REVIEW: Rewriting the Charro Mythos: A Review of “Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home” at the Poetry Foundation

Elizabeth, 2023. Coronelas de Illinois, Lockport, Illinois. Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home exhibition photos. Photograph by Constance Jaeggi, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.

REVIEW
Rewriting the Charro Mythos:
A Review of Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home
The Poetry Foundation
61 W. Superior St.
Chicago, IL 60654
April 17 – August 23, 2025

By Michael Workman

In Mexican history, the charro—a skilled horseman and master of cattle work—emerged as a national icon during the colonial period and solidified his status in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Dressed in elaborately adorned suits and wide-brimmed sombreros, the charro became a symbol of rural pride, tradition, and patriotic masculinity. His image would come to define la charreada, Mexico’s official national sport, and spread into popular culture as a paragon of honor, discipline, and strength.

This figure finds its echo in the American cowboy, who, though mythologized in different ways, likewise became central to national identity—particularly in the narrative of Manifest Destiny and the mass-murderous, genocidal settling of the American West. In both contexts, the cowboy has been held up as a hyper-masculine archetype: stoic, solitary, shaped by conquest and tethered to land and cattle. But these histories, deeply entangled with colonialism, erasure, and exclusion, often obscure the roles women and Indigenous peoples played in shaping equestrian traditions.

The exhibition reclaims and reimagines this iconic figure through the lens of escaramuza, a competitive, all-female Mexican equestrian sport rooted in the centuries-old tradition of the charreada. Translated literally as “skirmish,” escaramuza brings precision riding and synchronized patterns to the rodeo arena. But beyond sport, it becomes a space where femininity is not a limitation—it is a code of power, grace, fierce discipline and a timely, crucial and necessary machetona. The exhibition is a richly layered collaboration between photographer Constance Jaeggi and poets Angelina Sáenz and ire’ne lara silva (and all participants, really), who together braid portraiture, verse, dress, artifact and participation into a compelling counter-narrative of identity, gender, and diaspora.

What happens when this enduring figure is reimagined—not through confrontation, but through choreography, embroidery, and sisterhood? Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home, now on view at the Poetry Foundation, offers a quiet but deeply moving answer.

Marisol, Melanie, Nathaly, and Stacy, 2023. Escaramuza Charra Azteca, Manor, Texas. Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home exhibition photos. Photograph by Constance Jaeggi, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.

The photographer herself gives an in-depth overview on the work in her introduction to the project, featured as a folio in the April 2025 volume of Poetry—where she reflects on how these portraits came into being through years of travel, trust, and immersion within escaramuza teams across the U.S. and Mexico. Standing before the images in the Poetry Foundation’s lobby, what else is there to comment or question? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Jaeggi, whose previous work has explored the emotional and symbolic bonds between horses and riders, brings a practiced equestrian eye to the subject matter. Her long-standing interest in the human-equine relationship evolves in this project into a nuanced meditation on gender, culture, and liberation.

Over the past decade, Jaeggi has developed a distinctive visual language through projects, for example, such as The Devils, her documentary series for The Guardian in 2022 on The Devil’s Horsemen, a premier stunt riding company supplying horses and performers to major film productions. Shot in Buckinghamshire during the COVID-19 lockdowns between 2019 and 2021, the series captures the intimate, often unseen labor of equestrian stunt workers. Her solo exhibitions such as Aspects of Power, Light and Motion (2017–2018) and The Devils (2021), were both presented at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas alongside Escaramuza, where this exhibition also premiered before traveling to the Foundation. In these series, she examines the physical and affective dynamics between stunt riders, competitive equestrians, and their horses, often drawing attention to the entrancing rituals of control, intimacy, and spectacle embedded in these relationships.

Image left: Analuisa and Jessica, 2024. Escaramuza Las Nortenas, Canutillo, Texas. Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home exhibition photos. Photograph by Constance Jaeggi, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.

Deepening the accomplishment of this work even further, is her outsider status—Jaeggi is a Swiss artist—and the show gains power from how her photographic gaze opens space without overtaking it. Her images are large-scale, precise, and composed, yet allow the subject’s agency to remain intact. On the main gallery wall, young women and girls in full escaramuza regalia—velvet skirts, embroidered blouses, beaded sombreros—meet the viewer’s gaze with striking poise. While the salon-style hanging of the photographs did make it difficult to inspect them each more closely, this may well have been one of the difficulties of translating an exhibition from the Cowgirl Museum to the confines of the Poetry Foundation space, or even part of an intention to present the work as a unified whole. Or not, I just wanted to see them better and could not. Regardless, in each of them that I could engage with closely there’s an unmistakable tension in their posture: strength contained, elegance executed with discipline. These are not folkloric depictions. The subjects do not perform for the camera; they withstand it. Jaeggi’s photography reflects the formality and grace of the sport while gesturing toward its gendered labor and unspoken constraints. The result is not mythmaking but testimony.

Miranda, 2023. Escaramuza La Victoria, Joshua, Texas. Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home exhibition photos. Photograph by Constance Jaeggi, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.

If the photographs form the show’s structure, the poems animate its pulse. Sáenz and lara silva do not merely caption the visuals; they intervene. The poems respond to the photographs and interviews with escaramuza riders, offering a textured, multi-voiced expression of what it means to ride, to wear the dress, to carry the weight of tradition and resistance simultaneously. In “Dress Pet Peeves” and “You are prettier when you are quiet,” the poets explore the tensions embedded in the uniform—a space of cultural pride and respectability politics. In “Four Generations,” the tone is more reverent, echoing the transgenerational knowledge passed through fabric, touch, and discipline. The poems use fractured syntax, textual spacing, silence, and rhythm as devices of rebellious revelation, breaking open the visual archive to center internal experience. Where Jaeggi’s images show what escaramuza looks like, the poems insist on what it feels like. Take these lines from silva’s lo nuestro:

it was the truest thing to say    that we had
been made riding sisters that we were growing 
up together like a family that kept branching 
and branching that our children were being
raised together mothered by aunts and horses

it was the truest thing to say    that there 
are things in life that can’t be renounced 
because renouncing them is to surrender 
who we are and surrendering has never 
been an option this is life this is life
this is our truest life

That potential struggle with the thought of leaving one’s home—and the recognition that it traces a pathway stitched into oneself, filled with the memory of other paths lost, of the truths of those losses and the gains made lingering in all its vibrancy—finds delicate expression in the break within the second stanza. That pause, a metrical inversion at the fourth foot of each starting stanza, echo each other with brilliant lineation, ringing like silver bells marking the moment of reflection, of realizing that the choice has been made—and here it resonates with the undeniable affirmation of a deep sense of empowerment.

Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home exhibition installation photo. Photograph by Michael Workman, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.

The exhibition is further complemented in the Poetry Foundation library with a vibrant material installation curated in partnership with Rebecca Flor Zamudio, whose collection of traditional dresses, saddles, and charro suits extends the conversation past lived experience to inscription on the body that are the uniforms of the escaramuza. In the library, mannequins wear bright florals and deep purples, adorned with meticulous ribbon work, a black charro suit glinting with silver buttons, not costumes but artifacts, bearing the marks of movement, memory and inscribed with the power of these affirmations.

Nearby, a vitrine holds rosaries, charms, and devotional necklaces, interspersed with a silver medal from the 2021 Illinois State Championship. These intimate tokens conjure a spiritual dimension of escaramuza as devotion—an act not just of pageantry, but of ardent social reflection on the craft. Taken together, these objects embody a living archive—a shared repository of discipline, ritual, and of an alternative to the past destructive, patriarchal charro identity it interpolates.

Image left: Competition medal from the library vitrine. Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home exhibition photos. Photograph by Michael Workman, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation.

Just outside the main gallery, a Button-O-Matic vending machine—a gumball-style dispenser dressed in escaramuza branding—offers capsule souvenirs: miniature keepsakes bearing imagery from the exhibition. Free with the turn of a lever, viewers can leave with a tactile echo of the experience. It’s a playful gesture, yes, but also a symbolic one. Like the beaded charms and medals behind glass, the machine extends the show’s logic outward—a kind of vernacular distribution of cultural memory, shrinking the archive to fit in your hand. Taken together, these small gestures—garment, prompt, button—form a dispersed poetics of engagement. They invite participation rather than mere observation, and make the act of remembrance, choice—the language act of declarative selfhood—material, portable, and personal.

Ultimately, it’s evidence of what distinguishes Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home from traditional photojournalism in its deeply collaborative methodology. Jaeggi’s role is not that of detached observer, but of dialogic participant, working in conversation and collaboration with both the riders and the poets. The exhibition foregrounds this through intermedia design: visuals, text, objects, and prompts converge to offer multiple registers of interpretation. A participatory writing station titled “The Power of Adornment” invites visitors to write their own reflections, poems, or affirmations inspired by someone who made them feel empowered. This prompt—simple yet profound—asks the viewer to locate themselves in the same network of care and tradition.

At its core, the exhibition asks: What does it mean to belong? Is escaramuza a tradition preserved, reinvented, or both? And what does it mean for such a tradition—rooted in patriarchal nationalism—to become a vehicle for feminist self-definition in contemporary U.S. Latinx contexts? The answer lies in motion. Escaramuza is a choreography: one performed not only in the arena or between visitors, but across generations, languages, and geographies. This is not merely an exhibition—it is a revision of the archive, a feminist re-inscription of the ideals of our shared continental North American frontier, and an invitation to carry its lessons forward. It is care turned into form, true resistance styled in satin and silver. In the photographs, in the poems, in the objects of daily ritual, one feels the hum of continuity not as static inheritance, but as something continually negotiated. Sometimes resistance doesn’t shout. Sometimes it turns astride atop its mounts in formation, skirts flaring like flags of quiet revolution.

Michael Workman is the Editor-in-Chief of Bridge.

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