In fact, Mayisha is an important part of the story she was, as the author later recounts, the founder of the youth riding program from which most of the Compton Cowboys got their love of horses. Early on, for example, he refers in passing to someone named Mayisha in a way that implies the reader should be familiar with her. The author bypasses standard conventions of reportage, though not, one suspects, consciously. In a sincere and lovely page-long passage discussing this, Thompson-Hernández explains that the horses “had the ability to turn the most aggressive gangster on the block into the sweetest version of who they were as small children.” The men achieve a sense of purpose in caring for the animals, but it’s also a form of therapy. Similar to their mounts, the cowboys themselves have each undergone hard times and trauma some have been to prison. (As horse farms go, the Compton ranch is a low-rent operation, but it still costs $25,000-$30,000 per month to keep afloat the money comes from well-heeled donors such as Magic Johnson and others.) Bought for as little as $200, they were “horses that other riders and racers had given up on.” “There’s something about the outside of a horse that’s good for the inside of a man,” as the saying goes, and these cowboys seem to know that instinctively.Īccording to Thompson-Hernández, before their arrival at the Compton ranch, the cowboys’ horses were “throwaway” animals, sometimes abused and malnourished. The one thing that does come through with clarity, though, is the magic of horses. It is scattershot and often hard to follow. They make for a narrative that can be all over the place, and the story that worked so well as a magazine piece is stretched too thin for a book. These mixed authorial roles are problematic. Returning to the same wellspring for this book, he spent a year with them - partly as ethnologist, partly as journalist, and partly as friend - and became “part of the group, perhaps the 11th cowboy.” In March 2018, the author wrote a well-regarded New York Times Magazine feature about the cowboys. When he discovered the Compton Cowboys at age 6, he was entranced. Growing up in Huntington Park, a city close to Compton, Thompson-Hernández wondered why the history of the West that he learned about in school was exclusively white. Jones showed that black cowboys were plentiful in the American West after the Civil War. Yet that popular portrayal was inaccurate: The classic 1965 book The Negro Cowboys by Philip Durham and Everett L. There was no black John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, or Marlboro Man. The cowboys here are 10 African-American men (along with a few others, including one top female rodeo star) who spend much of their lives caring for their citified horses, riding them in public and cultivating a proud image that, it must be said, is almost as important as the horsemanship itself.Īmerican culture has always celebrated cowboys it has also depicted them, almost without exception, as white.
That’s what makes the story of the Compton Cowboys such a heartening one it is as unexpected as the subtitle of Walter Thompson-Hernández’s new book, The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland. “Heartland” ordinarily evokes the image of flyover country: a horsey kind of place with amber waves of grain, such as Colorado or Texas.Ĭompton, on the other hand, is known for drug trafficking, gang violence, murders, and other banes of urban life - in short, it is not a horsey kind of place. “Urban Heartland” is an unexpected way to describe Compton, a city in the southern part of Los Angeles County.
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