Michelle Rosado stands a few feet from the ropes, bouncing back and forth and clapping her hands as the ring announcer summons Phoenix fighter Alexis "Beaver" Santiago to his corner.
Jamie Peachey
Michelle Rosado and Alexis "Beaver" Santiago, a Phoenix fan favorite.
Jamie Peachey
Martin Vierra (left) battles Marco Mendias
during the first Friday Night Fights event in Phoenix.
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It's Rosado's debut boxing show — Friday Night Fights — and Santiago, a local favorite, is going against Walter Santilbanes in a professional super-bantamweight (119 to 121 pounds) bout.
Santilbanes, also from the Valley, already has entered the ring and is primed, waiting for his opponent to emerge from a back room of the Madison Events Center, the downtown Phoenix venue Rosado has rented for the evening.
This is the last fight before the main event on the card, and fans glance around in search of Santiago, who has not yet appeared.
Suddenly, security officers clear a path through the standing-room crowd packed in the venue's aisles.
Then, trumpets blast through the rumble of the crowd with the melody of a familiar Mexican ballad — "No Me Sé Rajar (I Won't Give Up)." The more than 900 fight fans rise to their feet as Santiago and his entourage march toward the ring. The throng roars with delight as two men holding a giant, silky Mexican flag lead a procession of Santiago, his boxing crew, and Banda La Llegadora, one of the finest Mexican bands in Phoenix.
"Yo soy de los hombre que no temen nada y, aunque esté perdido, no me sé rajar!" the band's singer croons about a man with no fear who doesn't know how to give up, even when a cause seems lost.
While the trumpets, guitars, drums, and tuba play on, the singer, microphone in hand, climbs into the elevated ring with Santiago and performs the rest of the ballad.
Santiago dances on his toes from one corner of the ring to the other, sporting the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag on his shorts and pumping his big gloves in the air.
Santilbanes hangs back as Santiago revs up the crowd.
Rosado, still standing ringside, grins as the band departs, leaving the audience howling with pleasure and pumped for the fight.
At the opening bell, the boxers start pummeling each other mercilessly.
The audience chants, "Beaver! Beaver!" — a nickname that Santiago's teeth earned him at a Phoenix boxing gym years ago.
After the final bell, the judges render their ruling, and Santiago walks away with a split-decision victory.
Rosado, a Puerto Rican American, spent months organizing the eight-bout event employing professional fighters (for six of the fights) and amateurs (for the opening two). Days before the April 8 fight night, Santiago asked Rosado whether he could hire musicians to perform as he walked toward the ring.
She said yes, hoping the stunt would resonate with the audience of overwhelmingly Latino fans at a time when the political climate in Arizona vilifies all things Mexico.
Two weeks before the event, it was Richard Soto, a longtime ring announcer hired by Rosado to work the show, who had revved boxing fans during a pre-fight press conference.
"We're bringing boxing back to Phoenix! We're re-energizing boxing fans in Arizona!" he bellowed from a lectern on the patio of La Canasta Capitolio, a Mexican restaurant near 17th Avenue and Van Buren Street.
"We have to bring back what the politicians have taken from us!"
The Latino-dominated boxing industry in Arizona believes that politicians who have crafted anti-immigration laws for nearly a decade largely are to blame for the sport's waning popularity.
And it's true that the state's harsh anti-immigrant climate hasn't made it easy for Rosado and other industry insiders to stage a comeback for the sport here.
The World Boxing Council, for instance, won't bring fighters to the state these days because of what it believes are "racist" laws and policies promoting racial profiling.
But the sport also has steadily lost fans across the United States, especially as mixed martial arts, a full-body-combat sport, has gained mainstream popularity.
Rosado says, "Tougher immigration laws are [why] boxing took a dive in Arizona, along with the fall of the economy, and MMA taking over by storm."
Michelle Rosado's uphill battle to revive fan interest in boxing isn't helped by the sport's checkered past here and across the country.
Then, there's the anti-Mexican sentiment in Arizona.
Mexican fighters must prove that they are in Arizona legally — which isn't the case in other states. California and Texas, for example, require only that fighters prove they are medically fit to fight.
Many national boxing matchmakers, Rosado says, believe Arizona is the hardest place in the United States to organize a fight card.
Richard Soto insists the anti-immigrant sentiment that hangs over the state "really is hurting boxing in Arizona.
"A lot of major promoters don't want to bring their fighters here," he says. "In the past four, five years, it's been very difficult."
State lawmakers have created an anti-immigrant culture for the better part of a decade by adopting statutes that foster an unwelcoming, often hostile environment for Mexican immigrants.
In 2004, Arizona adopted a law that required voters to provide proof of citizenship to cast ballots. In later years, lawmakers crafted measures mandating that Arizona employers verify employees' eligibility to work legally; that state authorities deny such public benefits as food stamps and unemployment pay to those who can't verify their legal status; and that education officials require undocumented college students to pay out-of-state tuition.
