A Black rodeo rewrites the story of the West

Part of the July 2022 issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

The tale of Bill Pickett, a legendary Black cowboy often barred from competing in largely white rodeos, stuck with Lu Vason. A Denver entrepreneur, Vason had first heard of Pickett — who invented the skill known as “bulldogging” to subdue wayward steers — on a chance visit to Denver’s Black American West Museum.

Historians estimate that one-quarter of American cowboys were Black, but Vason felt that Pickett and other turn-of-the-century Black figures who were part of the fabric of America’s Western expansion had been all but written out of history books. So, in 1984, Vason started the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, a Black rodeo that he saw as a way to challenge and broaden the narrow lore of the West. Today, the rodeo crisscrosses the US, serving as an inclusive gathering place for Black rodeo fans and budding Black rodeo stars alike.

San Francisco-based photographer Gabriela Hasbun was invited to tag along with friends to a Bill Pickett rodeo stop in 2007 at Rowell Ranch Rodeo, east of Oakland, California. Captivated, she returned a year later with a medium-format camera and a bag of film. For a decade, Hasbun captured what she saw: an age-old tradition infused with pride, highly modern fashion, and personal expression. A Bill Pickett rodeo is a place you might meet a horse named after Dapper Dan, catch a glimpse of a saddle emblazoned with the Louis Vuitton logo and artisan metalwork, or marvel at all the hair (horse), the nails (human), and the swagger (everyone).

Like Vason, Hasbun didn’t think the community was getting its due. “I couldn’t believe there was this huge Black community — very family-driven — having a wholesome event, and the media was overlooking it,” she told Vox.

“These kids are cool. They look cool,” says Hasbun. “They reek of cool. It’s this crazy attraction they have with the whole sport.”

Hasbun’s new book, The New Black West, captures the horsey set as a colorful whirl of activity and flash amid the faded, sun-washed backdrop of the dusty beiges of the drought-ridden country and the denim blue of the clear sky.

Images like her striking shot of Juanita Brown and her granddaughter Iyauna Austin atop their horses, with their African print skirts draped across their horses, and their dusty, worn lace-up boots peeking out from the stirrups, Hasbun believes, will help rewrite the story of the West, and of cowboy culture.

“No one,” Hasbun says, “can ignore a Black woman on a horse.”

The New Black West was published by Chronicle Books in 2022. Gabriela Hasbun is a photographer specializing in portraits; her work highlights marginalized and under-explored communities.

Lavanya Ramanathan is the editor of the Highlight.