Riding for Respect : A father teaches his son the art of the Mexican rodeo in hopes of keeping him in the ring and off the streets.

On a cool fall morning, a green Dodge pickup kicks up a cloud of dust as it rumbles out of an East Los Angeles stable, pulling a horse trailer. Feliciano Menchaca is eager to get going.

Hours earlier, he had rousted his 17-year-old son, Juan, out of bed. Juan was in no mood to be awake; he had been out late partying the night before. Too much was at stake, though, to stay asleep.

The Menchacas are charros, Mexican cowboys, leaders of an East Los Angeles team favored to win the forthcoming Congresso, or national championship, in Arizona. Juan Menchaca has been riding since age 6, learning from his father, who grew up on a Mexican ranch.

Juan, who was born in East L.A. and has never been south of Tijuana, is descended from a long line of Mexican horsemen--a tradition his father keeps alive despite the difficulty of raising a family in Bell Gardens, one of Southern California’s lower-income communities.

Even there, where the population is 88% Latino, people misunderstand the Mexican rodeo. At Juan’s school, kids “bag” on him about being a charro. “They call me ‘wetback,’ ” he says softly.

“You ignore them,” his father responds. “You show them who you really are.”

In a city where children often identify with gangs and drugs, Feliciano Menchaca has offered his son an alternative: the Mexican charro. For Juan and Feliciano Menchaca, winning the rodeo means more than the trophy. It means respect.

“But you have to be good,” Juan says. “And there’s a lot of good guys coming up right now.”

Amateur Mexican rodeos have become increasingly popular in the Western United States in the last five years. The number of registered teams has more than tripled in California, from eight to 29, and more than doubled in the West, from 32 to 83, says Alejandro Aguillar, president of the California Federation of Charros in Chino.

Every Sunday, a rodeo takes place in Southern California, Aguillar says, and the number of rings continues to grow: three are scheduled to open in Chino and two in San Diego next year.

Through the rodeo, Latino parents hope to divert children from gangs and connect them to a vision of Mexico’s past, says Florentino Cabrera, owner of the ring in Oxnard where the Menchacas are headed to compete.

“If we keep our kids’ minds busy on taking care of farm animals and horses, then we keep their minds off being on the streets,” Cabrera says. “That’s 50% of the reason. The rest of it is respect for the Mexican horsemen, their tradition and culture.”

Feliciano is lean and compact like the Huichole Indians who inhabit the corner of central Mexico known as Zacatecas, the state where he was born.

For centuries, charros have ridden the hills and plains of central and northern Mexico, the same ranges Pancho Villa roamed. The charro is a symbol of authentic Mexico, of the horseman of the Mexican Revolution.

Feliciano Menchaca’s father, Juan’s grandfather, grew up in central Mexico; he learned to ride and rope from his father. In the late 1940s, after his parents died, Feliciano, barely a teen-ager, lived with his godfather and became close to the man’s son, Leopoldo Gonzalez. Together, they learned to break and ride wild stallions.

Menchaca and Gonzalez were like brothers. They rode and roped together, competing in monthly rodeos. The good times lasted until the late 1950s, when farm prices fell and ranchers were unable to live on what the land produced. Armies of farmers moved to Mexico’s larger cities, where many died ragged and worn in slums, leaving children with no hope of escaping poverty.

Gonzalez and Menchaca, both barely 20, headed for Los Angeles. Thousands of others did the same, settling near the railroad terminal. As the years passed, the community grew and spread eastward, creating East Los Angeles. Today, more than 500,000 residents of East Los Angeles have ties to Zacatecas.

In the mid-1960s, Gonzalez and Menchaca formed California’s first association for charros. They competed against other Mexicans and rode in parades from Los Angeles to San Juan Capistrano. Eventually, Menchaca’s wife joined him here.

Feliciano Menchaca’s eyes narrow, the pupils dance and his grin widens as he stares at recent photographs of Zacatecas. It is hot this day, and he is sitting on a chair on the front lawn of his house, a two-bedroom rental that is home to half of his six children.

“Ah, look at the fine horses they have!” Menchaca says, tipping his black felt Stetson forward for a better look.

He would like to return to Mexico to live someday but doubts he ever will. “There is no way to live there, no way to earn money,” he says. “We can earn in an hour what they pay there in a day.”

The trade-offs, though, are considerable. In Bell Gardens, a city of about 2.5 square miles, there are 10 identified gangs and two full-time police officers to deal with them. The threat of gangs is so great that some children refuse to cross town out of fear of entering enemy territory, youth leaders say.

Fifty years ago, Bell Gardens had farms, orchards and predominantly white residents. Today, the predominantly Latino city has a large number of newly arrived immigrants and an average per-capita income of $7,900, says Bell Gardens Police Lt. Dale Pierce. The city is wedged between the Rio Hondo River and the Santa Ana and Long Beach freeways, a small town with a few wide boulevards bordered by strip malls and power lines. Mostly, it is filled with low-rent apartments and bungalows.

One small part of the area’s rural roots remains along the river, where the Menchacas board three horses in a stable on Bluff Road. Only Spanish is spoken among the men in cowboy hats who come every day to ride and groom the horses.

The only place where Feliciano and Juan Menchaca spend more time is at home on Gallant Street. Their small house is set far back from the street, between apartment buildings with peeling paint and weedy lawns. It is polished to a shine, with pressed tablecloths, fresh flowers, scrubbed walls and floors.

Feliciano Menchaca works in construction; his wife, Raquel, in the nearby See’s Candy Factory. The oldest children work too, often contributing to the parents’ income, says the couple’s 23-year-old son, Raymond.

Raymond Menchaca credits his father for keeping his youngest brother out of trouble. “If my dad hadn’t gotten him into the charro , he’d be out there,” he says, nodding at the street toward the cholos, the young men in Raiders caps and jackets hanging on the corner.

Juan is bored with his brother’s speech. He wanders onto the lawn, picks up a rope and starts twirling, making intricate circles in the air.

“I could be a cholo if I wanted,” Juan Menchaca says. “But if my dad sees me dress different he’ll ask, ‘What’s going on?’ If I let my hair grow, he’d take scissors to it. When I was a little kid and I told him I didn’t want to go wash down the horses, he would make me go. Finally I liked it, so I stuck with it.”

It has caused him trouble at Bell Gardens High School, where the vast majority of students are Latino. “The (white) kids . . . don’t understand,” he says. “And the Chicanos, they’re cholos. They don’t understand either, ‘cause they didn’t grow up in the Spanish culture. They’re into other things.

“I just stuck to myself. I was a loner.” He took refuge in the theater department’s stage crew, where he built sets. Feliciano, wearing his Stetson and cowboy boots, often came to help .

“The other kids used to really bag on my dad because of his hat. Then one kid who we really didn’t like very much called him a wetback. And well, we didn’t like it, so we got into trouble.” Last spring, Juan decided to leave school and follow an independent course of study, he says.

“He’s a bright kid with a good sense of humor and a lot of potential who never really applied himself,” says Bell Gardens High teacher Elisa Hastings. “Once he’s focused, he does well.” And, she adds, he’s luckier than a lot of students. “He has a very supportive home life.”

Juan calls his parents “old-fashioned.” Out of respect, he uses formal, rather than familiar, Spanish when speaking to his father. “My dad believes we have to work for everything,” Juan says. “I didn’t understand why he was that way, but I guess I do now. If you’re good, they’ll respect you.

In previous championships, he says, “I beat a lot of guys. They respect me for that.”

On the drive to the rodeo in Oxnard, Juan worries about winning. His father had sold his prize quarter horse, Granito de Oro, in the spring, trading it for a few thousand dollars and a 7-year-old gelding. Feliciano broke Granito as a colt and trained the horse to work with his son as a partner.

The two won a lot. But the new horse “needs a lot of work,” Juan says.

Two hours later, the truck pulls into Oxnard, down a two-lane highway past the fields and into a neighborhood of tiny clapboard bungalows that once housed Mexican farm workers.

Out of nowhere the street fills with trucks, trailers, horseback riders, low-slung Chevrolets and Dodge Ramblers, all moving toward a tiny box of a yellow house set back from the curb. Behind the house, unseen from the street, is a sprawling ranch with a private rodeo ring built by a Mexican-born carpet seller to give local charros a place to practice and compete.

As families fill the stands, meat cutters, factory workers, mechanics and cooks mount horses. The Menchacas change into leather chaps, clean starched shirts, stiff bow ties, wide-brimmed hats. They discuss the horses. They strategize. Fourteen men and boys make up their team, called La Espuela Zacatecana, the Spurs of Zacatecas. As in baseball, each player has a position in the rodeo’s nine events.

Three teams present themselves in the ring, 42 men and teen-age boys sitting in customized saddles atop gleaming quarter horses. Feliciano positions himself for the first event. He and two other competitors on horseback form a line in the corridor that leads to the ring.

“Aguas!” the announcer yells. Watch out!

A wild bronco flies out of the gate, running full speed toward the ring. In quick succession, the competitors whip ropes at the bronco’s front legs. They all miss.

Again, they try. Again, they miss. On the third try, the bronco speeds by. Whoosh! A miss. Whoosh! Another.

Feliciano stares hard at the thudding hoofs. Whoosh! The bronco falls. The crowd cheers.

Feliciano puts the Spurs ahead, but the team loses ground in the next event.

Instead of charging a steer and flipping it over by the tail, another charro loses his grip, yanks the tail and holds a clump of hair high in the air. The steer runs wildly, its tail exposed and dripping blood.

By the time Juan enters the ring, the team needs a win. His event, the standing lasso, is one of the most difficult, a ritualized demonstration of a charro’s control of rope and horse.

The event begins with three men on horseback chasing a wild galloping mare. In the middle of the ring, Juan stands amid the dust and charging horses, the lasso suspended over his head like a tornado. He whips it right, then left. He jumps through the whirring blur, a ballet dancer in heavy boots, leather chaps and sombrero.

He whips it forward. The rope misses the horse’s legs. He throws and misses again.

On the third try, he snares the mare’s front legs. He yanks, forcing the front hoofs together. The horse gallops away. Juan sits down hard in the dirt, wrapping the rope around his foot and torso to break the horse’s stride.

The mare skids to a halt. The crowd erupts in wild cheers. Juan stands. He doffs his hat and smiles.

The Spurs of Zacatecas never made it to the national championships the following weekend. In the last event, the stallion stopped abruptly, tripping one of the Spurs, throwing him face first into the dirt.

“He’s OK now,” Juan says of his teammate. “If he’d have stayed on, we’d have won. I guess we’ll just have to wait until next year.”

Juan and the team are comforted by their performance, especially Feliciano Menchaca’s win.

“You lassoed him? You’re kidding!” Raymond Menchaca asks his father afterward. “Musta been the first time in years!”

Feliciano Menchaca’s eyes sparkle. His chest swells a little. “Yes, I did it,” he says. “I did it.”