The Brief

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday called for a ban on rodeos that includes exceptions for certain historical and cultural events.

The move comes after city commissioners called for an all out ban, citing a history of animal injuries.

“These events can be harmful to the health and well-being of the animals that are used in the rodeo competitions and shows, at times resulting in injuries such as sprains and broken limbs,” according to a report by the city’s Board of Animal Service Commissioners.

The commissioners specifically called for a ban on activities such as “bull riding, bronc riding, calf roping, steer wrestling, team roping, tie-down roping.”

The council motion, put forward by Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, states that rodeos use "inhumane implements" like electric prods, flank straps, and spurs "to encourage aggressive behavior in animals to produce an entertainment product."

But Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said the council should also protect the rich cultural traditions of communities of color, including Mexican Charrería, American Indian, Native American, Black rodeo, Indigenous rodeo and Escaramuzas (women only Mexican rodeo).

Samuel Brown-Vazquez of the Avocado Heights Vaquer@s and the San Gabriel Valley chapter of Unión de Ranchos, said the outright ban discriminates against a practice that is “native to this area, that was invented in this region, it predates the state of California, it predates the country of Mexico.”

In present day events, trained professionals showcase livestock herding skills to audiences.

“Charreada (rodeo or equestrian events) was born out of a specific relationship to the land and a specific relationship to agriculture, and it was subsistence agriculture,” he said.

Unlike traditional rodeo, Charrería, Mexico’s national sport, is a team sport. It can be traced to when the Spanish arrived in America. In the 17th century, he said, they allowed the Native First Peoples to be able to ride horses and work as ranch hands “because there was so much cattle and they were unable to enclose the animals.” Because of the hacienda system at the time, the landlord would require the ranch hands to perform a series of different competitions “to prove that the horse was adeptly qualified and skilled in the way that they had wanted.”

“It was a big deal for the hacienda to win but it was also the rare opportunity that the ranch hand, that the laborer, the campesino could actually outperform the boss,” Brown-Vazquez said.

Deep roots in Southern California

The long standing tradition, he said, still has deep roots in places like Sylmar, the San Fernando Valley, Compton, Paramount, El Monte and South El Monte.

“A lot of the charros and escaramuzas, vaqueros and vaqueras from their region of California will actually go down into Mexico and they'll compete at the national final competition, basically the World Series,” he said.

Fifteen years ago, he added, there were twice as many horses in the San Gabriel Valley.

“There's not enough places for people to learn how to ride a horse, for people to learn how to compete in charreada. There's no public lienzo that we can use, a lienzo being the venue where you would practice charreada,” he said. “Ten, 15 years ago, there used to be four lienzos.”

Vaqueros and escaramuzas outside Los Angeles City Hall on Dec. 5, 2023.

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Courtesy Samuel Brown-Vasquez

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Avocado Heights, Brown-Vasquez said, has a reputation as having the best charros in Southern California. He said children in the neighborhood at the junction of the 605 and 60 freeways don’t want to play baseball. Instead, they want to be the best charro to compete in Mexico.

“If you eliminate the horses and you eliminate the spaces for the youth to be able to practice, then you're really eliminating the connection to our culture and the horses in a particular way really establishes a bilateral relationship with Mexico,” he said, especially for people that grew up here.

“People trying to pass the rodeo ban have actually made an error in essentially lumping us into the same category as the people that basically run the slaughterhouses,” he said.

By singling out the rodeos, and not banning sports like polo or hunter jumper, the ordinance will result, he said, in the “criminalization of a particular working class immigrant Latino population and Black population that is also involved in the rodeo because of the Bill Pickett Rodeo that comes around every year.”

Blumenfield said during Tuesday’s meeting that polo is not included in the ban because “those horses are not being tortured as part of the show."

"The reason for the entertainment is the pain that's being caused by these animals," he added.

Mandy Andrews, campaigns manager at Last Chance for Animals, a nonprofit that held a rally before the council meeting, said rodeos are events that "glorify animal abuse, adding that the organization is not looking at the ban as “an issue of culture,” but rather as “animal abuse and protecting animals.”

The Neighborhoods and Community Enrichment committee will now deliberate on the ordinance once it receives a draft from the city attorney’s office. Following the committee’s recommendations, the ordinance will be brought in front of the full council for vote.