‘Lucha Underground’ captures diverse L.A. in a wrestling ring, with tights and melodrama

*Cool read. “Latino culture is very pop culture now,” it says. It’s about time, I say. VL

By Jeffrey Flaishman, The Los Angeles Times

Across the Los Angeles River, in a warehouse of ghosts and corrugated steel, King Cuerno fastens his mask and strides bare-chested past girders and broken windows toward the ring, where wrestlers spin in pinwheels and dance on ropes in a frenzied ballet of peacock colors and flying head scissors.

The crowd in Boyle Heights — twentysomething Latinos, comic-book geeks and a rowdy bunch of Marines — stomps in glee. Sliding through the clamor with sinister aplomb is promoter Dario Cueto, his voice like a bullet through velvet. He rules over “Lucha Underground,” a professional wrestling TV series where heroes and villains tangle in noirish melodrama and Aztec mythology in search of the Gift of the Gods championship belt.