These Cowboys Build a New Juneteenth Tradition at a Rodeo in Portland

Ivan McClellan, a photographer, was captivated the first time he came across Black cowboy culture at a rodeo in Oklahoma years ago.

He saw Black people donning cowboy hats and saddling horses, images that inspired him to fully document that community in his work.

This year, though, he wanted to go a step further. Mr. McClellan and Vince Jones-Dixon, a city councilor in Gresham, Ore., sought to host a Juneteenth rodeo in Portland, one that would bring together the Black cowboy and cowgirl communities across the Pacific Northwest.

On Saturday, they unveiled the inaugural Eight Seconds Juneteenth Rodeo in the Portland Expo Center, where the Western lifestyle was showcased through barrel racing, bull riding and glimmering, weighty buckles.

“You see the cowboy, and it’s a shorthand for independence and grit and all of these things about America,” said Mr. McClellan, who is Black. “But then you combine it with Black culture, and it just wiggles your brain and disrupts things that you thought were true.”

Mr. McClellan and other attendees on Saturday remarked on how Black cowboys and cowgirls were fusing their fashion with Western staples: gold chains peeking out from button-down plaid shirts; women with acrylic nails adjusting their dusty bluejeans; cowboy hats flat across the front, popped up over the sides.

“It’s taking the things that we know about Black culture, and it’s taking the icon of the cowboy — John Wayne, Clint Eastwood — it’s taking that icon and disrupting it,” Mr. McClellan said.

Jarron Owen, a bull rider from Centralia, Wash., who attended the rodeo, said such events have rarely been organized in the region.

“There’s such a small community of Black people who rodeo on the West Coast,” Mr. Owen said. “To have a Black rodeo in Portland is big.”

More than 2,000 people attended, Mr. McClellan said. They stomped and cheered as bull riders jostled and swayed, struggling to remain mounted on the animal.

Mr. McClellan said they planned to make the rodeo a Juneteenth tradition.

“The Western world was bone white when we came in,” he said. “We started to sprinkle in some Black folks into that world — and make some change.”