. That’s more full-time years than either Mae Young or The Fabulous Moolah. She rivals Mildred Burke when it comes to international matches. Irma helped influence Japanese wrestling for the better. She carried the torch for Mexican Women’s wrestling even she wasn’t allowed to wrestle in her home city. One of the greatest of all time, La Maestra.