The History Of Mexican Fighters In The UFC | Noche UFC

“Julio Cesar Chavez was one of my favorite fighters,” said former UFC bantamweight Erik Perez. “I wanted to be like him and like Erik Morales and (Ricardo) ‘Finito’ Lopez. The best boxers in the world are the Mexican boxers.”

It was a rite of passage for young Mexican kids who saw Chavez and decided that when it came to sports, they’d rather go to a boxing gym than a soccer pitch. Another one of Mexico’s early reps in the UFC, Augusto “Dodger” Montano felt the same way as his peers; only his biggest influence was revered knockout artist Olivares.

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“Woooow,” he laughed during an interview before his UFC debut in 2014. “He (Olivares) is the master of destruction and also a great example. Because he is part of the underground and the rock music, he was a young man whom I identify with. He was humble, he was noble, and he was a rocker. When I fight, I try to think of what Ruben would do.”

By the time Montano and Perez made their first trips to the Octagon, mixed martial arts was finally starting to make some headway south of the border. But for a long time before that, Mexican fighters either fought in obscurity at home or honed their craft and made their name in the United States.

Efrain Escudero was born in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico, but largely was associated with Arizona, where he lived when he won The Ultimate Fighter’s eighth season and fought his UFC career. And when he won TUF in December of 2008, he became the first Mexican fighter to compete in the UFC.

It would be nice to say that Escudero opened the floodgates for his compatriots, but that wasn’t the case, as only a handful of Mexico natives fought in the UFC over the next five-plus years. There were Mexican Americans making noise in the big show, most notably Cain Velasquez, who became the first fighter of Mexican heritage to win a UFC title in 2010, and the history of the promotion is filled with fighters like Tito Ortiz, Frank Shamrock, Kelvin Gastelum, the Diaz brothers, Gilbert Melendez, Carlos Condit, Dominick Cruz, Henry Cejudo and Diego Sanchez. But when it came to those born in Mexico, it wasn’t a big crowd.

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Yet in the summer of 2014, The Ultimate Fighter Latin America premiered, with Velasquez coaching eight Mexico natives against Fabricio Werdum’s squad of fighters from other Latin American countries. And by November, the UFC was making its debut in Mexico City with a UFC 180 card packed with eight Mexican fighters, including future interim featherweight champion Yair Rodriguez.

Now things were starting to get somewhere. Two more seasons of TUF LATAM followed, and a young man named Brandon Moreno competed on season 24 of The Ultimate Fighter. The ladies were getting into the party, as well, with Alexa Grasso becoming the first Mexican woman to fight and win in the UFC when she defeated Heather Jo Clark in November of 2016, and her teammate Aldana making her debut in a Fight of the Night against Leslie Smith a month later.

More gyms were starting to open up, while those already established began producing world-class fighters, and business was clearly starting to pick up. All that was missing was a world champion from Mexico. That would put things over the top, and Moreno knew it when he faced Deiveson Figueiredo for the UFC flyweight title in December of 2020.

“If I win the title, everything will change so much,” he told me before the UFC 256 main event. “We have a lot of fighters in Mexico in the UFC, trying to do something in the company and in the sport, and we have an amazing culture of combat sports with boxing, but now, with mixed martial arts, if Mexico has some good champions from the country who were raised in the country, everything changes. A lot of young guys can watch me and say, ‘I can do something in this sport like Brandon Moreno.’ And that motivates me so much.”