New Mexico has long proved attractive to visitors because of the many old Hispanic and Indian customs surviving here. Ancient practices and folkways lend an exotic air to the Southwest and impart a sense of timelessness. They are reminders that history lies at our back door.
One strange custom, now rare today, is the corrida de gallo, or “rooster pull.” Formerly this “sport” was found in all of New Mexico’s villages and larger towns. It was one of the few aspects of native life which Americans found thoroughly disagreeable.
A traveler from the East
gave a graphic description in the early 1840s. “A common rooster or
hen,” he tells us, “was tied by the feet to some swinging limb of a
tree, so as to be barely within reach of a man on horseback. Or the fowl
was buried alive in a small pit, leaving only the head above the
surface.
“In either case, horsemen
racing at full speed grabbed the head of the bird, which, being well
greased, generally slipped out of their fingers. As soon as someone
succeeded in tearing it loose from the tree or from the pit, he spurred
his horse and tried to escape with the prize. He was chased by the whole
sporting crew. The first who overtook him tried to seize the fowl, a
fight ensured, during which the poor chicken was torn into atoms.”
Our writer goes on to
explain that should any of the horsemen escape with the whole bird, he
takes it at once to his lady and presents it to her. And she carries the
feathered creature that same night to the village dance where she
displays it as proof that her man is the best lover in the neighborhood.
As far back as the Middle Ages, the corrida de gallo
was popular throughout Spain. There, the rooster was often suspended by
its feet from a rope stretched across a narrow street. The riders
dashed by, rising in their stirrups in an effort to wring off the bird’s
head. That was made harder because men tugged at either end of the rope
so that the target bobbed wildly in the air.
The chicken, an Old World
bird, was brought from Spain to Mexico, and eventually to the upper Rio
Grande Valley. With it came the corrida de gallo. Soon the
Pueblo Indians adopted the rooster pull. And, as a matter of fact, they
are the only ones who still occasionally have done it in recent times,
the custom having died out in Hispanic communities during the 1940s.
The entire affair can be
fairly dangerous, especially when the rooster is buried and the rider
must lean from the saddle at top speed and make his wild grab. In a
number of places, the corrida de gallo was abandoned after someone was killed.
That happened at the
village of Manzano, east of Albuquerque, in 1898. A teenager, Antonio
Sanchez, fell from his horse and died. I saw a serious accident during a
pull at Cochiti Pueblo in the 1950s. There, a young man caught a hoof
in the face as he tumbled from the saddle.
In most cases, the
rooster pull was conducted on the feast day of San Juan, that is, St.
John the Baptist. An American official in Santa Fe in the 1850s, for
example, wrote: “On the afternoon of St. John’s Day the plaza is
thronged with Caballeros riding to and fro and testing the stretching
qualities of the chickens’ necks.”
In part, the rooster pull
was regarded as a manly art, “a macho thing,” in which youths showed
off their riding skill in front of the ladies. But it also had a deeper,
almost unconscious, religious meaning dating back to the pre-Christian
pagan rites of Europe.
In ancient Spanish
symbolism, drops of blood were closely identified with drops of water.
The Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains was where water rose
and flowed into the valleys. The shedding of blood, as in the rooster
pull, helped bring rain because the spattering of red drops was powerful
magic.
Nor is it coincidence
that the corrida de gallo was scheduled for the feast of St. John the
Baptist. Remember, he is closely identified with water, since he
baptized Christ and is regarded as patron of pure water. Also, like the
rooster, he lost his head which must have been accompanied by a
spattering of blood.
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