GUSTINE, CALIF. — The well-coiffed Portuguese matador, muttering provocations in his native tongue, sizes up his weighty opponent's slavering mouth and sloping horns. In his hand he flashes his weapon: a bandarilha tipped not with razor-sharp darts but with nonlethal Velcro. The bull makes no distinction.
Spectators' voices drop to murmurs. Overhead lights sparkle off the matador's gold sequins, and the smell of linguiça (sausage) perfumes the dusty air. This suspended moment could be a summer night in the Azores -- until the matador lurches toward the advancing beast and, with a graceful twist of his body, artfully sticks the strip of Velcro between the bull's shoulders. A brass band launches into a triumphant score, and I join 4,000 aficionados in an eruption of "¡Ole!" that rocks this creaky bullring in the San Joaquin Valley.
On Monday nights, between March and October, Mexican and Portuguese performers routinely headline "bloodless" bullfights in the nine or so bullrings in remote Central Valley hamlets such as Riverdale, Thornton and Stevinson.
The events are a legacy of the early rancho days, from the Spanish tradition inherited by Mexican settlers. In 1957, California banned gory bullfights but did allow supporters -- mostly Portuguese dairy farmers from the Azores, where the sport is popular and bloodless -- to continue the tradition as long as the bull isn't harmed or killed, and contests were staged in conjunction with religious festivals.
The Velcro adaptation was introduced in 1980 by Dennis Borba, an American-born matador whose father, Frank, was one of a few pioneering immigrants to revive the old-world spectacle in the 1960s. Their innovation was a unique hybrid that combined the horseback fighting central to the Portuguese tradition with the on-their-feet matadors in the Spanish style.
The fights remained amateurish until local ranchers began crossing domestic cows with Mexican "brave" bulls. Then came the Velcro, for new-world sensibilities.
Curiosity drove three friends and me up Interstate 5 to Gustine last fall on the concluding night of Our Lady of Miracles Festa, the year's largest Catholic celebration. During the weekend, cow-drawn cart parades, folk dances and communal feasts had transformed the sleepy, tree-lined streets of this agricultural town of 5,300 into an Azorean carnival.
