Tania La Guerrillera (Tania de Lourdes Díaz Álvarez, 60) passed away on Sunday. She’s officially listed as debuting on November 29, 1979, but the luchadb has lineups for her a year earlier. The timing matters because Tania was part of a generation of luchadoras who entered lucha libre after the UWA started promoting matches in Mexico State, but before Mexico City lifted the ban at the end of 1983. She was as insurgent as a “Guerrillera”, someone who spent her first years in wrestling fighting for her right to exist in wrestling. It seemed to make her tough, and it seemed to make her unlike people who didn’t have that same toughness later on. Tania made her Toreo debut in 1983, and came to EMLL and Arena Coliseo in 1987. She was a regular there for the next decade, always a ruda, usually just part of the pack. Her biggest win is pretty clearly her hair match win over Karina in 1987. There’s a story to that. Tania, La Diabolica, and Maria del Angel appear to have wrestled as Las Infernales during the late 80s/early 90s, but CMLL doesn’t seem to acknowledge that history. (They didn’t acknowledge her death, of course.) Her last big match was losing her hair to Lady Apache in November 1998. She wrestled in the indies after that, often with and against old friends (or getting the better of younger women with old friends on her side). She wrestled as recently as 2024 and remained an active part of the Mexico City wrestling community.
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