Bringing Jewish rodeo stories into focus
At a dusty rodeo arena outside Santa Fe, a rider adjusts a saddle while families gather along the rail. The horses, bleachers and broad New Mexico sky provide the setting, but Miriam Libicki’s documentary Rodeo: A New Mexican Story is chiefly interested in the people who carry those traditions across generations. Its Jewish rodeo cowboys emerge as complex figures shaped by work, family memory and the mythology of the American West.
Rather than treat rodeo as a colourful inheritance or a simple catalogue of rodeo cowboys, Libicki examines the labour behind the spectacle. Her subjects discuss livestock, competition, migration and the constant need to earn a place in a changing rural economy. The result is both a family portrait and an examination of what it means to belong to a place.
Libicki’s perspective comes from New Mexico roots, a Jewish communal background and a career spanning documentary film and visual art. She approaches the rodeo without turning its participants into curiosities. Instead, she listens for the complicated relationships between landscape, identity and the stories communities tell about themselves.
A Western story with Jewish memory
New Mexico’s rodeo circuit connects ranch families, small towns and itinerant workers whose lives move between the saddle, the corral and the home. Libicki places Jewish families within that larger world, showing how several generations learned to ride, compete, breed cattle and run businesses in a region often portrayed as culturally uniform.
The cowboy occupies a powerful place in American folklore, yet the riders in Libicki’s film are not simply heirs to that myth. They describe grandparents who arrived as immigrants, parents who worked ranches and children deciding whether to continue a demanding way of life. Their Jewishness provides a particular lens on questions of acceptance, inheritance and the difference between being tolerated and genuinely belonging.
Following the hands behind the spectacle
Libicki’s observational style keeps the arena active without turning it into a circus. Wide views establish the relationship between the horses, handlers and surrounding land, while closer attention finds hands tightening cinches, checking tack and guiding animals through the chute. Arena noise remains audible, leaving space for the unpredictability that defines rodeo.
Her editing also shifts attention beyond the rider receiving the most attention. Stock contractors, rodeo clowns, cooks, families and volunteers are part of the enterprise. Women whose careers span bucking horses, barrel racing, livestock work or animal care broaden the meaning of rodeo cowboy. This wider network helps explain that a local tradition survives through many forms of knowledge, not through heroic individuals alone.
The interviews are direct without feeling extractive. Libicki allows contradictory memories to stand together, including pride in winning, uncertainty about the future and ambivalence toward the danger built into the sport. Her camera treats horsemanship as skilled work rather than entertainment detached from the animals, weather and economic pressures surrounding it.
Clay, canvas and a shared creative language
Film is not Libicki’s only creative medium. Her visual practice includes drawing, painting and work with clay and other tactile materials, an approach that helps explain the film’s attention to surfaces: weathered leather, dust, skin, fences and the worn surfaces of family homes. A mark on canvas and a memory captured on tape both carry the pressure of the person who made them.
Related reporting on Jewish identity in Taos broadens this creative context, showing how artists working in clay and canvas use familiar materials to negotiate Jewish belonging, regional history and the appeal of Taos as an artistic centre.
| New Mexico in the film | Australian parallel | Shared concern |
|---|---|---|
| Open arenas and ranch roads around Santa Fe, Taos and Raton | Regional rodeo shows around Tamworth, New South Wales | How isolation and open country shape community life |
| Ranch families with several generations in the same region | Jewish families in Sydney and Melbourne shaped by migration | How identity travels between generations |
| Weekend rodeo as a shared calendar | Friday evening and Saturday morning synagogue followed by a family lunch | The rituals that bring a dispersed community together |
| Attention to horses, cattle, stock work and arena labour | Australian cattle markets, saleyards and rodeo circuits | The practical economics behind cultural traditions |
Reading the film from Australia
Australian viewers encounter this material in a different setting. Sydney and Melbourne contain long-established Jewish communities, with synagogues, schools, cultural organisations and kosher businesses embedded across metropolitan neighbourhoods. For many households, the weekly rhythm includes services on Friday evening and Saturday morning, followed by a family meal that turns religious observance into an occasion for conversation and connection.
Food provides another everyday reference point. Families stock up at local grocers, bakeries and farmers’ markets, where bread, bagels, vegetables and meat sit alongside mainstream produce. Small food businesses in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and Melbourne’s inner north help maintain a visible Jewish life, much as local stores and food traders support the New Mexico communities seen in Libicki’s film.
Cattle culture and the local market provide a particularly strong Australian parallel. Rodeo remains part of the national rural calendar, with Tamworth serving as a prominent centre, while saleyards and livestock markets connect urban consumers with regional producers. Legislation reflects the country’s federal structure: animal-welfare responsibilities are administered through state and territory laws, including Victoria’s Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1981 and New South Wales’s Animal Welfare Act 2010, along with rodeo-specific welfare requirements.
Land, history and the stories between
New Mexico is never an empty backdrop. The state includes the homelands of Pueblo nations and the Navajo Nation, and its ranch roads and arenas occupy landscapes shaped by long histories of grazing, settlement, trade and conflict. Any serious portrayal of Western life must acknowledge that history rather than presenting cattle country as empty or timeless.
Libicki keeps the film centred on Jewish families without suggesting they are the only legitimate presence in the landscape. Spanish colonial history, Mexican and Indigenous influences, Anglo ranching traditions and Jewish communal life overlap without becoming a seamless whole. The film’s movement between rodeo and Jewish ritual makes that coexistence visible, while retaining the differences between those experiences.
This context also complicates the cowboy’s apparent simplicity. Riding requires judgement passed between generations, but the arena also depends on vets, volunteers, cooks, transport workers and the financial arrangements surrounding animals. Libicki shifts the Western away from solitary male mastery and towards an interdependent way of life.
Why the Jewish perspective changes the frame
A Jewish filmmaker looking at a foundational American genre encounters familiar questions about who is allowed to represent the ideal settler. The cowboy can appear culturally universal, but access to land, livestock and public memory has never been universal. Libicki uses that tension without arguing that Jewish riders possess a monopoly on belonging.
Her perspective also guards against two easy stereotypes. The Jewish cowboy can be turned into an emblem of flawless assimilation, as though tradition disappeared with the first English-language conversation. The figure can also become an eccentric novelty, valued for surprise rather than as a person with ordinary ambitions and contradictions. Libicki resists both readings by returning to the sustained work required to sustain a family tradition.
The film’s emotional force comes from that combination of specificity and openness. Riders are neither representatives of an entire people nor isolated individuals detached from community. They are relatives, workers, competitors and witnesses whose stories gain meaning from what precedes them and what they hope to pass forward.
After the final cut, the work continues
For Libicki, screening is another stage of the filmmaking process. Conversations with audiences reveal which details riders recognise immediately and which parts of the story remain opaque to newcomers. She pays particular attention to corrections about language, family relationships and the practical business of rodeo, treating feedback as evidence rather than an endorsement of the film’s conclusions.
The work also continues through her return to the artistic communities around Taos, where clay, paint and film become different ways of asking where a person belongs. A Taos identity can be romanticised as timeless, just as a Jewish presence in rodeo can be made exceptional; Libicki’s methods resist both easy myths.
Her next fixed step is to return with a portable recorder and record a long oral history from retired women who worked in rodeo medicine, livestock care and family ranches, using those conversations to develop a short companion film.