Masculinity in America → Every bull ride is a contest of life and death — and also of story and history. A Mexican American cowboy tries to hang on.
In LARAMIE, Wyoming - A stocky cowboy climbs onto a 1,400-pound bull. For the moment, they are both bound within a bucking chute. But already their muscles are tense and the arena is thick with dirt and adrenaline and soon, perhaps, also with blood. Joseph Quintana, the 25-year-old rider, is at once the trigger and the target. He needs to hang on for eight seconds to qualify here at the Wyoming Rodeo Association finals. The animal, named Wild Turkey, has been trained to make that nearly impossible.
Joe gives the nod.
The bull bounds out of the chute. The purple tassels from Joe’s riding chaps fly akimbo as the animal kicks up and down. But Joe himself looks sturdy; he keeps his left arm down on the bull-rope and shoots his right one into the air. One second.
Rodeo celebrates the raw skills of ranch work. It is an enunciation of dignity and of nostalgia for a lifestyle that feels far away in modern America. It also provides a respite from the isolation that persists in rural regions like this one. About 150 spectators are gathered here in late August at the Albany County Fairgrounds in Laramie to celebrate “the western way of life.”
“This is the time of day for a cowboy when all the hard work was being done. The bronc stompin', the fence buildin', the well diggin’ and the cattle tendin’,” an announcer says in a treacly voice at the start of the show. “It was this way of life that the sport of rodeo came to be, and folks, we are about to embark on one of the nation’s greatest feats of history. Because for a cowboy, this is his story.”
The script of American manhood is often set here in the frontier West, ever since the cowboy emerged as an iconic symbol of the United States more than 100 years ago. In that narrative, the cowboy lives by his own rules and bends others to his code. Stoic by nature, he betrays no emotion, except perhaps anger. He is good but also bad when the situation calls for it. He works alone but never gets lonely. He is almost always White.
At the rodeo, the bull ride is the culminating event, the main draw. There are few things that appear more macho than riding bulls. In a time when there are many conflicting ideas about how to be a “real man” in the United States, to cling to a bull is to cling to tradition, to embody a simple vision in a country where everything else feels adrift.
But unlike other rodeo events — tie-down roping, breakaway, and even steer wrestling — bull riding is unrelated to the grueling day-to-day skills necessary to subsist in Cowboy Country.
The bull kicks up more violently now, again and again, but Joe hangs on. Two seconds.
Now the animal starts to corkscrew like a crashing warplane. The dirt it kicks up is flying everywhere, from ground to sky like a sepia filter. Three seconds.
Riding bulls is entertainment..
In his day-to-day life, Joe breeds and raises high-altitude cattle in Saguache County, Colo., in the San Luis Valley about 300 miles south of Laramie. He is here to compete for thousands of dollars in prize money alongside scores of other athletes. They come from faraway parts of Nebraska and Colorado and Montana and Wyoming and even Texas
Joe isn’t a legacy cowboy, like many in the Western United States who have inherited property and are trying to figure out what to do with it. He made himself into a cowboy, methodically, even obsessively.
Joe, who is Mexican American, gravitated toward cowboy things even as a child. Western hats and saddle boots. Giant belt buckles. Riding around on horses.
In time, he began to identify with the men around him who did agricultural work. It seemed honest and dutiful — and manly. When he was a teenager, Joe started attending rodeos and training on his own to master the bull ride. It felt like a declaration of freedom, like a step toward becoming his own man.
“I just looked up to those guys for some reason. They were like heroes to me. And I just said, man, I’m going to ride bulls one day,” he says. “Rodeo is not like a job that you go apply for. It’s one of them deals that you got to want it more than you want anything.”
The story of the American cowboy is often framed as one of authenticity.
But it has always been about creation. And re-creation.
Joe was born and raised in Golden, Colo., a suburb of Denver where the quintessential American entertainer William Cody is buried.
Buffalo Bill, as Cody came to be known and immortalized, was the person most responsible for popularizing the lore of the Wild West in the late 19th century. His highly produced and scripted Wild West show recast cowboys from undesirables into figures of romance and virtue, says Richard White, an emeritus historian of the West at Stanford University.
A new narrative of American manhood was born — a highly profitable one.
The transformation from cowboy to Cowboy, from worker to showman, happens in the moments before Joe climbs into the chute and onto the bull. On the platform, his face becomes less soft as the ride approaches. His mouth turns down. Joe paces side to side, like he’s dancing a two-step. He practices jolting up and down. A shadow cast by his hat covers his eyes.
Joe is still upright, looking every bit the iconic cowboy in silhouette. Except Joe is flesh and blood. And so is the bull. Four seconds.
Wild Turkey spins and spins and spins like a hydroplaning car. Joe looks like he’s hanging on tight. And then, suddenly, he looks unsteady. Five seconds.
Gilbert Quintana, Joe’s dad, was not supportive of bull riding, and even now he wishes Joe would stop. He thinks it’s dangerous but that Joe is too headstrong to see all it could cost him.
After Joe’s parents divorced when he was about 3 years old, Gilbert did his best as a single father to keep his four kids on a schedule while working as a tower crane operator. Wrestling was not only the family sport but also a lifeline, which Joe, his brother and two sisters practiced seven days a week, all year round. But for Joe, it was a secondhand intensity. He came to resent the sport. “It’s like anything. Like, you can’t eat a ham sandwich every single day for every meal,” he says. “It wasn’t what I wanted to do. Rodeo was what I wanted to do.”
Joe dropped out of school in 2014 when he was 17 years old, in part to get away from wrestling. He moved out of his dad’s house abruptly; the two were estranged for a time. Joe worked as a cowpuncher in Flagler, Colo., making $150 a day tending to cattle on horseback.
In his free time, he rode bulls.
He thought he had his life all figured out. He recalls his elation when he bought a Dodge pickup truck with his own money.
Hard times followed. Once, with no money and no gas, Joe showed up at his dad’s house to ask for help. It was snowing.
“Do you remember what I told you?” Gilbert recalls telling Joe. “You’re a man now. And if you leave here, not to come back. You made a man’s decision, and you have to live with a man’s decision.”
Gilbert cried afterward. It was one of the hardest things he ever did, he says, but he wanted to teach Joe a lesson about accountability.
Later that year, a bull stepped on Joe’s chest at the end of a ride. It broke his sternum and his clavicle, and pushed bones so far back into Joe’s chest cavity that doctors thought his aorta was going to rupture. Both of his lungs were punctured and he lacerated his liver. He also broke his jaw after getting hit in the face several times. To help him breathe, Joe went on a ventilator and his lungs were sewn with mesh to the inside of his ribs.
The damage could have killed him.
For the next three months he could hardly walk or shower by himself.
About halfway through his 13-month recovery, Joe began to ask his doctor when he could ride bulls again. She shot that down.
And yet the week Joe was officially given a clean bill of health, he says with pride, he entered another rodeo. The six-inch plate left in his chest from the accident provided some reassurance: “I don’t think it’s going to break again.”..
After his accident, he went at bull riding even harder than before.
He figures he has “about five solid years left in this body” and he’s going to keep going until it gives out. He knows each bull ride could be his last.
What could possibly be worth such high stakes?
He can’t put it into words. The prize money isn’t good enough on its own to justify the sacrifices. Maybe he does it for the adrenaline. Maybe it makes him feel alive. Maybe it makes him feel like a man. Maybe it’s an old story: a young guy grasping for somewhere to belong.
Or maybe it’s none of those things, exactly.
“People call it the worst drug in the world. They say you can’t do it just once,” he says. “You’ve gotta be the right type of person. And if you are, and you do it, there’s just no other feeling in the world like it.”
And what is that feeling? The one that shaped his life and his work and his ambition?
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just that feeling.”
Whatever it is, Joe is always thinking about bull riding — when he is planting seed, when he is putting up hay, when he is driving to pick up his daughter. Sun up to sun down.
The bull kicks up again one more time, and as Joe pulls down to find his center of gravity, the bull starts to spin again, except this time Joe can’t hang on.
For the slightest moment he is hovering above the bull but is no longer on it. Five-and-a-half-seconds.
Every rodeo is a contest between story and history.
Behind the announcer’s booth, freight trains heave back and forth, betraying the truth of the land. Wyoming is called “The Cowboy State” but agriculture is a very small part of the economy here today — just two percent of Wyoming’s gross domestic product, according to government data. The state’s population relies heavily on the extraction and exportation of natural resources like oil, gas and coal.
As an icon of manliness, the American cowboy exists somewhere in the space between myth and reality as well.
The Frontier Thesis, an intellectual consensus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bolstered the idea that American exceptionalism was forged through mastery over the continental wilderness. The idea spread, from paintings to Wild West shows to frontier films, and turned the West into the cradle of American masculinity.
In the popular telling, American virtue and maleness and Whiteness became one thing. Today, the cowboy remains a stand-in for the ideal man in American life; dominant, independent, and unwavering.
In truth, the crucial skills of rural Western life find their historic origins with Mexican vaqueros, mestizos of mixed Indigenous and Spanish lineage whose presence in North America preceded the Republic. But the frontier exceptionalism notably did not apply to the indigenous peoples who had lived on the land since time immemorial.
And cowboys in the Old West were corporate cogs, not mavericks. They worked primarily for large profit-driven corporations that were at the time consolidating ownership of once-open ranch-lands.
Joe comes crashing down. He lands on his flank and then his head falls into the dirt. The ride won’t count. Joe turns his body and is now face down. The bull still is on top of him, kicking. Six seconds.
“The cowboy’s life is not a glorious life but it’s his life,” the announcer tells the audience at the start of the show. “He owns a horse and a saddle. His life is hard work and true grit to survive and to live by the unwritten code. Week to week, trying to earn his wages, freedom and pride are the driving forces of the American cowboy. As we keep our soldiers, pride, and our freedom in our hearts, I want to ask you one thing: are you proud to be an American?”
Euphoria scatters throughout the arena like a cloud of dust.
Cheers ring out.
Two years ago, Joe bought about 2,600 acres and leased another 10,000, which he uses to run an operation of about 300 mother cows. “A bunch of critters,” he calls them. It was his dream. One thing he has learned is that the most valuable players in ranching towns are community-minded men. And women. Their lives are about attention to unglamorous details, not bravado and myth.
But he has grown wary of the myths that circulate around “real America” — who belongs, who doesn’t, and the unspoken reasons why. Some of the best cowboys Joe knows are Brown, Black and Indian.
“They’re the good workers,” he says with a chuckle.
You wouldn’t know it looking at the crowd or the athletes here at the rodeo, which are almost exclusively White. When the announcer lauds Bill Pickett, the Black cowboy who inspired steer wrestling, it registers more as oddity than overture. No one in the audience reacts.
There are very good rodeo performers, Joe points out, who aren’t real cowboys at all. He has encountered bull riders in the past who don’t even know how to ride a horse, who “show up in an Escalade and Air Jordans with their skinny jeans,” he says, laughing. “Then they’ll put on their rodeo attire and go out there and win, too!”
All those contradictions become irrelevant when Joe rides.
Every time he gets on a bull, he marks his territory. The bull’s two hind legs fall on each side of Joe’s body, a miracle in motion that spares Joe’s spine from getting crushed. Joe needs to get out from underneath the bull. Seven seconds.
Addie, Joe’s 5-year-old daughter, has been watching the action. It’s all happening very quickly but she is following as best she can.
Joe had just been teaching her how to lasso in the hours before his ride.
“Hold your spoke,” Joe instructed, warmly, a gold cross resting atop his button-up western shirt. “Slide your head up. Flip it again.”
Addie’s giant belt buckle glittered in the sun as she swung the lasso around and aimed for a bottle of yellow Gatorade.
“You missed again! We gotta try a little harder,” he told her. “Here, rope my foot while I’m walking.”
“Swing it a little longer, before you throw,” he added.
A few tries later, she finally got him.
“Nice!” Joe shouted. “That’s the best one I’ve seen you throw!”
Joe hopes rodeo is something he and Addie can share. Women compete in a few roping and horse riding events, which is how Joe met his current girlfriend. Together they are teaching Addie how to ride.
“Are we ready for fast horses and beautiful women?” the announcer asks the crowd before the barrel racing begins.
Joe crawls back toward the pen and away from the spinning bull. A flash of disappointment hits his face at the precise moment he is finally safe.
“It felt good as f---, too!” he shouts.
Joe paces back and forth. His face is hard, turned downward in disappointment, or anger, or sadness. Eight seconds.
Amid the violence of a bull ride, the men who cling on become something other than themselves, brash characters instead of actual cowboys, Marlboro Men instead of the real thing. It is easy to see Joe this way, too.
But what does Joe think? Is a “real man” someone who does dangerous things simply because he can? Someone who knows that pain is a part of glory and pursues it anyway? Someone who works with his hands, or drives a big truck, or always gets what he wants?
It’s none of that, he says.
Joe aspires to be somebody who “will take the time to do something right instead of doing it twice,” he says, “somebody who takes care of his business, someone who is always on top of it.”
“You’re never sitting around waiting. You’re always trying to make something happen. You’re always on your way,” he says.
To be a “real man” one must also be a good man, Joe adds, and that is decided outside the arena. It’s about how you treat people. Being there for your family and your friends. Approaching strangers with kindness and respect.
He has messed up before. He probably will again. That’s real life.
“I’ve been in some low places in my life and I know some people are in low places,” Joe says. “And I just try to be a nice face that people can remember.”
The hardness drains from Joe’s face the farther away he gets from the bull chute. He catches his daughter’s gaze and he finally smiles. Joe’s ride didn’t qualify but he’ll try again soon. Another rider prepares to go on.
No comments:
Post a Comment