Pensamientos: Rodeo Days

Reading: Latin American Folktales by John Bierhorst

Opening procession

Here’s a Latin American riddle for you:

Monte blanco,
Flores negras,
Un arado,
Y cinco yeguas.

White mountains,
Black flowers,
One plow,
Five horses.

Paccha and the Canton of Atahualpa have spent the last three weeks celebrating their founding with a series of fiestas. The drawn out affair started out with a pregón dedicating the new coliseum to the canton (equivalent to a county) that involved dancing until all hours of the morning to a Maná cover band. This precursor gave way to a series of fiestas throughout the canton cumulating last weekend in Paccha with several more dances, including the beloved and gratuitous street dance. Let it be noted that Atahualpa is the only place in this country that I have encountered where it seems that Club beer is preferred to the national staple of Pilsner. Pacchenses like to keep it classy with personal 12ozers, a novel practice in this country.

Ecuadorian campo sad

The last town fiesta that I participated in was in the parroquia while I was still living in Chimbo. Aside from bingo, the most exciting part of that fiesta was a donkey race, where after months of talking up my riding ability, I was humiliated at the expense of Equus africanus asinus' hormones. Paccha, however, not only had a much more impressive bingo, but there was also a legit rodeo. (Want to know how to get 2000+ people to be absolutely silent for four hours? Bingo where the prizes include a new car, a motorcycle, and an oven.)

Now, Paccha is a pretty small and concentrated town due to being nestled on the side of a mountain and pervading urban migration. Only 1500 people, it is a town that has nothing beyond necessity of small town living. A few family run stores, a health clinic, the high school and elementary schools, a couple of restaurants, a hardware store, a furniture store, a small slaughter house, a bordello, and a car wash, there is no desperation and there is no excess. Except for the rodeo grounds.

Since moving to here, I have been fascinated by the Holstein cow motif structure sitting in abandonment on the outskirts of town. With some basic gates and shoots, the small arena is built into the side of the mountain and surrounded by earthen bleachers carved into the red dirt. As I began to inquire into what looked like obvious livestock showground, I was surprised to find that its only purpose was to host the county rodeo once a year. Finally! A soft spot in Paccha’s frugality.

Growing up around horses on the Great Plains, it would be sacrilegious if I were to say that I did not enjoy a good, sporting rodeo. Back in my 4H days, I used to dig out a dusty western saddle once a year just so I could race my smart, hunter pony around the cloverleaf barrel pattern. I may prefer breaches, field boots, and cross-country fences to wranglers, cowboy boots, and ropes, but there is a reverence to be found while sitting on a well-trained cutting horse with it’s instinctual cow sense. Horsemanship is a culture in and of itself and therefore holds an immunity to our self-constructed societal restrictions. And when it comes to riding horses and herding cattle, there seems to be a few universal truths that hold across the world.

It is very physically demanding and consequently weeds out the majority leaving only the adrenaline loving, hardwearing few that are willing to put up with the jarring hours spent in the saddle, the kicks, the bites, the falls, the dust, the heat, the cold, and the long hours.
It is mentally and emotionally demanding. Working with people is challenging. Now try working with two, often opposing and unpredictable, species without the normal form of communication, in the conditions listed above.
It is addicting. Most find themselves born into; few stumble upon it by some arbitrary chance. Both, however, can never fully leave it, whether it is through work, recreation, writing, photography, music, or that constant, nagging yearning in the back of one’s thoughts.

Traditional Ecuadorian hacienda saddle

As for the actual rodeo, Ecuadoran rodeos and American rodeos could not be more different. Yes, they both involve horses, bulls, cowboy hats, and rodeo queens and clowns. But the similarities stop there. Rodeos in the States are more or less an open competition at the local level and mostly consist of individuals competing against one and other in a wide array of events. True to our Americanism, our rodeos are a rapid succession of rides, with very little dead time in order to satisfy our ever-shortening attention spans. We want rank horses, mean-ass bulls, and some real breath holding rides. If this means we need to add a flank strap to really get 'em jumpin', so be it. Just as long as we get our dollar's worth with each eight seconds.

In Ecuadorian fashion, rodeos south of the equator are all about the presentation. Opening with a vibrant dance with women in flowing skirts and men welding faux rifles, the precedent of the Ecuadorian rodeo is set early. There are extravagant speeches, long processions, drawn out spectacles between clowns and bulls, comedians impersonating a drunk Jesus, no flank straps, and very few actual events. In fact, there are only three. Three events for three competing teams representing three haciendas that were personally invited by the municipal rodeo committee. I leave you to do the math.

Not that I’m complaining. A day spent out in the sun, with a cold beer in hand, watching men attempt to saddle and ride an unbroken horse is surely not a day wasted. When that scene is couple with a mountain backdrop, you could just as well die happy. Be it Paccha or Gardiner, rodeo days will always be the best of days. (I even got to do a tour de Paccha on a very handsome Paso Fino, to the shock of the vaqueros, who never realized that a gringa might actually know how to ride.)