Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida : The Saga of Cesar Rincon (review)

Classic bullfighting has been an essential element in the history and culture of Spain and selected parts of Latin America for many centuries, yet foreign scholars often appear reluctant to include the Fiesta Brava in their depictions and interpretations, or at best they treat it as a marginal, even exotic, appendage. This may be because they do not understand the technicalities and nuances of the spectacle, or because they are uncomfortable with the perceived brutality and bloodshed. Allen Josephs, whose prior interests include the lives and works of Ernest Hemingway and Federico García Lorca, seeks in this volume to extend to a larger audience an appreciation of tauromachy/toreo through the career of torero/matador Julio César Rincón Ramírez.

His father from Bucaramanga, Santander, his mother a native of Tenza, Boyacá, César Rincón was born in the Colombian capital in September 1965 and lived much of his childhood under modest conditions in that city's south side. It was his father, himself a frustrated torero, who moved César into the taurine world for which he seemed so naturally prepared. His mother provided more of the inspirational and emotional drive. It all culminated in Rincón's spectacular performances in Madrid and Josephs' commitment to turn that story into a book. Almost half the text takes us through the rise to celebrity (1991-1992); the remainder covers the next three years of national and international adulation.

However, bullfighting is more than capes and swords, verónicas and picadors. From Josephs' account it is clear that toreo is tradition, art, and passion; it is also business, politics, nationalism, and lots of luck. This is a symbiotic relationship: if the matador does not draw the right bulls, he has very little chance of having a good afternoon. And, compounding all the dangers to the body inside the ring, the matador can suffer reduced capacity from health problems acquired outside. In the case of Rincón that was the hepatitis C he apparently contracted from an emergency blood transfusion he received in 1990 following a near fatal goring in Palmira, outside Cali. Thus, in Josephs' words: all of his triumphs "had been achieved, to some degree or other, in spite of the disease" (p. 361); some of his periodic lapses and his eventual retirement were because of it. Now, "barring a medical miracle, the saga of César Rincón, matador de toros, is finished" (p. 362); he resides mainly in Spain where he owns extensive property and breeds bulls.

From his public debut at age eleven, Rincón attracted attention, praise, privilege, and expectations. For the most part he ultimately justified those feelings. By the early 1990s, Colombia was "a country devastated by civil conflict and defamed by the drug cartel" (p. 28). Starting with his parade through Madrid's Puerta Grande de Las Ventas del Espíritu Santo on 21 May 1991, the first of four consecutive times, Rincón had become a national hero, grouped by some with Gabriel García Márquez and Fernando Botero. By overcoming "Spanish prejudice against Colombians and the Colombians' own taurine inferiority complex" (p. 106), the young "taurine ambassador" (p. 31) had given his "unhappy homeland" (p. 28) something to cheer about, a ray of hope inside the gloom. (The national soccer team in that era was doing much the same, until its disastrous performance at the 1994 Mundial.)

This heavy tome may be difficult to read for non-aficionados of tauromachy. It has lots of detail, corrida by corrida, bull by bull. But it provides some intelligible explanations of taurine history, terminology, and techniques as well as insights into the place of bullfighting in the national cultures of several countries. And it recounts a moving human story. I just hope another historian will...