Ranch Report: The Mexican Midget Rodeo

It could only happen out here, west of the Pecos (I think)

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I was going through the Fort Stockton online events page last month when this item caught my eye…..

Yes, it was an ad for a Mexican midget rodeo!

Now, I used to watch midget wrestling on TV back in the 60s when I was a kid, and I’ve seen that midget actor who played in Game of Thrones, but I had never heard of a Mexican midget rodeo, so I just had to check it out!

Having no idea what I was going to see, I drove out to the Pecos County Coliseum alone (Diann had no interest in it.)

I was surprised to see not only a full house, but primarily families, with children.

The crowd. All Mexican, and mostly families.

I was also the only Anglo in the building. Adding to my sense of being a “stranger in a strange land”, the entire show (even the music) was in Spanish, so I didn’t understand a word the announcer was saying or recognize any of the songs, except one. (It was “Bad to the Bone” by George Thorogood.)

The only Anglo in the Coliseum, and the only person who didn’t speak Spanish!

But everyone was extremely nice, and quite frankly they were tickled to see an old white guy (gringo viejo) taking in the show.

This was my second foray into the deep Mexican culture of Pecos County, and by that, I mean the centuries-old Mexican traditions that aren’t really attended in large numbers by Anglos out here. My first encounter was the Quinceañera I went to a few months ago, where I was one of only two Anglos there.

Mom and daughter at the Quinceañera, Pecos County Civic Center

I must say that the Mexican-Americans I’ve met out here are a warm and welcoming people who as my late mother used to say, “Know how to have a good time.”

I took my seat, but was a bit disappointed that we were all seated so far from the arena. That it made it tough to get good photos. The show started, and yes, it really was Mexican midgets, all in the arena.

The first thing I learned is that a lot of what passed for a “rodeo” was the midgets dancing in the arena, and lip-synching songs in Spanish. Here’s how the show opened.

The crowd loved it, mainly because I think they’d seen this movie before!

After one or two “performances”, they got ready for some actual rodeo action, but not before one of the non-midgets in the show ran up into the bleachers to toss out Capri Sun fruit drinks to all of the kids.

And they also had a dude dressed in drag, who ran up and down the bleachers, encouraging older men to dance with him/her.

A somewhat reluctant participant is “encouraged” to join the fun.

Everyone in the crowd was good with it, and found it to be uproariously funny. Most of them were pointing to men in the audience they wanted the drag performer to dance with. Actually drag has been popular in Mexico for some time. There is even a popular reality show on Mexican TV titled "La Mas Draga"

Finally it was time for the rough stock part of the rodeo. First the midget cowboys all came out into the center of the arena in their vests and chaps.

A big entrance for the midget cowboys!!!

They had three rough stock events:
1) Roping a bull
2) Trying to get up onto a Shetland pony’s back while it was on a dead run
3) Riding a bull, backwards

The first event, roping a bull, turned out to be the most dangerous. All three midget cowboys stayed afoot in the arena as a bull was turned loose. The idea was to “team rope” the bull, meaning two cowboys had to toss a loop onto the bull, then pull from opposite directions to stop it. The only problem was that when one cowboy got a rope on the bull, it ran around so much that it was hard to get a second loop on him. One midget had to make an escape crawling underneath the fence. (Notice there is a previously injured midget cowboy already lying on the ground! He was hit hard by a bull earlier.)

This was a pretty rough event if you weren’t horseback.

All of these performances, from the dancing and lip-synching to the rough stock events were enthusiastically received by the crowd. I have to believe that much of the response was because this event was a reminder of home, the Mexican state of Chihuahua that borders this part of Texas. A large contingent of the Mexican-Americans in Pecos County have family in Chihuahua, or came from there.

I often say that the Mexicans out here are different than everywhere else, and I stand by that. For one thing, they have been in Pecos County for more than 350 years. Actually their ancestors were here 15,000 years ago! When the Conquistador Juan Dominguez de Mendoza came to Comanche Springs in 1683, he found people already living here.

The native Americans were here for centuries, making flint tools and hunting everything from mammoth to deer. They congregated around several large springs we once had, with the largest being Comanche Springs, and left cave paintings, or pictographs.

When Fort Stockton was established, the community around Comanche Springs was called St. Gall, and was predominately Hispanic. They were the descendants of the native Americans (Comanche), and the Spaniards who had come here centuries earlier. The history books like to say that the Spaniards “inter-married” with the native Americans, but I’m fairly sure it was rape. My late grandfather used to say that the Mexicans out here had “more Indian in them” than other places in Texas.

These folks moved back and forth across the Rio Grande for centuries until the Mexican War gave much of what is now the southwest to the United States. Despite the Rio Grande being the official boundary, they continue crossing frequently to this day, primarily the families living in Pecos County and the state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico.

So, as I said, this was a truly Chihuahuan presentation, and it played to people with roots there.

My ticket stub.

One of the midget cowboys.

The highlight of the night was the “backwards bull riding”. Don’t have any idea how they came up with this concept, but it was how they put the midgets on the bulls without using the chute. (Looked like a lot of work!)

Riding a bull, backwards.

I wish that I had mustered up the courage to get shots of the people in the crowd, but not speaking the language, I was hesitant to walk up to strangers and ask for a photograph.

The main thing I noticed was that most of the young women were wearing knee-high cowboy boots.

Had never seen that before.

If you look closely at the next photo, you can see one of them in the far right corner of this shot. She’s in the brown knee-high boots. Several of them had boots like this that were heavily decorated. This is a new thing out here (to me). Don’t recall seeing that anywhere else in Texas.

Check out the knee-high boots on the young lady in the lower right. Saw dozens of young women in this style, from white to bright red!

There is a deeply-rooted Native American-Spanish culture in Pecos County that the Mexican-Americans have embraced for 100s of years. I am only now beginning to dive into it, because you don’t really pick up on it during casual visits or three-day weekends.

My late grandfather spoke Spanish, or Tex-Mex, fluently which allowed him to go anywhere. I wish I knew how to speak it, because it would open more doors, but for now I’m exploring as much as I can and really enjoying it.

Grandfather Roland, with his Mexican cowboy, Froilo Gonzales in 1966.

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Thanks for reading this far l’il partner. Hope you didn’t get eyestrain.

Adios!