Teen ‘Escaramuzas’ Synchronize Their Horses in a Perilous Ballet

By the time the girls parade into the riding ring, their petticoats will be primped to starchy perfection. Their wide-brimmed sombreros will be firmly anchored over their long, dark hair and their horses will be brushed to a glossy sheen.

But at the moment, in a dusty parking lot behind the arena, bedlam reigns.

“I don’t have a hat!” Edith wails from atop her horse at anyone who will listen. “None of them fit! I guess I have a big head.”

Gabby, meanwhile, has accidentally dropped her silver hoop earring in the dirt. Her horse promptly paws over the gleaming sliver of metal, hopelessly burying it.

Then, as mothers bustle around smoothing their teenage daughters’ skirts, a bull charges by. Several women scream as the animal bolts away from a nearby pen where the men are preparing for their rodeo.

None of this backstage chaos is apparent to the dozens of fans clomping up the creaky wooden stairs into bleachers at Hansen Dam Equestrian Center on a recent Saturday morning. They are here for a classic Mexican rodeo, or charreada, a lavish display of horsemanship whose roots stretch back four centuries to the Spanish haciendas of colonial Mexico.

While the men known as charros excel at macho feats like riding bucking bulls and leaping from one galloping horse onto another, the women and girls perform more of an equestrian ballet.

Riding sidesaddle in squads of eight, they expertly weave their horses across the ring in smooth synchronicity. The female teams, called escaramuzas, light up the drab corral with bright dresses adorned with ribbons or lace.

When their horses prance in a graceful row, the escaramuzas resemble silk fans brushing over the gritty arena floor. But a moment’s inattention can be perilous, leading to equine collisions that make the performance look more like a game of bumper cars than an artful dance.

Gabby Gandara, a 14-year-old from Sylmar, rides for one of the youngest teams in Southern California, a group of teenagers from the San Fernando Valley.

The girls train twice a week, all year round, at Hansen Dam Equestrian Center. For a few years, they were called Arco Iris, or rainbow. They recently renamed themselves Charras de la Noria, after a town in the Mexican state of Durango. The group will perform at noon Sunday at the San Fernando Valley Fair, which takes place at the Hansen Dam Equestrian Center, 11127 Orcas Ave. in Lake View Terrace. For a recent exhibition, Gabby and the other girls got up at 5:30 a.m. to make an early-morning practice. It did not go well.

“It was a terrible practice,” she lamented later that morning, as she scurried around her horse trailer, getting dressed for the competition. “We were going too fast. People weren’t watching each other. This is a very dangerous sport, and if you don’t look, you can crash.” But a few minutes later, when the girls on horseback gallop into the arena in their cornflower-blue dresses, all the messy rehearsals and behind-the-scenes mishaps are forgotten.

“Que bonita! Que bonita!” the announcer shouts merrily. Mexican music blares from the loudspeakers, the audience cheers, and little boys in pint-sized Wranglers and cowboy boots scramble to the front of the bleachers to watch.

Leonardo Lopez, a dapper, mustachioed horseman whose daughter and five sons were practically raised at rodeos, beams as his 13-year-old daughter, Liseth, hurtles by on a white horse.

Like many of the Mexican immigrants here, Lopez has lovingly instructed his American-born children in the art of the charreada, a symbol of Mexican pride.

The sport is full of families, and many a charro here first glimpsed his future wife riding in an escaramuza.

“A lot of people choose cars, or motorcycles, or boats,” Lopez says. “We choose horses. We take care of our horses better than we take care of ourselves.”

This summer, Charras de la Noria plans to compete against several regional teams for a chance to ride in Mexico’s national escaramuza contest in November.

The girls hope to follow the hoof prints of another Valley-based escaramuza squad, Flor del Valle, which has won the state championship several times.

For all its fanfare, this morning’s competition is only a warmup.

The points earned here will not count toward the score needed to advance to the nationals. But the day yields valuable advice for the escaramuza teams.

That’s because in the stands, sitting in the back row apart from the crowd, an immaculate blond woman clad in a black velvet jacket and a long gray skirt is taking copious notes.

Pilar Perez, an escaramuza judge from Mexico City, scrutinizes each performance and later shares her observations with each team.

So, how did Charras de la Noria do?

“They’re a new team and they have a lot of potential,” Perez says, “if they just watch their distances.”

In other words, the girls need to keep their horses evenly spaced. Escaramuzas should move like spokes on a wheel or teeth on a comb, not like cars on the Ventura Freeway.

Afterward, the girls dissect their performances, grumbling over blunders of timing that only they (and Pilar Perez) noticed. Whatever minor missteps were made, it all looked smooth as satin to Jesse Garcia, a 21-year-old from Sylmar.

“I’m just really impressed with the way they control their horses,” Garcia said. “They’ll ride one way and then totally switch directions. They make it look really easy.”