Bullfights Without Blood Tiny California Town Keeps Tradition Alive While Staying Within State’S Law
On the edge of this tiny town, on the grounds of the local Lions Club Arena, stands a raging bull, a 1,000-pound fighting bull, and he doesn’t know Laton from Lisbon.
He doesn’t know he’s snorting and drooling and bellowing in the middle of a makeshift ring.
He doesn’t know that he has a Velcro swatch strapped across his back, that the guy with the cape and the sticks isn’t after blood and that the state is looking out for his best interests. Or that a couple of thousand aficionados have gathered to be touched by a tradition.
The bull is a wild, pure, dark beast, and he commands attention. Despite the focus heaped upon the matador, and despite the general pomp that accompanies a bullfight, the bull is, well, The Man.
“The bull is the main character,” concedes 83-year-old Manuel Sousa, one of the forefathers of bullfighting in California’s Central Valley.
Bullfighting in California? For 30 years now, thanks to farmers like Frank Borba, Manuel Correia and Sousa, the region’s sizable Portuguese community has had a link to the Old Country. In places such as Turlock, Madera, Stevinson, Escalon, Crows Landing and Laton, the horse sport/art of bloodless bullfighting has become a regular piece of the culture from April through October.
“Our people love fighting bulls, so that’s why I tried to keep the tradition going,” said Borba, 71.
Borba’s people - like Sousa, Correia and many of the other 200,000 or so Portuguese in the Central Valley - have their roots in Terceira, the third of the nine islands that make up the Azores, a chain 740 miles off the coast of Portugal.
It was on Terceira, during a period of Spanish occupation between 1580 and 1640, where bullfighting was introduced to the Azores.
“As a child, I was fascinated by it,” Sousa said. “My dad loved it, my family, my grandfather, they all talked about it, and I loved it, too.”
Laton is an unincorporated town you’d be hard-pressed to stumble upon, a hamlet of about 1,400 that is about 25 miles south of Fresno.
Folks here are mostly farmers - cotton, dairy, grain, corn, hogs - though Laton also has become a homey spot for employees of the prisons in nearby Corcoran and Delano.
But here, even on a cold, rainy night, some 2,000 folks showed up to taste the flavor: the trumpet’s blare - much like the call to the starting gate at a horse race - the grand entrance of the matador and the cavaleiros (horse matadors), the sheer bravery/lunacy of the forcados (bull grabbers) and the unmistakable sound of the gate opening and the bull charging into the ring.
“It’s like anything else,” said Correia, 58. “A lot of people like football, a lot of people like soccer. Bullfighting is my favorite sport.”
To watch it is a sport. To do it is an art.
The Central Valley has a local-boy-makes-good story in Borba’s son, Dennis, only the seventh American matador in history and the lone active one. He is a chiseled sort with a handsome face, and he carries the confidence of a matador.
Dennis’ grandfather raised fighting bulls back in Terceira, and Dennis, like many of the younger generations in these families, can recite the history of those islands. He grew up far removed from all of that, but between his father’s love for bulls and regularly watching Tijuana bullfights on TV, Dennis was hooked.
By 1978, he had earned amateur status as a bullfighter, and it took another eight years of training in Mexico, Portugal and Spain to rise to the level of matador. In that way, perhaps even more than Sousa, Correia or even his father, Dennis can speak to the moment, to the art.
“It’s a great feeling when you can dominate and make a bull do what you want to do,” he said. “You’ve got to have bravery and also intelligence. You have to think like the bull.”
In 1957, a state law was passed banning bullfighting, bloodless or otherwise, while ensuring the continued role of rodeos as a piece of Americana. But one paragraph left open the door: “This section shall not, however, be construed as prohibiting bloodless bullfights, contests, or exhibitions held in connection with religious celebrations or religious festivals.”
Exactly how bullfighting came to the Central Valley is a debated point. The three families are fiercely proud, and each seems to have its own interpretation of exactly what happened.
It’s generally agreed the forerunner was Frank Borba, who, using mixed breeds, put on the only show in town from the late 1960s until 1975. He especially pleased the locals by carrying on Terceira’s unique brand of bullfighting, touradas a corda, in which the bull is tied to a rope and run through the streets of a village.
Borba didn’t send bulls running through places like Gustine, but he simulated the event wherever he put on his bullfights.
“People were going crazy because everyone comes from the Azores,” Borba said.
Sousa and Correia, though, weren’t crazy for the mixed breeds. Borba’s animals were at least part Brahma (the rodeo type), not quite the undiluted savage that is the purebred, and Sousa said he felt “empty” when he watched those early bullfights.
By 1974, the quest was on to find a way to get true fighting bulls across the border from Mexico, and the next year, the deed was done. The Sousas and Correias each claim credit for the first fight with a purebred bull, and the Borbas maintain everybody got into the act about the same time.
At any rate, an industry grew, and now there are nearly 20 families or groups that put on bullfights in the region. As in Terceira, and in keeping with the state law instituted in 1957, the events always have ties to religious festivals that run from April through October.
Bullfights in the Central Valley are not massive spectacles. They rarely draw more than 2,500 fans and more typically play to crowds of 1,000 to 2,000. On a recent Saturday in Madera, where Correia lured two of Portugal’s finest matadors by paying them $15,000 each, about 1,000 people showed up.
The fights are held either in portable bull rings or rickety-looking venues in need of a paint job.
But with few exceptions, none of this is about money. Correia admits his business is “mostly just a hobby,” and Sousa says he has “never made a dime” in the bullfighting business.
Marketing is not a top priority for many of the promoters.
“Right now, we’re sort of scared to promote it to the American public, and even the Spanish public, because we’re scared to get the Humane Society on our back,” said Sousa’s youngest daughter, 28-year-old Liliana Sousa Kim. “We try to keep it low-key, which is another reason we don’t have full houses.”
Sometime around 1980, one of the families - again there is disagreement - came up with the idea of placing a Velcro patch on the back of the bull to catch the bandarilhas (sticks) used by matadors and cavaleiros. To that point, the events either had gone on without bandarilhas or the organizers had used various other means to keep the events bloodless.
“This type of activity, I compare it to the rodeo,” said Marcelino Cardosa, a Los Angeles attorney who was born and raised in Terceira and has experience as a cavaleiro. “This is not any worse to the bull or the horse than the rodeo.”
Said Dennis Borba, “If it wasn’t for bullfighting, the fighting bull would be extinct.”