Global Courant
A honky-tonk twang echoes across a carnival as cowhands wrangle cattle in a muddy-floored stadium. The scene would be typical of Texas, but this rodeo takes place about 8,000 miles away on an island in the Philippines.
Almost every spring for 30 years, the country’s best wrestlers travel to the island province of Masbate to test their skills at the Rodeo Festival in Masbate City. It is both a sporting event and a celebration of Philippine cowboy and cowgirl culture.
“Where there’s cattle, there’s rodeo,” said Leo Gozum, 51, a rancher who runs the festival’s rodeo events. “It’s not necessarily American.”
In the juego de toro event, or bull game, people chase about 30 cattle through closed streets, like those in Spain chasing bulls through Pamplona. The rules say you can keep any cow you catch – as long as it’s with your bare hands.
Some travel to the Masbate rodeo, usually by boat, from other islands in the Philippine archipelago. Others work on farms in Masbate province, one of the country’s poorest regions.
The contestants, mostly farmers and college students, compete for $23,000 in prize money, an average of $250 for each of the approximately 90 winners. Many of the skills on display have been practiced in the Philippines for centuries – long before the country gained independence from Spain in 1898 and then from the United States in 1946.
One of the toughest events is the carambola, where teams of men or women hold back an unruly cow in the rodeor ring. By hand of course.
Masbate province, like other places in the Philippines, has a violent history and an ongoing communist insurgency. “Here you are bribed and then intimidated,” said Manuel Sese, a retired judge who owns a ranch outside of Masbate City.
Judge Sese said Masbate’s rugged culture and rolling grasslands have helped produce legions of capable cowboys, some of whom work on his ranch.
One of them is Justin Bareng, 26. Mr. Bareng said he gets up at 4am most days to feed his little mare before saddling up. With the $100 he earns a month, he feeds his six children and sends his 19-year-old brother to high school.
The total prize pool of the rodeo is an incentive for the participants, who sometimes refer to themselves as koboys, the Philippine slang for cowboy.
But money is not their only motivation.
“Rodeo is a game of strength for me, and only for the brave,” said Kenneth Ramonar, 50, a businessman and evangelical preacher who heads a rodeo team from the southern province of Mindanao.
Mr. Ramonar said he used to be a drunkard and a drug addict. Then he started a family, found the Bible, and invented a new application for his ranching skills: rodeo. Now he runs a ranch resort where tourists can learn the way of koboys during their visit.
Masbate City is a former colonial port city with cattle sheds near the harbor until the 1970s. The rodeo arena is located next to a carnival where fans walk around in denim, flannel and cowboy hats.
Vendors barbeque beef and pork over smoky grills under colorful tents. There will also be line dancing and a honky-tonk song written for the occasion.
“Row-dee-oh Masbateño,” sings the singer.
One recent morning, a cow hand hung in dusty jeans. Another shook off the icy dampness by dousing himself with water.
In a cattle herd below the grandstands, some farmhands cooked fish for breakfast just after sunrise.
When the rodeo started a few hours later, they were busy feeding cows, choosing the right cows for specific events, and herding in and out of the ring.
The rodeo includes seven cattle-centric events, including bull riding, lassoing, and “throwing down,” where teams of four attempt to lasso a particularly large specimen.
The organizers of the event are seasoned farmers, agriculturists, vets and livestock keepers who are experts in handling animals, said Mr Gozum, the event director.
He said the key to a good game was selecting animals that were lively enough to make the action interesting, but not too dangerous.
“What I’m looking for is the borderland between playable and non-playable,” he said.
This year’s event, the first after a three-year hiatus due to the pandemic, saw more than 300 participants compete as professionals or students. Many in the second category were women.
“A woman can do what a man can do,” says 25-year-old Rosario Bulan. She was part of a team that took first place in two women’s only carambola events.
Ms. Bulan, who has a bachelor’s degree in crop sciences and is studying for a master’s degree, added that while she was happy to win, her primary goal was to avoid injury.
Religious landowners had established farms around Manila by the 17th century, said Greg Bankoff, a historian in the city. By the 19th century, horses were being used all over the country to transport sugar, coconuts and other commodities.
In Masbate, cowboys herded cattle to the warehouses around the harbor. From there, the cows were exported to farms across the country.
Mr. Gozum said that while Philippine cowboy culture is rooted in Hispanic traditions and was heavily influenced by American ranching techniques, it now embodies the Philippine virtues of patience and perseverance.
Cowboy culture in the United States, popularized by such figures as the actor John Wayne and the musician Jimmie Rodgers, also drew on Hispanic influences. But early Texan cowboys deliberately distanced themselves from the Mexican vaqueros they learned from, said Sarah Sargent, a scholar in Britain who is writing a book on Spanish horsemanship in America.
“The cowboy figure that emerged as an iconic symbol of American national identity was thus stripped of any association with Hispanic ancestry,” she said.
For Mr. Bareng, the henchman of the Masbate farm, such differences are not important. He just likes to drive.
mr. Bareng, the seventh of nine children, moved to Manila when he was eight to live with two older siblings after his mother died.
However, city life bored him and he passed part of the time watching armed horsemen in Philippine cowboy films inspired by Hollywood westerns.
At the age of 18 he came home to herd cattle.
To him, the only unusual aspects of participating in a rodeo ring are the spectators and the cash prizes. “Rodeo,” he said, “is what we do here every day.”
