Greetings from Mexico City, where a bullfighting ban doesn't stop this matador training
In Mexico City, where bullfighting is banned, practitioners continue to train in public parks to maintain their skills. The article explores the cultural and philosophical significance of the sport, framing it as a confrontation with fear and death.
Why it matters
This piece provides a cultural look at how traditional practices persist in the face of modern legal prohibitions and changing societal values.
Eyder Peralta/NPR They practice in the middle of Mexico City's big urban park. With a pair of real horns, one of them plays the bull by gliding toward the fuchsia bullfighting cape. They're practicing to kill, but as the sunlight filters through the trees and the bullfighter dodges with grace, his hips to one side, his arms perfectly perpendicular, it looks incongruently beautiful.
"It's the ballet of death," José Luis Herros explains. But the movement from the bull looks too slow, too graceful, I tell him.
"That's the way bulls move," he says. When their head is down and it's ready to gore you with its horns, he explains, it comes at you slowly.
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