snrtobias

 

Rebecca has written about our time in Esquel, on the edge of the Patagonian Andes. In her post she included a bunch of pictures of he jineteada, that we attended. Her pictures were all of the first day, because her camera battery died the second day. So I’m sending along my jineteada pictures with a few comments and, hopefully, captions (Rebecca hasn’t told you that each of her posts has taken her close to all day because the software, Word Press, is extremely hard to use. It doesn’t always do what you want it to, like put the pictures where you want them in the text, or put the caption you want with the picture you want it with.)

Jineteada is a gaucho word, and is the “Southern Cone” version of the American “rodeo.” I “googled” the word, and the article related it to rodeos, a Mexican version of the same thing with another name that I forget, and a Spanish sport that was practiced even before the Spaniards came to America. I suppose it must go back to the Arabs of Al Andalus, and some day I’ll look it up again, because it’s just fascinating. (Don’t  forget to click to read more and see the pictures.)

Part of a jineteada is the presence of a payador, about which I learned from Padre Oscar on my January 28^th walk in the Andes, which I already told you about in this blog. The payador sings a payada, a stanza he improvises on the spot, in honor of the jinetero, or rider, both before and after he rides. I could only follow them enough to know that they included comments, sometimes very clever, about the particular rider and his ride of the day. We met and talked with two payadores, Manuel Rosa and Marcelo Marín.

We had a chat with Marcelo and his girlfriend, and he showed me a whole other rhyming scheme, that is other than the one that Padre Oscar had shown me. Rosa was at the event not to sing, but to to sell his CD’s and we bought one. Marin was one of two official payadores, who took turns singing in honor of jineteros. We bought a tape of his work; he had no CD’s, explaining that country people often don’t have CD players.

There are four or five categories of jinetea, and we witnessed two – one bareback and the other with saddle. You can imagine that the amount of time you have to stay mounted in order to qualify is longer with saddle than bareback.

We spent more time looking and shooting than getting to know people, so we didn’t learn much more than this. Oh, except that each untamed horse, or potro, is new and has never had a person on its back. Don’t ask me how they get the potros to accept the ride in a trailer, probably many kilometers.  And except that riders go all over the country doing these events, so that some of the national champs were at this one.

At the event are many fogones, which are barbecue fires. And I think the word also refers to campsites where people stay for the whole event. Like at the Folk Festival. It was very “festival,” as I think you can tell by the way people are decked out. The elegance of their dress and stature knocked me out, and I took as many pictures as I could of people to show their outfits and great gaucho faces. Here are only a few.

I thought these were some pretty captivating pictures, but here, they’re only “thumbnails.”  I hope you’ll click on them — and then click again – to really enjoy looking at them.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.