Only a handful of professional wrestlers from Chile have made it to the international stage, but those who have aim to achieve the same grand heights as their compatriot, Stephanie Vaquer.
Stephanie Vaquer’s work in Mexico, Japan, and the United States has earned her the recognition many aspire to.
But few attain, and with that being said, the time between her discovery by the wider world and her rise to the forefront of professional wrestling has been remarkably short. Yet, with each appearance, she continues to amaze audiences and keep the world talking.
From San Fernando, Chile, all the way to New York City, we will find out just how all this came to be for ‘La Primera,’ one of the most exciting female talents to ever come out of South America.
Stephanie Vaquer –
Part of The New Generation in Chile
The country of Chile is sometimes referred to as the ‘country of poets;’ not professional wrestlers.
Believe it or not, one of the first Chileans to make it to the famous stage of WWE was Snooki, of the reality show Jersey Shore, who found herself in a match at WrestleMania XXVII back in 2011.
It was no more than a few years before this that a young Stephanie Vaquer found herself training to become a professional wrestler in her home nation under the tutelage of another Chilean named Paul Slandering in San Antonio, Chile.
Slandering himself only had three or four years of experience at the time, having worked primarily for National Strike Force, a local indie in Talca, for the most part of his career.
Slandering had the benefit of being trained by Angel Blanco, another Chilean who knew his way around rings as far back as the late 1960s, and he was more than happy to pass this knowledge down to Vaquer, who worked as his valet prior to her in-ring debut.
As February 2009 came around, Stephanie Vaquer was ready to make her debut on the Chilean independent scene under the name ‘Dark Angel.’
The short-lived local promotions Maximo Combate de Lucha, Valparaiso Lucha Libre, and most notably Generacion Lucha Libre all hosted Vaquer in her early years.
As a young competitor, Vaquer did not have many opportunities to perform in front of thousands or even hundreds, but those who did catch a glimpse of her at this stage of her career will have seen that she had plenty of title opportunities across Chile.
Her first successful championship win was in Guerreros de la Lucha Libre, where she won their Women’s Championship in 2013.
The Next Big Step
Striving for success, Stephanie Vaquer made her way up into North America where she settled in Mexico, a country renowned for producing the best luchadores and luchadoras that the world has ever seen.
With a change of scenery came a change of name, Vaquer dropped the Dark Angel name and went ahead using her real name that most know her by.
Producciones Sanchez was the first independent promotion in Mexico of real name value to book the now Stephanie Vaquer for shows in 2015, two years after she arrived in the country and started working around Veracruz.
Big stars like Cibernetico, La Parka and Dr. Wagner Jr. worked on promotions at this level all the time outside of their appearances for the big two promotions in Mexico, CMLL and AAA, and these interactions certainly would have helped Vaquer get to the next level.
During this period, she also received training from various Mexican names, such as Gran Apache and former partner Ricky Marvin, as well as Villano IV and Low Ki later on.
Stephanie Vaquer’s biggest break came in 2018, almost ten years after her debut, with a standout performance in the legendary Ultimo Dragon’s Toryumon.
This promotion was originally a Japanese promotion until Ultimo Dragon moved the name to Mexico. There, it continued to use plenty of Japanese stars and take a number of them on learning excursions from Japanese promotions.
This meant that a lot of their bigger shows, including DragonMania XIII, were aired in Japan and it just so happened that Stephanie Vaquer was booked for the very show mentioned above.
Undoubtedly the biggest crowd she had ever performed in front of, be it due to the sheer number that watched it in Japan or the eight-thousand fans that came to Arena Mexico to see it live.
Vaquer teamed with La Diva Salvaje against Zatara, a fellow Chilean and thirty-one-year veteran, Mima Shimoda, who had competed across Japan before Vaquer was even born.
The match lasted ten minutes and ended in a time-limit draw, ten minutes that may have been the most important ten minutes of Vaquer’s life up until then, as her performance attracted some interest from overseas.
Touching Distance
Rossy Ogawa came knocking for Stephanie Vaquer shortly after her Toryumon match aired on Samurai TV in Japan.
Rossy Ogawa had worked in a whole host of female professional wrestling promotions in Japan and founded World Wonder Ring Stardom, the promotion for which he wanted Stephanie Vaquer to perform at for their ‘Bright Summer’ series.
It has always been a fairly common practice for Japanese promotions to bring in foreign stars for shorter periods, especially if they are fairly young, to gauge how the fan base reacts to them and to see if there is much of a desire to see the star return more frequently.
Vaquer was not taken on full-time by Stardom and, with the exception of a singles loss to Saki Kashima, worked tag team and trios matches as most do on tours in Japan.
Even so, appearances in Stardom meant more appearances on television and thus more eyes on the individual, which helped to set her far apart from the other women in the Mexican independent scene.
Not long after her return from Japan, Vaquer worked a date in January, 2019 for one of Mexico’s top five promotions, IWRG, and from there the stature of the promotions she appeared at steadily started to increase.
She had outings at a number of CMLL spot shows, which, in short, added the name value of CMLL stars to local independent promotions, along with Alberto El Patron’s Nacion Lucha Libre that had just started up that year.
Finally, she debuted for the official CMLL promotion in August 2019 in the semi-finals of an all-women’s tournament, where she was one of ten women in the match, yet she did not remain a part of the brand immediately.
It didn’t take much for CMLL to re-sign her permanently, though; it seemed that a strong showing in a tournament for Alianza Universal De Lucha Libre’s Women’s Championship was enough for CMLL to see the error of their ways and secure the future superstar for the long-term.
Where She Made Her Name
With 2020 underway, Stephanie Vaquer made her re-debut in CMLL at one of their weekly Tuesday shows in Guadalajara.
More often than not, Guadalajara shows were reserved for younger talent and talent not in the main event scene, with the occasional star filtered in to ensure that the show attracted a decent crowd.
These shows also allow performers much more flexibility in the ring and help them understand the landscape in CMLL at any given time.
Unfortunately for Vaquer, 2020 meant that the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world, and lucha libre in Mexico was forced to shut down for several months, so there was not much wrestling to be done, at least not consistently.
When a sense of normality returned to the world in October 2020, Vaquer returned to work CMLL shows with the rest of the roster, this time in Mexico City due to the fact that only certain locations were able to run wrestling shows behind closed doors (without fans).
She formed a brief alliance with Dalys la Caribena in an attempt to capture the Mexican National Women’s Tag Team Championships and continued to team with a whole host of others as the year progressed.
Vaquer challenged for a number of CMLL’s different women’s championships but she found more success on the independents, of which she was allowed to work when she wasn’t required by CMLL.
A small Mexican-inspired promotion in the United States, IWC Supremacia, chose her to be their latest women’s champion in late 2021 and they partnered with Vaquer’s old haunt Alianza Universal De Lucha Libre, who made her their next women’s champion too.
Having tried and failed to beat Princesa Sugehit for the CMLL Women’s Championship twice, success in the upper echelons of CMLL’s women’s division didn’t appear to be on the cards for Vaquer for quite some time, and in late 2022, she was sent back to Japan to appear for one of CMLL’s Japanese partner promotions – Ice Ribbon.
Ice Ribbon may not have had the reach that Stardom did in Japan, but they have been known for some time as experts in showcasing young talents, whether under their founder, Emi Sakura, or their long-standing Ace, Tsukasa Fujimoto.
In Ice Ribbon, Vaquer once again teamed up with Dalys and a number of Ice Ribbon’s young talents where she worked an arguably more vigorous style than in CMLL, just like the rest of the Ice Ribbon roster.
This also gave Vaquer the chance to appear for Secret Base as well as WAVE and Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, two promotions with bigger reaches than Ice Ribbon but they were nevertheless happy to partner with them.
By the end of her three months with Ice Ribbon, Vaquer had competed in more than her fair share of tag matches and a match for the ICExInfinity Championship against Saori Anou as a farewell bout.
Gold Rush
As evidence by her time in Ice Ribbon, Stephanie Vaquer was clearly quite the performer when it came to tag team matches and so CMLL elected to pair her up with someone different upon her return to the promotion at the back end of 2022.
The individual chosen was a masked woman from Puerto Rico, Zeuxis. Zeuxis had been in CMLL for some time before a departing for a number of years to work independent shows and WWE’s 2018 Mae Young Classic.
With the two’s returns scheduled for around the same time, it seemed natural to put the two together as a team.
The decision turned out to be a great one as the pair looked good on their run to the Occidente Women’s Tag Team Championships tournament final, where they successfully won the championships in March 2023.
Vaquer and Zeuxis continued their steady rise through CMLL’s women’s tag team division until, almost out of the blue, CMLL’s other big partners in Japan, New Japan Pro Wrestling, came calling.
New Japan needed a female wrestler from CMLL to work their California show in the United States against Mercedes Mone in the NJPW Strong Women’s Championship tournament, and CMLL decided, given her history in Japan, that Stephanie Vaquer was the best option to go up to Long Beach and face have the match.
This was, categorically, Stephanie Vaquer’s biggest match to date where the more foreign eyes than ever before would be on her.
Just under three-thousand fans were in attendance and plenty more watched at home as a former WWE star like Mercedes Mone was quite the draw for fans in the US.
Vaquer lost to Mone in around eleven minutes of action but eleven minutes was all Vaquer needed to prove that she could hold her own against one of the most popular women around.
Her return to Mexico saw her and Zeuxis enter a feud with the team of La Jorochita and Lluvia, known as ‘Las Chicas Indomables,’ over the brand new CMLL World Women’s Tag Team Championships.
The four women battled up until their championship match at CMLL’s 90th-anniversary show, which opened the show in front of 16,000 fans. On top of that, the new tag team belts were not the only championship belts that needed new champions around that time.
Long-time CMLL World Women’s champion, who Vaquer had failed to defeat on multiple occasions, Princesa Sugehit, required neck surgery and had to vacate the championship as she was unable to defend it for the foreseeable future.
A new champion needed to be crowned at Noches de Campeones in September, so CMLL pit Stephanie Vaquer against another young Chilean, La Catalina.
Vaquer’s opponent started her career in 2016 and spent some time in WWE’s developmental brand, NXT, as Catalina Garcia before joining CMLL in March 2023.
La Catalina was defeated by Stephanie Vaquer in the second match of the night and Vaquer claimed her third championship as a CMLL luchadora, though she would only carry the CMLL World Women’s and World Women’s Tag Team Championships around with her.
Defenses of her CMLL World Women’s Championship came quickly but petered out as time went by. Las Chicas Indomables challenged Vaquer for the rest of the year as well as TNA alumni Tessa Blanchard.
For most, two championship belts would be enough but Stephanie Vaquer was invited back to the United States for another New Japan Strong show in Garland, Texas where she challenged IWGP Women’s champion Mayu Iwatani.
Though unsuccessful, this was another chance for Vaquer to shine in front of international audiences and set herself up for an even bigger opportunity on the international stage in 2024.
Rumors began to circulate that Giulia, the NJPW Strong Women’s champion at the time, was set to leave her home promotion of Stardom as part of an exodus led by Rossy Ogawa, who planned to start up his own promotion.
These rumors turned out to be true, and Giulia had to drop her championship at some point in March 2024, which she did to Stephanie Vaquer during Stardom’s Cinderella tournament.
The match took place in front of over 1,300 fans in Tokyo’s historic Korakuen Hall and it was the main event of the night. This left Vaquer with three separate and relatively prestigious championships that she could carry around wherever she went.
Now everyone wanted Stephanie Vaquer on their shows, the first of which being Revolution Pro Wrestling in the UK for their Fantasticamania joint event with CMLL.
Vaquer competed and won on both shows to mark a successful UK debut, leaving fans clamoring for a return down the line.
With this heightened interest in Vaquer came a desire from the fans to see her face off against her old rival Mercedes Mone, who had just signed with AEW in the United States.
A rematch between the two was made as part of AEW’s Forbidden Door crossover show with New Japan Pro Wrestling and CMLL in June 2024, where Vaquer had a chance at revenge on Mone and a chance to capture some new gold in the form of Mone’s TBS Championship.
Stephanie Vaquer put her NJPW Strong Women’s Championship on the line, too, but fell short to Mone after one of the best matches the night had to offer.
Just The Beginning
In the short time she was in AEW, Stephanie Vaquer left a lasting memory in fans’ minds as she offered a well-rounded mix of offense and one Hell of a look to go with it, whether she had three belts or two.
Unfortunately for those fans, any hope of a return for Stephanie Vaquer to AEW was put on hold the following month when CMLL announced that she had been stripped of the CMLL championships that she held and would be departing CMLL with immediate effect following her last CMLL match against Tessa Blanchard.
The reason was unknown but not for long as Shawn Michaels of NXT announced that Stephanie Vaquer had signed for WWE and would be appearing as soon as WWE’s live event in Mexico on the upcoming weekend.
Vaquer’s move to WWE shocked the professional wrestling world. There had been no prior signs that Vaquer planned to move to the promotion but she chose to do so and live her dream of being a WWE superstar.
Naturally, CMLL didn’t appear best pleased in their statement about Vaquer’s departure, and it left them with a hole to fill, which they did with AEW’s Willow Nightingale on the same day that Vaquer made her WWE debut on their tour of Mexico.
The world of professional wrestling beyond Mexico had only just been introduced to Stephanie Vaquer when she departed for WWE, and the list of Stephanie Vaquer’s dream matches was still fairly long.
Her transition to WWE marks the beginning of a new chapter in her career, filled with fresh opportunities and challenges.
Fans eagerly anticipate her future bouts, knowing that her unique style and undeniable aura will continue to light up the ring.
As Stephanie Vaquer steps onto the global stage, the wrestling community watches with bated breath, excited to see her legacy unfold and new rivalries emerge.
