Review: Beatriz Aldana Marquez, ‘From the Peaceable to the Barbaric’
Review of Beatriz Aldana Marquez’ From the Peaceable to the Barbaric. Thorstein Veblen and the Charro Cowboy (Routledge, 2019), 144 pages.
Abstract
A brave new look into the iconic charro culture (Mexican cowboy). Following Veblen's framework, Aldana offers the results of doing ethnographic research in charro teams in Mexico and the United States. This book addresses issues of race, class, and gender in an interesting sociological approach. It reveals the tensions that are often invisible to anthropological approaches, more centered in national identity as a value in itself. Despite its peaceful beginnings, charro culture in the last decades has become predatory, obsessively competitive, authoritarian and thus barbaric. Aldana shows her ability to understand not only the language but also the gestures and hidden meanings in both countries, and put all this in a well written explanation.
Reviewed by Ana Cristina Ramírez Barreto
The title of the work, From the Peaceable to the Barbaric. Thorstein Veblen and the Charro Cowboy, provides us with a fair and accurate description of the book's content. In the Greater Mexico (as Américo Paredes would say, referring to the region between the Usumacinta river, to the south, and the Great Lakes in the border with Canada, to the north), charro refers not only to the corrupted syndicate leader in alliance with the employer. It refers to horse people, in the mestizo-centric stereotype built in the margins of what the 21st century profiled as “the cavalcade of the nations”, according to Gustave Le Bon’s expression. Le Bon published a celebrated recount of “riders of the world” that excluded Mexico and its charros; such omission coupled with other events detonated the institutional, state-sponsored production of the charro stereotype as a living symbol of Mexicanity, counting on the enjoyment of a part of the Mexican population, besides its intense projection in the so-called golden epoch of national cinema and the posterior “sport” version of jaripeo, which urbanites called charreada towards the second half of the 20th century. In Mexico, the charrería is the sport with more federated partners, after soccer (Ramírez-Barreto 2005).
Veblen is not an unknown author to cultural, anthropological and gender studies around contemporary equestrian activities. Thus, Sandra Swartz (2010) utilizes Veblen’s theoretical framework (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899) to address a process in the history of South Africa, when in that region horses lost their efficacy as a weapon of war. Their upbringing, maintenance, training and use as “saddle horses” orbited around luxury consumption, for horses were imported from breeding places in the United States. With a closer approach to the Mexican charrería, the anthropologist Frédéric Saumade (2001) has also used Veblen to point to this “elephant in the room” that is the aspiration to whitewashed, pseudo-aristocratic status by “the charro family”. However, the presence of Veblen's work in Aldana's book goes far beyond a theoretical framework. It is the common thread and the constant reference, since the author set out to corroborate point by point Veblen's satirical theory about "the [North American] leisure class" and The Barbaric Status of Women (1899) based on the empirical material offered by Mexican charrería.
From this, the result is a quite convincing exercise. The modernization of colonial livestock practices and their conversion into an exhibition space governed by principles of "prestige", normalized production of damage to animals (although not as ostensible as in the bullfight), as well as the principles of profit, ostentation, leisure and waste transform the previously gentle character and turn it into predation, into barbaric use of women as property and as men's trophy -- another great thesis of Veblen. For her research, the author placed herself in the field of action, working in the summers from 2012 to 2015 for ranches in different parts of Mexico and the United States where charrería was the family hobby. She conducted participant observation, as well as in-depth interviews with people involved in different ways in the charro activity, men and women of different ages and conditions. Granddaughter of a migrant charro to the United States, the author took advantage of her situation as both an insider and an outsider. She provides a relevant analysis of the interactions between team owners, the “employed” charros, the coaches, their performance in competitions, their considerations on what is and what should be "the charro family" and society in general. Aldana was able to penetrate the field of study to the point of precisely locating the dissonances between the publicly assumed script -- conservative, traditionalist, heteronormative, homophobic -- and the effective positions, much less strident, of people who, with common sense, try to find their way however they can, even in terms of their non-adaptation to sex-generic stereotypes and compulsive heterosexuality.
The exercise is carried out in four chapters between the Introduction and the Conclusions, well supported and elaborated, in which Aldana establishes a connection between the ethnographic material of the 21st century and the Veblenian visions of the cultural and institutional change of the leisure class in the capitalist regime in the United States in the late 19th century. It is ironic and highly provocative that the Mexican charrería best illustrates the predatory condition of the class described by Veblen, since the charrería usually defends itself from criticism for the most barbaric aspects of its work (the mistreatment of animals, discrimination against women) in an alleged cultural difference with "the gringo."
Another success of the book is to dedicate a chapter to women in charrería ("Beautiful women on horseback"). They carry out (and are) the highest degree of luxury consumption both personally and in skirmish teams. "Escaramuza" refers to precision exercises at gallop performed by eight raiders, using a sidesaddle, a "woman's" saddle to bring both legs to the left side of the horse, with fancy dresses. Aldana’s contribution thus complements the information available to English-speaking readers already provided by Sands (1993), Nájera-Ramírez (1994, 2002) and Ramírez-Barreto (2016). Aldana shows the different roles and hierarchies of women in charrería according to age, class or social condition, race, and parallel activities to the hobby, their jobs. It includes the vendedoras, women outside the charrería who attend events to sell their products (food, saddlery, clothing accessories). She also reveals the general inferior status of all women to that of men. This, not only within the nearby "community", "the family", but because for the Mexican Federation of Charrería (the institution that coordinates the performance of official competitions) its female members are ornaments, a guarantee of continuity in future generations and income quotas without effective representation. This is widely noted by Aldana's ethnography. In this normalization of contempt towards women, the Mexican Federation of Charrería is not alone. For the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (CONAPRED), the statutes of the Mexican Federation of Charrería do not incur discrimination despite excluding women -- because they are women -- from the possibility of being elected to positions on the Board of Directors (Request for Access Information, Folio INFOMEX 0441000002421, 04/06/2021). Aldana's book makes an important contribution in documenting the forms of discrimination and abuse in an activity that is claimed to be “representative” of the national identity and which, sadly, perhaps is.
Two aspects seem little addressed in this book. On the one hand, it does not take notice of the unusual technology of horse riding “for women”: the sidesaddle (albarda Lepe, according to my own research). This is the artifact that, for various reasons, has allowed thousands of women in Mexico and the United States to ride horses in charro events, much more women than in any equestrian sport in the world. The most obvious reason for the implementation of this saddle rests in that, visually, it emphasizes femininity when riding a mujeriegas (woman style). The underlying reasons: the albarda Lepe is, in reality, a rough adaptation of the "normal" saddle for the convenience of the manufacturer, so that its production is as cheap as the normal saddle can be; in addition, riding a mujeriegas using the albarda Lepe allows to be hooked by locking the legs on the "horns". In the case of skirmishes, this hitch technology to go a mujeriegas goes against what researchers in the rest of the world have solidly documented: “equestrian activities give many women an opportunity to free themselves from the restrictions of conventional gender roles” (Thompson and Adelman 2013: 202). The skirmishers (escaramuceras) are tied to those conventions with ribbons and laces that are stronger than iron chains. They are obliged to use an artifact to show off the femininity of the rider, without any consideration of equestrian order or the health of both -- the rider and the horse. Many skirmishers are excellent horsewomen who use the sidesaddle because it is necessary for competition. But the albarda Lepe is a device that mutilates the functions of both legs of the rider while allowing even the worst riders to stay on top of the horse almost no matter what happens. This has been the cause of many fatal misfortunes.
Finally, the book misses a much more detailed consideration of the abuse and mistreatment of animals that systemically carry out these para-livestock activities. It does show direct and personal violence, such as a chain of abuse that goes from the boss or owner of the team aspiring to win the championship, putting pressure on charros and grooms (who end up consuming drugs, which they call “their vitamins”), to the last link in the chain -- the horses abused, damaged, sold with deceit to other charros who will continue that route of "gallant" brutality until the horses are sent to the slaughterhouse. Yet beyond this order of personally barbaric animal abuse there is another geopolitical one, which is not visible because we assume that cattle are at our disposal to do whatever we want with them before consuming them as food. Thus, for two decades the National Charrería Congresses in Mexico have been carried out by importing “clean” (wild) horses from the United States; this country claims to have "a serious overpopulation problem" of mustangs, according to the version of ranchers competing with mustangs for pastures. Many times, they do not only bring unfortunate mustangs to the great charreadas, but sale horses at gift prices, because in the United States a federal law prohibits the slaughter of horses, and it is more convenient to sell them at auction and have them sent to charreadas or slaughterhouses in Mexico.
This book is undoubtedly of anthropological, sociological and philosophical interest. Hopefully it can soon be translated into Spanish so that it is also accessible to the very broad sector of the population of which it speaks about, the thousands of people who still vinculate their lives with charro competitions, on both sides of the Rio Grande.
References
Nájera-Ramírez, Olga (1994) Engendering Nationalism: Identity, Discourse and the Mexican Charro. Anthropological Quarterly 67(1):1-14. https://doi.org/10.2307/3317273
Nájera-Ramírez, Olga (2002) Mounting Traditions: The Origin and Evolution of La Escaramuza Charra. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, Cantú, Norma and Nájera-Ramírez, Olga (eds.). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Ramírez-Barreto, Ana C. (2005) El juego del valor. Varones, mujeres y bestias en la charrería en Morelia, 1923-2003. PhD thesis in social anthropology, Zamora, Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán.
Ramírez-Barreto, Ana C. (2016) Escaramuzas Charras: Paradoxes of Performance in a Mexican Women’s Equestrian Sport. The Meaning of Horses: Biosocial Encounters, Davis, Dona L. and Maurstad, Anita (eds.), London: Routledge.
Sands, Kathleen M. (1993) Charreria Mexicana: An Equestrian Folk Tradition. Phoenix: University of California Press.
Saumade, Frédéric (2001) Du taureau au dindon. Domestication du métissage dans le Nouveau Monde mexicain. Études Rurales 157/158: 107–40, doi:10.4000/etudesrurales.32.
Swart, Sandra (2010) Riding High: Horses, Humans and History in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Thompson, Kirrily and Adelman, Miriam (2013) Epilogue: A Research Agenda for Putting Gender Through Its Paces. In: Adelman, Miriam y Knijnik, Jorge (eds) Gender and Equestrian Sport. Riding Around the World. New York City: Springer.
Ana Cristina Ramírez Barreto is a former escaramucera (member of a Mexican precision riding team). She has a PhD in Social Anthropology. Her main concerns are with issues of violence/non-violence and the possible renegotiation of "identities", including the idea of the game-as-it-must-be. She is professor at the Philosophy Department, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia, México. Her writing is available at https://umich-mx.academia.edu/ACRamirez.
