The ribbon in her black hair bounces and her dress flutters in the wind as she races her quarter-horse full speed ahead. The girl, not much more than 100 pounds, must stop the animal, 16 times her weight, with the utmost grace before she reaches the end of the ring.
This is the challenge facing Carol Munoz, 17, as she runs through similar moves with five other girls on this sweltering summer evening on a ranch in unincorporated Will County called Cuatro Caminos, or Four Roads in English.
Riding sidesaddle at 15 miles an hour, Munoz takes the horse within two feet of the ring’s edge, stopping just short of crashing into the wall.
Her father and friends break into wild applause for her fine horsemanship.
“Ay. Go Carol,” someone shouts.
“It’s exciting,” says Munoz of Chicago’s Southwest Side, grinning fearlessly as she recalls the ride. “I love riding at full speed. It’s so much fun.”
She is one of seven girls forsaking many of the activities of city and suburban life to carry on a decades-old Mexican tradition their parents grew up with, la escaramuza, a riding competition for women that started in 1953 on a ranch in Mexico City.
Munoz is the reina, or queen, of her escaramuza team, called Las Palomas, the Doves. She earned this title for being the most capable and the oldest girl on the team; the youngest is 8. Between school and work–Munoz holds a part-time job as a bank teller and is beginning her freshman year at Lewis University in Joliet–she has little time for anything else but the escaramuza.
“It’s part of my family tradition, and my father wanted to pass it on to me,”Munoz says.
In July, Las Palomas performed for the first time in public, and in August they performed exhibition-style in Joliet with another escaramuza team from Beecher. This was a first for both teams because never before have there been two escaramuza clubs in Illinois.
“This definitely unites us,” says Patricia Lopez, 22, of Lowell, Ind., who trains the second team of girls, called Rayo de Esperanza, or Ray of Hope. “There’s no competition, not at all. It’s something we share.”
Their team has been training for two years in Beecher, and they also perform in various U.S. rodeos.
Escaramuza was started by a charro, or Mexican cowboy, by the name of Luis Ortega, who came up with the idea after seeing horse drills in Austria, explains the girls’ trainer, Consuelo “Chelo” Manero, 28, a Mexico City native who now lives on Chicago’s North Side.
It started with three daughters and three sons of several charros and then evolved into an all-female competition performed before the male competition, called the charreada. The charreada, with origins dating back several centuries, includes bronco riding, steer roping and horse tripping, but the female competition does not include any of these maneuvers.
Manero knows the history well because she grew up on the ranch in Mexico where the escaramuza tradition started, following in the footsteps of her mother.
“I was riding at 4 and doing the escaramuza at 8,” says Manero, whose team was called Las Coronelas.
After college, Manero left Mexico to pursue her graduate studies in mental health counseling at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. She now works part time for a social service agency in the Chicago area serving the hearing impaired.
While she was attending a ceremony at the Mexican consulate in Chicago this spring, she met Raul Munoz Jr., the son of the owner of the Will County ranch. The younger Munoz was on hand to accept an award for his father and the charros of Cuatro Caminos. When he learned of Manero’s background in escaramuza, Munoz promptly asked her to work with the girls, who were learning basic riding at the ranch from a U.S. trainer.
“We wanted to include the girls in our family of charros,” said the elder Munoz.
Manero has been working with the girls two evenings a week since May.
” have become like my family,” says Manero, who was homesick for the ranch in Mexico. “We go to the movies together. We spend a lot of time together.”
In the summer, late afternoon practice lasts until 10 or 11 in the evening as the girls ride in formation around the dirt-covered ring Munoz Sr. built in 1987. The ring lights cast a golden hue about the girls dressed in white ranchera-style dresses with red and green ribbons and petticoats underneath. They wear the colors of the Mexican flag on this occasion, but another outfit is red, white and blue. The dresses, their sombreros, leather riding boots and single spurs are imported from Mexico. In competition, each maneuver is given a certain number of points, and judges can also deduct points if their outfits do not match perfectly.
“They will lose points if their earrings don’t match or if their hair isn’t braided the same,” Manero says.
At the August performance, as a mariachi band plays traditional Mexican music, the girls ride around the ring with the charros, saluting the audience, which applauds.
When it is their turn to perform, five girls and Manero circle the ring and split into pairs for their synchronized moves. (Two of the girls, 8-year-old Angie Reynoso and her 9-year-old sister, Julie, are still in training and have not yet performed in public.)
They start out simple, with the girls riding parallel and parting directions at the edge of the ring. Their pace quickens and they change directions riding past each other, inches separating each girl and her horse from the other horses.
From there they ride into braid-like formation; from the corner of the ring they form two lines crossing each other two at a time. Other moves include riding in the shape of a star or a rose, and the one so bravely executed by Carol, called cala de caballo (the move described at the beginning of the story).
“It looks so easy,” says Irma Reynoso of Chicago’s Southwest Side, Angie and Julie’s mother. “So far, all of them have fallen, but they have courage.”
To show their support, the mothers, novices to escaramuza, rode the horses after a recent practice.
“It helped the girls to see us up there,” Reynoso says. “Mom can do it, too.”
The parents also hope the girls, all U.S.-born, can capture a sense of their Mexican heritage through the escaramuza.
“We want to teach them to maintain their culture,” says Miguel Gonzalez, who grew up on a ranch in Jalisco, Mexico. His daughter, Daisy, 10, is on the team.
Gonzalez, who runs a restaurant and lives on Chicago’s Southwest Side, sees the charreria culture as one that keeps the family together, and even his 4-year-old son, Miguel Jr., is learning to ride.
Efrain Munoz, also of Chicago, sees it as an alternative activity for his three daughters, Carol, Lucy, 12, and Naty, 11.
“I hope it keeps them away from all of the bad influences of city life,” says Munoz, a distant cousin of ranch owner Raul Munoz.
“It’s easier for me to keep an eye on my daughters here than if they were going out.”
Eva and Ignacio Tayahua of Summit bring their daughter Elizabeth, 10, to give her something she didn’t have.
“The only place they ever saw a horse was at the zoo,” says Eva Tayahua of her daughter, who in suburbia had little contact with ranch animals. “It gives her a sense of tradition.”
The girls’ training will last until the winter months. Part of it includes caring for the horses their parents bought and learning how to saddle and train them. Cost for participating can range upward from $3,000 for the horses and at least $500 for the costumes.
After practice, Daisy Gonzalez feeds sugar cubes and carrots to her white and gray horse, Micaela.
“It’s so my horse can see that we care about them,” Daisy says. “She is part of my family.”
And when it is too cold to practice outside, they will ride inside a large covered barn. They must stay agile because they have been invited to a charreria in Mexico in January.
“All of this strengthens their culture,” Manero says. “They are very proud to be Mexican, and this is part of it.”
Manero also makes sure the girls understand all aspects of the men’s competition, completing their charreria education. They watch the the men’s team, Cuatro Caminos, at a recent performance in Joliet, and when a maneuver is successfully completed, they root from the bleachers in a Spanish version of hip hip hooray:
“A la bio. A la bao. A la bin. A la bin, bon, ban. Cuatro Caminos. Cuatro Caminos. Ra. Ra. Ra.”
