Marco Bell

Cowboy culture holds a unique place in the global imagination because it exists simultaneously as a lived tradition and a constructed mythology. This duality has made the cowboy one of the most enduring and influential cultural symbols in the United States. The American cowboy is often seen as a symbol of freedom, grit, and rugged individualism—an icon carved into the collective imagination through cinema, folklore, and national myth. But behind the stoic silhouette lies a more complex and multicultural reality, one shaped by Latino, Native American, and African American horsemen whose contributions have long been obscured or erased.

In places like Florida—where cattle culture predates the Western frontier—the cowboy becomes both a real figure and a projection. Rodeos, uniforms, rituals, follow a coded language that says who belongs and who doesn’t. Clothing becomes performance, gesture becomes inheritance. And the myth persists, polished and rebranded, even as its origins are forgotten.

This project explores the visual anthropology of cowboy culture today, as contested space. Who is seen, and who is not? Aspiration, exclusion, labor, and the power of myth to rewrite truth.

The American frontier was never monolithic. It was layered, and borrowed.