In the his-story written by white men, indigenous people were predators and settlers their victims. In the his-story written by white men, cowboys represent real masculinity. But the reality is far different. These same white settlers are the men who stole land from the First Peoples and hung Black people from trees. I don’t romanticize cowboy culture. John Wayne doesn’t mean shit to me – he was a straight-up racist! Jordan Reyes‘ new video “Rebirth At Dusk,” directed by Eryka Dellenbach, shatters the white supremacist myths we’ve been taught and told. Jordan’s music is beyond moving and the accompanying visual is spot on! Sand Like Stardust is the title of his new album, and it comes out on Nov. 20th via American Dreams.
We started by looking at the complex, many-layered history of the vaquero, and how the North American cowboy of contemporary imaginations descended from that through colonialism. The cowboy also symbolizes an eroticized hyper-masculinity. Through talking with friends, pulling from my past life as a horse-girl and background in Butoh, I felt inclined to imagine the cowboy as an ecosensual outsider, someone scrappy and magical with an amorous love of the land but who is reckoning with their identity’s legacy and ancestry. These juxtapositions had strong, resonant intersections with other elements, such as Jordan’s Tejano heritage, the syncretization of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin and Our Lady of Guadalupe and the psychogeography and total history of the sites of industrial ruin in Chicago’s far south that we worked with.
– Eryka Dellenbach, director
