Upcoming Petco Park Rodeo is a Threat to Public-Safety

By Erin Evans

As a border city, San Diego is proudly supportive of our neighbors, family, coworkers, and friends who are Mexican, Mexican-American, Chicano/a/x, Latino/a/x, as well as the wide range of peoples from regions that aren’t Spanish-speaking. People who live on the San Diego side of the colonial border or who live on both sides of the border are the reason we all enjoy the vibrancy of our “border town.”

We support Dreamers, we march for people incarcerated at the border, and we provide sanctuary to asylum seekers and refugees. Simply, we welcome everyone, and we do not welcome hate. At least we shouldn’t. 

This is why I’m surprised that our city and the Padres are so blindly welcoming the rodeo to Petco Park for the first time in January. By welcoming the rodeo, we are not only welcoming animal abuse, we are welcoming a “sport” that is rooted in colonialism, and we are welcoming fans who are predominantly hostile towards immigrants, whether they are documented or not. We are also welcoming a company, C5 Rodeo, that has close ties with not just conservative interests, but alt-right conservative interests.

I didn’t even have to do a lot of research to determine that C5 actively garners audiences that are aligned with alt-right and anti-immigration interests. All I had to do was explore their Instagram profile, @c5.rodeo . They have 25,300 followers, and they are following 1,651 other profiles, which tells you that they are big enough to be selective in terms of the profiles they choose to follow. 

One of these profiles, just one, that C5 chooses to follow is called @.offendingeveryone. Go ahead and check out the profile, especially the post called “Letter Kids”, wherein they cyber-bully high schoolers who identify as LGBTQ+ , or the one called “Asian Girl,” wherein they bully AAPI high schoolers. There is also the Canadian, antisemitic, gay bashing profile, @.jboy000, and so many more. 

Again, this was a deliberate choice of the company, and it’s an important indicator of C5’s ideological mindset, a mindset they most likely are not advertising widely. What I found in their list of followers was so disheartening I stopped looking and started writing this. I encourage you to check it out and see the various types of hateful venom C5 supports on social media. 

There is also the larger problem of the Padres and San Diego welcoming a sport that is a vestige of violent Western expansionism and settler colonialism. Some of you reading this are thinking, “but the rodeo is even more popular in some Mexican states! How can that be Western settler colonialism??” 

Spain was/is a prolific colonial force that brought myriad violent practices that are now touted as “traditional.” For instance, cockfighting is also hugely popular in Mexico and is an established vestige of Spanish colonizers. Cockfighting and the rodeo are products of socially constructed “native” traditions that are projects of settler colonialism. They are obviously powerful products because their violent colonial histories are largely silenced. 

While these historical underpinnings are important, there are also practical dangers to public safety that the rodeo will bring to downtown San Diego. I can’t count how many rodeo protests and demonstrations I’ve attended over the last 30 years, one of which was in Poway last month. 

I am not exaggerating when I say that at least once during every single demonstration I have been personally accosted with misogynistic insults. At least five times that I remember I was followed by men openly trying to intimidate me while walking to my car. At the Poway protest I was called a “dyke” once, which felt like a reprieve because it was only once. (I should mention that I am a pretty traditional looking white, cis-woman.) 

Through my 20s and 30s I attended demonstrations at the Grand National Rodeo when it was held in the Bay Area, a region known as a “liberal sanctuary.” One of the primary protest organizers was a darker-skinned, cis-man who had a Spanish accent, and he was called derogatory names, told to “go back where he came from,” and physically intimidated so often that it became a part of our yearly protest routine.

These hateful attitudes are more prolific than we assume, but there is an ease with which people express these attitudes at the rodeo that doesn’t happen at other public events. (Well, except maybe at rallies for a certain leader from our previous administration.)

That ease exists because rodeo audiences are a cluster of people who share the same hateful attitudes. Downtown San Diego is a dense area, with people who are unhoused, people who are undocumented, people who are trans, people who are Jewish, people who are women, people who are Black and Brown, people who wear Palestinian keffiyehs, and other people who are often targets for hate crimes. 

The rodeo is going to bring together masses of closed-minded rodeo fans who will get drunk and riled up while they’re cheering on violence against animals. At the closing of the rodeo those fans will leave the stadium and flood our streets. 

While my heart hurts for those animals, I also genuinely fear for public safety because of that flood. Rodeos are usually held in venues that are off the beaten path, not in the downtown area of a densely populated city. That is because of the volatility of those drunken, hyper-masculine, closed-minded fans. 

A lawsuit was filed against the Padres and C5 Rodeo based on charges of animal abuse and health code violations, and I encourage readers to learn more about the torturous conditions animals experience during the event. 

The abuse alone should be enough to ban rodeos all together. But even setting that aside, San Diego should not welcome the predominantly alt-right-minded rodeo fans en masse into our beloved Petco Park and downtown. Instead, we should continue to protect our city as a sanctuary for animals and for historically marginalized people. 

About the author: Erin Evans is an Associate Professor of Sociology, San Diego Mesa College, Faculty Vice President, AFT Guild Local 1931. Court Appointed Special Advocate, Voices for Children