Spirit: Riding Free and the Frontiers of Western Girlhood: Nostalgia, Academics and Motherhood

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           Spirit: Riding Free plays on the tropes of conventional “horse fiction” filled with city girls finding themselves out of sorts in the country, bonding with a wild (or otherwise unwanted) horse, and then finding friends in an ambiguously developed but picturesque West. In this way, Spirit: Riding Free is both a fabrication of Western girlhood and to me surprisingly familiar. Arguably, a television show aimed at the five and under crowd is an unconventional space for academic discourse, but after watching the series with my then three-year-old daughter, I found myself engaged as an academic, a mother, and a horse girl who grew up racing through the last of Orange California’s namesake groves.

            The animated series, revolves around Lucky, who moves to the fictional Texas frontier town of Miradero in the 1890’s. She makes friends; tames Spirit, a Mustang stallion; and has adventures that involve runaway trains, bank robbers, and gold mines. When Lucky arrives in town via her grandfather’s railroad line, she asks, “Is this the  whole town?” Her father replies, “For now, but tomorrow we’re going to start dynamiting that land over there to lay new railroad track...and before you know it, this will be a bustling city.” Lucky’s family profits from such development through their stake in the railroad. But in Lucky’s initial act of letting Spirit remain free, we see the familiar resistance to development coupled with nostalgia for undeveloped land that inhabits the classic Western.

          This romantic vision of Lucky’s “frontier” is already cleared of the Native American peoples by the time of her arrival, but the Atakapa character Mixley, whom Lucky and her friends befriend in one episode, critiques forced relocations and recognizes the problematic nostalgic stance of settler colonialism, albeit briefly. His attachment to and violent removal from his land shows the girls that their rapidly closing frontier required erasure, and while neither the girls of the show, nor the audience meditate on the impact of such erasure, I do. The inclusion of Mixley’s story in Spirit reveals one half of the two common threads of the Catholic, and American, Doctrine of Discovery, which required the dehumanization of an existing peoples in order to ‘discover’ then desecrate the land on which those peoples live.

           In Spirit, while the brief presence of Mixley speaks to colonizer’s dehumanization of peoples in the name of development, the dangers Lucky faces often emphasize the colonial violence towards land, whether she faces a narrow escape from her father’s blasts, or a dam breaking which causes the valley to flood. And here, what I the postcolonial scholar and mother, see is the narrative of Manifest Destiny and nostalgia for the West’s untouched beauty remaining ever ironically intact.

            In between the first and second incarnation of Westworld, my friends and I sat in the kindergarten playground riding horses made of tires and imagined opening up a dude ranch on an island cut off from technology, just our horses and an outhouse. As we moved on to real horses, we’d find a new home in Orange Park Acres, its own little island. A sign hangs on all four corners of the 1.5 square miles that make up OPA. “An Equestrian Community, Founded in 1928.” The town of 5,500 or so now consists of mostly larger homes, though some of the original modest ranches and bungalows remain.

           Before I moved there, we’d drive to OPA to ride my cousin’s pony Sunshine. Back then you could tie up your horses up at a biker bar that sold great chili. Across the street grazed cattle. By the time I bought my own horse five years later, concrete was poured in much of the creek bed to help with drainage from the sprinklers watering the green lawns of Santiago Hills townhomes and the community college, both built where those cattle had grazed on yellowed desert shrubs. The biker hangout was the upscale “Farmers Market.” In junior high, we’d tie our horses up at the well-maintained hitching post daily, as we supplied our rides with Fun Dips and Twizzlers from that market. The hitching post made us feel closer to our dream of the island, the creek where the concrete stopped part of the delusion. Still we missed the cows.

            When we first started riding, the new builds occupied a small area, and once past them, we could race through orange groves, but soon an Albertson’s arrived, our favorite hill no longer stretched a half mile for races on a wide dirt trail down wild land, but instead consisted of carefully laid out squares marked with orange flags, and a gravel road. The summer before they built, we used the gradations in elevations as a steeplechase course. Also that summer, we snuck out of our houses and rearranged orange and pink flags, Monkey Wrenching before we knew the term. The stoplights that arrived on all four corners by the time I graduated high school symbolized the closing of my own fictional frontier. Today, the newest Irvine Development reaches the hill filled with cactus, where I told my two best friends that I started my period in the Farmers Market restroom and that I still hadn’t kissed a boy.

          While some might miss critiques of the development of the land in Lucky’s frontier, I saw them, but I’m sensitive to the subject as a horse girl. The only Little House episode I remember is when Laura’s dad has to shoot her mare Bunny. The closing of Laura’s frontier involved a barbed wire fence that she didn’t see—Lucky’s is yet to be closed, but the environment shows the signs. The drought, when a neighbor hoards the limited water for himself, the flood after the damn breaks, the fire that nearly took out Spirit’s herd, all a consequence of attempts to tame land of Lucky’s open range.

  

           When we were kids, we’d watch the flames lip over the open hills nearby. We’d hose off our wood shingled roofs. Much to the chagrin of the fire department, we’d ride out in the hills, and stomp out small flare ups. The firemen and their trucks at the base of Santiago Regional Park would shake their heads and thank us before kicking us out, but we knew the back roads to sneak back in. We, like Lucky and her friends, liked the danger and loved our land. Of course the fires were just one natural disaster that was an effect of another. Like the Texas of Miradero, my Southern California was defined by periodic droughts, which varied in severity, but rarely in fiery results. Climate change has not improved this situation.

        The first time my daughter watched Spirit, I messaged my horse girls. Louisa liked the horses. I watched it for nostalgia for a time and place that wasn’t. As Louisa introduced me to her favorite characters, I couldn’t help but assign them names familiar to me. Abigail was Amy, Pru was Bree, Kristen was definitely Maricela, and I, I was Lucky, minus the whole heiress to a railroading fortune. But even as I was naming them, I noticed something very different from my roster.

           Fortuna Priscilla Navarro Prescott. This wasn’t some white girl on the range. While the show rarely deals with race, the representation is not like horse girl fiction Alice Nuttal writes about for Bookriot, a fiction populated by “white, middle- or upper-class, cishet, abled girls, usually from close-knit and supportive families.” Whether it’s the mestiza Lucky, or a minor character like Javier the teenage Charreada, the show resists whitewashing the Mexican reality of Texas. And characters frequently speak untranslated Spanish. In fact, Lucky is shamed when she cannot. Pru is African American, with a horse wrangling father. I watch and think of the work of scholars like Michael K. Johnson and Kalenda Eaton who have spent much of their careers speaking to the erasure of African Americans from the national consciousness of the Western frontier. For a minute, I think we’ve made it.

           A few years ago at a conference for The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), Lawrence Coates presented a piece as part of the Western Literature Association panel. He spoke about the suburbs of Southern California as a variant of the West and one part struck me: he discussed the conspicuous whiteness of these neighborhoods. As a scholar of the West, and a child who grew up in my own version of this West, it hadn’t occurred to me to examine the whiteness of my life as a horse girl until that day at ASLE. My junior high, my high school, had high populations of minority students. But in Orange Park Acres, I lived an incredibly white life.

           Unlike Lucky and her friends, my friends were all Caucasian. It’s not that we didn’t have Hispanic people in OPA. I learned the basics of Spanish from my cousin’s nanny Aurora, I learned more from Pedro as we cleaned the horse stalls together when I was in high school, and later hired Jose, a stall cleaning baron, who employed multiple guys and moved up to OPA himself in the 2000s. Like the world of Lucky, in my world everyone spoke some transactional Spanish, but unlike her world, the Spanish speaking population had been relegated visitor status. When Pedro bought his own horse to ride around the trails and when Jose bought his modest home, I remember hearing upstanding citizen cowboys, laughing that they must be “paying the Mexicans too much.” While they didn’t say it, by that time I’d taken my first ethnic lit class. I heard the subtext: there goes the neighborhood.

           In OPA, the whitewashing of the Old West, Ronald Reagan’s cowboy image, morphed into a historical amnesia in which this faux Western neighborhood had always been white. And as a kid, even as an adult in my remembering, I hadn’t noticed the omission. As a mom raising a daughter born in rural Wisconsin in 2016, I found solace in a show that didn’t whitewash history, even if it did simplify the diversity in the West.

           At three, Lou had pink cowboy boots usually dirty from the barn. But she most enjoyed a brown and white rocking horse her great-grandfather from Wyoming had made for my husband when he was young. Lou swore she was riding with Pru, Abigail, and Lucky. More than a few times, as Lucky and Spirit reared at the end of the opening credits, Lou flipped her horse over in an attempt to rear in tandem. After the fall, Lou dusted herself off, uprighted her horse, patted his neck, and climbed back on. She was tough.

           As I researched this paper, I decided to look at reviews for the show. The critics varied from disbelief, “No one can break this horse but a TWELVE YEAR OLD GIRL?” to soreness at exclusion, “I just feel like the show only focuses on the girls. Men have a long legacy with horses. Look at the cowboys.” As I read, I couldn’t help but wonder why these men needed a show for kids to adhere to that John Wayne image so attached to that US narrative of masculine identity. But then I recognized their omission.

          Pru’s dad, the cowboy didn’t count in these men’s perception of the show-despite his presence in most episodes. Neither did Javier, despite his role as the “greatest” trick rider, and neither did Mixley despite his relationship with his horse. I’m not sure the degree to which these commenters were conscious of their omission, but they didn’t see all the men supporting these girls in the show perhaps because they weren’t white--or perhaps because the story wasn’t about them.

           My scholarship examines the power dynamics in play when we look at the intersections of colonialism, racism, environmentalism, and gender in the West, and so I saw these through lines sitting on the couch with my kid, and I loved them. These posts online, these resisters, they both failed to see these lines and demonstrated their existence in way that no essay could. These men’s narrative of Manifest Destiny assumed beneficial dominance over the land, people, and horses as part of an American identity based a fictional frontier. Yes, Spirit was just a show about three girlfriends riding horses, but it also resisted this fabricated narrative of white masculine settler colonialism. And so I thought, perhaps in watching it, my daughter’s perception of the development of the West where she spends each summer, might be just a little more complete than my own.

 

Bibliography

Johnson, Michael K. Hood-Doo Cowboys and Bonze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West. University of                 Mississippi Press, 2014.

Nuttall, Alice. “A Girl and Her Horse: Who Gets to Be a ‘Horse Girl” in Fiction?” Bookriot August 31, 2023.

Eaton, Kalenda and Michael K. Johnson. “Teaching the Black West.” Teaching Western American Literature. Ed.                  Brady Harrison and Randi Lynn Tanglen, Postwestern Horizons. Series, University of Nebraska Press,                      2020.