Border Patrol Cowboys: U.S. Rodeo Performance,Property and Whiteness

Performance Arenas

Folks take pictures next to Dodge Ram trucks outfitted in BP insignia outside of the convention center. Inside, a line forms at a BP recruitment booth. Agents glad- hand the crowd while attendees say, “Thank you for your service.” Agents do pull- ups on a makeshift bar and others practice roping a dummy cow. A high- pitched Star- Spangled Banner echoes throughout the center. Sonically beneath the anthem, boots click against the concrete in a heel- toe- clink rhythm as people find their seats. Folks put their cowboy hats on their chests and sing along. I jog to my seat, adding my boot clinks to the cowboy cacophony. Military jets fly overhead and the crowd cheers and yeehaws. I close my eyes and prepare for the performances to come. Cowboy bravado on bucking bulls and horses. Feats of strength in service of discourses of masculinity and nation. The rodeo should flow in an orchestral manner if nobody gets hurt. In an hour, sirens will blare, and the BP will “capture” someone crossing the imaginary U. S. “border.”

I use the trope of performance to ground and drive research praxis by centering the body as a relational site of knowledge (Conquergood, 1983; Madison, 2012). In the above scene, my body relationally implicates me in the unfolding ritual of the rodeo and its meanings. Attending to the body allows researchers to argue that identity is co-performative, relational, and context based. Identity is accomplished in contexts which articulate identification with corporeal embodiment (through discourses of race, class, gender, ability) and, since identity is relational (Anzaldúa, 2012, 2015), it is a performance dependent on recognition. In this way, doing identity is always already a reference to the border between you and I and the other borders that divide or unite us. Goltz and Pérez (2012) explain, “Performance highlights embodied, personal/relational, and affective dimensions of the border, complementing broader discursive investigations” (p. 165). As such, critical theory requires performance ethnographers to name and interpret discursive effects and how they are accomplished through the relationships of recognition through the performative body. Madison (2012) explains, “Ethnography becomes the ‘doing’ —or better, the performance—of critical theory” (p. 14). Drawing on the knowledge of the marked body as it is made precarious within systems of oppression, performance studies heeds lessons of critical queer scholars of color to use embodied liminal space as a heuristic for possibilities of identity, subjectivity, and resistance (Anzaldúa, 2012, 2015; Keating, 2009). While Trinh's (1989) claim that “we do not have bodies, we are our bodies” remains useful for thinking the body in relation to structural discourses of power and violence, there is still performative space in the liminal moments before recognition wherein habits of recognition and vision (of the other) can be upended, broken, and reframed to shift or transform oppressive articulations of identity (p. 36).

Many of the possibilities of (re)signification and recognition are caught up in the representational economy of vision. Phelan (1993) explains, “The relationship between the real and the representational, between the looker and the given to be seen, is a version of the relationship between the self and the other” (p. 3). This relationship, of course, is dependent on the historical and contextual discourses of dominance that operate within the field of vision to mark bodies as seen/scene or present/invisible. Performance requires an audience, just recognition does, and neither are without respective power dynamics. The performative interplay between the self/other in the performer/audience relationship marks certain bodies with the power to see/name/own and other bodies as property to be seen/named/owned. McCann (2019) builds on this to argue that presence of bodies in performance necessarily bring positionalities and potential to resist overdetermined recognition of looking/seen bodies in relation.

Additionally, performance may present bodies not previously seen as present—such as the nation-state or whiteness. In this way, there is no looking that does not at once implicate the looker in what is seen, and thus, performance must reflexively consider the position of the researcher/looker (Calafell, 2020; Madison, 2012; Conquergood, 1982). Calafell (2020) calls for performative and intersectional reflexivity, which implicates the researcher into uncomfortable positions of power. This requires me to “theorize white privilege alongside its damning consequences” (Goltz & Pérez, 2012, p. 164). Thus, when the audience and I watch the BP halftime show, we are implicated in the border logics (Lechuga & De La Garza, 2021) of othering by being an audience together. Thinking through the collective audience as a performing body (Pérez, 2019), opens the staged relationship of self/other for critique of how the performance materializes. While legacies of capitalism and colonization have normalized white supremacist patriarchal vision, performance aims to disrupt the violent determining power of habituated gazes that replicate bordering logics of self/other. The cultural production of the other makes itself visible through recognition of physical and symbolic borders as substantive to tautological theories of self.

Anzaldúa (2012) poses the dialectic of the border; theorized as the literal border of U.S./México, the bodily border between individuals, and the divide between binary thinking, to open possibilities for play between preferred meanings. Play between meanings can occur in performance and performativity, as performance allows us to think about how borders of property secure nation and Whiteness relationally. In performance, the conditions of shared meaning lie in the liminal and relational moments of recognition between subjects of a discourse (Butler, 1993). Since meaning making often relies on binary opposition, the border is a useful symbolic and physical marker of how designations and recognitions of self and other occur. Anzaldúa (2012, 2015) offers nosotros as a means of articulating consciousness of false binary oppositions (which mark bodies for entry, humanity, or entitlement) at borders between people. Nosotros is we, but when broken up nos means us and otros means others, the example showing that there is no we without the other, no me without you, no us without them. Anzaldúa impels us to recognize the relational condition of the “other” on which one’s understanding of self is based. In this way, identities claimed at the border are comprehensible in opposition to and through one another. Thus, one might ask how the condition of dispossession of the “other” is the foundation by which one understands one’s own possession of national identity.

If, as Conquergood (1983) explains, “Reality, then is caught and clarified in the focusing powers of performance” (p. 29), then what reality is caught by these BP halftime shows? Border rhetorics produce bodies for recognition and discipline, and these bodies are imagined not only as corporeal human/non-human bodies, but as the bodies of land made nation through border violence. Cicneros (2012) explains, “Contemporary border rhetorics call citizens to perform their belonging by participating in the policing and persecuting of immigrant-others, as border vigilantism is converted into a form of civic duty and a performance of national affect” (p. 148). Thus, performances of the border and at the border ritualistically follow the self/other script to dispossess those seen as others from their bodies and the U.S. At PBR and rodeo halftime shows, border capture performances hail audiences as the national body. As Chávez (2021) argues, the U.S. nation rests on the ability of citizens to perform whiteness to recognize each other as citizens (ownership of legal status) and immigration threatens the possibilities of recognition. These performances are not restricted to white people, but to those willing to take up the violent mantle of the nation. Chávez (2021) explains,

“What keeps us together, how we prevent ourselves from becoming alien [as a nation] to one another, is to uphold the right to alienize: to enslave, to capture, to displace, and to kill…We become a people in our inalienable right to alienize” (p. 164).

The question becomes, how is the work of the state done through bodies and performances in PBR and rodeo arenas? How do I observe and participate in the border being done as an audience member? The hope is to imagine otherwise at the collision of identities, bodies, and borders. Next, I explain my use of autoethnography.

Borderlands of Autoethnography

I am cosplaying cowgirl with two friends, one who is white and one who is Iranian and Mexican. This is their first rodeo, and they are rightfully skeptical it will be hostile toward “liberals” and people of color. I assure them that I will take care of them. I say, it is fun to watch the horses, bulls, and cowboys. I teach how qualifying for a bull riding score depends on many points of evaluation. First, you must stay on the bull for eight seconds. This is extremely difficult; some say this is the most dangerous sport in the world. While holding on, you must put your torso, arms, and legs in a particular position. The bull can out- muscle you, ram you against the rails and bust your head open or stomp you to death. It is a stupid test of masculinity, we can be critical of it later. What is thoughtful about saying this seems cruel and the cowboys might be racist? We know that. As American as apple pie. The words leave my lips, sirens blare, and BP is here to capture someone crossing “the border.” Everyone cheers, and I think, what the hell am I doing? The show ends, I apologize. I am going to write a paper about it.

All sorts of people attend and compete in rodeos and PBR, but it often feels like a white space. I am unsettled in my negotiation of Whiteness and gender at the rodeo as alluded to in the previous vignette. Performativity of my Whiteness seems to be the toll of attendance, but my continued attendance is borne out of more than ethnographic inquiry. For me, horses are magical. However, my love of horses does not excuse the nationalist meanings performed in rodeo arenas and supported in my attendance. Thus, autoethnography in addition to performance ethnography allows me to think more deeply about my relationship to PBR and rodeo. I include vignettes from times where I participated in predominantly white cowboy culture to evoke visceral responses from the reader and to locate myself at the many positions of privilege I inhabit within this culture. I employ an intersectional approach to understand the performative relations of my identity and to account for the individual and institutional interplay of gender, race, class, and citizenship. I autoethnographically locate myself within property discourses that activate relationships between identities, borders, cowboys, and white nationalism in U.S. capitalism.

Spry (2011) notes that autoethnography is invested in the critique of the structural and how material and discursive structures of power manifest specific lived realities. Autoethnography analyzes how personal experiences reflect, resist, and maintain larger institutional and cultural narratives. Autoethnography can offer moments to reimagine stories of cultural significance through the frame of social justice. Holman Jones (2005) argues that “personal text can move writers and readers, subjects and objects into a space of dialogue, debate, and change” (p. 746). I use autoethnography to enter dialogue about how the trope of the cowboy does performative work to enforce U.S. borders. Like autoethnography, autohistoria-teoría is decolonial personal writing that considers the relationship of the individual to the cultural to reflexively analyze and critique systems of power, such as imperialism and nationalism, often normalized in the cultures and contexts in which we find ourselves (Keating, 2015). Autohistoria-teoría was created by Anzaldúa for women of color to write their stories and speak back to hostile white feminist and colonizing narratives of knowledge production. I am white and feminist, attempting to decolonize the knowledge production surrounding white property ownership signified by the cowboy. My engagement with autohistoria-teoría does not negate the implications of my positionality. I use autohistoria-teoría to highlight the productive tension of theorizing from the performative border of self/other and colonizer/colonized to deconstruct secured meanings of U.S. white property ownership.

Employing Anzaldúa’s approach to personal narrative allows me to focus on the intersectional and relational construction of the borderlands. Anzaldúa, according to Keating (2009), maintained that nobody “had an exclusive, superior, insider perspective into her theories and her writings” (p. 12). However, in applying her theories, I remain reflexive of potential appropriative moves while acknowledging my particular standpoint. Anzaldúa and I do not share the same identity standpoints, but we share the political goal to “rewrite existing cultural stories” (p. 319). Thus, I evoke her work precisely to trouble stories we already know about the cowboy and the border while holding myself accountable to these tellings. I blend autoethnography, autohistoria-teoría, and performance ethnography to exact critique on the colonial U.S. border performed and made property at the rodeo and PBR. Next, I situate my theoretical focus on property and how discourses of property enforce whiteness and white nationalism.

Property, Nation, Whiteness

At the Thomas and Mack center in Las Vegas for the National Finals Rodeo (NFR), people are dressed in their best Western outfits. Feathers adorn American Cowboy hats and turquoise squash necklaces grace necklines. I made a list of Western influencers, the best riders and ropers, and rode for a week to prepare to speak cowboy. NFR qualification depends on how much money each cowboy or cowgirl won rodeoing throughout the year. It takes a lot of money to compete, attend, and win. The arena buzzes as men drink Yellowbelly Coors and women complement each other’s style. I find my seat in in the nosebleeds as everyone takes off their hats for the star-spangled banner. I think about Fiesta del Charro, Bill Picket Invitational rodeo, International Gay rodeo, Women’s World Championship rodeo, and Indian National Finals Rodeo and wonder what exactly it means to be here at the NFR. When I talk about this research, folks are curious to learn that Brazilians dominate PBR while PBR’s board of directors is comprised of white men. I put my hat back on my head, the anthem ends, and fans cheer. In an hour, the Border Patrol will conduct their halftime performance.

The above scene indicates how NFR audiences signify and recognize belonging in Western cowboy culture. The embodied promenade of cowboy cultural capital at these events relationally signals who appears to fit within the imagined aesthetics of the cowboy. Cowboy aesthetics and the capital it (re)presents is conditioned by relationships to property, whiteness, and U.S. nationalism. Historically, property ownership and the development of U.S. borders materially and symbolically drove the cowboy Westward (Slatta, 1999). The cowboy body, horses, cattle, and lands stolen from Indigenous people shape the narrative of the U.S. settlement of the Southwest (O’malley Halley, 2012; Ketcham, 2019). Smith (2012) argues that development of the U.S. nation and capital happens through displacement of Indigenous peoples and the seizure of their land/property, enslavement and exploitation of Black people and their labor, and constant war and violence against foreign “others.” Here, I want to focus the cowboy narrative on property to argue that when the story is told through the lens of property and property ownership, we can see how property relations animate and maintain discourses of identity, power, and nation-state in the development of U.S. capital.

Property discourses are performed at the borders (of identity, land, bodies) and through bordering (LeChuga, 2020) of us versus them. The physical border visualizes and performs the nation-state while surveilling, disciplining, and legislating who and what can belong via ritualized signification of bordering in multiple contexts (Anzaldúa, 2012; Chavez, 2011, 2021; Flores, 2003, 2020). Property discourses enact binaries of possession/dispossession and owner/owned that articulate via the self/other binary to bodies in sliding scales of violent racist, sexist, nationalist demarcations within historical and cultural contexts of the U.S. Enmeshed within this historical context and given the global capitalist condition of the world, meaning making and the possibilities of signification at the borders are necessarily bound up within discourses of property.

In rethinking borders, analysis of property and dispossession is a critical entry point to critique intertwined regimes of Whiteness, capitalism, and U.S. nationalism. Harris (1993) outlines how Whiteness is created, enforced, is a thing to possess, and becomes privileged through property ownership in the U.S. Property as a legal, material, social, and symbolic institution purposefully reinforces white supremacy in the U.S. Harris (1993) explains, “Whiteness and property share a common premise—a conceptual nucleus— the right to exclude” (p. 1714). Exclusion is enforced legally, violently, and discursively. Harris demonstrates how racist private property ownership in the U.S. set up a system where Whiteness as ownership becomes a tool and system of domination over Indigenous and Black people. Property discourses in capitalism create regimes of power, privilege, and dominance by turning all things into property relations—where the subject/self/owner is the powerful privileged position and the object/other/owned is the marginalized and dispossessed position. Explicating how Whiteness is established through property, Brayboy (2005) (Lumbee) notes that imperialism and colonization are white supremacist projects driven by material gain. Yet, whiteness and white supremacy are not only secured through the institutions of property and property ownership but are also done through violence and the threat of violence in the name of ownership and dispossession.

Hooks (1997b) explains that Whiteness is violence, and it invokes terror in the Black imagination (p. 175). This terror is based on the capacity for institutions of whiteness, white supremacy, and white folks in general to enact violence to dispossess non-white people of their bodies and land. Coates (2015) explains the U.S. as a white supremacist nation engages terror in the power “First and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies” (p. 8). Similarly, Flores (2020) argues that race is produced through threats and enactments of violence at borders and through disposability. Chávez (2021) further explains, “The alienizing potential—toward the enslaved, the Indigenous, the poor, the alien citizen of color, the migrant—is the bond required for the sovereignty of the nation, these united states, and the masters” (p. 164). Collectively, audiences practice this alienizing potential at the rodeo when they cheer for the BP after the halftime capture performance. Together, these scholars point to the ways in which nationalism and whiteness are linked. In my analysis, this linkage is accomplished through discourses of property in performances that hint at this violent dispossession in the figure of the cowboy.

U.S. cowboy iconography implies violent nationalist histories of whiteness without always explicitly stating it. O’Malley Halley (2012) explains, the story of the U.S. cowboy is the result of violence by which “(White) men become men. Animal lives and human lives of color are supposedly subdued. ‘Civilization’ is born” (p. 23) and these men “became masculine through conquering, subduing, controlling, entering Others” (p. 27). Arguing that subjugation of the earth and the “other” are central to the archetype of the cowboy might not be novel (See: Denzin, 2002; Pelias, 2012, Callier, 2012, Poulos, 2012; kumar & Moreira, 2012; Alexander, 2012a, 2012b, 2014), however, my argument is that this subjugation functions as a transformation into property relations through dispossession. Dispossession occurs in the marking of arbitrary U.S. borders administrated by the cowboy in BP violence. The BP does nationalist and white supremacist performances on horseback, which in turn, are property relationships and performances. Subsumed by the U.S. capitalist project, I argue that the cowboy body becomes complicit in frontier myths for property consumption and proper border enforcement. As a sort of minstrel to this original border performance, rodeo and PBR recall these demarcations of U.S. property in the figure of the cowboy. Next, I review Communication literature on the cowboy.

Cowboys on the Ranch

My grandfather was a Ranchero Rider. He died when I was three, so I look at photos to imagine him. In my mother’s favorite photo of him, he sits proudly atop his prized white flea- bitten horse, Cricket, who wears a breast collar of sterling silver conchos. In another photo, he sits at a wooden table surrounded by faceless men whose hands grip long- neck bottles. The lens focuses on his ice- blue eyes, crooked teeth, white cowboy hat, jean jacket, cigarette between pointer and middle, ash about to fall. The white American cowboy. Here, he rides in the Santa Barbra Old Spanish Days Fiesta parade. I think it used to be named the mission days parade. My family collected parade posters which feature a man and woman dancing in traditional Spanish dress. My mother gifted me one from 1950. I could not frame it nor hang it. To me, it represented colonization and murder of Indigenous people. It did not mean that to my mother who was hurt when I rejected a family heirloom that reminded her of her dad who loved riding his horse in the parade.

I do not believe my grandpa endorsed the celebration of Indigenous genocide represented in the Old Spanish Days parade, however, there is a performative sanctioning when riding in the parade—like my rodeo and PBR attendance. I always felt a sense of pride that my grandpa was a cowboy, yet I never considered it nationalist pride until I further analyzed representations of the cowboy. The cowboy cycles through popularity in popular culture and “mainstream” U.S. media. In fact, the cowboy remains one of the most popular figures in the U.S. today (Schneider, 2023). A significant American icon, the cowboy has mostly been studied through film and history (Cartwright, 2021; Slatta, 1999). Although cowboying is not just for white men (Durham, 1955; Durhamn & Jones, 1965; Wagner, 2011), mass media has historically shown it as such. Aside from two special issues edited by Alexander (2012b, 2014), articles about Brokeback Mountain (Cooper & Pease, 2008; Shugart, 2011), Denzin’s (2002) “Cowboys and Indians,” and McIntosh's (2020) study of gay rodeo, our discipline has not said much about the cowboy. Importantly, Alexander’s special issues consider how, even if we avoid him, the cowboy ideologically impacts identity discourses of and in the U.S.

Autoethnographic inquiries consider how the mythic cowboy (Poulos, 2012), Manifest Destiny (Callier, 2012), and distorted scenes of “Cowboys and Indians” (Pelias, 2012) creep into identity when least expected, often demonstrating the seriousness of play and performance (kumar & Moreira, 2012). When children watch Westerns, play “Cowboys and Indians,” or, as I argue, attend rodeo or PBR, these performances cross the border of the imaginary into lived social hierarchy through nationalistic, racialized, and gendered play. Alexander (2012b) explains, “[Cowboy] stories offered rigid lessons on performative masculinity and femininity, race relations and the propriety and power of Whiteness…human rights and social justice” (p. 471). The archetypal cowboy embodies Manifest Destiny, pushing westward to claim territory for oneself in the face of threats of the “other” imagined as brutal landscape, demonized/dehumanized Indigenous people, or lawless bandits. Gale (2014) considers how the “Cowboy and Indian” trope ignites “the civilized/savage, honorable/dishonorable, rational/irrational binaries of essentially Eurocentric methodologies of colonization” (p. 239). These character binaries shore up the white masculine identity of the “heroic” cowboy. Jelača (2014) further argues that the cowboy and his representations are used to displace the gnawing anxieties of white masculinity and to conceal the genocide of the U.S.’ founding.

Through a performative lens, the cowboy’s relationship to the BP provides insight into functions of U.S. cowboy culture and how property and nationalist discourses relationally play out on bodies in cowboy scenes. U.S. Border rhetoric and performances of/at the U.S. border call for violence upon Black and Brown bodies coded threatening or with suspicious legal status to affect racialized white national duty (Cicneros, 2012). The BP specifically, and the symbolic cowboy generally, bring into focus how the borders and implied ownership of U.S. property/land are violently performed in favor of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1997a). Given the role and signification of the cowboy in imperialist U.S. history, we must do more to critique this iconic figure. Performance and autoethnography articulate how we are (willing or not) implicated in the narratives of property that divide people, animals, and places--materially, symbolically, and violently. Beyond the BP as a new site of analysis, the (re)dissemination and (re)deployment of the cowboy to various popularly imagined borders of the U.S. indicates how discursive representations attempt to secure discourses of whiteness as property and entitlements to property ownership wherever he may appear. Rooted in relationality and reflexivity, performance and autoethnography can provide opportunities to locate the figure of the cowboy within ourselves and deconstruct his settler tendencies at home and abroad. Next, I analyze my experience as a rodeo audience member to theorize how the scene relationally hails the nation.

Enforcing Borders at the Rodeo

It is raining at the July 4 ^th Rodeo in Livingston, Montana, so, lighting my cigarette under my cowboy hat is more difficult than usual. Two white teens stop next to James and me to complement our boots. Mine are bedazzled, sparkling in the mud and manure and James’ are high-heeled cotton-candy tie-dye. The teens linger, perhaps to bum a cigarette or talk to people so clearly not from here. I listen to the announcer on the loudspeaker and watch the movement in the stands for the cue that the BP halftime show is over. Ten minutes ago, the announcer said, “We have a special show for you, Livingston!” Then, the rodeo clown ran out of the arena. Four trucks with flashing police lights entered the back of the arena where horses usually enter. “Get ready everyone! Dodge Ram presents, your U.S. Border Patrol! And! I think they are looking for a clown!” The audience cheered. The speakers boomed with Inner Circle’s 1987 “Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?” Four trucks entered the arena carrying uniformed BP officers with two German Shepherds. The clown now wore protective gear and ran across the dirt while the dogs chased him. Everyone cheered. The clown tried to run as the announcer encouraged everyone to root for BP to capture the “criminal.” The crowd hooted and hollered. Once the dogs tackled the “criminal,” the announcer narrated how important the BP is to keeping the U.S. safe. “Everyone give these officers a round of applause! Thank you to our United States Border Patrol! Get this criminal out of here!” I turned to my friend and said, “I need a cigarette.”

Cowboys and the BP are bedfellows. The Livingston rodeo exemplifies how BP performances are easily accepted as part of cowboy culture due to the BP’s history of reinforcing borders and white nationalism on horseback. The BP was officially created in 1932. According to the BP website, unofficial mounted watchmen began surveilling the border in 1904 to stop “the flow of illegal Chinese immigration” (Border Patrol History, 2020). These BP cowboys oversaw enforcement of the Chinese exclusion act. This racist act was interested in securing and protecting white ownership of wealth in the U.S. Historically, the BP was a racializing force aimed at protecting the Whiteness on the U.S. side of the border. At the rodeo or PBR, the BP invokes this racist history through militarized performances of maintaining the U.S. border. In the arena, big trucks and uniformed agents signify the U.S. border. Demonstrating their undefeatable strength, the BP always catches the clown/criminal. When the clown/criminal runs away, it is meant to be funny, as there is no escape, and he is protected from the intended violence of the dogs. Moreman and Non Grata (2011) explain, “While the border is dangerous, it is not experienced the same by everyone” (p. 311). At the actual border, migrants do not wear protective gear and are not alerted of attacking dogs. The lyrics of the song reinforce this overdetermined relationship where the body of the clown, now signifying the wrong side of the border, normalizes militaristic performance of the righteousness of U.S. border enforcement. When the announcer frames the BP as heroic and the clown as criminal, a white nationalist frame of recognition structures the performance.

The audience recognizes the performative parameters by which bodies can be in the role of the migrant, “criminal,” or the often-used slur, “illegal.” The slur “illegal” has been ontologically and rhetorically mapped onto the non-white body as condition and justification for violence, and as Flores (2020) argues, specifically against Latinx bodies at the border. This condition of racialized illegality affectively marks the U.S. border as a white line. Ritualized in this halftime performance, the audience suspends belief that when the clown runs, even if he is white, he becomes a racial “other” so that capture is justified by BP logic. The announcer entrenches otherness by calling the clown a criminal. Flores (2020) explains, “the slippage from immigrant to criminal seems almost natural” (p. 363). This slippage is the rhetorical process of racialization for non-white bodies. Historically, according to Flores (2020) citing López, immigration was legally tied to race in that immigrants at the border needed to be recognized as white for access to citizenship. Although migrants of all nationalities and races cross the border, the migrant body is often coded Latinx in the U.S. As Moreman and Calafell (2008) explain, the U.S. provides a “cultural backdrop which sees Latinas/os as threat to nationalism and cultural (read whiteness) preservation” (p. 320). At the rodeo and the border, white nationalist conditions of capture delineate that capturing bodies are coded white and captured bodies are coded non-white (Latinx). While the rodeo performance shapes the clown into non-white status, it also racializes the audience into Whiteness. The BP agents shepherd Whiteness as privileged property by enforcing the white/non-white binary through the dispossession of non-white bodies at the border and in the arena. For Callier (2012) and for me at the rodeo, cowboy play in a white nationalist frame normalizes and prepares the ground for violence, concretizing how BP performances are at once imaginary and deadly serious.

Focusing on the connection between cowboys and BP allows me to illustrate how BP performances allude to discourses of property that structure this connection. In the U.S., the cowboy’s job is to police the movement of cattle bodies since these bodies are property commodified (Ketcham, 2019). There is a long history of black and brown cowboys and vaqueros working under racist conditions for white U.S. ranchers. Here, I focus on how the labor of the bodies involved reinforces imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy through property. For example, each cow represents capital that constitutes rancher and cowboy livelihoods. Cowboys track cow movement which is dependent upon the land ranchers own. Fenced enclosures of land and cattle indicate arbitrary borders of men’s property and livelihood, and thus, these borders are significant demarcations within a capitalist system. In the U.S., the property rights of white men are validated and enforced institutionally. In this example of the white man’s ranch, the cowboy protects of borders of property and enforces claims to property/territory. This historical function of the cowboy on a white rancher’s ranch maps onto the U.S. BP, in that, the job replicates the role of protecting rancher (capitalist) property. Now, the cowboy’s rancher bosses are supplanted by the U.S. BP which is invested in the enforcement a similar type of property ownership, the U.S. nation-state and white nationalism. Embodying rugged individualism, the cowboy can never acknowledge how he depends on the nation-state for validation of property rights and for direction in how to enforce these rights. Enveloped in contradiction, the cowboy is a consequence of the borderlands where national identity and property rights depend on the division of nos/otros through dispossession. Here, then, the cowboy is caught in service to a nationalist discourse which is replicated by rodeo BP performatively protecting the borders between lands and peoples.

The continual patrol of the borderlands by the cowboy constitutes where the U.S. border is, and determines which bodies and lands belong to/on each side. Locating the cowboy at the border reinforces how the cowboy figuratively and materially constructs borders through the act of patrolling. Patrolling, protecting, and seizing property in the name of Manifest Destiny is the backbone of U.S. cowboy iconography. Poulos (2012) explains, the cowboy lives “on the border between town and wilderness, between civilized and uncivilized, between compassionate and ruthless, between good and evil” (p. 487). Not only does the cowboy live in-between these spaces, but he enforces who and what is seen as civilized, compassionate, and good. In the rodeo arena, cowboy narratives are easily weaponized in BP halftime performances. The cowboy is deployed to reinforce U.S. white nationalist narratives and bolster capitalist gains at the rodeo. Whether the audience recognizes this or not, the effect and signification of the performance is secured through the relationship of the cowboy to the BP and the staging of the capture of both human and animal bodies in the arena. Next, I further discuss racialized capitalism at the PBR by analyzing a tragic event.

Death, Property, and Capitalism at PBR

I watched a Professional Bull Rider die in Fresno, California. Amadeu Campos Silva was a 22-year-old Brazilian who trained his entire life to compete in U.S. PBR. The PBR called him a “rising star.” Before he died, the announcers told his story; “Amadeu is following his dream of becoming the best bull rider in the world. He works harder than anybody and sends money back to his family in Brazil to provide a better life for them and buy them a house. One day he hopes to bring them to the U.S. But first, let’s give it up for your U.S. Border Patrol!” The ritual sirens sang, patrol lights flashed, “bad boys” blared, and the BP did their halftime capture performance. Ten minutes later, it was time for Campos Silva to ride. He was riding after a qualified ride, and he was riding for money. He nodded, the gate opened, and the bull burst out of the chute. His body got over itself, unbalanced in the torso within the first three seconds. He flew off, hung up by his hand on the rope attached to the bull. In the next second, the bull stomped on his head or arm and then his body was at the back of the bull. I winced and watched through my fingers as the bull kicked him in the chest with both hind legs. I think I saw blood blossoming in two hoof marks on his shirt. He was on the ground. All this in 5 seconds. Clowns lured the bull away. Campos Silva did not move. Nobody said they saw blood. I said, “I think he is dead. I know he is dead. I just watched a man die.” The announcers said, “Everybody clap for Amadeu. He’s going to be okay. We have our medics on the way. Cowboy tough.” Cowboys surrounded him, their hats covering his body. I said, “oh my god, he is dead” through my hand that now covered my mouth. The cowboys took him out of the arena on a stretcher and I saw or imagined more blood blooming on his chest. The announcers said, “Give him a round of applause, folks. He is gonna be okay. I think he gave us the thumbs up. Okay, folks we are gonna have one more ride.” And the audience cheered. And there was one more ride.

The next day, it was reported that Amadeu Campos Silva ¹ died ² from his injuries at the hospital. I know I saw him die right there in the arena. This night held too much brutality and too many juxtapositions. This young Brazilian man, dead after a BP performance, risking his life and crossing the U.S. border for his family, the crowd cheering, the lack of acknowledgement of the severity of his injuries, and how he was swept away so the show could go on. Would the BP apprehend him if he were not risking his life in the name of capital for PBR? Why is PBR sponsored by the BP when the sport is dominated by non-U.S. citizens? Is analysis of the violent convergences of capital, whiteness, and BP worth my continued attendance at these sadistic shows? The bull can take a life in an instant, yet a bull is more than an animal. Bulls are a symbol of U.S. capitalism, exemplified in the charging bull on Wall Street. The bull along with the BP sponsorship of PBR signify profit under U.S. capitalism and white supremacy. In witnessing Campos Silva’s death, it became clear how PBR performances illustrate how capital in combination with masculinity and U.S. nationalism, exploit and extinguish bodies for profit.

The BP gives PBR millions of dollars. BP sponsors and pays for bulls to be trained and is paid when these bulls buck off riders. Consequently, the BP both sponsors and makes a profit from PBR. BP had recruitment tents at all the PBR shows I have attended. PBR also has nights where the rodeo clowns and bullfighters wear BP insignia and uniforms that say, “protected by the U.S. Border Patrol.” Many bull riders are sponsored by the BP and wear patches on their chaps or vests. Some that wear the BP gear are not U.S. citizens nor are they white. I cannot claim to know what goes on in the heads of the bull riders when they watch the BP perform halftime captures or when they don BP gear. Perhaps wearing the BP logo offers conditional privilege of Whiteness at the PBR. One does not need to be white to enforce Whiteness or white nationalism. If BP pays somebody to wear their logo, the payment alone might be justification. In some ways, the BP sign on the cowboy or clown signifies ownership of those bodies wherein the treatment of these bodies, the violence to which they may be subjected, and the profits earned from these bodies, remains within the jurisdiction of the BP and thus, the U.S. nation-state. The pay matters—if the sponsorship were not producing more BP agents or propping up white nationalism, the BP would not be cutting the checks.

PBR and NFR are billion-dollar industries. In fact, PBR was just acquired for 3.25 billion dollars by an investment firm that owns World Wrestling Entertainment and Ultimate Fighting Championship. ³ Payouts for cowboys can be millions of dollars. The industry of raising bucking bulls and betting on them exemplifies how capital shapes the rodeo and PBR. Fredriksson (1984) traces the formation of U.S. national rodeo to conclude that the primary motivation to compete in rodeo is the pay. Fredriksson (1984) explains that capitalism and the quest for big-business profits drive how the boards, stakeholders, sponsors, and investors organize U.S. rodeos. Therefore, the cowboy and the surrounding technologies of cowboying cannot be divorced from their capitalist origin. Thus, when the announcer relayed Campos Silva’s story, they sold the capitalist American dream back to the audience. As an example of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, the announcer claims Campos Silva is able to cross the U.S. border due to his complicity in capital at PBR. The incentives to risk one’s life for the promise of owning property (a house) are glorified in the cowboy performance which if successful, is awarded money, masculine validation, and perhaps honorary citizenship. I wonder if the crowd would have cheered for Campos Silva if his life was not framed within the capitalist American dream, since his body could have easily been substituted for the one captured at the halftime show.

In Western films, Alexander (2012a) explains that Whiteness is positioned against, “Red for Native Americans, Brown for Mexicans, Yellow for Chinese, Black for African Americans… these bodies are … constructed as trusted yet unincorporated companions” (p. 476). Applying Alexander’s logic to PBR, non-white non-U.S. citizen bull riders are unincorporated companions that make the sport money. Campos Silva and other non-white non-U.S. citizens are allowed to compete in arenas that are definitionally against their bodies because of their bodies’ capacity to garner profit. Money is often the justification for violence done to bodies in sport, but it also justifies violence in many other contexts. Berlant (2011) explains, in capitalism the idea of the good life is a bribe that attempts to justify exploitation of one’s body, labor, and spirt. The conditions of capital permit the juxtaposition of white nationalism and Campos Silva’s non-white non-citizen body to collaborate in PBR. The lives/livelihoods of the riders literally depend on their ability to survive these conditions. Flores (2020) explains, “Within capitalist structures, some bodies become mere troves of expendable labor, valued—if not cherished—for their disposability” (p. 8). Campos Silva’s death was a devastating spectacle of expendable bodies and labor within the borders of U.S. capitalism and PBR.

The PBR released a statement about being heartbroken, how rare death is in PBR, and asked for prayers for the family. It was horrific to witness Campos Silva die, and utterly disgusting to see him removed from the arena while the announcers called for another ride. Their actions attempted to erase Campos Silva, the horror and consequential violence of the night, and the implications of the context and relational bodies. The next ride was performed to soothe the audience, assuage critique, entice return to the next show, and to obscure raw violence that the sport endorses and represents. That the show went on seemed to me, a metaphor for the casualties, exploitation of bodies and labor, and collateral damage of U.S. capital. For a moment, the veil of the Western show was lifted, and we saw the complete brutality of the sport as a capitalist enterprise invested in recruitment and enforcement of nationalism through the U.S. border and BP.

Cowboy Horizons

I arrived at the National Finals Rodeo in time to attend “Cowboy Christmas” where vendors sell cowboy gear, art, and tractors. I was there to interview a cowboy social media influencer who promotes white nationalism, toxic masculinity, and sells T- shirts . Instead, I saw an elderly white woman selling vintage clothes and jewelry and asked, “How did you get all these things?” she replied, “I see people wearing something and buy it right off them!” In her locked glass case, I saw two tiny, beaded leather moccasins. I wondered what stories of nation, ownership, and borders these small shoes told and how much she expected to make off them. I touched my sterling silver Thunderbird necklace from my grandmother and puzzled on my white possession of this heirloom. Later, at the Rodeo, I cheer for number 3 in the world: Derek Begay (Diné) to win team roping. Then it is halftime, and I prepare for the Border Patrol. Instead, three white Marines; grandfather, father, and son, enter the arena for a “Military Honors” performance while announcers narrate war stories, love of nation, and generational service in protection of U. S. borders. The audience cheers and cowboys salute.

Like the performative displays of nationalism and white property ownership mentioned above, the cowboy similarly enforces U.S. border violence via embodiment of U.S. property discourses. Throughout this essay, I have sought to critique how property discourses animate the figure of the cowboy by analyzing BP sponsorship of PBR and BP halftime performances. Critiquing the seriousness of “play” at these shows, I have argued that these performances prime audiences and the cowboy to reinforce whiteness through racialized ownership of property and bordering. BP performances place audiences and cowboys in a relationship with property through borderlands, capital, and dispossession. Rodeo and PBR clear way for militaristic performances of U.S. white nationalism in their staged captures that assume the identity of the “other” as criminal non-white foreign invader. If not sponsored by the BP, as in the above vignette, forms of nationalism and militarism remain integral to the rodeo and PBR shows. Legacies of violence wrought through U.S. colonization, slavery, capitalism, and patriarchy are within reach at these shows, for purchase at Cowboy Christmas, and enacted on the dirt, as these are the conditions and contradictions through which the cowboy exists.

At the rodeo, borders of identity materialize in property discourses that articulate physically, symbolically, and corporeally in the shifting national geographies of the U.S. alluded to in the arenas. Outside the arena, PBR cowboys travel to the U.S./México border on horseback to “capture” people and garner public support for the BP (Peter, 2020). When the PBR cowboys are at the U.S. border, there is no difference between play and reality. In the collapse of play/reality, the cowboy is again offered as a mirage of justice. The cowboy serves to violently secure borders and the possibilities of ownership of or claims to one’s own body, property, capital, or U.S. nation and citizenship. The BP plays cowboy to enact violence on bodies dispossessed by the U.S. in lands where jurisdiction is enforced on horseback through patrols, surveillance, and “guarding” arbitrary property/territory borders. Rodeo performances center the guise of patriotic cowboy justice and eschew how border logics of self/other ease materialization of and desensitization to institutional violence of the nation-state. This tension is reflective of the division of nos/otros which has been integral to the U.S. border since the formation of the U.S. At the U.S. border, non-white bodies are treated as animals to be herded and caught or as disposable and deportable. Thus, for the cowboy—whiteness, masculinity, and U.S. nationality become recognizable in their shared ability to dispossess animal and human of their lands and bodies. The ability to dispossess, then, is central to cowboying as an administrative force for whiteness as property of the nation-state.

From within these discourses of property and capital, we must truly consider who is dehumanized or dispossessed in the name of profit and property. The 2022-2026 U.S. Border Patrol strategy explicitly aims to increase public acceptance of the violence necessitated to claim ownership of bodies and land at the border (2022-2026 U.S. Border Patrol National Strategy, 2022). The normalization of this violence in the culture of rodeo and PBR reduces resistance when the BP violence is employed in U.S. streets. However, the BP, like most institutions in service to dominant discourses of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, understand the fragility of power and how it must be constantly demonstrated and secured through performative maintenance. Likewise, the fragile tensions of power maintained through property discourses at the border (of lands, people, things) provide opportunities to resist and change predetermined narratives of dispossession based on identity or status. Like Anzaldúa, I ask how a different story can be told here.

In the face of the institutional and embodied problems that the border, BP, and cowboy pose, Anzaldúa reminds us that the border is a space of contradiction and that the borderlands between self/other are in constant transition. Some contradictions of my autoethnography have been my attempt at reflexivity about my whiteness, whiteness at the rodeo and PBR, and my attendance and knowledge that PBR and rodeo will continue if I stop attending in protest. Yet, my relationship to these spaces is ever-changing as I am—as we all are. Anzaldúa (2012) explains, “‘Knowing’ is painful because after ‘it’ happens I can’t stay in the same place and be comfortable” (p. 70). I hope readers share my discomfort in this knowing. Borders erected in the arenas of PBR and rodeo maintain harmful hierarchies of whiteness, property ownership, and capital. While I do not see an easy resolution, I offer a move to recognition of how the border is sustained by the cowboy in these performative instances. If recognition can occur, so then can transformation. Whenever and wherever cowboys appear, discursive border work to secure property also occurs. We must recognize how the cowboy enables property discourses by staking claim to land and bodies, and we must sustain critique of how cowboy iconography reinforces physical and cultural borders by dividing nosotros.