At the jaripeos in Penjamillo, Michoacán — rodeos where cowboys ride bulls, waterfall tequila and flex their machismo — there’s more than just bravado. Under a veil of riotous drinking glides a queer subculture where men can connect over displays of virility.
“Jaripeo,” by co-directors Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig, sheds a sideways light on the masculinity at play in these rural Mexican rodeos, painting careful portraits of the queer rancheros who come to the gatherings. For them, the drinking, the intensity and the aura of the bullrider are all part of the appeal, a Venn diagram that leads to an environment where homosexuality becomes permissible, if clandestine.
Mojica said the idea for the film came after they started inviting Zweig home with their family for Christmases in Penjamillo. It’s a hometown tradition to go to the holiday jaripeos on Christmas Day and New Year’s, soggy with alcohol and bright with celebration.
Zweig at that time had been working as a poet and a teacher and moonlighting as a journalist. Something about the jaripeos struck her, and as she attended over the years began talking to people and taking notes about what she saw. After the pandemic, she said, the idea for a documentary started coming together — and her decade-long friendship with Mojica began to grow into an artistic collaboration.
“It was just very unexpected and very organic the way that things happened,” Zweig said. “We weren’t necessarily looking for a documentary to shoot. It was more that Efrain has lived this story for their whole life. I was invited into this place and just found something really dynamic about it.”
Mojica said when Zweig and the pair’s eventual producer, Sarah Strunin, asked about the idea of doing a documentary, Mojica was interested.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, but I’d like to focus on the queer subculture that I’m familiar with, bringing attention to this world,’” they said.
The documentary begins with Mojica driving Zweig out to the edge of town, where they look out over the expanse of Penjamillo through Mojica’s cracked windshield.
“I brought you here to Penjamillo so you could see a little bit of what it’s like to be a young queer ranchero,” Mojica says to Zweig.
Mojica continues to narrate, speaking to Zweig, over the course of the film as it shows a visual progression of the jaripeos developing over the course of a day, from day drinking to evening revelry, including some characters who give their perspective on how their queerness exists within the rodeo culture.
Vignettes pepper “Jaripeo” and show the ways masculinity converges, from men performing drag at the rodeo and getting a little too drunk, to the bull riding itself and the strength it takes, as well as the performance of that strength for others. The culture surrounding the jaripeo isn’t completely one thing or another, Zwei said, and part of the film’s goal is to use visual language to show how the town’s relaxed notions of gender overlap with more turgid perceptions of masculinity.
“We just wanted to be able to present all of it with a more objective eye of ‘these are all of the things that happen in this place,’” Zwei said.
Mojica said the choice to put themself in the film was partially to put some skin in the game, to become vulnerable in order to build trust with the film’s protagonists, who open up about their queerness.
“I wanted to get all of this information from them,” Mojica said. “And it was like stories that I was telling Rebecca and our crew of how I would sneak out to the cornfields … all of these fun anecdotes that I knew the protagonists also had, but (that) they were a bit shy to talk about. So it was a decision to be vulnerable with them in order to get something back, not just like extract.”
So how does one shoot a documentary about cruising culture at the rodeo? How to capture something that exists, literally and culturally, on the fringes?
For shooting intimate encounters at night, Mojica went abstract.
In one early scene with a couple, Mojica had spotted two men holding hands and kissing early in the day. Mojica told them they admired that the couple wasn’t afraid of being seen and asked if they could film them. The couple said yes, left for the bathroom and then didn’t come back. But Mojica found the couple later that night and asked again, assuring they could just capture silhouettes.
In that scene in the movie, as two figures converge in a cornfield, a light begins to strobe, just infrequently enough that it’s hard to parse exactly what’s happening, and the two seem to embrace each other and descend into the field.
“I wanted to almost leave it to the imagination,” Mojica said. “Represent it in more of an artistic, visual way.”
Mojica also shot parts of the film on analog film using a Super8 camera, which they said felt appropriate.
“From the beginning, the idea of the Super8 was, like, the queer lens, literally,” they said. “It’s all my camera that I’m using. It was almost like a magnifying glass going from the very wide, wide shots of the digital, the rodeo happening, and how the Super8 would help us focus on the subtleties that are going on in the rodeo … the discrete signs that show that the queer culture is there, and it’s always been there. You just have to pay attention to where it is.”
For both directors, the film’s debut is personal, but it’s particularly the case for Mojica, who said the decision to be on camera meant stepping fully into their identity.
“It was a difficult decision for me. To this day, it still is. I haven’t spoken to my family, really, about what the film is about,” they said. “But there’s like this bravery that I see in … the protagonists, that I almost have to live up to.”
‘Jaripeo’ in-person screenings
- 3 p.m., Jan. 25, The Yarrow Theatre
- 11 a.m., Jan. 26, Megaplex Redstone 4
- 6:30 p.m., Jan. 27, Broadway Centre Cinema
- 1 p.m., Jan. 30, Holiday Village Cinemas 2
- 10 a.m., Feb. 1, Holiday Village Cinemas
Online
- 8 a.m., Jan. 29-11:55 p.m., Feb. 1