"School wasn't going well for me," Lopes recently said on UFC Connected. "One day my mom said, 'Either you work or you study. What do you want to do?' But I wanted to keep fighting to stay on the path. She asked, 'What will you do?' I said, 'I want to be a fighter.' One day this guy arrived at our gym. He approached me and asked, 'Do you want to go to Mexico?' And to be honest, I didn't even know where Mexico was..."
"Imagine arriving in a country where you don't speak the language, and you have to teach classes but you don't know how to communicate with the students. That forced me to learn Spanish very quickly."
In Mexico, Lopes met UFC flyweight Alessandro Costa, who is also from Sao Paulo, and together they set up the Brazilian Warriors gym. They then came across the Lobo Gym MMA team consisting of the likes of Irena Aldana and Alexa Grasso..."
Lopes was initially focusing on teaching jiu-jitsu but eventually got involved with the Lobo Gym team, allowing him to further his MMA career while establishing a new life in Mexico.
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