In New Orleans, Black Cowboy Tradition Collides With Prison Rodeo Spectacle

NEW ORLEANS — Outside, along Claiborne Avenue in the Algiers section of New Orleans, Sunday looked familiar. Black children slurped snowballs in the street, adults danced around them, and Black riders eased their horses through the crowds, past corner stores and shotgun houses, hooves clapping against the asphalt. 

For Black riders like Robert Pollar, who learned to ride from his father, the Sunday scene is a ritual of care and presence that he said keeps Louisiana’s Black history alive.

“We ride so that people can see that there are Black cowboys, that we do this and this is a fun, safe outlet in New Orleans,” he said. “This is my passion, my love. I own three horses [that] I feed twice a day just to keep this tradition alive of Black cowboys, horsemanship, our community.”

But a few miles away across the river, on the floor of the Superdome, another “cowboy” story played out beneath the lights of the new Hondo Rodeo Fest — a three-day, $1 million spectacle of concerts and bull-riding.

Alongside career rodeo athletes, a select group of imprisoned men from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola — the largest prison in the country and the site of the nation’s longest-running prison rodeo — performed for a nearly all-white crowd. It was the first time Angola’s rodeo had left the former slave plantation and entered the heart of the city most tied to its legacy.

Louisiana is the prison capital of the western world — and, as Gov. Jeff Landry boasted last week, the cowboy capital of the United States. This past weekend in New Orleans, which has the second-highest incarceration rate amongst major cities, those two identities collided. 

Outside, Black riders like Pollar were parading a living history of self-determination. It is a long-standing lineage in the state where some historians trace the nation’s first Black cowboys to formerly enslaved men who blended cattle work with resistance and skill.

Inside the Superdome, Angola’s men were being rebranded as family fun and a uniquely American redemption and “rehabilitation” story. In the central event for the incarcerated participants, attendees watched as incarcerated men stood inside a hula hoop on the floor while a bull was released toward them, trampling each of them until only one man remained standing. 

The event offered a stark look at which narratives — about tradition, redemption, and the “best” of Louisiana — people are more willing to embrace. Is it a prison‑built spectacle in the Superdome, or the everyday traditions Black riders have kept alive in the streets? 

For some, the rodeo’s debut off the Farm at Angola laid bare how incarceration has become a pillar of Southern culture and economy. Samantha Kennedy, executive director of the Promise of Justice Initiative, explained the prison system is “everywhere” in Louisiana life, from men in jumpsuits cleaning up after Mardi Gras parades to incarcerated workers cooking and mopping inside the governor’s mansion and state Capitol. 

“If you take the plantation economic and power system and just scale it to a state level, that’s what Louisiana has done with incarcerated labor,” she said.

But for others, the rodeo offered a rare chance to congregate around shared values, bridging a racial gap that feels like it is only widening nationwide.

“Angola [Prison Rodeo] is a lot different. There’s a lot of people who put their life on the line, who really don’t have — I guess — life to live,” said Kahlie Aucoin, who lives in Gonzales, about 60 miles north of New Orleans. “This rodeo is a lot different. It is meaningful because [Hondo] is the first national rodeo to ever come to Louisiana. That we can have all these people here to celebrate something.” 

When the prison rodeo comes to town  

Tens of thousands poured into the Superdome over three days. The air smelled like beer and kettle corn; country music thundered as spotlights swept over a crowd dressed in pearl snaps and bedazzled crosses. A merch stand pushed “Rednecking” shirts. Attendees wore trucker hats with red and navy images of rifles and rodeo bulls and shirts that read “Make America Cowboy Again.”

In a state where more people are incarcerated per capita than anywhere else in the U.S., and Black people make up the vast majority of those behind bars, the rodeo folded seamlessly into a festival selling religion and patriotism. 

In between events, the arena became a concert venue for acts like Jason Aldean — a vocal Trump supporter whose song “Try That in a Small Town” was filmed at a Tennessee courthouse where a Black teenager was lynched and drew criticism for juxtaposing Black Lives Matter protests with images of crime and chaos — and Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band that has long woven Confederate flag imagery into its shows as a point of pride.

For Pollar, who didn’t attend the rodeo, that choice stung in a Black city where people like him ride through the streets every week. “It’s disappointing, but that is why we ride to keep our specific culture alive,” he said. 

On the microphone, commentators constantly reminded attendees of the event’s theme: “God, family, and country.” But the rodeo also showed how a tradition can travel from a former slave plantation to the Superdome. That journey reveals much about race, home, and who gets to claim their history in the modern South. 

LEFT: Some of the rodeo attendees. RIGHT: The rodeo’s themes were prominently displayed during the rodeo. (Courtesy of Hondo Rodeo Fest; Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

Photographer Drake LeBlanc, who has spent years documenting Black cowboy culture across Louisiana, has fought to keep the image of Black cowboys alive. He is descended from sharecroppers and formerly enslaved people who relied on horses and mules for work and socialization. Over the years, he has said that the Angola Prison Rodeo obscures the history of Black cowboys and makes it seem like the lineage in Louisiana is only tied to the prison system.

“Someone once told me, when they thought of Black cowboys, they thought of the Angola rodeo,” LeBlanc said in 2024. “Black cowboy culture goes so far beyond that. It’s about the true cowboys and horsemen of Louisiana, and how this culture has contributed greatly to music, food, dance, fashion, and American culture as a whole.”

To qualify for the Angola rodeo exhibition, the eight incarcerated contestants earned eligibility through good behavior and by participating in workshops with Hondo Rodeo experts. Winners of the two events at the rodeo would see the prize divided evenly, with half directed to Louisiana’s Victims Impact Fund and the remainder supporting inmates’ families. 

Over the years at the prison rodeo, broken bones, concussions, and snapped necks have become routine, often to jeers from the crowd. (Typically, participants are overwhelmingly Black, but of the eight participants invited to the Superdome, just two were Black, despite the prison being somewhere between 70% and 80% Black.)

“Black cowboy culture goes so far beyond that. It’s about the true cowboys and horsemen of Louisiana, and how this culture has contributed greatly to music, food, dance, fashion and American culture as a whole,” LeBlanc said.

Left: Kenneth Miles (left) poses for a photo with a friend, who declined to share his name. Miles called the prison rodeo’s inclusion in the Superdome “beautiful.” (Right: A group of rodeo attendees from Texas and Louisiana. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

Christean Robichaux, a 35-year-old New Orleans native whose family keeps horses in the New Orleans East neighborhood, has spent a lot of time at rodeos, primarily in Colorado. She said she grew up seeing rodeo as “white culture,” only later learning how deeply Black riders shaped cowboy history, even as her own family kept horses and a foothold in that world. 

“It does feel like some of the Black history is purposefully hidden in this culture,” she said. “I still feel really comfortable in these spaces regardless.” 

Kenneth Miles, who splits his time between the city and his land in Mississippi, said he has gone to the prison rodeo for years and called its inclusion in the Superdome “beautiful.” It is a way for people who “love rodeo” to be in the same place, no matter what.

As a younger man, he said, he might have bristled more at the racially charged themes threaded through the show and the “dog whistles” in the headliner’s music. Now, he prefers to “overlook it” and enjoy the bulls and broncs, he said, praying for people who peddle those politics.

The rodeo and Louisiana’s prison boom

When Norman Dozier was incarcerated in Angola during rodeo season, he used to stand behind a table stacked with his painting, but at the Superdome spinoff in New Orleans there was no such space for men like him. There was no art show or any chance for incarcerated people to “look visitors in the eye and call them by name.” 

To Kennedy with the Promise of Justice Initiative, that absence is the point. She described the Angola rodeo as “a kind of minstrelsy, a display of buffoonery and mockery where white audiences go to watch Black people see if they can survive.” The men may be building real skills and grasping at rare chances to earn money or feel seen, she said, but “it’s all happening inside an extremely coercive system built on maximum control over people’s bodies and autonomy.”

For many attendees of the rodeo at Angola and for more incarcerated people, the most enjoyable part of the rodeo is outside the arena where incarcerated people set up booths to sell their handmade artwork, leatherwork, and woodwork. While some are forced to sell their products behind locked and guarded fences, most others sit out in the open, able to share hugs and laughs with their loved ones.

As one incarcerated person told Capital B, it is the only time he can interact with people outside. It brings back a “familiar” feeling, he said, of being “free to exist.”

For 27 years, the prison’s twice‑a‑year rodeo was one of the only ways Dozier could see the outside world up close. He remembers the days as “a big visit,” a rare blur of family, strangers, and cash when his paintings and leather pieces could move fast enough to matter. He had taken a couple of art classes back in high school, but it wasn’t until 2016 that another incarcerated artist at Angola pushed him to “tap into” his talent, turning long nights into canvases and, eventually, a small business. By the time he came home in 2023, art was his therapy. Now he rents a booth at a mall in Alexandria, Louisiana, travels to pop‑ups in New Orleans, and sells commissions online, calling the work “lucrative” and “a blessing.”

For Dozier, it is “surreal” to be outside again, but in some ways, Louisiana today “definitely makes you feel like you’re on a plantation.”

This weekend will mark three years since his release. He’ll be going back to Angola this weekend, walking through the same gates where he once picked cotton under gunpoint, to watch the rodeo as it returns to the prison from the Superdome. 

At a press conference before the rodeo, Landry, who led the charge to bring the Hondo rodeo to Louisiana, said the opportunity to combine the million-dollar rodeo with Angola represents “everything that is great about Louisiana … family … fun … faith … our country.” 

Landry, who spoke about growing up with an uncle named “Cowboy,” has built his first years in office largely on “tough on crime” policies that may lead to more “Angola Cowboys.” In 2024, he advocated for ending parole for most new convictions in the state. 

Those laws are already reshaping the state that Dozier came home to. Louisiana locks up about 1,067 people per 100,000 residents — the highest rate in the democratic world — and after modest pandemic declines, its prison population has begun rising again. Analysts estimate Landry’s changes could nearly double the number of people in state prisons within six years. 

Even before recent legislation essentially ended the chance of parole for most people convicted of crimes, the number of people granted parole had fallen by more than three‑quarters compared with the years before he took office. For men still in Angola’s fields, that means the rodeo art tent might be one of the only places they ever touch free people’s lives — and at the Superdome this year, even that thin thread was cut.

In the shadow of the Superdome’s events, Pollar said he is trying to build a different future with the same tools of the rodeo. 

“If you’re not from here, there’s not many things for children to get into in New Orleans,” he said. “We a heavy party city. There’s a lot of violence; we need to feel like we’re getting invested in, too. It helps the children channel that energy they have from getting into the wrong things into something good.”

For him, riding isn’t about drawing more people in to watch Black culture on a stage, but about investing in the kids who are already here, before they’re pulled into the same systems that feed Angola’s fields and rodeo pens.

“The culture is beautiful. I love it. I’m just a dad trying to give these children more.”

Read More: 

• Inside the Angola Prison Rodeo and America’s Mass Incarceration Crisis
• The Legacy of Black Cowgirls
• Inside the Brown Family Ranch Rodeo in Gary, Indiana
• In New Orleans, Essence Fest Is a Celebration — but Not Always for Black Locals
• 20 Years After Katrina, Louisiana Residents Are Most Vulnerable to ‘Die of Despair’

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