2023-04-18 16:00:24
Why ponchos aren’t banned like sombreros
Eastwood wore the same poncho in all three films
Quelle: pa/Mary Evans Picture Library/Rights Managed
A dance ensemble is not allowed to wear sombreros at the Federal Garden Show. A piece of clothing given to Clint Eastwood by a dying man in 1966 is still allowed. The story of the rise and fall of the poncho in the white world.
Zou heard from Clint Eastwood’s lifetime achievements that he was the only white man who ever managed to look cool in a poncho. The traditional garment of the indigenous peoples of South America takes revenge for the cultural appropriation by Europeans and Americans by always appearing clumsy in it. Except for Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns of the “Dollar Trilogy”.
It is all the more astonishing that this garment is so well established in Europe half a century later. Apparently no one takes offense to this in the same way as they do to Indian costumes, dreadlocks and sombreros. A dance group of mature women who want to perform their show “Around the World with a Dream Ship” at the Federal Horticultural Show in Mannheim were talked out of wearing the wide straw hats that the Mexican rural population used to use to protect themselves from the sun. Ponchos are still allowed for women – that’s the compromise.
The poncho is apparently no longer perceived as exotic. It has arrived in the global consumer world – just like other items of clothing that we have culturally appropriated: the parka invented by the indigenous people of Siberia, or the anorak, originally a weatherproof garment worn by the Inuit.
That the guardians of cultural correctness are not as sensitive to the poncho as they are to the sombrero is astonishing given that the cloak – essentially a blanket with a hole for the head – is actually an original Native American achievement, while the sombrero is is already a consequence of European cultural transfers to the New World. The Mapuche, Inca and Aztecs did not know hats in the narrower European sense.
With the poncho, director Sergio Leone wanted to set Eastwood apart from the western heroes of the olden days, who were all “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants”. Although Eastwood is white (he is introduced as “the blond” in “Three Glorious Scoundrels”), the cloak marks him as a mystical crossover between cultures. The way he “receives” the garment also fits in with this: He gives a dying soldier his coat and takes his dirty, bullet-riddled poncho in return.
Eastwood wears the cape in all three films. Leone had bought it somewhere in Spain because he didn’t like the one Eastwood had brought from California from the outfitter Western Costume Company. There must have been at least two of these, as photos from the shoot also show Leone wearing a poncho similar to Eastwood’s. Leone doesn’t look cool in it though. Quod erat demonstrandum!
Bought in a third world store
Speaking of demonstrandum: demonstrators sometimes wore ponchos from 1968 onwards. For a time, it became a counterculture accessory worn by rebellious hippies. First you had to bring it with you from abroad, then you bought it in Third World shops and finally in any mail order company. Now it has sunk to something that no longer even culture-sensitive BuGa officials feel provoked by.
#Cultural #Appropriation #Ponchos #Banned #Sombreros