Uncovering the not-so-subtle queerness of Mexican rodeos

At a Jaripeo rodeo event in Penjamillo, a small town in the central Mexican state of Michoacán, a group of rancheros are getting hyped. They are dressed in striking red, white and black outfits, with fringed chaparreras trousers and cowboy hats, while two rancheros touch the ground to say their final prayers. One of them is about to mount a wild, bucking bull, and they are all hoping no one gets hurt. In the middle of all the tension, one of the rancheros is wearing a waistband with the words ​“CORAZON PA UNA VERGA PA TODAS” embroidered on them, which translates to ​“HEART FOR ONE DICK FOR ALL”.

Soundtracked by a tinnitus inducing, high-pitched string sound and washed-out twangs, the scene is captured in a new experimental feature documentary, JARIPEO, directed by writer and poet Rebecca Zweig and visual artist Efraín Mojica, with the latter also featuring as a central protagonist in the film. It sees Efraín revisit their rural hometown and focus the lens on its LGBTQ+ people – from Joseph Cerda Bañales, the openly gay president of the community church, to cowboy and nurse Noé Margarito Zaragoza.

The Jaripeo, which often take place around the festive season, are traditionally hyper-masculine events, bull riding takes centre stage, but they are also a huge gathering and party, with banda music, food, and a lot of drinking. Look just below the surface, and queer stories quickly manifest, from the not-so-subtle clothing to sideways glances, lingering brushes of skin contact, along with illuminating conversations that shed light on experiences of growing up queer in rural Michoacán. ​“Even when we first started talking about the project, I was like: ​‘Yeah, it’s a film about queer cowboys,’ and people are like: ​‘Oh, gay cowboys are not really a thing, right?’” says Efraín. ​“And it’s like no – of course there’s gay cowboys. There’s gay everything.”

JARIPEO has just premiered at Sundance Film Festival, and now travels to the Berlinale for its EU première and the Glasgow Film Festival for its UK première. To find out more, we sat down with Zweig and Mojica to ask them about the performance of masculinity at the rodeo, and the self-realising process of making the film.

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How did you have the idea for the film?

Rebecca Zweig: Efraín and I have been friends for over a decade now. We met when we were little Seattle punks a very long time ago. Efraín is originally from Michoacán and they invited me to their hometown to spend Christmas there and go to these rodeos. I was really captivated by it – this performance of masculinity that was happening, the community and Efraín’s stories too. It was an idea that I kept thinking about and we kept going back [to the rodeos] together. In 2021 when I was telling our producer about it – who’s also a good friend from being punks in Seattle – she said that it sounded like it could be an incredible documentary, and I reached out to Efraín and was like: ​“Do you want to do something with this?” And they said: ​“Yeah, but can we make it about queer stories there?” Everything came together in that moment.

Efraín, what’s your history with ranchero and cowboy culture?

Efraín Mojica: I grew up in the town where the rodeo that we’re covering in the film takes place. My dad used to ride bulls when he was younger, and I rode a baby bull when I was a baby.

You rode a bull when you were a baby?

EM: Yeah, I was five years old. My dad put me on a calf. So I’ve been around cattle and rodeo bull culture my whole life.

What’s a Jaripeo rodeo like, and how important is it to the local community?

EM: It’s important. The big ones take place on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, so it’s something you do when you’re hungover after Christmas Eve dinner. Everybody goes – the grandmothers go, the kids go, the dogs go. It’s the town gathering. And the big ones on New Year’s Day and Christmas are particularly important because it’s when a lot of people that live in the US come back to Mexico to see their families, so the Jaripeo is kind of put on from for them. It’s this remembrance of what Mexico is like, and that’s why it’s a blatant performance too.

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I can imagine the atmosphere gets festive.

RZ: Yeah, we always joke about this as kind of a drunk movie. There’s some good partying happening.

EM: Even though it’s the days after Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve and people are hungover, they still show up at 11am. By noon the place is packed and there’s a hair of the dog type of situation – everybody starts drinking as soon as they get there and there’s the rodeo clown show. And locals ride wild horses or wild bulls, and that’s the main event. Then after all the animal riding, there’s a dance that happens towards the end of the night. So it’s a complete party, and there’s not one time of day when there’s silence.

RZ: When we filming this became our biggest problem, there’s literally not one moment of silence. When there’s a completely blown out speaker system, they are just blasting trumpets the entire day. But it ended up being something that we utilised really well, I think, and became such a life force in the film.

Can you explain how masculinity manifests in the Jaripeo?

RZ: The structure of the event itself is hyper-masculine. It’s an arena of people watching a man dominate a bull.

EM: Also, the dressing up to go to this place. Me and my queer friends dress up as macho cowboys, but even my straight friends dress up to live up to this idea of the representation of a man in this place. It’s cowboy hats, tight wrangler jeans, shirts with bold shapes in the back, big belt and boots. But it’s attire that young people in town never wear, though people who work with horses in their daily lives do.

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How did you go about queering that vision, and explore queer stories?

EM: They’ve always been present. Wherever there’s a lot of men, there’s a lot of gay men. And I had recently met a few folks that are very cowboy and ranchero in their day-to-day lives that are also queer. But in our interactions they would deny being gay, because for them being a gay man represents being a flamboyant gay person. So in this limbo identity, even though he’s married to a man, he used to deny being gay. But at the same time, there is a new generation of queer folks that are very outward and very proud of their identity. Like Joseph who is one of our protagonists – he wears a pink pedestal cowboy hat, a leather corset, green boots. He’s a fashion diva, and he’s respected and celebrated in the town for being who he is. He’s a leader of his community.

RZ: When we were making the film, people kept asking us: ​“So how is this a story about gay oppression?” And really it’s more about finding senses of belonging in a community. Because our protagonists didn’t leave. They didn’t feel the need or want to leave their community in order to be who they are – they wanted to be who they are within their community and the place that they grew up in. The more that we realised that ourselves and focused on the community, we saw how non-queer people were opening up to these ideas as well. Like Joseph, who wears full acrylic nails and full face makeup all the time but is also the church president. He’s an extremely active member of the community. There are some tensions between tradition and queer expression, but ultimately what we found was very positive.

So being queer is generally accepted in rural Mexico? Or is it something that’s looked down upon a lot, or something that people feel they have to hide? 

EM: I can’t speak for the whole of rural Mexico or even the country, because it’s such a big country and there are so many diverse regions, but that’s why we wanted to focus the film in my hometown Penjamillo, because it’s very accepting there. Like Joseph is basically the mayor of the town and because of his strong presence, younger generations are embracing their femininity and queerness more, and being outwardly open with it. Older folks are not appalled anymore, because it’s been around, you know.

RZ: I think what we also really wanted to show in this film was how things exist in a sort of simultaneity. There can be a rodeo clown in drag, and a queer person in the same space, and they can both exist, whether one seems outdated or not, they’re both people that want to occupy the same space and they are both welcome there. What we wanted to show is how there’s a lot of simultaneity happening, and how people are complex and desires are complex.

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Efraín, did you learn anything about yourself in the making of the film?

EM: Yeah, totally. That’s kinda what the film turned out to be. Because at first, it was a portrait uptown with little glimpses of queer cultures. Then every year that we would go back to film, I would see my hometown with a different lens and understand different things about my culture, my family, myself, and why at some point I wanted to leave this place. I thought it was not who I thought I was, but then it was realising all of that is within me – it’s so enrooted in me, as much as I want to say I’m deconstructed from this, it’s still there. It’s still who I am. So it was more like shaking hands with all these complex ideas.

RZ: Something we also have to add is the voiceover in the film is a conversation between Efraín and I over four years. You see shots of Efraín in this pickup truck with this beautiful vista behind him. It’s one of their favourite spots in town, and towards the end of our first shoot it was becoming more apparent to us that some of the things that the film wanted to say were things that Efraín needed to say in the film. We decided, ​“Okay, I’m going to interview you,” and we had almost a form of a psychoanalytic conversation for years that ended up structuring the film.

What does JARIPEO mean to you personally?

EM: It’s a celebration of queer culture in traditionally macho dominant places. An acceptance of who we are, especially in these communities where most queer folks are repressed, and erased. So it’s scary to come out and embrace who we really are, but once you do, it’s freeing and people accept you and love you regardless.

RZ: Aside from being a deeply transcendental queer film, I also think it’s really deeply human. It shows the complexity in each person who is in it. It’s why we spent so much time there, to show the wholeness of people. And also how special our collaboration is too. It’s very made by a poet and a visual artist – it’s not a traditional documentary, but so many of the questions we arrived at by making this film came from our collaboration. I think we find self-realisation through our interactions with others and maybe more people should make autobiographical films with collaborators also.

JARIPEO, directed by Rebecca Zweig and Efraín Mojica, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, before EU premieres at the Berlinale between February 18 – 22 and the Glasgow Film Festival on March 1.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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