Rodeo Clowns | Sam Cowie

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Sam Cowie

no. 84

June 2026

Rodeo Clowns

How cowboy culture remade Brazil

© James Marshall

Outbursts

Brazilian cowboy-influencer Pedro Henrique Biondo Matias weeps on an Instagram reel from the end of January as he crosses the border with Peru into his homeland. “It’s a joy to eat our rice and beans and to speak Portuguese again,” he tells the camera. Having ridden his mules, Ada and Oklahoma, across nine nations of both American continents as he vlogged his journey, Matias returned to Brazil for the first time in over a year for the final leg. A civil engineer and champion cattle caller with 738,000 Instagram followers as of this writing, Matias has embarked on his odyssey as an ode to Brazilian sertanejo, a behemoth cowboy-themed cultural industry underpinned by the political and economic might of the South American superpower’s world-beating agribusiness sector.

Starting in Texan cowboy outpost Fort Worth, passing through Mexico into Central America, and then from Panama into South America, Matias’s journey will come to an end deep in the interior of São Paulo state at the Barretos Rodeo Festival, Brazil’s very own cowboy mecca. Matias is a four-time winner of Barretos’s cattle-calling title using a berrante, a wind instrument fashioned from cow’s horn.

The event kicks off at the end of August, as election season hits full swing in Brazil, both the world’s fourth-largest democracy and home to more cattle than people, with 238 million bovines versus 213 million humans. Last year, the seventieth-anniversary edition of the festival saw nearly one million visits generating some $100 million in economic activity over eleven days, with a star-studded lineup of sertanejo music giants, rodeo champions atop prizewinning bulls, agribusiness magnates, and right-wing politicians from across the country.

Conspicuously absent was Brazil’s far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro. A regular attendee and star guest of the event, he was still under house arrest awaiting trial for his failed coup of 2022, following his loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Onstage amid organizers decked out in Stetsons and jeans, Bolsonaro protégé and São Paulo state Governor Tarcísio de Freitas blasted the charges against the ex-president as a “grave injustice.” Ronaldo Caiado, then the right-wing governor of Goiás state, in the heart of Brazil’s hinterland, told the crowd: “In fourteen months, one of us will be occupying the Presidential Palace, and we will return Brazil to the Brazilians.”

The Barretos Rodeo Festival is perhaps the most visible demonstration of the nation’s economic, political, and cultural power base’s inland shift over the course of the past few decades. Brazil is no longer the country of samba and Jorge Ben Jor’s “País Tropical”; sun-soaked, soft-power postcard images of Rio de Janeiro’s beaches belong to the nostalgia of an imagined past. Today, sertanejo music—which blends Brazil’s traditional música caipira with North American country and western—dominates the country’s playlists with ballads like “Ugly Fight,” “Bad Reputation,” and “Smell of Guilt.” Themes typically include lost love and betrayal, while echoing late-capitalist tropes: performative consumption, flirting via Instagram likes, and online jealousy with an emphasis on cuckoldry. There’s even a subgenre called agronejo, a kind of blingy rap but for farmers: Instead of diamonds and platinum, it boasts of abundant harvests, cattle profits, and imported pickup trucks, the preferred vehicle of insurgent interior Brazil.

Sertanejo’s success is a nod to Texas’s cultural victory over Brazil’s farming frontier—and agribusiness’s victory over the Brazilian economy, accounting for around a quarter of its GDP. Turbocharged by social media in one of the world’s most terminally online nations, increasingly...