This is the first 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.
Last year, Candela was in my Wrestling Observer Newsletter Worst Match of the Year.
This year, she may get my vote for Most Improved.
I have been thinking about those two sentences since last Tuesday night. Wrestling fans prefer improvement stories with a clean first act, a training montage and no surviving footage of the original problem. Professional wrestling, unfortunately for everyone involved, keeps an extensive tape library.
The two votes belong together. Candela matters because she is raising the floor of CMLL’s Amazonas division, and there is enough bad tape behind her to show how far the floor has moved.
The Tape Is Unhelpful
The match that earned my vote was Candela’s loss to Tabata at CMLL Día de Muertos on October 28, 2025. It lasted nine minutes and felt twenty minutes too long. I remember checking the clock and thinking something was wrong.
They never found a rhythm. You could see them thinking between moves, then thinking about whether the other person had finished thinking. Everything that should have carried them into the next exchange brought them to another stop.
Last night, August 11, at Arena México, they found the same problem waiting for them.
There was a portion in the middle of the match where they began with wrist control and moved into a rope-running exchange. They crossed once and met again near the middle of the ring. Then the move stopped. For several seconds they remained upright and tangled, changing their grips and trying to locate whatever was supposed to happen next.
They finally separated and went back to the ropes.
The rest of the sequence had the same problem. One woman would set her feet and wait for the other to arrive. Tabata went over Candela’s back only after Candela bent and stayed there for her. A tumble put them both on the mat. They got up and tried another rotation, with Candela helping Tabata through it before Tabata landed and Candela rolled across her.
You could see what they had planned. This was supposed to be one of those quick lucha exchanges where two wrestlers trade counters, land together and pop back up before the crowd has time to sort out who did what. Instead, every setup remained on the screen. Wrestling is cooperative, of course. Good wrestling lets you forget that for a while. Here, you could see all the paperwork.
The trouble lasted longer than a botched move.
Candela and Tabata spent the whole passage waiting on each other. Neither could turn the mistake into a shove, a strike or a little bit of attitude that might have made the hesitation belong to the match. They simply restarted the choreography.
It looked hurried without ever becoming fast.
A match like that ought to end any Most Improved argument. Except one week earlier, Candela did not need a restart.
One Week Earlier
On August 4, she teamed with Kira against Maya World and Hyan during CMLL’s Semana Internacional. Hyan came in with the international reputation. Maya arrived as the young TBS champion. Kira has become one of the steadier Amazonas on the roster.
I went into the match expecting Candela to be the weak link. She may have been the best worker in it.
Dave Meltzer gave the match 2¼ stars, which does not sound good but is about two stars better than I imagined.
Candela opened with Hyan and looked comfortable matching her speed. Later, she hit the tornillo onto all three women on the floor, came back inside, hit her codebreaker and kept moving through the next exchange.
Her timing was cleaner, her positioning was better and she gave the match urgency when it needed it.
The finish became untidy, with missed moonsaults and a dropkick that did not find much of anything, but Candela had already done her part. For most of the match, she was the person keeping everybody connected. She worked like someone who understood what the match was supposed to feel like.
Watching the two matches a week apart, I think Candela’s best work begins once the match is already moving.
Candela studied contemporary dance before becoming a wrestler. Once a match has momentum, she understands where her body belongs. A busy tag gives her people entering, leaving, feeding and bumping. There is always another piece of motion for her to join.
Against Tabata, Candela had to create that motion herself. When the timing disappeared, she could not hide the pause or guide Tabata into something simpler. Tabata could not help her. They share a weakness, which may explain why they keep locating it so efficiently.
Candela already knows how to run, dive and rotate. Her next improvement will happen between the moves, when an opponent is late, a grip is wrong or the idea they discussed in the back does not survive first contact with the ring.
I have preached sermons like that.
The notes make sense on Thursday. They still make sense on Sunday morning. Then, somewhere in the middle of preaching them, you realize nothing is landing. You can feel it happen. The congregation is looking back with the patient expression church people develop after years of listening to preachers find their way home.
Afterward, somebody says, “I liked that story.” You know which story. It was twelve minutes into a forty-five-minute sermon, back when everybody still had hope.
There is no useful defense of the sermon. You thank them, go home and preach again the next week. I have not found a shortcut.
Candela has had plenty of chances to learn the same lesson. According to Cagematch, she wrestled 78 matches in 2025. Through August 12, she has worked 64 in 2026. She is one victory away from matching her win total from last year.
Win totals in professional wrestling require an asterisk large enough to be seen from space, but they tell us something about how a promotion sees a wrestler. The match total tells us more. Candela is working. She is getting the repetitions developing wrestlers are always told they need, usually by people who do not have to take the bumps.
The Middle of the Card
Candela is not Persephone. She is not Tessa Blanchard. That is fine.
Persephone is the crown jewel of the Amazonas division. She has the physical presence and obvious ceiling of someone CMLL can put in a major match and explain with a poster.
Tessa carries herself like a main-event wrestler because she has spent years being one. She can take over a match, establish its pace and pull an opponent back toward the plan when things begin to wander. Whatever else follows Tessa Blanchard into a building, uncertainty about whether she belongs near the top of a wrestling card is not among it.
Candela occupies the less glamorous part of the roster. She is the second or third match. She is somebody’s partner in a Tuesday tag. She works Puebla, Coliseo and Arena México, sometimes in the same week, and keeps collecting valuable experience.
Useful is faint praise among wrestling fans. It is a much better word in a booking office.
CMLL cannot make a division entirely out of Persephones and Tessas, any more than a football team can employ eleven quarterbacks and hope somebody remembers to block the blitz. Someone has to make the weekly cards work. Someone has to wrestle the visiting talent, steady the prospect and keep a tag moving when one of its pieces comes loose.
Fans prefer to talk about ceilings. We want to know who might headline Aniversario, win the Grand Prix or become the next crossover star. I’m not a contractor, but I know a vaulted ceiling is easier to admire when the floor is not collapsing.
The floor of a wrestling division is the second match on a Tuesday card. One great main event can make a night memorable. The floor determines how much of the night you have to endure before getting there.
Candela is helping that part of the Amazonas division.
The process remains uneven, and anyone wishing to argue the point may submit either Tabata match as Exhibit A. She now has matches where she adds pace, covers space and makes better wrestlers’ nights easier. A year ago, I mainly noticed her when something went wrong.
The Belt in the Middle
This is why something Cubsfan suggested caught my attention. He mentioned Candela as someone CMLL should consider for the Mexican National Women’s Championship, currently held by Thunder Rosa.
My first thought was that he had forgotten the Tabata match. My second was that he may have understood the point before I did.
Thunder Rosa won the championship from India Sioux on July 31. Rosa is a former AEW Women’s World Champion, an international name and now a dual-contracted AEW and CMLL wrestler. Moving the belt from Rosa to Candela would be a considerable drop in star power.
It could also give the championship a useful place on CMLL cards, even though we all know CMLL does not care much about championships and cares even less about the ones held by luchadoras.
Persephone already holds the world title and occupies the top of the division. The national championship can serve the group below her, the wrestlers who matter every week even when they are not closing Friday night. It can be defended in Puebla, Coliseo, Guadalajara and on the Tuesday shows where the middle of the division does most of its living.
Candela would be a risky champion. Then again, Thunder Rosa won the title in what is, at the moment, my Worst Match of the Year for 2026. The belt has survived worse arguments.
For Candela, it would be a gamble worth taking.
Singles matches still expose the gaps in her timing. A championship asks its holder to set the pace, make challengers feel important and get a match home when the original directions have become useless. Those are the responsibilities she has yet to master.
They are also the responsibilities she needs.
CMLL has already moved her near the conversation. In March, Candela and Metálica challenged Kira and Skadi for the Mexican National Women’s Tag Team Championship. They lost, but Candela did not look misplaced in a title match worked at a higher pace.
A singles title reign would give her regular matches with a reason for happening. Let her defend against Astoreth in Puebla, Keyra at Arena México, Zeuxis at Coliseo or someone from the Guadalajara roster trying to move up. Put Candela in charge of the lower half of the division and find out whether she can hold it.
Nobody would need to pretend the belt meant she had arrived. Give it to her as a test. For the first time, I can imagine Candela passing it.
I would still vote for the 2025 match against Tabata as the worst of that year. Improvement does not ask us to pretend the old work was better than it was.
It asks whether the wrestler has become better since. Candela has. Some nights the difference is hard to miss. Some nights Tabata is standing across the ring and the chemistry just doesn’t work.
I imagine the most improved worker award will go to someone like AEW’s Kevin Knight, who has shown he can hang in the main event. It may even go to someone in WWE that I don’t know about.
For me, the most improved isn’t always about who is hitting the ceiling, but who is raising the floor. Candela is doing her part to prove she’s doing that.
The ballot is not due for several more months. I may write Candela’s name again, this time on a different line. I may find someone else more worthy.
Until then, she has more matches to wrestle, and I’m okay with that.