On a dusty ranch in the heart of South Texas brush country, the veteran matadora is still in training. There are no bullfights on the horizon–her professional career has quietly ended–but Raquel Martinez, the first and only American female matador, keeps drilling intensely.
“Eh, toro!” she cries, practicing her graceful footwork and cape movement in an empty bullring. Her voice, encouraging and commanding, echoes across the mesquite-covered land. “Hey, bonita!”
The others at the Santa Maria Bull Ring, a fledgling no-kill bullfighting school in the Rio Grande Valley, are relaxing about 50 yards away, drinking cerveza, smoking cigarettes and reminiscing. The sun is beginning to set, but Martinez refuses to leave the bullring.
“She always yells at all of us: ‘How come you never train?’ ” said Bruce Hutton, an auto detailer from San Diego and old friend, who has come to the Texas ranch to practice. “She’s addicted to it. What she loves is to be out there by herself or to pass on knowledge to young bullfighters.”
Martinez is over 50 now–a good decade past retirement age for most matadors–but she refuses to bow out of the bullring. After decades of fighting bulls primarily in Mexico, she has returned to the U.S. in part to inspire other young women to persevere in the highly politicized male bastion of bullfighting and to teach others the finer points of slaying an antagonized, 1,200-pound bull.
Her main venue will be this Texas bullring, located on an aptly named ranch called “La Querencia,” which literally translates as “homing instinct.” For Martinez, home will always be a bullring and the people who know and understand her curious passion, known as “el gusano” or “the worm.”
The school, which is also a bull breeding ranch, was created last year in part to give Martinez a place to fight in the U.S., said founder Fred Renk, a former bullfighter who has supported Martinez throughout her career and wanted to bring a modified form of bullfighting to the United States. For $950, students receive five days of training during which they learn basic vocabulary and the fundamentals of cape handling and killing techniques. Because it’s illegal to kill bulls in fights in the U.S., the finale is simulated when the matador plucks a rose attached to the bull’s neck, instead of plunging a sword.
“It’s time to come home,” said Martinez, who has split her time between Mexico City and San Diego for most of the last 20 years. “I did everything I set out to do. Now it’s time for me to be near my family and the country I love the most.”
One dream remains unfulfilled. Although she was a pioneering female matador who tangled with more than 500 bulls in bullrings across Mexico and Latin America, Martinez never fought in the Holy Grail of bullfighting, the Plaza de Mexico in Mexico City. An appearance in the sacred stadium, where the world’s top fighters have performed, confirms a matador’s elite status.
It still haunts her. But in April, she returned to Plaza de Mexico for the last time. Taking a deep breath, she said goodbye to the 50,000-seat stadium, where she frequently trained but never performed.
“I fought in every plaza but Plaza de Mexico. That was my fight,” said Martinez. “And that’s why I fought for so long. My turn in life was to be the first, and pave the road for others.”
She was not alone
Indeed, though women are still an anomaly in the centuries-old tradition–many men still refuse to fight on the same card as a woman–they are making inroads. Spain’s Cristina Sanchez in 1996 stormed into European bullfighting and became a world phenomenon. Sanchez retired in 1999 at age 27, complaining that male prejudice against her was so strong she was unable to get the top billings she deserved.
“We’re definitely in a better position today; [a woman] is not the oddball she once was,” said author Muriel Feiner. Her new book, “Women and the Bullring” (University Press of Florida, $34.95), includes a chapter on Martinez. “Women like Raquel bring the possibility or the reality [to others]one step further.”
Still, many Americans question why anyone would get involved in the first place. To those outside the sport, bullfighting is an unfathomable form of cruelty. Most see it as barbaric and nothing more than stabbing a confused, scared animal until it dies. Although bullfighting is legal in 13 countries, it has its share of critics even in places like Mexico and Spain, where some question whether or how the ritual fits in a modern society.
Bullfighting aficionados, however, say there is no greater art form.
“Once you get in the ring and you taste it, you’re never the same,” said Kate Lefler, a San Francisco artist who attended the Santa Maria bullfighting school. “There’s life, death and beauty.”
“I do suggest people see it,” added Feiner, who was against bullfighting before she saw a performance. “A person is risking his life to create art–a very special, transient work of art. It happens in an instant and then disappears.”
Since the 1600s, women have had a minimal presence in bullfighting. But before Martinez, only two women took the alternativa–the ceremony that allows a matador to fight bigger and more dangerous bulls–according to Feiner.
The first was Juanita Cruz, a Spaniard who fought until Francisco Franco banned female matadors from fighting on Spanish soil in 1939. Colombian Bertha Trujillo qualified in 1968 and is now retired and teaching at a bullfighting school in Cali, Colombia.
Then came Martinez, a spirited but stubborn, green-eyed gringa, who persevered without losing her integrity, friends and family said.
“Raquel really has scruples,” said Lefler, who began bullfighting six years ago. “The politics in bullfighting make it an ugly show sometimes. But Raquel won’t be pushed around and won’t do things to violate her integrity for bullfights.”
Born to Mexican parents but raised in San Diego, Martinez was an active, athletic child, who hunted, fished and went rock climbing and scuba diving with uncles. At 16, she was mesmerized after watching her first bullfight in Tijuana.
“I’d never seen that type of emotion or feeling,” she said. “I just wanted to learn more.”
She found a local bullfighting club in San Diego and had to fight a small calf to become a member. After six months of training, Martinez stepped into the ring, took one look at the animal and tried to flee. But the emergency escape routes were blocked.
“I remember the baby calf loomed up like a giant beast to me at the time, but when I look back, she was probably no bigger than my Doberman,” Martinez recalled in “Women and the Bullring.”
After that, studying music and becoming a teacher no longer seemed palatable.
`I could feel the coldness’
In the mid-1970s, Martinez packed her 2-year-old son into a Ford station wagon and drove to Mexico City.
She became known as the “blond girl who speaks Spanish like a tourist,” according to Feiner, and diligently worked her way up from small bulls at festivals to larger animals at bigger venues. All the while, she believed she had to be “as strong as a man, without losing her femininity.”
In 1981, she received her professional status in Tijuana, where she sliced the ear off the bull and dedicated it to her father, Miguel Martinez, a retired schoolteacher.
“The audience at the beginning was very difficult. I was breaking a barrier,” Martinez said. “At certain bullfights, I could feel the coldness toward me. I’d say, `just wait, I’ll have you applauding.'”
And for a while, she did. Martinez filled arenas through 1983, her best year. But she always had trouble securing performances, she said, because male colleagues often refused to fight with her. Exasperated, she returned to San Diego. After a three-year hiatus, however, she returned to Mexico and to the career that could kill her.
This time she was also coaching her son, Scott Robinson, who began bullfighting at age 15. Occasionally, the mother and son team performed together, raising eyebrows throughout Mexico’s bullrings. When Robinson fought in the Plaza de Mexico in 1994, he dedicated the first bull to his mother.
“My mom expected more out of me and even when I did well, she’d push me,” said Robinson, 28, now a senior at San Diego State University. He left bullfighting when he was 21 and joined the Air Force. “She was always the first one to train and last to leave–always the most prepared. I won’t doubt it if one day she does go back to Mexico. She says she’s here to stay, but it’s not the first time I’ve heard that and probably won’t be the last.”
For Martinez, bullfighting is still her life’s work, one she takes very seriously. The bull, she says, never goes to parties, stays up late, smokes or drinks. The bull also makes no distinction between a man and a woman.
“The bull is always strong, so the matador has to be in top physical and mental condition,” said Martinez, who has suffered a goring in her thigh, a broken hand, foot and nose (twice).
“The most important part is no matter where I go in the bullfighting world, all the people know and respect me as a serious matador de tores,” Martinez said. “I wasn’t a clown or someone people laughed at or had negative things to say. On the contrary. I achieved quite a bit, so I’ll stay with that.”
Life or death in three acts
A bullfight is neither a sport nor a fight, because the bull is destined to lose. Rather, aficionados consider this centuries-old tradition to be a drama in three acts. The crowd serves as the ultimate judge. If spectators feel they have witnessed a moving display of art, the matador will be heartily cheered and awarded a trophy, such as an ear or a tail. The bulls are specially bred, at least 4 years old and weigh between 1,100 and 1,800 pounds. The bulls must never have faced a person on foot before they enter the bullring, because they might charge the person instead of the cape. It is said that the bull is the only one who is oblivious to the matador’s gender.
The fight: After a preliminary act, each bullfight is divided into three stages and lasts for about 20 minutes. The three stages include the picadors (mounted lancers), banderilleros (who drive darts into the bull) and, finally, the matador (bullfighter).
Preliminary phase: The footmen work the bull with large magenta and gold capes while carefully appraising its agility, intelligence, dangers, sight and, most important, its strength.
First stage: The picadors, mounted on padded and blindfolded horses and armed with lances, antagonize the bull. Their job is to test the bull’s bravery and to weaken the bull’s neck muscles with the lance so it can follow the cloth better.
Second stage: When the bull has been sufficiently weakened by the picadors, barbed darts decorated with colorful ribbons are stuck in the bull’s neck by the banderillero. These are not supposed to weaken the bull but rather correct any tendency to hook, regulate the carriage of the head and slow it down.
Final stage: The death of the bull begins as the matador brings the animal close to his body with a series of passes. The crowd generally shouts Ole! with each pass. As the bull grows weaker, the matador will reach for his killing sword and maneuver the bull directly in front of him with its head down. Looking down the sword to sight the target, the matador leans over the horns and attempts to insert it between the cervical vertebra and into the bull’s heart.
Finale: If the kill is quick and clean, the matador will be applauded and white handkerchiefs are waved. If the bull was especially feisty, its carcass might be paraded and feasted on. Occasionally, the crowd’s response may grant a reprieve to an exceptionally brave or strong bull, who will be allowed to return to its stud farm to live out its life in peace.
–Julie Deardorff
