Tumble

Lourdes Ramírez is Addie’s mother. She was born and raised in Esperanza, the neighboring town to Thorne, by her grandmother, as her own parents died young. Lourdes and Manny, Addie’s biological father, were high school sweethearts. However, they broke up a year after Addie was born and after Lourdes’s first year of college. This is when it became clear that Manny, consumed by wrestling, would not be around for his daughter.

Lourdes is an independent and ambitious woman. Even when she was younger, she had clear dreams for herself and Manny; she wanted them to leave Esperanza, particularly because she saw how much Pancho influenced Manny. Despite the fact that Manny doesn’t initially accompany her, Lourdes leaves Esperanza on her own for college and doesn’t come back even when she discovers that she is pregnant. Manny tells Addie that Lourdes would always push back against Pancho’s patriarchal ideas; she chose to live by her values when she decided to raise Addie on her own, rather than subject her daughter to an absent father.

Lourdes’s decision to tell Addie nothing about her biological father displays her capacity for maternal protectiveness, but also for control. She chooses for Addie to remain completely ignorant about Manny growing up, rather than have her daughter feel hurt by the fact that Manny chose his career over his daughter. However, Lourdes is unable to accept that Addie, as she grows, has questions about her father that refuse to go away. She is extremely resistant to Addie spending time with the Bravos, and it takes a great deal of conversation with both Alex and Addie for Lourdes to see that Addie is old enough to understand who her father is for herself.

Part of Lourdes’s reluctance to let Addie engage with the Bravos also comes from her own hurt and disappointment at Manny’s past actions. This is why she refuses to talk about her upbringing in Esperanza, or Manny and the Bravos. However, when Lourdes invites the Bravos for the Christmas photo, she demonstrates that she can be reasonable and is willing to move on. She sees how much the Bravos mean to Addie and how spending time with them in Esperanza has helped her. Ultimately, as a mother, Lourdes’s priority remains her daughter’s well-being.

Emmanuel “Manny the Mountain” Bravo is Addie’s biological father. He is a luchador and belongs to a dynastic family within the lucha libre world, with his father, mother, and siblings having all been wrestlers. After Lourdes gives him an ultimatum to choose between them and wrestling, he spends years traveling the world to wrestle and is therefore absent for most of Addie’s life. He returns to Esperanza around the time that Addie begins looking for her biological father.

From the very outset, Manny comes across as selfish and unreliable. He fails to turn up at the very first meeting with Addie and is late or absent consistently after, even as they try and build a relationship. However, Manny is not motivated by malice; rather, he is motivated by the desire to fulfill his father’s dream of seeing someone in the next generation win the world championship belt, especially as the youngest of three brothers. Manny didn’t see his father much growing up, and so wrestling is Manny’s way of feeling close to his father and earning his approval. This leads him to prioritize wresting over everything else, including his relationship with his daughter. Unwittingly, Manny repeats the same mistakes with Addie that his own father made with him because of how deeply he idolizes his father.

In this way, Manny and Addie are extremely different. Where Addie attempts to find out more about her father so that she can understand her history and form her own identity, Manny is blinded to everything else in his life except his father’s love and approval, and so conflates his own identity with Pancho’s expectations. By the end of the book, Addie has learned more about her family and has grown as a person, but Manny remains as deeply mired in the problematic ideas of career, success, and achievement as he was when he separated from Lourdes. While he has not necessarily grown much as a person, he still loves Addie and would like a relationship with her (albeit on his own time); thus, he sends her a Christmas gift, as he cannot be there himself. Manny’s character arc is a testament to the fact that people and situations in real life are more complicated than in wrestling, where characters are easily divided into hero or villain stereotypes and follow a script.

Alex is Addie’s stepfather. He runs a diner that his grandfather started decades prior. Alex has been in Addie’s life for a while, but on her 12th birthday, he and Lourdes jointly present the suggestion that he officially adopt Addie.

Alex is a stable and trustworthy presence in Addie’s life, exemplified by how she feels comfortable asking him questions about her biological father and confiding in him her frustrations at not knowing much about her past. When Manny fails to pick up Addie, Alex is the one she calls. Alex is able to take a detached and objective stance on the situation. He understands Lourdes’s fears and worries, but he also sees how important it is for Addie to understand her roots. As a result, he doesn’t take it personally that Addie wants to connect with her biological father, despite the fact that Alex has been there for her when Manny has not. Even when Lourdes doesn’t want to hear about the Bravos, Alex patiently and enthusiastically listens to Addie’s stories and supports her right to spend time with them. This speaks to Alex’s maturity and secure sense of self, which contributes to his dependability to both Lourdes and Addie.

Besides Manny, the other Bravo men include Francisco “Pancho” Bravo, the patriarch of the family, and Manny’s older brothers, Speedy and Mateo. Pancho was a famous luchador known as “El Terremoto” and won the world championship belt in his time. He is a demanding father and an old-fashioned husband; after Rosie marries him, she gives up her own career in wrestling to stay home and raise the children, while Pancho is often absent because of work. It is suggested that Pancho would not have been open to splitting domestic responsibilities with Rosie so that she, too, could have a career. This is further underlined by how none of Rosie’s achievements—or even her presence, along with the other women in the family—is showcased in the family room.

Pancho’s legacy and the subsequent expectations of the next generation weigh most heavily on Manny, especially when Pancho occasionally expresses his disappointment that none of his sons have won the championship belt. Now an old man, Pancho suffers from memory ailments, potentially as a result of wrestling injuries. In moments of confusion, some of his misogynistic attitudes are on display, when he asserts things like girls can’t be champions, or men can’t wear glitter. However, in moments of lucidity, Pancho expresses regret over his past actions, especially with respect to Lourdes, suggesting that he has had a change of heart and perspective over the years.

Speedy, the oldest of the three brothers, passed away in a plane crash when his daughters were three years old. His death has a huge impact on the family in multiple ways, including the Thanksgiving tradition of visiting and clearing his grave. While Eva feels like she is visiting a stranger during this time, Maggie claims to remember him and continues connecting to him through wrestling.

Mateo, the middle brother, realizes that he cannot wait around forever for Pancho’s approval and quits wrestling, choosing to do something he loves instead—making masks and costumes for the luchadores. In fact, he gives up wearing masks both literally and metaphorically, as he is the one who tells Addie the truth about the Bravos. He helps Addie see Manny clearly and encourages her to give up false hope. However, Mateo also believes that people can always change, as they have the power to make different choices. Thus, he holds no resentment or grudges, even toward his own father. Through his life choices, Mateo breaks out of both his family’s and society’s expectations of him.