What is the enduring appeal of the Mexican Midget Rodeo? Is it the outre, the extreme, the Other, marshaled in traditional contests of skill and daring? A parody of an insular macho culture, nurtured from within? The simulacrum of defenseless children thrust into unspeakable danger, as we sit and smile helplessly? Or is it something deeper, primal, the stuff of myth and fairy tales--Rumpelstiltskin assailing the Cretan Minotaur, Taurus the bull engaging the Lollipop Guild, leprechauns at the Augean stables impeding the 12 labors of Hercules? And if such spectacles are predicated on our fears, then why would these participants sanction them, validating them with their presence?
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Los Matadoritos
In the ring, the midget rodeo troupes of Mexico parody macho culture in pink Speedos and diminutive displays of daring. But on their home turf of Aguascalientes, Paul Cullum discovers that these little people have bigger dreams.
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Such suppositions are raised in the incubator of privilege. They do it because it's a living.
And so I find myself winging south of the border toward Aguascalientes, Mexico, capital city of the state of Aguascalientes, where Los Enanitos Toreros live, work, train, love and no doubt try to avoid just these sort of intrusions, to find out what constitutes ordinary life for these figures of legend.
We meet at the impressive multitiered bullfighting ring that anchors one end of the Plaza de Toros San Marcos, the promenade of colonial architecture that dominates the center of this dusty city of nearly 1 million people. Beneath a statue of famed matador Fermin "Armillita" Espinosa, who trained future film director Budd Boetticher in the art of the Veronica and doubled for Tyrone Power in "Blood and Sand," I am introduced to manager Alfredo Rocha, a translator and seven of the eight working members of the troupe--five men and two women, ranging in age from 19 to 40, all dressed in identical red T-shirts.
After a brief tour of the ring, replete with onsite infirmary and chapel--a contingency plan for both before and after--we pile into a van and drive several blocks to El Cortijo (The Farmhouse), a bar and restaurant frequented by the bullfighting crowd--or as the proprietor takes pains to elaborate, "the bar for bullfighters to make party." Out back is a private patio and a small bullring where the troupe practices, and where they will later insist on staging a minor exhibition as a gesture of hospitality for the distance I've traveled. But for now, with the morning light refracted through the colored glass set into the stone walls of the open-air cantina, an enormous cauldron of paella simmering in one corner, they gather over chilled orange sodas to try to articulate what it's like to be them.
