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A jaripeo is a traditional Mexican rodeo and cultural festival that blends bull riding, equestrian exhibitions, live music, and dancing. Rooted in 16th-century ranching traditions, it is a vibrant, community-centered fiesta popular in central and southern Mexico, as well as in Mexican American communities across the U.S. In Mojica and Zweig’s documentary it is firmly situated in rural Penjamillo de Degollado, Michoacán, western Mexico, where Mojica returns to ruminate on the jaripeos of their youth. In its opening sequence Zweig asks Mojica why they have brought her to a high vantage overlooking Penjamillo and they gesture to the vista’s expanse, which speaks to how an identity is formed from where a person has been raised.
Mojica’s background as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist are on full display in Jaripeo where their non-binary approach offers a unique and privileged perspective on the otherwise traditionally gendered jaripeo where masculinity is an expectation celebrated in performative display. It’s a theme as difficult to saddle as the relaja featured in the film (a relaja is a horse that doesn’t let you ride it easy and resists domination) and yet Mojica and Zweig manage to ride it out as long as they can, which is arguably all one can do when presenting a film that is critiquing but also celebrating the construction of gender, though the film has come under some criticism for not somehow resolving these complicated constructions. I ask: how can it? Or even: why should it?
The “Lavender Scare” that began in the late 1940s and escalated rapidly into the 1950s was a moral panic and mass purge of LGBTQ+ individuals from federal government employment, driven by the belief that queer civil servants were security risks susceptible to communist blackmail but Michael Trask has observed that the true gist of its paranoia was that “the argument that homosexuals were comprehensible due to their obviousness was trumped by the claim that such figures were beyond discovery by virtue of the finesse with which they could act any role.” It was some men’s ability to pass as straight that proved most threatening. Mojica says as much when they talk about gays being “disguised as cowboys.” The cowboy is an icon of constructed masculinity whose taciturn manner avoids having to talk about masculinity at all and who deftly skirts the potential of being apostrophized. Machismo, you could say, is the easy way out and it’s precisely that ease that makes it so attractive, if not addictive. If you can prove you’re a man, you don’t have to prove anything else, right?
This dialectic is poignantly expressed in a mid-film conversation between Mojica and Noé who—buff and bearded and thoroughly macho—is nonetheless a member of “the guild.” Noé makes it clear that he disfavors “girly” men and will only interact with straight masculine men because they’re the only ones who are really sexy and hot. Mojica argues that there are men who are inbetween girly and macho who are also sexy. “No,” Noé insists, “that’s not true.” This clearly troubles Mojica’s non-binary perspective and eventually they are forced to admit they are no longer in alignment with macho rancheros because it doesn’t feel right to hide one’s nature. But is Noé hiding? Or does he know exactly what he desires, regardless of political correctness and identity politics?
Speaking across the festival to Frameline’s inclusion of Sasha Waters’ Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2026), Oliver might as well be describing Noé when she writes in her poem “Wild Geese” (1985):
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Noé has committed himself to what he desires, even if it means playing into a patriarchal system that rewards a posturing machismo. At the same time he is fully compassionate in defusing Mojica’s fear of coming out to family and friends. Other characters that are part of the jaripeo scene include a rodeo clown who dresses in drag to entertain the crowds, posing no threat for helping jaripeo participants to have a good time. There’s also an effeminate queer who remains a devout Catholic by believing he is made in God’s image. Both are briefly sketched as caricatures to prove a passing point but not given much depth.
What lingers as an indelible image, however, is that chosen for the film’s theatrical poster: a man in a charro suit splashed with vivid pinks and blues (I was reminded of James Bidgood) suddenly enveloped in stars before the camera reveals he’s riding a mechanical bull in a dun-colored desert. Commentary on the construction of the Mexican ranchero has never been so exact and brilliant.
