When I started The Luchadora Project, the idea was simple: document the year in women’s lucha libre and leave a record that does justice to the work. The matches, the rivalries, the wrestlers who kept showing up and delivering—those stories deserve to be remembered, whether they unfolded in a major arena or on a regional card. The awards grew out of that same idea. If we’re going to look closely at the year, we should also recognize the people who shaped it.

The ballot is now open for the inaugural Luchadora Project Awards, honoring the luchadoras, matches, teams, and rivalries that distinguished themselves in 2026. Work in CMLL, AAA, independent promotions, regional groups, and other Mexican lucha libre organizations is eligible. No one promotion owns this conversation.

The awards consider in-ring performance, consistency, significance, achievement, and lasting impact. Some categories ask voters to weigh a full year of work; others focus on a particular match, team, or rivalry. We’ll also make one announcement that reaches beyond the 2026 ballot.

Inaugural Luchadora Project Hall of Famer

In January, alongside the award winners, we’ll announce the first Luchadora Project Hall of Famer. This recognition is about preserving the history behind the work we follow today. The inaugural honoree’s name will come later, but the Hall of Fame belongs at the start of this story: The Luchadora Project was built to document women’s lucha libre, and that means honoring the people who have shaped it.

Luchadora of the Year

This award takes the widest view. It recognizes the luchadora with the most outstanding overall year, weighing her in-ring performances alongside consistency, accomplishments, prominence, significance, and impact on lucha libre. A title win or a remarkable match can strengthen the case, but neither tells the whole story on its own. Who put together the year that will be hardest to leave out of the record?

Most Outstanding Luchadora

Luchadora of the Year considers the whole picture; Most Outstanding Luchadora concentrates on the wrestling. Match quality, execution, psychology, versatility, and consistency across a full body of work are the measures here. This is where voters can recognize someone whose performances were exceptional from bell to bell, regardless of whether she had the year’s biggest spotlight.

Luchadora Match of the Year

What made a match stay with you after the bell? This category considers the quality of the wrestling, the story told in the ring, the crowd’s response, and the match’s significance. Spectacular moments count, certainly, but so does everything that connected them: the pacing, the stakes, and the performances that made the finish matter.

Rookie of the Year

Recognizing the luchadora who made the strongest impression in her first documented year of professional wrestling. For the 2026 award, her first verifiable professional match must have taken place between October 1, 2025, and September 30, 2026. A dated recording, published result, or other reliable contemporary record can establish that match. Earlier professional work under another publicly established ring identity counts; a new name, mask, or promotion does not restart eligibility. Training matches and exhibitions do not count.

Consider her 2026 work in Mexican lucha libre: in-ring performance, development, consistency, accomplishments, and impact relative to her experience. The Luchadora Project will resolve disputed eligibility based on the available evidence.

Most Improved Luchadora

Improvement can be obvious, or it can arrive a little at a time: cleaner execution, stronger matches, a more convincing character, steadier performances, greater confidence. This award looks at year-over-year growth in a luchadora’s work or presentation. It isn’t simply a second breakout award; it’s a chance to recognize the progress behind the finished product.

Luchadora Tag Team of the Year

The best regular teams offer more than two strong wrestlers sharing a corner. This award considers chemistry, teamwork, match quality, consistency, accomplishments, and significance over the course of the year. How well did the partners work together? What did they build as a team that neither could have produced alone?

Rivalry of the Year

A compelling rivalry gives each new encounter a reason to happen. This award recognizes a sustained rivalry or storyline involving luchadoras, considering its progression, emotional pull, match quality, significance, and payoff. One heated exchange might catch everyone’s attention; carrying that attention through a story is the harder achievement.

International Luchadora of the Year

This category recognizes a wrestler primarily based outside Mexico, or whose regular work is with promotions outside Mexico, who made a significant impact in Mexican lucha libre during 2026. Voters should consider her appearances and performances in Mexico, match quality, accomplishments, and contribution to the scene. Eligibility is about where a luchadora primarily works, not her nationality: wrestlers competing primarily or full-time in Mexico are not eligible for this award.

Vote in the 2026 Luchadora Project Awards by Friday, December 18. The award winners and the inaugural Hall of Famer will be announced in January.

This is the third installment of Why She Matters, a recurring feature from The Luchadora Project about luchadoras working outside the spotlight, what makes them worth watching, and why their work matters.

On Cagematch, Tessa Blanchard’s name is blue.

Click it and you get her matches, championships, ratings and enough other information to put together a pretty good idea of her work.

Hécate’s name is plain black text. You can’t click it. She doesn’t have a profile.

The Cagematch page for CMLL’s August 18 show in Guadalajara places a warning above her match. It isn’t eligible for the match guide because at least one wrestler doesn’t have a profile. In this case, that wrestler is Hécate.

Why does this matter? Well, in that match Hécate pinned Tessa Blanchard. The woman whose name leads nowhere on Cagematch had just pinned one of the women CMLL almost never asks to lose.

Hécate folded Tessa into an Olympic bridge and held her shoulders down for three. A few moments later, Dark Silueta took the deciding fall from Lluvia.

Who CMLL Lets Lose

Counting wins in professional wrestling remains a questionable way to spend time. Still, I keep doing it.

For The Luchadora Project, I count only events promoted solely by CMLL. Joint cards and independent appearances are excluded. Through August 25, Tessa had worked 55 proper CMLL matches in 2026. She won 42 of them.

Lluvia had worked 47. Her record was 34-12 with one match ending without a winner.

Based on my West Virginia public schools math education, that is a combined 102 appearances with 25 losses, though I’ll admit I may have missed a couple. Of note: most of these matches were team matches or cibernéticos. A loss on the record doesn’t mean Tessa or Lluvia personally took the loss. I didn’t watch all 102 finishes because I have a family and I’d like to keep them. However, the record does show how consistently CMLL places both women on the winning side.

Along with Persephone, Tessa and Lluvia are among the most protected women in CMLL. Tessa has spent the year hovering near the CMLL World Women’s Championship, and I still believe she’ll win it before the year’s end. Lluvia entered 2026 as one half of the CMLL World Women’s Tag Team Champions and has remained one of the division’s most dependable técnicas.

Their losses tend to go to a small and familiar group. Look at this.

Persephone has beaten Tessa twice in World Women’s Championship matches, including their July 31 match at Arena México. Tessa’s other proper CMLL losses have come in a three-way won by La Jarochita, a cibernético won by Zeuxis and team matches against combinations of Persephone, Zeuxis, Keyra, Olympia, Dark Silueta, Candela and Hera.

Lluvia’s list is even tighter. Before August 18, her losses had come against teams or tournament fields won by Persephone, Zeuxis, Keyra, Olympia, Lady Frost, Dark Silueta, Miss Guerrera and Tessa. Tessa beat her in the Copa Dinastías final. Lady Frost beat her in a singles match, which I think is a problem that probably deserves its own column at some point. The rest came in tags or cibernéticos.

So, the loss to Hécate officially put the newer luchadora on my radar. Her record kept her there.

Here’s what stood out about her even more. Hécate has never appeared in an Arena México match. She has never wrestled a proper CMLL singles match or challenged for a championship.

On that night in Guadalajara, Hécate and Dark Silueta beat two of CMLL’s top women. Hécate personally pinned Tessa.

There is room to overstate this. Hécate didn’t beat Tessa in a singles match. She didn’t leave Guadalajara with a championship or a booking for Arena México. One fall on a Tuesday card can disappear into CMLL’s schedule before Friday.

CMLL still had to choose who would take it.

Twenty Matches in Guadalajara

Finding information on Hécate isn’t the easiest search in the world.

If Hécate had a Cagematch profile, this would have taken ten minutes. That probably would have been healthier for everyone involved and would help me ensure my figures are correct.

Instead, I went through event results, opponent pages and Hécate’s limited record at LuchaDB. Based on my findings, there’s 24 matches on Hécate’s proper CMLL record through August 25. Twenty came this year. Her 2026 record was 12-8.

Every one of those 24 matches took place at Arena Coliseo Guadalajara.

Arena Coliseo Guadalajara supplies one useful piece of biography. It has described Hécate as an Olympic-style wrestler who came directly from CODE Jalisco. CODE is the Consejo Estatal para el Fomento Deportivo, the state agency responsible for developing sports in Jalisco. Before CMLL started putting her on Guadalajara cards, Hécate had trained in the state’s amateur sports system. LuchaDB’s record of her under that name begins in Jalisco in 2025.

I still couldn’t find a reliable age, the name of her trainer or the interview where she says she spent childhood dreaming of this. That’s fine. We know enough to see that the Olympic bridge on Tessa Blanchard wasn’t a lucky tangle of limbs. It came from the one part of Hécate’s background CMLL has told us about.

The rest of her introduction happens in the ring, usually near the bottom of the card.

Hécate’s early assignments came against Guadalajara regulars such as Dulce Kitty, Náutica, Ivanna, Dominia, Lady Danger and Princesa Águila. Six of her first 17 proper CMLL appearances this year opened the show.

Opening matches are rarely where you put your biggest stars. Some of the crowd is still finding their seats. Someone watching online in Ohio is trying to determine whether the picture looks blurry or if this is simply what being over 40 is like.

Hécate kept returning, and CMLL kept letting her win.

On June 16, she entered an eight-woman cibernético with Dominia, Dulce Kitty, Ivanna, Náutica, Princesa Águila, Rina and Tabata. Hécate survived the field and defeated Tabata at the end.

The cibernético was the second match on a Tuesday card. CMLL runs enough tournaments that winning one does not require the immediate construction of a trophy room. It was still an acheivement. The promotion gathered much of its younger Guadalajara group, added Tabata and chose Hécate to be the last woman standing.

One week later, Hécate appeared fourth on the 67th anniversary card at Arena Coliseo Guadalajara, a show Cagematch lists at about 5,500 fans. She teamed with Lluvia and La Jarochita against Dark Silueta, Miss Guerrera and Zeuxis.

Her team lost.

Seven days after beating the local field near the bottom of the card, Hécate was working with five established CMLL luchadoras on the building’s anniversary show. The result mattered less than the company she was keeping.

Hécate hadn’t changed buildings. CMLL had changed who it trusted her to wrestle.

By July, those names included Tessa and Lluvia. On July 14, Hécate teamed with Dark Silueta and Sanely in a loss to Tessa, Lluvia and Johnnie Robbie. One week later, Hécate, Sanely and Zeuxis lost to Tessa, Lluvia and Tabata. Both results are listed beneath Tessa’s convenient blue name.

Hecate started in Guadaljara’s opening rotation, won the cybernetico and moved into matches with luchadoras CMLL uses throughout the promotion.

The first two times, Hécate lost.

The third time, she pinned Tessa.

The CMLL We Miss

Most international fans see CMLL through Arena México. I do too. Friday night gives us the major matches, the clips, the ratings and most of the discussion available in English.

It doesn’t give us the entire promotion.

Arena Coliseo Guadalajara has hosted CMLL wrestling for nearly seven decades. Its Tuesday cards have their own audience and a local roster that has to function whether anyone outside Mexico is watching or not.

Calling Guadalajara a developmental gym undersells its history and misses what Hécate has already done there.

Guadalajara is not a waiting room where she sits until CMLL decides her career is real. It’s where her career has happened, from the opening matches and cibernético to the anniversary show in front of 5,500 people.

Hécate works with Guadalajara’s regular women and the name CMLL uses elsewhere. She can work an opener against Náutica, enter a tournament with the younger group, then stand across from La Jarochita, Lluvia, Zeuxis, Dark Silueta and Tessa.

I’m not claiming she’s the next Persephone or Stephanie Vaquer.

Persephone is the CMLL World Women’s Champion. She has beaten Mercedes Moné and Tessa in title matches. Hécate has never worked a proper CMLL singles match. I would be lying if I told you I had uncovered CMLL’s next major star somewhere beneath the second match on a Guadalajara card.

CMLL has a women’s division that continues after the Arena México stream ends. A weekly promotion needs local cards to feel connected from one show to the next, especially when larger names pass through.

Hécate has become one of those wrestlers.

Hécate matters because she has become part of that connection. Her record shows how a woman can begin in Guadalajara’s opening matches and gradually earn better assignments from the promotion and something more valuable from the wrestlers above her. I really believe based on what I’ve seen from her, not to mention the tag team with Dark Silueta forming, that we will see her in Mexico City sooner rather than later.

Hécate’s name is still black on Cagematch. Tessa Blanchard still got pinned.

This is the second installment of Why She Matters, a recurring feature from The Luchadora Project about luchadoras working outside the spotlight, what makes them worth watching, and why their work matters.

Rarely does one watch a match with Sanely in it and walk away talking about Sanely.

I know because I watched what history will call her best match.

In fact, I’ve watched it three times.

The first time I watched the July 17 CMLL trios match, I remembered Persephone. I remembered Tessa Blanchard. I remembered thinking Thunder Rosa’s dancing was something I didn’t want someone to walk in on me watching. I remember Johnnie Robbie moved quickly and I questioned why she doesn’t have a full-time gig somewhere. Olympia looked good. There were dives and the sort of crowded closing stretch that felt like every other trios match featuring luchadoras.

When I saw that Dave Meltzer had given the match 4.25 stars, I thought maybe I had missed something.

Then I couldn’t remember who was even in the match.

Wait, Sanely was in that?

I watched it again casually and still couldn’t remember much she did. She had entered the ring. That much I could recall.

The third viewing was for this column. I kept my eyes on Sanely, including the long stretches when she stood on the apron while someone more exciting did something more exciting.

That was when I understood why CMLL keeps booking her.

Someone has to lose.

Someone has to lose without making the rest of the match look bad.

I think that’s why Sanely matters.

Daveflation

We should deal with the 4.25 stars first. I appreciate Dave shining a light on luchadoras, but in no world is this a 4.25-star match.

Meltzer gave the same rating to Randy Savage and the Ultimate Warrior’s retirement match at WrestleMania VII. He gave 4.25 to Shawn Michaels’ return against Triple H at SummerSlam 2002. Shawn Michaels and Chris Jericho also received 4.25 stars for their WrestleMania XIX match.

I’ve now watched Sanely’s trios match three times. It isn’t as good as any of those. I don’t think it is particularly close. Of course, had I been sitting ringside like Dave was this night, I might have thought differently.

The match is good. It is a busy, enjoyable CMLL trios match with recognizable stars and a strong final few minutes that stretch on for too long. I wouldn’t get near four stars.

Wrestling fans call this Daveflation. Meltzer’s scale has expanded over the years, first beyond five stars and then far enough beyond five that the original ceiling is somewhere down around the chair rail molding. A 4.25 in 2026 seems to purchase about 3.5 stars in 1993 money.

Meltzer can rate matches however he wants. It is his newsletter and, unless something has changed, he has not invited me onto the committee.

The inflated rating did accomplish something useful. It made me go back.

Once I stopped looking for a 4.25-star match and started watching Sanely, I found a better reason to write about her.

Four Wins

Counting wins in professional wrestling is a questionable way to make an argument. Doing it with CMLL’s luchadoras, who spend much of the year being shuffled through trios matches, might be even worse.

Naturally, I counted every one.

In 2024, Sanely wrestled 49 proper CMLL matches. Her record was 22-27.

In 2025, she worked 71. She went 24-47.

There’s 35 proper CMLL matches on her 2026 record through August 16. Sanely has won four.

Four wins. Thirty-one losses.

That is twenty less wins than she had last year. Her winning percentage has fallen from almost 45 percent in 2024 to 11 percent this year.

She hasn’t won a proper CMLL match since March 25, when she teamed with India Sioux to beat La Magnífica and Zeuxis. Sanely has lost 20 consecutive CMLL matches since.

A wrestling record can’t tell us whether somebody is good.

It can tell us what a promotion asks them to do.

CMLL used to ask something different from Sanely.

The Lady of the Black Glove

Sanely is the daughter of Mano Negra, the former NWA World Light Heavyweight Champion whose mask she adapted for her own career. The long black glove comes from him too, giving her the nickname La Dama del Guante Negro.

She grew up around wrestling and wanted to enter it herself. Mano Negra resisted. Sanely has said her father understood how difficult the business could be for women, so he insisted she finish her education first.

Her career has included injuries and long absences. She returned from more than a year away in 2024 and found herself in one of CMLL’s more unusual paths to a championship. Fans voted her into a Mexican National Women’s Championship match against Reyna Isis.

On September 27, 2024, Mano Negra stood in his daughter’s corner while Sanely won the championship at Arena México.

The reign lasted 161 days. India Sioux beat her on March 7, 2025.

Sanely still had meaningful wins after losing the belt. She joined India Sioux, La Jarochita and Lluvia to win the Copa Herederes cibernético in June. A tournament for second-generation wrestlers was an appropriate place for the daughter of Mano Negra.

Less than two years after becoming national champion, almost all the wins are gone.

Her schedule has not disappeared with them.

Eighteen Matches With Tessa

Sanely and Tessa Blanchard have been opponents in 18 proper CMLL matches this year.

Tessa, or Tessa’s team, has won all 18.

One was a cibernético. The other 17 were team matches. Tessa didn’t personally pin Sanely every time, and they haven’t had a singles match. They’ve simply stood on opposite sides of the ring 18 times.

Tessa’s side keeps winning.

Through August 16, Tessa had wrestled 51 proper CMLL matches this year. Sanely was across from her in 18 of them. That’s more than a third of Tessa’s CMLL schedule and more than half of Sanely’s.

That’s too much to dismiss as a coincidence hidden in the schedule. In 2026, helping Tessa win has become Sanely’s most regular assignment.

CMLL has made it increasingly clear that Tessa is a big deal. She works the important Friday shows and the regular cards throughout the week. She wins tournaments, pins champions in preliminary matches and receives world title opportunities. The volume of her Arena México appearances even led Cubs Fan to ask why she gets so many of them.

Persephone has beaten her twice in CMLL World Women’s Championship matches this year. The second came on July 31, two weeks after the Sanely trios match.

I still believe Tessa will eventually beat Persephone for the championship, most likely at Aniversario. I’ve been wrong about wrestling before, and I’ll be wrong again, but CMLL keeps giving me reasons to believe this one. I’ve already made the longer case.

To get Tessa to those title matches, CMLL keeps putting Sanely on the other side of the ring.

If you want to know who CMLL sees as a star, look at who keeps beating her.

The July 17 match was already their 15th meeting of the year. Sanely teamed with Olympia and Persephone. Tessa stood across from them with Thunder Rosa and Johnnie Robbie.

Tessa’s team won.

Sanely took the pin. The result was familiar. The 4.25 stars were the strange part.

Watching Sanely

Sanely spends the first three minutes of the match on the apron.

That explains part of why I forgot her. Six-woman tags do not encourage patient viewing. The eye follows whoever is running, diving or being thrown into something. A wrestler standing in the corner has to compete with five other wrestlers, a referee and the possibility that I will look down at my phone.

Sanely eventually tags in against Thunder Rosa.

She slows Thunder down, stands over her and raises the black glove. She wins a collision with a shoulder block, follows with a simple slam and settles into grounded control. The offense is basic. It gives Thunder’s quicker movement something to push against.

Thunder counters with a series of rolls and pinning combinations. Sanely follows her through them and takes the bumps cleanly. A couple transitions reveal the setup. Nobody gets lost.

Later, when the rudas take control, Sanely usually knows where the next piece of the match is happening. She joins the stomps, pulls an opponent into position and leaves enough room for her teammates.

I didn’t notice any of this during the first viewing. I noticed that the rudas were in control.

That is the job. Sanely helps create the part of the match everyone else remembers.

Her most memorable offense happens in the closing minute of the match.

The Dive Is Fine

Sanely runs toward the corner, hops onto the second rope and throws a crossbody onto the pile below, where Johnnie Robbie and Persephone are waiting.

Neither the height or distance are remarkable. Sanely isn’t particularly smooth getting onto the rope. The jump will not become part of a career retrospective of Sanely’s work.

Sanely reaches the people waiting for her. They catch her. Everyone lands close to where they intended, and the match continues.

The dive is serviceable.

That word sounds like an insult in wrestling. Fans want spectacular. We want moves that can be clipped, posted and described with at least two fire emojis by an account called SashaFan02018.

CMLL needs the dive to land.

One missed catch changes the match. A bad jump leaves someone injured or three wrestlers standing on the floor pretending they were supposed to watch Sanely fall beside them.

She gets there. They catch her.

The match goes on.

There’s a temptation in a profile like this to rescue Sanely from ordinary praise. We could call the dive beautiful, daring or evidence of some hidden athletic ceiling. The footage would say that’s a lie.

It is fine.

Much of Sanely’s work is fine. Fine becomes valuable when a match has six wrestlers, several dives and a closing sequence that depends on everyone being in the correct place.

Sanely does not create the best moments in the match. She avoids becoming the reason the match falls apart.

Someone Has to Lose

The dive explains part of Sanely’s value. The finish explains the rest.

After nearly fifteen minutes, Sanely returns to the ring with Thunder Rosa. She climbs to the top rope and hits Thunder with a missile dropkick. It is Sanely’s strongest individual move of the match and arrives when the result still needs a little doubt.

For a few seconds, Sanely looks capable of winning.

Thunder survives. She catches Sanely, lifts her and plants her with the Fire Thunder Driver.

Sanely takes the move flat and clean. She stays where Thunder needs her for the cover.

The referee counts three.

That is the full assignment.

Losing well requires work. The winner needs resistance before the finish. The last move has to look decisive. The person taking it has to land in the right place and remain there without making the pin look like a complicated furniture delivery.

No one is ever going to confuse Sanely with Manami Toyota or Jaguar Yokota. She isn’t building a case for inclusion among the greatest women to ever wrestle. I don’t imagine wrestling historians were waiting on this column to settle that question.

Sanely’s value is found further down the card, where most of professional wrestling actually happens.

CMLL runs several shows every week. Tessa Blanchard can’t wrestle Persephone every Friday. They’d run out of matches long before CMLL ran out of Fridays. The promotion needs familiar opponents who can give its stars useful victories without making the outcome feel completely free.

Sanely can do that because she isn’t some anonymous wrestler brought in to fill an empty corner. She’s Mano Negra’s daughter. She has spent nearly a decade in CMLL. The mask and long black glove give her an identity people recognize, and she held the Mexican National Women’s Championship less than two years ago.

Beating Sanely still means something.

Thunder Rosa’s victory looked decisive. The match ended exactly when it was supposed to. Sanely had done her part without demanding that anyone stop and admire it.

That has been much of her 2026.

Through August 16, Sanely had worked 35 proper CMLL matches and lost 31 of them. Eighteen placed her across the ring from Tessa Blanchard. CMLL knows what keeps happening when it books Sanely, and it keeps booking her anyway.

Those 31 losses tell us where she sits in the division. Being sent back out nearly every week tells us she still has a place in it.

Sanely matters because CMLL’s women’s division has to function between championship matches. It has to work on ordinary cards in Puebla, Guadalajara and Arena México. Someone has to keep the trios match moving, give the featured wrestler enough resistance and take the finish without dragging everyone else into the wreckage.

Sanely has become very good at being that someone.

Okay, so, the tree.

We have to start with the tree, because the spreadsheet will tell you almost everything about Tessa Blanchard’s place in CMLL right now, but it cannot explain the tree.

December 2025. Arena México has been dressed for Christmas. Fake snow on the portico. Ornaments painted with the masks of the roster. A Douglas fir standing in the Cathedral, ninety-two years of lucha libre history hanging from its branches like tinsel.

The broadcast goes out on YouTube and Facebook. Wrestlers file through for interviews and keep getting asked about ensalada de manzana—apple salad—because in Mexico at Christmas there is always apple salad. It becomes the running joke of the stream: a procession of enormous, violent people getting sentimental about dessert.

Then the host announces her.

Ha llegado la gringa más mexicana.

The most Mexican gringa has arrived.

Tessa Blanchard steps into the frame beside Esfinge and says the thing that has become her public grammar in CMLL: that walking down these stairs and standing in this building feels like coming home.

Yo amo México y México me ama.

I love Mexico, and Mexico loves me.

Then the remote comes out. One button, red. Salvador Lutteroth, CMLL’s president, stands at the center of the roster. Masks, sweaters, title belts. The countdown begins.

Diez, nueve, ocho.

Tessa’s thumb goes down on the button.

The tree came alive. The crowd cheered. CMLL had itself a Christmas card.

It also had itself a metaphor.

One woman. One switch. Every light at once.

By then, CMLL’s investment in Tessa was already obvious. What has happened since has removed any remaining subtlety. She has been introduced, protected and promoted less like one of the Amazonas than as the woman around whom the Amazonas are being arranged.

On Friday, she challenges Persephone for the CMLL World Women’s Championship in Arena México.

The question is not whether Tessa can credibly win it.

She can.

The question is whether CMLL understands the difference between making Tessa Blanchard its champion and making Tessa Blanchard its women’s division.

Because those are two different decisions.

The Part the Spreadsheet Can See

The numbers are almost comically straightforward.

Through July 24, Tessa is 32–9 across 41 tracked CMLL matches in 2026. She is tied with Lluvia for the most wins among the Amazonas and owns the best winning percentage of any woman with at least 20 appearances. She has been on the winning side in 13 consecutive tracked matches.

This is not the résumé of a challenger who caught fire for three weeks so the promotion could manufacture a title match. It is the résumé of a champion waiting for someone to hand her the belt.

Persephone, by comparison, is 15–10 in 25 tracked CMLL matches. That record is not bad, particularly for a ruda working a schedule filled with tags. But it does tell us something about the hierarchy CMLL has been establishing. Tessa has not merely been winning more frequently than the champion. She has been present more often, protected more carefully and positioned more deliberately.

Still, the spreadsheet only gets us so far.

Lluvia has 32 wins too.

Same number. Forty-two matches to Tessa’s forty-one. By any measure the spreadsheet can produce, the two of them have had the same year.

CMLL did not ask Lluvia to light the Christmas tree.

That is the entire problem in one sentence, and it is worth sitting with before we go any further. If this were purely a question of production, the promotion would be choosing between two wrestlers with identical output. It isn’t choosing between them. It hasn’t been for months. One of them is a lifer, a homegrown star, one half of the reigning tag champions, married into the company’s history. The other one arrived from outside, left once already, and came back—and she is the one the company put in front of the tree, in the promotional images, at the center of the roster.

Numbers can make the case for a championship. They cannot explain why a company chooses one wrestler to symbolize an entire division.

For that, look at Persephone.

Persephone is not absent from CMLL. She works Arena México. She has been in the program with Tessa all summer. But the shape of her year is unmistakable, and one detail states it more plainly than any argument I could build around it: in May, she did not wrestle a single tracked CMLL match. Not a light month. A month.

The geography of her title reign says the rest.

Persephone won the belt from Mercedes Moné in Arena México on March 6. Her first defense came against Lacey Lane on an ROH taping in Jacksonville. Her second came against Tessa at CMLL’s Las Vegas event. Her third came against Billie Starkz on AEW Collision in New Mexico. Friday will be her first defense inside Arena México since she won the championship there nearly five months ago.

Meanwhile, her most visible singles progression has happened in AEW. Six days after beating Mercedes, she challenged Willow Nightingale for the TBS Championship. She entered the Owen Hart tournament. She beat Julia Hart in a TBS title qualifier. She wrestled in the six-way to crown a new champion. Even the Starkz defense was framed partly as a step toward Persephone becoming a double champion in AEW.

And it is still happening this week. Days before she defends the CMLL World Women’s Championship in Arena México—her first defense in that building in nearly five months—Persephone challenges Maya World for the AEW TBS Championship.

Read those two bookings in sequence, because CMLL essentially has to. In the same week, the reigning CMLL World Women’s Champion is chasing another company’s television title and finally defending her own at home. One of those matches advances her story. The other one resolves a program CMLL has spent the summer building.

That does not make her disloyal. It makes her a modern dual-company wrestler.

But it does clarify what the championship has become, and the answer has less to do with Persephone than with the belt itself.

In AEW, “CMLL World Women’s Champion” functions as a credential. It is the phrase that establishes Persephone as a plausible threat to AEW gold—the international bona fide that makes a TBS title challenge feel earned. The title is doing narrative work. It is simply doing that work in service of a story that resolves on somebody else’s television, for somebody else’s audience, toward somebody else’s championship.

This is the part that should worry CMLL, because it has happened before, and recently, and worse.

Zeuxis held this championship for 278 days—a long, homegrown, Arena México reign, the kind that builds a division. It ended at Grand Slam Mexico, a co-produced AEW show, when Mercedes Moné took the belt. Moné then held it for 261 days and three defenses, one of which happened on AEW Collision rather than a CMLL card. During those eight months, the CMLL World Women’s Championship traveled the world as one item in a belt-collector gimmick that peaked at thirteen simultaneous titles. It was not the prize. It was an accessory. A crown in The CEO’s collection.

CMLL’s answer to that was correct, and worth crediting: when Moné finally lost the belt, she lost it to a homegrown talent. Persephone had earned the shot, and she won it in the Cathedral, in the main event of the promotion’s biggest all-women’s show. The handoff was the right call.

It also did not solve the underlying problem, because the wrestler CMLL elevated had already signed a dual contract in January. The belt came home in March and started commuting again almost immediately.

So trace the last two years of this title and what you find is not disloyalty on anyone’s part. It is a championship whose meaning keeps getting determined somewhere other than the building it belongs to. First as a collector’s item. Now as a credential. In both cases, the story that gives the belt its significance in any given month is a story CMLL is not writing.

That distinction matters more than the win-loss record.

CMLL has a world champion. What it has not had, for a while now, is a world championship whose meaning it controls.

The Belt Has Always Had A Passport

Before anyone gets too precious about CMLL potentially putting its women’s world championship on a gringa, it is worth opening the title history.

The first CMLL World Women’s Champion was Bull Nakano.

Not the first foreign champion. The first champion, period.

The title has since been held by Akira Hokuto, Mariko Yoshida, Hiroka, Syuri, Panama’s Dalys la Caribeña, Chile’s Stephanie Vaquer, Willow Nightingale and Mercedes Moné. Its recent lineage has moved from Vaquer to Willow to Zeuxis to Mercedes to Persephone.

The “World” in the championship’s name has frequently been literal. Foreign champions are not an intrusion into this belt’s history. They are part of its grammar.

A Tessa victory, then, would not represent some radical Americanization of the Amazonas. Willow and Mercedes have already held the championship. Persephone herself is Mexican-American. CMLL’s women’s world title has often functioned as the promotion’s passport belt: the championship most comfortable crossing borders, appearing in other promotions and connecting Arena México to women’s wrestling elsewhere.

The historical problem has not been nationality.

It has been control.

In 1996, CMLL stripped Akira Hokuto after she appeared on WCW Monday Nitro. In 2024, Stephanie Vaquer was stripped when she left for WWE. Willow then won the vacant title in San Jose. Mercedes won it on an AEW show co-produced with CMLL. Persephone’s first three defenses have occurred in Jacksonville, Las Vegas and Rio Rancho.

The belt traveling is part of its identity. The belt repeatedly becoming entangled in another company’s plans is part of its history too.

CMLL has spent the last few years confronting a basic problem: the more internationally valuable an Amazona becomes, the harder it may be for CMLL to keep her story centered in CMLL.

Tessa offers a possible solution.

And this is where the argument becomes uncomfortable.

To my eye, Tessa is not especially likely to receive the call from WWE or AEW. Nothing in wrestling is permanent, and no one outside those companies can know what they will do. But they have had years, multiple free-agent windows and plenty of opportunities to sign her. Neither has.

Readers of this project know why. There is no need to retry the entire case from 2020 every time Tessa’s name appears. The history is known. So are the allegations, the denials and the reasons her name remains radioactive in certain parts of the industry.

At some point, though, the absence of a call becomes evidence.

That gives Tessa a peculiar kind of value to CMLL. She possesses the résumé, name recognition and in-ring ability of a wrestler who should be attractive to either American giant, but she carries baggage that makes both companies reluctant to touch her.

Her limited market elsewhere begins to function like exclusivity.

This is not theoretical. Tessa has already shown CMLL that she can leave. In December 2024, she departed for TNA while holding the CMLL World Women’s Tag Team Championship with Lluvia, forcing the promotion to vacate the belts.

CMLL’s answer to that, when she came back, was to book the betrayal directly. Her first match on returning—October 10, 2025, Arena México, eleven months after walking out—was a singles match against Lluvia. Not a soft landing against a stranger. The partner she left holding the bag, on night one, in front of the building that remembered.

That should tell you how deliberate this has been from the beginning. CMLL did not stumble into a Tessa Blanchard push. It walked her back through the exact door she had slammed, with the exact person she had slammed it on, and let the crowd decide in real time. The crowd cheered her. The company has been building on that answer ever since.

The more recent evidence points the same direction. When TNA asked her to choose between TNA and CMLL this summer, Tessa says she chose CMLL. She said her life was in Mexico. She called herself the Mexican gringa.

Both facts belong in the evaluation.

Tessa left CMLL holding a championship.

Tessa later chose CMLL over the company she left it for.

That does not make her unpoachable. It does make her a safer bet than a champion whose career is increasingly being integrated into AEW television.

CMLL may have found a market inefficiency: an elite wrestler whom the two richest companies in the United States appear unwilling to pursue.

Sports teams build contenders this way all the time. A player becomes available because every other organization is scared of the injury history, the personality, the contract or the headlines. One team decides the production is worth the risk. Sometimes that team looks smarter than everybody else.

Sometimes it becomes so invested in proving everybody else wrong that it stops noticing what the player is costing it.

That is the line CMLL is walking.

The Risk Begins After The Win

If Tessa wins Friday, I will not call the decision indefensible.

Her results justify it. Persephone’s increasingly AEW-centered trajectory helps justify it. A gringa wearing this particular belt is not a violation of CMLL tradition—the title history settles that.

The risk is everything CMLL might ask the victory to mean.

Tessa is not being presented as an American ruda who arrived to steal a Mexican championship. CMLL has wrapped her in the language of belonging. It has made her commitment to Mexico part of the product. It has placed her at the center of public events and promotional imagery. It has encouraged the idea that this is not simply a successful foreign wrestler, but someone who has finally found the country and company that understand her.

That is a larger endorsement than putting a belt around her waist.

It turns every match into another chapter in the rehabilitation of Tessa Blanchard. Every opponent risks becoming a supporting character in that story: the woman who challenged Tessa, the woman who validated Tessa, the woman Tessa elevated, the woman who eventually proved worthy of succeeding Tessa.

The division stops generating stories of its own. It becomes one long story about her.

That is what it means to make someone the division.

And we already know what that costs, because this project has spent a year documenting the other end of it. The reason CMLL needs a Tessa Blanchard is that it has never built a reliable structure for developing and keeping its own women. Vaquer left. La Catalina walked. Kira—twenty-five years old, second-generation, arguably the most talented young Amazona on the roster—has spent this year losing to Candela and working third from the top on Fridays while imports collect the featured slots.

A division that cannot develop its own answer will eventually buy one. That is not a moral failure. It is a structural one, and Friday is what it looks like when the bill comes due.

The danger exists even if Tessa does everything right.

She can be dependable. She can have excellent matches. She can honor her commitments. She can make CMLL’s gamble look brilliant. None of that changes the structural risk of allowing one wrestler to become the division’s identity, drawing card, international résumé and proof of concept all at once.

CMLL does not need to choose between using Tessa and protecting the division from dependence on her. It can put the championship on her and still build opponents who possess identities independent of her. It can use her name to create new stars without making proximity to Tessa the only measure of their importance. It can let her stand at the center without allowing everyone else to disappear into the background.

It can, in other words, put the belt on Tessa Blanchard and put Kira in a real program in the same month.

But that requires CMLL to understand why this relationship works.

Tessa did not become the most valuable Amazona merely because Mexico recognized something the United States failed to see. She also became especially valuable because the largest American companies have apparently decided the risk is not worth taking.

For CMLL, that creates opportunity.

It does not erase the risk.

Friday night, Tessa Blanchard may become CMLL World Women’s Champion. If she does, the booking will be easy to defend. The numbers are there. The history is there. The opponent’s trajectory is there.

The real test begins Saturday morning, when CMLL has to decide what exactly it crowned.

Last Christmas, the company placed one red button in Tessa’s hand and every light in the plaza answered.

That is a beautiful way to light a tree.

It is a dangerous way to wire a division.

You can watch Kira and know something immediately.

She’s a problem.

Not a problem like a difficult worker. A problem like “this person is going to be a star, and whoever fails to figure that out is going to spend the next decade explaining why they let it happen on their watch.” It’s the feeling I get every time I watch her. She has an aerial vocabulary built across fourteen years of competition. She has the ability to make a live crowd feel the setup before the move lands. You stop what you’re half-doing and actually watch.

Let me be precise about why I think she’s special, because calling her a “promising prospect” doesn’t cover it. Kira is twenty-five years old and has been doing this since she was a child — the daughter of Gran Jefe III, part of the Comarca Lagunera wrestling family La Tribu Lagunera, sister to wrestlers, raised in the business and trained inside it. Her ability isn’t a learned imitation of someone else’s style. It’s her native language, built over a decade of competition, and refined through hundreds of matches on every kind of show.

She is, based on my research, one of a small handful of luchadoras doing a 450 splash as a legitimate finish, and she’s doing it with the credibility that comes from a crowd that believes it means something. The Cagematch community notices it, too. Over a year ago, a user wrote, “One of the most promising talents in CMLL women roster right now. With tons of potential and one of the most interesting movesets in CMLL’s women division… it’s about time that she becomes really something else.”

It’s about time.

That was thirteen months ago. She is still waiting.

This is not really a story about one wrestler being underused, though it is that. It’s a story about what one wrestler’s usage reveals — about a division that has never been a priority, a development model that keeps producing the same outcome, and a deadline that has never existed before now.

A Division That Was Never the Priority

The honest version of CMLL’s relationship with its women’s division has to start here: it has never been the priority.

This is documented history, not a hot take. After Lady Apache’s departure in 2000, women’s wrestling in CMLL entered a period of effective dormancy that lasted roughly five years. When the division revived, it revived largely around Dark Angel — a Canadian wrestler whose work in Arena México generated enough authentic interest that the promotion had to respond to it. The pattern was established early: the division’s credibility would depend, again and again, on forces external to CMLL rather than on any development structure inside the building.

Women’s Month in October and Noche de las Amazonas in March are the products of that history — annual checkpoints that create the impression of commitment without requiring a sustained one. They’re not nothing; they produce real shows with real stakes. But they’re not a pipeline either.

What’s changed in 2026 is the cost of that structural gap. Because AAA is now a TKO promotion, and the talent pipeline TKO has built runs directly through CMLL’s women’s division. The model that papered over the development problem for decades now comes with a deadline it never had before. To understand that deadline, you have to trace what happened to the last four women who carried this division.

The Vaquer Problem

Stephanie Vaquer was CMLL’s women’s division for a sustained stretch. The Campeona Universal. The inaugural World Women’s Tag champion alongside Zeuxis. The reason the title felt like something worth holding during the years she held it. CMLL invested in her consistently, built real feuds around her, and the work paid off: she became the most credible women’s star the promotion had produced in years.

In 2025, NXT signed her.

She is now one of the most discussed women in WWE. CMLL absorbed the loss, changed nothing about how they build and protect their next women’s star, and waited for the next break to arrive.

It arrived in two pieces, almost simultaneously.

The Moné Problem

The first piece was Mercedes Moné.

CMLL needed a centerpiece in Vaquer’s absence and solved the problem the way they had solved it before: they borrowed one. Moné won the CMLL Women’s World Championship at Grand Slam Mexico — a co-produced AEW show — defeating Zeuxis, who had been carrying a 278-day homegrown reign. She then held the title for 261 days — eight months, three defenses. Those defenses were against La Catalina at Fantastica Mania Mexico, Persephone at the October 17 Viernes Espectacular during Women’s Month, and Olympia — that last one on AEW Collision, not at a CMLL show.

During those eight months, the belt traveled the world as one piece of Moné’s belt-collector gimmick alongside the AEW TBS Championship, the RevPro Undisputed British Women’s Championship, the EWA Women’s Championship, and titles from Poland, Austria, Denmark, Canada, and Malaysia — a collection that peaked at thirteen simultaneously and broke Último Dragón’s record for the most titles held at once. The CMLL Women’s Championship was one more crown in The CEO’s gimmick.

To CMLL’s credit: when Moné finally dropped the title, she dropped it to a homegrown talent. Persephone had pushed her in that October defense, earned the credibility, and got the shot at Noche de las Amazonas on March 6. CMLL used eight months of borrowed centerpiece to eventually elevate one of their own. The handoff landed.

Which brought its own complications.

The Persephone Problem

Persephone winning the Women’s World Championship from Moné at Noche de las Amazonas on March 6 was the right call, and CMLL deserves credit for it. She built herself into the most credible contender the division had. The match worked, the crowd was there for it, the finish landed. Of everything discussed in this piece, that decision is where CMLL got it right.

The complication is what happened next, and it’s worth tracing carefully.

Persephone signed a dual AEW/CMLL contract in January 2026. She was, by any measure, a success story — a twenty-four-year-old from El Paso who had built herself through CMLL into someone AEW wanted on contract. On December 5, 2025, three months before she won the title, she was in the main event of ROH Final Battle, challenging Athena for the ROH Women’s World Championship.

She lost.

On March 11, five days after winning the CMLL title, she challenged Willow Nightingale for the AEW TBS Championship on Dynamite — a real moment, the new CMLL champion on national television.

She lost on a backslide.

Then, on the April 22 Collision tapings in Portland, her team lost to Skye Blue and Thekla after Julia Hart blew black mist into Persephone’s eyes, with Blue getting the pin.⁷ Dave Meltzer reported in the Wrestling Observer that the mist finish was a storyline cover for a genuine injury Persephone had been dealing with — and that prior to the injury, AEW had been planning a Women’s World Title match between Persephone and Thekla at Double or Nothing.

The picture this paints is more complicated than “CMLL’s champion is thriving in AEW.” Persephone is positioned strongly and clearly valued by both promotions. She is also, on her AEW record this year, 0-for-every-major-singles-opportunity she’s been given. The CMLL Women’s World Championship spent 2026 as a prop in an AEW storyline that was going to pay off in an AEW Women’s World Title match — a match that didn’t happen because she got hurt. The belt has not anchored a CMLL narrative in months. The champion’s story belongs to another company, and it didn’t even resolve in her favor there.

Putting the title on Persephone was right. The structural problem isn’t the decision — it’s that the decision immediately fed into the same pattern as every decision before it. Another star made in Arena México, another story told somewhere else.

The Catalina Problem

La Catalina is the cautionary tale. Not as a story that ended badly for her — it didn’t, she’s thriving in AAA and the future is bright — but as a story that ended badly for CMLL. Because CMLL had everything it needed with Catalina, let it slip away through a combination of structural neglect and borrowed-talent overcrowding, and is now positioned to do the exact same thing to Kira. The playbook is identical. The clock is running faster.

Catalina came up in WWE, working NXT from 2019 to 2021 under the name Carolina against the likes of Bianca Belair, Candice LeRae, and Xia Li. The night after her November 2021 release, she posted on social media under her WWE name, Katrina Cortez:

Thirty days’ notice. Everything she’d built, sold.

In a 2022 interview with POST Wrestling, she described the real cost of that period — the pressure to meet WWE’s body standards, the physical toll she paid trying to conform, the online criticism that came anyway, most of it from fellow Chileans. “I felt the weight of being the first Chilean,” she said, “and I felt that I was doing it wrong, but now I see it and I know it was not like that.” She was pragmatic about the release itself — she’d seen the mass layoffs coming and assumed she was next. The worst part, she said, wasn’t the firing. It was that her father had flown from Chile to visit her, and was on a plane home the same day she got the call.

There’s an irony buried in that WWE tenure. The person who told her about Mexico, about AAA, about CMLL — who became something like a wrestling father figure to her at the Performance Center — was Santos Escobar. The system that ultimately discarded her was also, in a roundabout way, the system that pointed her toward where she’d end up.

After leaving, she told POST Wrestling:

She went home to Chile, rebuilt, and eventually landed at CMLL in 2023 — not through any pipeline the promotion built. As thecubsfan — who runs luchablog at thecubsfan.com, the most thorough English-language record of CMLL results in existence — noted after her departure, she arrived “because Sarah Stock and Taya Valkyrie pointed her toward CMLL.” CMLL caught a break and capitalized on it: the Campeona Universal, a years-long rivalry with Vaquer that gave the division its best sustained heat in years, a title match against Moné at Fantastica Mania 2025 in front of a full Arena México.

Then the AEW working relationship expanded, AEW women began filling out CMLL cards with more frequency, and Catalina’s positioning compressed. Title matches became mid-card tags. Mid-card tags became curtain. Her contract expired April 1. She didn’t renew. CMLL announced the split April 7.

On April 11 she arrived in AAA in a pink car and crashed Flammer’s Reina de Reinas celebration. Immediately positioned as the next title challenger.

This is a woman who left WWE because it wasn’t giving her opportunity, who said publicly she wanted to wrestle abroad again — and who, when the authentic lucha promotion stopped making room for her, walked back toward the WWE ecosystem because it was. She didn’t go back for the brand. She went back for the booking. The “authentic lucha” argument has a hard time competing with a pink car entrance and a title shot on week one. The wall is still the wall whether or not it’s properly plastered.

“Catalina was a young person who felt young in a promotion that likes feeling old and a women’s division that is even older,” thecubsfan wrote the morning after her departure. She was, he said, “wallpaper over a CMLL problem that still isn’t fixed.”

The wallpaper is in AAA now. The wall still needs fixing.

And in the same post, Cubsfan added the sentence that should be printed and pinned somewhere in CMLL’s booking office: “You can see her influence on Skadi and Kira, and part of that is why I think Kira is the next logical WWE target.”

CMLL has seen this play before. The question is if they care enough to stop it.

Who is Actually Being Featured

The mechanism that compressed Catalina is still running. You can read it off the 2026 cards.

CMLL’s women’s division is currently topped by Persephone, who holds the World Women’s Championship and a dual AEW contract. Below her: Thunder Rosa, who signed her own dual AEW/CMLL contract on April 3 and has appeared at Arena México-level shows eight times in the ten weeks since — Friday Espectaculars, the 83rd Anniversary of Arena Coliseo, Saturday Coliseos, Domingo Familiars. Alongside Rosa: Las Chicas Indomables (Lluvia and La Jarochita), the World Women’s Tag champions, who are in everything. Zeuxis, who won the Copa 70. Aniversario De La Arena México De Amazonas in April — an eight-woman tournament at the biggest show CMLL ran in the first half of the year — and then won the Torneo Internacional De Amazons in Guanajuato in June. India Sioux, the CMLL Japan Women’s Champion, who appears in every meaningful tournament. And Tessa Blanchard, who is — worth noting — not even under CMLL contract, a TNA talent who has been taking bookings since October 2025, and who as of this week received her TNA release amid the ongoing cross-promotional cold war. Blanchard got a spot in that Copa 70. Aniversario tournament. She got a title shot against Persephone over WrestleMania weekend.

That is the division’s top tier: two dual-contract AEW signings, the tag champions, the year’s most decorated tournament winner, the Japan champion, and an unsigned outside worker collecting tournament spots and title matches.

And then there is Kira, the woman CMLL chose to send to Japan first.

Before her Stardom debut, she told Fightful: “I have a lot of weight on my shoulders, a lot of positive energy. If I didn’t have nerves, it would mean that I no longer love wrestling. I love wrestling with all my heart, so nerves will always be there.”

She went to Japan carrying that. India Sioux, Kira & Tabata defeated God’s Eye in 10:36. She came home to the opening match of Noche de las Amazonas — below Mina Shirakawa, below Megan Bayne, below Starlight Kid and Mei Seira, all guests from the partnerships she had just been sent to legitimize. On March 14, she traveled to Atlanta for an MLW taping and challenged Shotzi for the MLW Women’s World Featherweight Championship. She took the clean loss, putting Shotzi over ahead of CMLL vs MLW at Arena México. When CMLL vs MLW ran on May 1, Shotzi defended that title against Garra Negra.¹ Kira was not on the card. On April 27 in Puebla, she and India Sioux beat Lady Frost and Shotzi clean in a tag match. She beat the visitors who got her Arena México slots, in a building where it didn’t count, and the booking the following week was unchanged.

She was not in the Copa 70. Aniversario Amazonas tournament — the night before it ran, she lost to Candela, Metálica, and Princesa Sugehit at the Martes Populares. She was not in the Torneo Internacional De Amazons. She was absent from the Copa Dinastias, which is a second-generation tournament, built around wrestling bloodlines — and the daughter of Gran Jefe III, part of La Tribu Lagunera, qualifies by definition. That’s not an oversight born of eligibility. She simply wasn’t entered.

Her Arena México Friday Espectacular record in 2026: four appearances, 2-2, third match every time. Thunder Rosa’s Arena México-level record in 2026 since signing in April: eight appearances in ten weeks.

Candela — who was one half of my WON vote for worst match of the year — has pinned Kira three times this calendar year. January 24. May 30. June 15.

The critique people use to justify all of this is the honest one: she’s still rough. Thecubsfan, after a recent match, noted that she “had a first fall sequence where she looked awesome and then badly blew the springboard to end the run” and that she’s “stuck at 90% of the way there.” That’s accurate. The last 10% is a real gap.

However, I believe Kira at 90% is better than most women in this division at 100%.

And that final 10% is a polish problem. Polish problems close in high-stakes matches against quality opponents with real consequences attached. They do not close in Puebla against Candela while a dual-contract AEW import collects eight straight Arena México appearances.

The Clock Is Ticking

Every pattern described in this piece — the talent built and then taken, the borrowed prestige, the contracted star looking elsewhere — has accelerated under the TKO relationship. AAA is not a distant competitor now. It is a funded, staffed, connected pipeline with a recent track record of identifying and signing exactly the kind of talent sitting on CMLL’s mid-card. It signed Vaquer’s rival. It signed Catalina.

Cubsfan’s observation — that Kira is the next logical target — is not a dramatic prediction. It is a reasonable inference from a visible pattern, made by someone who watches every show and has no investment in hyperbole.

The paths available from here are knowable. The Catalina path: TKO calls, Kira leaves, AAA positions her as a star on day one — which, given what just happened with Catalina, is exactly what they should do. The Persephone path: external attention forces a dual contract, her story splits between two promotions, and CMLL gets the credibility of her name while someone else builds the narrative — and as Persephone’s own 2026 shows, that doesn’t even guarantee the talent wins. The current path: the holding pattern continues, she collects more losses to Candela, and one of the first two paths eventually claims her anyway.

The other path that benefits CMLL requires CMLL to move first.

Kira wants to be here. She walked out of AAA in September 2023 — no negotiation, no counter-offer play — because CMLL was where she’d said she wanted to be since she was nineteen years old. She has a lineage in this business and chose this promotion inside it. She is still choosing it, against a booking sheet that gives her three losses to Candela and four Friday appearances in six months.

This does not require CMLL to rebuild its women’s division from scratch or confront ninety years of structural deprioritization in one season. It requires one thing: give her a program. A real program — a real opponent, a real feud, a story with a direction. Enter her in the Copa de Amazonas. Put her in the Friday match that counts, not the one that fills time. Let the Arena México crowd build the relationship with her before someone in TKO’s talent pipeline takes a meeting.

She is twenty-five years old. She has been doing this since she was a child. She won in Japan, took a title loss in Atlanta in service of someone else’s positioning, beat that someone else in a tag match in Puebla the following month, and showed up for work the next week without a word about any of it.

She is still here.

But she might not always be.

There are a lot of ways to enjoy professional wrestling. Some people follow the biggest promotions and keep up with every major show. Others go deep into one style or one era and stay there. And then there are the moments when you stumble into something you didn’t expect to care about, and it quietly sticks with you.

Over time, I found myself watching more CMLL. Not casually, but consistently. And as I watched, I kept coming back to the women’s matches. At first it was just curiosity. Then it became appreciation. And eventually it turned into a question I couldn’t shake. Why does this feel so undercovered compared to everything else in wrestling?

It’s not that no one is paying attention. There are always people who care, people who track, people who know far more than I do. But when you zoom out and look at the broader wrestling conversation, it becomes clear that certain areas receive far more attention and documentation than others. Japanese women’s wrestling has a strong, dedicated following. American women’s wrestling is constantly discussed, debated, and promoted. But the luchadoras of CMLL often exist in a quieter space. Matches happen. Performances come and go. And very little of it is tracked in a consistent, intentional way.

That gap is what led to this project.

The Luchadora Project is, at its core, an attempt to pay attention on purpose. I want to follow the luchadoras of CMLL and beyond throughout 2026, to watch their matches, to evaluate them, and to create a running record of what is happening in that division. Not in a way that claims authority or expertise, but in a way that values consistency and care.

More specifically, my goal is to build a working archive. I’m creating a spreadsheet that tracks luchadora matches dating back to the beginning of the year across CMLL, , and other promotions where these wrestlers appear. Alongside that, I want to highlight standout matches, surface performances that might otherwise go unnoticed, and offer some ongoing commentary on what’s happening in the world of luchadoras as the year unfolds.

I’m not a reporter. I’m not connected to the promotion. I’m not pretending to have access that others don’t. What I do have is time, interest, and a genuine appreciation for the work these women are doing. And sometimes that’s enough to start something worthwhile.

This project is not about proving anything. It is not about arguing that one style is better than another or that one division deserves more praise than the rest. It is simply about giving attention where attention has been limited. It is about documenting matches that might otherwise fade into the background. It is about creating a space where these performances are seen, considered, and remembered.

There is also something deeper at play, at least for me. In a wrestling landscape that moves quickly and constantly chases what is new, there is value in slowing down and keeping track of what is actually happening over time. Not just the big moments, but the regular ones. Not just the headliners, but the matches that build the foundation of a division. When you track something consistently, patterns emerge. Growth becomes visible. Strengths and weaknesses become clearer. The whole picture starts to come into focus.

That is what I hope to accomplish here.

I want this to become a living record of the year for luchadoras. A place where matches are logged, evaluated, and reflected on. A place that, over time, tells a story not just about individual performances, but about the division as a whole.

If nothing else, I hope it helps a few more people see what I’ve started to see. That there is something here worth watching. Something worth following. Something worth remembering.

That feels like a good place to start.