MASBATE, Philippines — A honky-tonk sound plays at a fairground as cowboys perform tasks with bulls and cows inside a dirt-floored stadium.
The scene would be typical in Texas, but this rodeo is held about 13 thousand kilometers away, on an island.
Nearly every spring for 30 years, the Philippines’ best cowboys have traveled to the island province of Masbate to test their skills at the town’s Rodeo Festival of the same name. It is both a sporting event and a celebration of cowboy culture.
“Where there’s cattle, there’s rodeo,” said Leo Gozum, 51, who runs the festival’s rodeo events. “It’s not necessarily American.”
In the bull game, people chase about 30 head of cattle through roped-off streets, like the bull runs in Pamplona, Spain. The rules say you can keep any cow you catch, as long as it’s with your own hands.
The contestants, mostly farmers and students, compete for $23,000 in prizes, an average of $250 for each of the 90 or so winners.
Many of the lucks on display have been practiced in the Philippines for centuries, long before the country gained its independence from Spain in 1898 and then from the United States in 1946.
Masbate province, like other places in the Philippines, has a violent history and a persistent communist insurgency.
“Here, they will bribe you and then intimidate you,” said Manuel Sese, a retired judge who owns a ranch outside Masbate City. He said Masbate’s rugged culture and grasslands helped produce legions of capable cowboys, some of whom work on his ranch.
One is Justin Bareng, 26, who gets up at 4 a.m. most days. With the 100 dollars he earns a month, he feeds his six children and sends his brother to high school.
The rodeo prize pool is an incentive for the participants, who sometimes call themselves koboys, “cowboy” in Filipino. But money is not his only motivation.
“For me, rodeo is a game of strength, and only for the brave,” said Kenneth Ramonar, 50, a businessman and evangelical preacher who captains a team from the southern province of Mindanao.
Masbate is a former colonial port that had cattle pens near its docks until the 1970s. Its rodeo arena is next to a fairground where fans mill about in denim, flannel and cowboy hats.
The rodeo includes seven livestock-focused events, including bull riding. Organizers are experts at handling animals, Gozum said, adding that the key was to select animals that were lively enough to make the action interesting, but not too dangerous.
At this year’s event, the first after a three-year hiatus due to the pandemic, more than 300 contestants competed as professionals or students. In the second category there were many women. “A woman can do what a man can do,” said Rosario Bulan, 25. She was part of a team that won first place in two women’s carom events.
The Masbate event is the highest-profile rodeo festival in the Philippines, a major US military ally and one of several former Spanish colonies where settlers established ranches with imported cattle and horses. Gozum said that while Filipino cowboy culture is rooted in Spanish traditions and was influenced by American livestock techniques, it embodies the Filipino virtues of patience and perseverance.
For Bareng, those distinctions are not important. He just likes to ride. The seventh of nine children, he moved to Manila when he was 8 years old after the death of his mother. But life in the Capital bored him. At 18, he returned home to herd cattle.
For him, the only unusual aspects of a rodeo ring are the spectators and the prizes. “We do rodeo here every day,” he said.
By: MIKE IVES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6799503, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-07-11 21:30:07
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