Escaramuza
United States, various locations
Photographing Mexican-American women riders performing the Escaramuza has allowed me to engage deeply with a subculture shaped by both tradition and tension. I photographed riders across the United States, traveling to their home lienzos where they train, and often photographing them within the surrounding landscape. In my conversations with the escaramuzas, we frequently spoke about their attire—what it represents to them and the immense respect they hold for it. The idea that, when wearing the Adelita dress, they “represent Mexico” was echoed by teams across the country and directly informed how I chose to photograph them. The attire, along with the formality with which the escaramuzas carry themselves while competing, suggests a certain rigidity and strictness within the tradition. At the same time, many spoke of the sometimes-frustrating machismo they must navigate within the sport.
(Constance Jaeggi)
“In my photographs, I seek to respond to this tension by capturing the grace and dignity of these women, while reckoning with the gendered complexities of Escaramuza within the broader charrería tradition.”
Grammar of Belonging
Text by Marta Franceschini
There is a particular force in uniformity, and a mirror force in the elaborated, flamboyant, hypertrophic uniform. Costume does not represent pre-existing identities but constitutes a material device through which identity is produced and transmitted. When a body dresses in formation with other bodies, clothing ceases to be an individual choice and becomes shared grammar, a community articulated in the very act of dressing together.
[…]
The Escaramuzas face a challenge: how to build continuity where continuity has broken, how to fabricate transmissible memory when generational transmission was interrupted by migratory survival. Escaramuza is a performance of stereotypical duality: elaborate femininity married to equestrian skill requiring strength and courage. The “diasporic space” is material practice: embodied in embroidery, choreography, body-to-body transmission. Costumes reference revolutionary Adelitas, Victorian fashion, tourist folklore. No citation is “pure”—within this impurity resides power as a technology of diasporic memory. The horsewomen produce a tradition that previous generations could not transmit. Migrant mothers, forced to negotiate survival in hostile contexts, did not teach their daughters dances, embroidery, riding. Yet the daughters actively seek this knowledge. Memory is not recovered but fabricated: a lieu de mémoire where memory crystallises because lived continuity was broken. The horse becomes a technology of memory. Learning to ride in the Escaramuza means incorporating gestures that evoke haciendas and revolution, spaces and times never directly inhabited. The Escaramuzas also inhabit a complex visual economy: elaborate costumes, public performances, circulation of images place the practice within circuits where “authentic Mexicanness” is commodity. They navigate multiple expectations, performing a Mexicanidad that is simultaneously sincere and strategic.
[…]
I had been vaguely aware of escaramuza for a while, because of my involvement in the Western riding industry and escaramuza performances being part of our local Fort Worth Rodeo. I had also been making work that explored the idea of the “Cowgirl” in a broad sense, but hadn’t really dived into the world of escaramuza yet when the Cowgirl Museum in Fort Worth approached me about creating a series for an exhibition they were planning. I would say my initial draw was the relationship between women and horses, and of course the incredible beauty of the tradition, the dresses, the elegance. But as I started researching, I found the story to be so rich and layered when it comes to the community partaking in the sport here in the US. I was fascinated by the historical connection to the soldaderas, the women who fought in the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920, and how their image, blended with myth had served as inspi- ration for the creation of this contemporary tradition. As I started shooting and speaking to the escaramuzas I met, their individual stories really took center stage in my mind. This sport is about so much more than beauty. It’s about cultural preservation, about finding belonging, about family and tradition, and about gender norms and immigration. I felt that it was an important project to take on because of all these layers.
(Constance Jaeggi)
Discover the full Travel story in Muse Issue 67.
