Souvenirs,materialities and animal encounters: Following Texas cowboy boots

Introduction

I disembarked the plane and followed the signs to the baggage carousel, passing glass display cabinets filled with boots. These were cowboy boots – brown, black, snakeskin, lizard skin – with underslung heels and ornate, ostentatious designs, inlaid sewn butterflies, chillies and scorpions. At any other airport, waiting for a suitcase, one might linger in front of an LCD screen showing a loop of local news and weather updates. Here in Texas, there is a cabinet filled with locally crafted cowboy boots, studded with rhinestones, tooled and carved, draped in heavily textured leathers. Welcome to El Paso – the cowboy boot capital of the world.

In this article, rather than bypass cowboy boots as a superficial or transitory object, I want to pause for a moment, to dwell on this peculiar souvenir, as a material item that links tourists, animals, manufacturing and regional cultural tradition. The Texan boot is more than a specific type of footwear, but a fashion-souvenir object that, as we shall see, comes together – is literally assembled – at the intersection of histories, economies, materials and the senses (Gibson, 2010: 524). The cowboy boot is the quintessential souvenir of Texas: product of an artisanal trade with deep regional historical roots, turned into contemporary tourist consumption object.

Through this seemingly parochial fashion item–souvenir we can reflect on how humans make and enchant material things via geographical and popular cultural mythologies, and entangle ourselves in increasingly complex flows of people, animals and place (Ramsay, 2009). As Mike Featherstone (2011) puts it, material things are ‘not necessarily superficial distractions; the materiality of “stuff” has important implications for ethical conduct’ (p. xx). Souvenirs are an especially heightened type of material object in this regard (Morgan and Pritchard, 2005) – connecting tourists with circuits of craft, commodification and collecting across cultural difference (Ateljevic and Doorne, 2003; Hitchcock and Teague, 2000). Seemingly trivial cowboy boots are one such entry point into questions of morality and materiality, mobility and the value of cultural work.

In this article, I follow the Texas cowboy boot in time and place, from small workshops on the Mexican–American border (and in the case of some workshops in El Paso, within a 100 yards of that border) to large boot barns in tourist districts, from leather traders in anonymous warehouse districts to high-end fashion boutiques. The article draws on archival work in El Paso and at the Smithsonian and Library of Congress in Washington DC (where histories of bootmaking, Texan tourism and cowboy marketing were traced), and on fieldwork undertaken across Texas in 2010 and again in 2012 (when I interviewed boot retailers, bootmakers in 20 participating workshops and engaged tourists in informal conversations about boots). From these sources I begin unravelling a historical cultural economy of material production that entangles animal skins, migrant workers, Western movie stars and tourists.

Bootmaking survives in Texas as a niche cultural industry, linked to histories of Spanish colonialism, ranching, popular culture and tourism (DeLano and Rieff, 1981). Concentrated especially in El Paso, and with other centres of production in Fort Worth, San Antonio, Houston and San Angelo, cowboy boots are made in small workshops with reputations for craftsmanship – serving a market dependent on working cowboys, Texan corporate executives, dedicated collectors and bootscootin’ tourists. The iconic Texas cowboy boot is a mythological design, in that it has only the most tangential links to practical agricultural origins. But it is also a very material object of mobility – made by hand, by (mostly) Mexican migrant artisans who use slowly accrued haptic skills with a variety of leathers to assemble an artefact of fashion, fable and travel.

Behind the remarkable longevity of cowboy style – epitomized in boots – is the allure and continuing marketability of cowboy imagery in a global cultural economy (Hobsbawm, 2013). The cowboy myth is one of the most enduring American pop culture fabrications. But as we shall see, the story is not nearly so entirely disembodied: cowboy boots also enrol the mobility and materiality of animal skins, workers, tourists and souvenirs. Following the boots requires exploring visuality, sensuality and materiality: the myths of the lonesome rider and the frontier landscape, the promise of mobility enshrined in the boot designs themselves, the tactility and animality of the skins with which the boots are made. In rural work, in film, on stage or in the rodeo ring, and at festivals, in America and beyond, an assortment of clothes, boots, holsters, horses, saddles and spurs visualize and hyperbolize cowboy identities. The cowboy boot is an especially multivalent object: a malleable signifier, the wearing of which enables macho, camp and conservative masculine bodily identities to be performed, as well as country femininities, tourist fantasies and brazen sexualities (Gibson, 2013). The cowboy boot links nineteenth-century cowboys as a specific type of agricultural worker, with contemporary urban tourists, popular culture, and the global leather trade.

The approach I take here in following the boots is from cultural economy, an interdisciplinary field of scholarship frequented especially by sociologists, geographers and political scientists, which begins with a stated phenomenon, thing or scenario, and traces qualitatively the relationships that unfold in situ between humans, technologies, other living beings, institutions and overarching ideologies (Amin and Thrift, 2007; Gibson, 2012). In the tourism context, cultural economy has much in sympathy with what Coles et al. (2005) describe as post-disciplinary critique: viewing tourism less as a coherent ‘production system’ or even a distinct phenomenon, and more as an outcome of jostling and overlapping assemblages, a hybrid social–natural–economic formation blending different industries, the state, ‘nature’, the informal sector, the capitalist and non-capitalist economies and all manner of technologies, materials, substances and infrastructures (Gibson, 2009: 329). In this case, it is a souvenir – the cowboy boot – that provides the starting point for analysis. Much tourism studies focuses on the tourist – their proclivities, mobilities, encounters – or on place, as the setting or stage for tourism. ‘Tourism’ has become overly fetishized, ‘as a thing, a product, a behaviour’, (Franklin and Crang, 2001) belying its inseparability from other forms of mobility (Hall, 2005; Sheller and Urry, 2006). In this article, I want to start with the humble souvenir, as a more prosaic entry point, yet one emblematic of cultural, economic and ecological entanglements.

The argument accordingly contributes to an emerging research agenda in tourism studies focused on materiality, and especially around souvenirs and their entanglements in cultural economies of craft production, host–tourist interactions and material affordances (Ateljevic and Doorne, 2003). Beyond research on souvenir markets and tourist purchasing preferences (e.g. Asplet and Cooper, 2000) are such questions as the meaning of souvenirs and for whom it bears that meaning (Hitchcock and Teague, 2000); the agency and inherent qualities of souvenirs in relational networks of translation (Jóhannesson, 2005); souvenir objects as repositories of memory and recognition (Franklin, 2010); souvenir-giving within wider familial and cultural contexts (Kaell, 2012); and the extent to which souvenirs facilitate the performance of ‘polysensual tourism experiences’ among tourists who are self-aware of their status as tourists (Morgan and Pritchard, 2005: 29). As discussed below, such polysensual performances enrol not just the visual but also the haptic touch, and smell. And in the case of boots, we can move from the souvenir as affective object to consider its very fabrication, following not just the whole commodity ‘thing’ but its constitutive materials, into darker regions of animal slaughter and leather trading. The kind of moral economy that results hinges on both the means and manner of production, and the modes and spaces of consumption.

In following the boots, I accordingly trace three threads: historical legacies and reclamations of the past; materialities of animal encounters; and the politics of boot production and consumption. These are not the only possible threads – elsewhere, for instance, I have emphasized the intersectionality and performativity of masculinities through cowboy fashion (Gibson, 2013) – but they are nevertheless threads that highlight materiality, mobility and moral complexity in our interpretation of tourist souvenir objects.

Historical legacies

The generally accepted wisdom is that cowboys emerged as a specific form of frontier rural worker in the American south and west, a variant on the already-present Spanish–Mexican vaqueros who worked under poor conditions on colonial cattle ranches from the 1500s onwards (Dary, 1989). In the colonial expansion of New Spain vaqueros were important figures of conquest, nature management and permanent occupancy. Vaqueros were far from a romanticized figure: rounding up, moving and branding cattle were considered some of the lowest forms of work, and vaqueros were effectively indentured labour. The vaquero’s form of pastoral work moved northwards through the 1700s and 1800s as cattle ranching spread into modern California, New Mexico and Arizona and Texas, where Americans ‘adopted and modified many of the vaquero’s tools, techniques, and customs and thereby created their own cowboy culture’ (Dary, 1989: xi). The period from the 1860s to the 1880s was characterized by gigantic trans-continental cattle drives from Mexico and Texas up to railheads in Kansas, across California and the West and up into the high plateau Rocky Mountain States. The archetypal cowboy is said to have emerged within this relatively short, confined time period – before the advent of fences, stock feed and railways.

The accoutrements of cowboy style mostly stem from this period, from Spanish–Mexican antecedents: cowboy saddles and lariats retained vaquero style; their riding style reflected an Andalusian past (which in turn was a hybrid with Moorish influences) and horses and bulls retained Mediterranean genetic code (Dary, 1989: 7–8). The practice of branding cattle with unique identifying markers was Mexican, as was the use of the rope lazo (later lasso) to trap cattle, the practice of wearing spurs on ankles as a disciplining technology for horse riding (cf. Hurn, 2011), and rodear (to ‘go around’ or to encircle), the act of rounding up cattle to prevent them from becoming too ‘wild’ (which became rodeo). The iconic ‘look’ of cowboys, so central to later pop culture, also reflected vaquero origins: protective chaparreras (chaps) and bandanas were Mexican, while the Spanish sombrero evolved into the cowboy hat (George-Warren and Freedman, 2006). The cowboy ‘look’ has a distinctive material cultural history, and that history is entwined with Spanish colonialism.

The exception to this is boots: originally desperately poor and barefoot, vaqueros could not afford riding boots. The iconic cowboy boot emerged rather later, as a hybrid blend of Civil War–era military and English ‘Wellington’ boots with vernacular bootmaking adaptations, notably in Kansas and Texas (Beard and Arndt, 1992). Such adaptations included a sharp toe point, high-heel and reinforced steel arch (for finding and locking into stirrups securely) and high vertical tops for protection from scrub, with stitching patterns to reinforce the tops and prevent slouching. Early boots from the 1880s and 1890s have the silhouette of the classic cowboy boot, though without its later embellishments.

Notwithstanding the agricultural origins of Texas bootmaking, diffusion of frontier myth was already rampant by the time of the great cattle drives (Gibson, 2013). Indeed, by the 1850s, and preceding the golden age of the cowboy on the cattle trail, American readers were already devouring ’the tall tales in which … the mythic hero of the Tennessee wilderness, battled nature, killed Indians with his bare hands, and subdued wild animals’ (Rupp, 1999: 54). By the 1860s and 1870s working cowboys were ‘aware that their occupation had attracted the popular imagination, and some tried to cash in by writing their stories or giving exhibitions … By the late 19th century most … probably knew that their occupations exemplified heroic masculinity’ (Wilk, 2007: 23).

Cowboy mythology spread rapidly in the late nineteenth century. The cowboy figure globalized early, through Remington and Russell paintings, dime novels, postcards, children’s toys and stories, sheet music and fashion, and then later through silent and singing cowboy movies, country music radio, television Westerns and films (Hobsbawm, 2013). The cowboy ‘look’ completely relied on the fantasies of urban audiences for its endurance. Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show started an urban craze for all things cowboy – ‘children’s toys, chocolates, candies, cigar boxes, cabaret songs, operettas, books, comic books, postcards, anything that could be printed or designed’ (Rainger, 2000: 170). To attract attention and dazzle crowds, late nineteenth-century travelling cowboy showmen and rodeo tricksters wore larger and more exaggerated cowboy hats, increasingly decorative embroidered shirts and chaps, and high-heeled boots with evermore intricate inlay, tooling and silverware embellishments (Bull, 2000; Weil and DeWeese, 2004). Mobile entertainers were central to the generation of the cowboy ‘look’, including boots.

Another kind of mobility also came into play: that of tourists. As early as the 1850s, tourists could be found at places such as St Louis (at that point on the perceived western edge of Anglo-American civilization) seeking glimpses of Western frontier life and Indian culture, decked out in leather shirts and riding boots in preparation for an ‘authentic’ Western experience (Nottage, 2006). City dwellers purchased Western costumes as tourists, visiting ‘Dude ranches’ across the West from the 1870s onwards (Manns and Flood, 1997). Newly minted states such as Montana and Wyoming marketed themselves to migrants and tourists as ‘Western’ through the cowboy figure. The cowboy costume, itself a hybrid of agricultural work needs and pop culture, became de rigueur ranchwear for an entirely new form of tourism – enabling tourists to ‘go native’ by adopting what was perceived as local dress, and participating in such activities as horse riding and cattle roundups.

Cowboy clothing as we have now come to know it – Western snap shirts, chaps, blue jeans, boots, hats – then settled into a mass-production formula in the 1930s and 1940s with the rise of rodeo, Wild West shows, and visual media, especially film (Bull, 2000). Wild West performers, rodeo riders and Western silent film stars such as Tom Mix and Buck Jones sewed their costumes themselves, or had extravagant outfits made by expert tailors such as Nathan Turk, Rodeo Ben, and Nudie Cohn, conveniently concentrated in Hollywood (Nudie and Cabrall, 2004). Another phase of cowboy mobility ensued, with screen idols such as Hopalong Cassidy following the earlier trails of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Shows to Australia and beyond (Elder, 2013). Rather than buying stock clothes from dry goods stores (as might working cowboys), rodeo, film and recording stars had tailors and bootmakers produce evermore stylized and exaggerated designs. The lines and embellishments of cowboy clothing and boots were steadily dramatized in order to amplify masculinity and sex appeal for cinema audience and live crowds at rodeos or concerts. In consequence, nationwide demand grew for decorative boots, a seemingly authentic, and yet always invented, American apparel. Television magnified this demand in the 1950s and 1960s with serial Western dramas and the intense marketing of childhood heroes. A proper pair of cowboy boots was essential for dressing up and playing ‘cowboys and Indians’, an expression of youthful adoration for cowboy stars.

To meet this demand, over a period of three decades, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the Western wear and bootmaking industries aggregated and expanded in key urban centres in the West. Cowboy shirts, jackets and jeans grew as domestic apparel industries in Denver (Rockmount, Miller), Los Angeles (H-bar-C, Nudie) and San Francisco (Levis), while bootmaking concentrated in both El Paso, with its cheap labour and access to skilled Mexican bootmakers, and Fort Worth, a major cowtown with access to investment capital (in neighbouring Dallas) and growing tourist numbers. In addition, El Paso had ample skilled (but cheap) Mexican labour, and was (and still is) a major leather trade import/export city, with major railroads, highways and both formal and informal routes of leather importation concentrated there.

Behind tourism’s aggrandizing of the myth of the American West, and behind cowboy pop culture, was a specialist post-war cultural/fashion industry supplying the various essential costume elements. Lines of hats, shirts and boots emerged from companies such as Justin, Tony Lama, ACME and Nocona – a handful of once-tiny bootmaking workshops who up-scaled production to become quasi-Fordist factories churning out standard line boots. They supplied metropolitan department stores, Western wear retail chains in Western and Midwest cities (servicing both the ranch and costume cowboy markets), and sold boots via widely popular mail-order catalogues that enabled East Coast Americans to buy ‘genuine’ Western boots from afar. The boots themselves were marketed as pop culture objects, and then in the 1960s and 1970s increasingly as souvenirs in Texas. The models carried suitably macho, adventurous frontier names: ‘The Idaho’, ‘The Ranger’, ‘The Laredo’, ‘The Thunderbird’, ‘The Stallion’, ‘The Sharpshooter’ (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Cowboy boot designs from the 1940s to 1960s evoked frontier masculinity through ‘tough’ product-line names and the use of exotic leathers, though they also incorporated decorative embellishments as a result of popular culture hyperbolization. This advertisement is from a 1962 Jackie Wolfe Ranchwear mail-order catalogue, a common means for farmers, East Coast cowboys and tourists to order boots, and covers the full design spectrum from the workmanlike ‘Plainsman’ to rodeo-flashy ‘Quantrill’.

As with many other forms of commodity production, the off-the-shelf side of the Western wear industry has since largely headed offshore, to China and Mexico, where labour and leathers (poorly tanned, lower-quality) are substantially cheaper, and where automation has speeded up production and further reduced costs. Yet, in a few places, especially El Paso, Fort Worth, San Angelo and San Antonio, custom bootmaking workshops have survived. Some such as James Leddy Boots in Abilene, Texas, are orientated towards local ranchers, law enforcement officers, car dealers and graduating college kids, who want custom-made souvenirs, work boots or ‘going-out’ dress boots. A few such as JB Hill in El Paso and Mercedes in Fort Worth specialize in flashy exotic skinned boots for corporate boardroom wear. Other workshops such as Rocketbuster in El Paso have benefited from the increased interest in the heritage of bootmaking, the Americana collector scene and the possibilities of selling customized retro kitsch boots via the Internet. There is also now an exclusive artistic bootmaking scene, centred on individual creativity, and solo artisans such as Stephanie Ferguson and Dave Allen, who have 6- to 12-month waiting lists for their expensive, artful boots.

Workshops interviewed for this research described tourists as an increasingly important component of their market. Big bootmaking companies such as Tony Lama and Lucchese, both still with factories in El Paso, sell boots to tourists in factory outlets on interstate junctions on the outskirts of the city. Meanwhile, niche custom makers such as Tres Outlaws and Rocketbuster in El Paso and ML Leddys in the Fort Worth Stockyards Historic District aim to sell vintage designed boots to discerning tourists. They are featured in Lonely Planet guidebooks, and have generated a small but consistent trade with high-end, usually wealthy collectors who visit principally to be fitted for boots – as one bootmaker in Fort Worth described: ‘we have a lot of people that literally fly into town in their private plane, come here, get measured, get back on the plane and go home. We go pick them up if that’s what we have to do. That happens way often’.

In hip tourist districts of Austin and Dallas, there are specialist antique boot dealers. In Fort Worth, thousands of tourists buy boots to wear to rodeos, or to clubs such as Billy Bob’s (the world’s largest honky-tonk). At one level, this is dressing up and playing cowboy–cowgirl as part of a holiday. At another, such tourist consumption is a loose link to the dude ranch tradition, revisiting, reconstructing and reclaiming the Western myth: a counter-modern turn of sorts focused on ‘consuming, reviving, reusing and reappraising older objects’ (cf. Franklin, 2011: 161). In this case, it is crucial that the boots are vintage styled. This form of souvenir consumption ‘hold[s] still in an aestheticized manner, the look, the feel, the technology, the actual materiality and culture of times past through its objects’ (Franklin, 2011: 165, emphasis in original). For collectors, boots are seen as living remnants of a rural, pre-modern, pre-Fordist manufacturing technique, things made well by human hands – and in the case of custom workshops often by the very person who measures one’s feet. Workshops purposely hold onto archaic production techniques such as hand-pegging soles and carving personalized lasts (shoe moulds) that are kept on file for future reference. The names of bootmakers and places of production are proudly labelled inside the boots – provenance assured.

Materialities of animal encounters

A second thread is the manner in which boots bring tourists into contact with nonhuman others, through the trade in animal skins. There is an especially visceral element to this kind of tourist–souvenir encounter. Where tourism studies has considered the place of nonhuman animals, it has tended to be through themes such as tourists gazing at animals deemed wild or scenic (cf. Curtin, 2005; Franklin, 1997), or assessing the ethics of animal welfare in tourism (Hughes, 2001). Meanwhile, a growing theme in research on souvenirs and materiality is to disrupt ‘the assumption that objects simply await enlivening by human subjects’ (Ramsay, 2009: 198). In the case of cowboy boots, tourists come into grizzly contact with an assortment of nonhuman animals, feeling their dead skins, smelling them, wearing them.

This thread invites reflection on the animate qualities of the boot and its components, as footwear and souvenir. Jane Bennett’s (2010: vii) invocation towards the ‘vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations’ is relevant here: to consider the capacity of things to disrupt everyday life, to ‘act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (Bennett, 2010: viii). In this case, there is a deep paradox between the making and selling of boots, which requires the absolute power of humans over animals skinned for their leather, and the inherent agency, and indeed the resonant animality, of the very skins from which they are produced. The latter lingering animal qualities – of leather’s feel, smell and strength – pre-empt human engagement. Of animals brought into human networks of industrial production, they have ‘tendencies and directions of their own, which makes their enrolment in agential networks different and more problematic in practical and ethical terms’ (Jones, 2003: 295). The tendency of skins, as leather, to retain animal traces is in Texas responsible for the textural, sensual responses elicited both among bootmakers who manipulate skins into boots, and in tourists by touching, feeling and smelling hides.

Resolving this paradox with Bennett’s argument about vibrant nonhuman matter is fraught: bootmaking requires an absolute rendering of animals as inanimate, the reduction of diverse beings to a selection of available leathers (Figure 2). But those animal skins continue to have affective power after death; indeed, boots are only marketable because of their feel, smell, colour, texture. The expected performance of tourists is to discuss with boot retail assistants which animal skins they want on their boots, on their special souvenir. Custom bootmakers especially discuss with customers which batches of leathers smell and feel great, and often where they were sourced. Meanwhile, part of the skill of bootmaking is the ability of craftspeople to know the feel, strength, malleability and application of various skins (from various parts of animals) in the construction of the object. Master bootmakers know how to best position and how far to stretch a skin over a last, which parts to use on hardwearing heels and vamps, which skins to line the uppers against which human skins rub, which kinds of snake or lizard skin to use as inlay for decorative purposes. All of this is premised on the human mastery of animal deaths for industrial processing, while the preconfigured animal qualities of skins resonate as a constraint and enabler of possibilities.

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Figure 2.

Leather swatches from various animals assembled for consumer choice at a cowboy boot workshop in Texas. At one level, biodiverse animals are reduced to mere assortment of materials for human consumption; at another level, their skins retain animate power through their smell, feel and colour, and in their naming – the latter crucial to the ultimate monetary value of the custom-made cowboy boot.

El Paso retains centrality in this scene because it is where the leather is traded, enabling bootmakers to feel the skins first before procurement. Workshops in El Paso interviewed for this research repeatedly cited this as a key strategic advantage of locating in that city. According to Rocketbuster:

you can get leather anywhere, but here you can actually go look at it and touch it … here we can go and touch everything. Mum and Pop boot shops around the country have to order stuff and hope for the best.

And, from its heyday as factory hub in the 1960s, El Paso is where most of the ageing Mexican bootmakers live; craftspeople who learned how to feel and tool leather over the decades. This haptic craft knowledge, in combination with the plasticity, durability and texture of particular skin types, makes a boot wearable, comfortable and individual (cf. Sennett, 2009). Skins used with care, craftsmanship and creativity last much longer than factory-made shoes and boots; they age and mature, moulding to accommodate the quirks of one’s feet. Collectors care and treasure them – in the case of custom-made boots, these are expensive objects costing from US$500 to US$10,000 – and have them resoled and wear them for life. They are put on mantelpieces, brought out for special occasions and become family heirlooms. Although premised on the slaughter of animals for human utility, this form of bootmaking inserts animal materiality in the immediate lives of humans, on their walking feet – where peculiar forms of animate agency persist.

Making things: boot production chains and political economy

A third thread arises from the manner in which souvenirs also link tourists to global geographies of trade – in this case of leather, and accompanying questions of the lives lived by the animals being worn: those culled (such as kangaroo, which for decades has been one of the most commonly used skins, because of its combination of strength and softness), quasi-domesticated animals farmed for skins (especially alligators, crocodiles, and ostriches) and those still hunted ‘wild’. The tourist browsing boots in a Western wear shop or flipping through samples of leathers in a custom boot workshop is not spared from acknowledging the animal origins of the material. Tourists unaccustomed to recognizing the animal origins of their footwear can be overheard asking whether the animals were raised in farm-like conditions (appealing to a sense of what Lubinski (2002) called ‘benevolent dominion’) or hunted (for many Americans, seen as a ‘fairer’ playing field for the animal). There are attendant ambiguities in both possible answers. Shop assistants in boot barns are rarely able to answer tourists’ questions accurately about where the leathers come from and the conditions under which the animals lived. Retail assistants will not reveal (or even know) that leather from alligators and snakes can be obtained by skinning them alive (Plous, 1993). In boot barns selling cheap mass-produced boots, hidden from view are more complex global production chains that, for instance, link high-quality cowhide from tanneries in Italy to deforestation in the Amazon basin (Siegle, 2013).

Custom bootmakers, on the other hand, can point quite precisely to the provenance of skins: kangaroos, for instance, are culled ‘wild’ in Australia (under premise of biodiversity conservation), their skins shipped to Italy for tanning and then imported into the United States; ostrich is farmed and tanned in South Africa (American attempts to farm ostriches have failed because of poor knowledge of how to tan their skins, and are limited by stricter environmental regulations on tanning). Whereas once alligator skins came from Florida, where it was hunted ‘wild’, it is now farmed and tanned in Southeast Asia and Brazil. Elephant, hippo, giraffe and wildebeest skins made their way onto mid-twentieth-century boots via poaching in Africa. When I toured workshops in Texas in both 2010 and 2012, some custom bootmakers showed remnant stocks of those leathers (stocks they inherited as part of ‘handed-down’ collections from previous generations of bootmakers). Such skins have been progressively banned from the leather trade since the 1980s and did largely disappear from commercial boot production – only for some of them, notably elephant, to reappear in the last few years as supposedly ‘legitimate’ supplies have resulted from culling programmes and sanctioned hunts in Africa. Some bootmakers insist on using only commercially raised leathers and steer clear of imported skins with likely dubious provenance (implying a moral preference for domesticated over ‘wild’ nature); a couple preference kangaroo and calf skins and specialize instead in delicate inlay work on retro boots, avoiding ‘exotics’ altogether. Others buy the whole range of possible animal skins from leather traders in El Paso and are reticent to discuss where they come from. One El Paso bootmaker even spends considerable periods travelling the world himself in order to source skins – to alligator farms in Brazil, to tanneries in France, Italy and Japan, so he can feel the highest quality, most expensive skins in the world before buying them. The boot as souvenir object therefore also invites consideration of both the animal rights’ debate and a post-wilderness environmental critique.

The comparison with other forms of footwear and leather products is worth making, too. Just as certain animals are culturally encoded as okay to eat (and others taboo) (Franklin, 1997), it has become mundane to wear cattle on our feet via sneakers or business shoes, to use leather handbags or furniture – and to be desensitized to the animal origins of such materials (though not others, such as fur). ¹ Beyond vegans, how many people purchasing sneakers, ballet slips or leather bicycle seats consider the animals contained therein? In Texas, some tourists are clearly revolted upon seeing an array of animal skins on cowboy boots beyond the ‘normal’ cow leather. But this encounter is also a confrontation with the reality of death and the utilitarian purposes to which humans put animals. Unlike animal meat, which is rendered inanimate and impersonal through euphemisms such as ‘pork’, ‘beef’ and ‘veal’ (Plous, 1993), in boot shops, the animals are labelled – indeed, are a central part of the attraction. And unlike cow leathers used on sneakers and many handbags, which are coloured and cut to belie animal origins (‘temporal and spatial distancing … to insulate the public’ (Plous, 1993: 20; see also Purcell, 2011), on cowboy boots the texture, imperfections, smell – the animality of the skin – is upfront and even celebrated.

A final set of complexities stem from the politics of boot production and consumption: custom boots are expensive and are usually a one-off purchase for tourists – except for the most ardent, and wealthy, collectors. They are made to last lifetimes, playing on the cultural association between leather and connotations of ‘classic timelessness’ (Leslie and Reimer, 2003). Boot collectors fly into El Paso or Fort Worth to be measured up after spending weeks or month planning a pair of boots. Mass tourists might rarely indulge to this extent, but they evidently do spend hours in boot shops in a quandary over which pair to buy. Visiting a bootmaking workshop or even a cheaper boot barn is a time-consuming, and expected, part of a holiday in Texan cities. Boots are not disposable things – a far cry from many other souvenirs, but highly aestheticized objects that, like tattoos, are worn on the body as overtly symbolic markers of personal style and taste. The same kind of thinking goes into buying them: which designs, and skins, are the most accurate statement of one’s personal identity and style? The diversity of styles, boot heights and subcultural inflections is massive (punk boots, rock ‘n’ roll boots, line-dancing boots, ‘sexy’ boots, ‘tough’ masculine boots bordering on motorcycle gang style, elegant boots, novelty boots). From a political economic point of view, the bootmaking industry thus has much more in common with fashion and cultural production industries than with other more traditional manufacturing industries: many product lines, customization, small workshops and a very high degree of aesthetic/design content.

Nevertheless, in recent years, attempts have been made to transform this market into industrial-scale production and consumption. Cheap boots, made using automated techniques and computer-aided design (CAD) technology in China, Thailand and Mexico, are increasingly flooding the market, available in large, cheap boot barns on the interstate junctions outside El Paso and the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. They too sell boots made of exotic skins – especially crocodiles, alligator and ostrich, but with even less certain provenance – and on boots where corners have been cut in manufacturing technique to make them comparable in price with sneakers. Such boots depend on cheap labour, with glued rather than pegged soles, plastic heels and machine-embroidered stitching. Such boots – increasingly dominating the tourist market in El Paso and Forth Worth – depend on leather connected to an outsourced tanning industry in countries with low labour costs and poor environmental regulations, and increasingly widespread, and much more difficult-to-trace, global sourcing of skins (Knusten, 2000). The ethical complexity of wearing animals on our feet is thus cut across by other moralities: of industrial-scale production and the invisibility of downstream suffering; of the disposability of poorly made material things (and their environmental consequences); and of labour exploitation.

Conclusion

Cowboy boots are the product of an especially vivid form of regional cultural production, and a souvenir object filled with paradox: they evoke an idealized past of frontier masculinity and hand-crafted production. They enable self-conscious performance of ‘Western’ and ‘country’ tourist identities, and are objects of nostalgia, but also reaffirm human violence – bounded by the necessity of breeding, raising, hunting, killing and wearing animals (Buller and Morris, 2003: 217). And yet, the curious case of cowboy boots also opens up space for debate about acknowledging animality and the agency of nonhuman others, even after death (cf. Jones, 2003). Meanwhile, the increasingly mass-produced boot market maintains the visibility of the skin and its animal origin, but draws the boots, and the tourists, into different kinds of exploitative relations and geographies of material things.

Another lingering question beyond resolution here is ontological, bringing to mind Heidegger: in the case of cowboy boots, when does the material cease to be an animal skin and become ‘leather’, a production material, something else entirely? (cf. Calarco, 2008: 16). In the case of cowboy boots, they are marked as containing certain ‘leathers’, but their makers talk of ‘skins’. For the animals, their sentience is of course lost at death, but their agentic qualities persist. Also unresolved are questions about what kinds of ecological and material knowledges we carry with us in everyday life, expressed in the relationships we might have with the things we wear. Just as knowledge of local butterflies or wildflowers may have faded with time, so too have we become distant from the animal origins of our shoes and handbags. In the case of cowboy boots, a seemingly inane tourist souvenir goes some way towards encouraging people to confront animality, to think about our connections to nature (even if mediated by animal death). Certain objects are thus, as Ramsay (2009) argues, ‘enchanting and enchanted’, objects of attachment and estrangement (p. 200).

Meanwhile, custom bootmaking survives, despite cheap imports, because the boots are distinctive, stylish (to most, at least) and are an evocative souvenir of Texas. Beyond nostalgia for a frontier past, custom boots are also a prime example of the renaissance in high-quality crafting; arguably what Featherstone (2011) promoted as a

greater use of localized craft designs, to produce higher-quality, better-made, longer-lasting goods with greater sensory-aesthetic qualities, [that] would encourage the kind of small-scale, artisanal and sustainable forms of consumption required to support more ethical and aesthetic ways of life. (p. xxii)

Buller and Morris (2003: 217) point to the dilemma that while posthumanist thinking encourages us to see the subjectivity of non-humans as beings, modernity continues to put them on our plates as meat. And, as provoked here, on our feet, as shoes and boots. Texan boots depend on the continued killing of animals for footwear; they continue to disassociate consumption with pain (Plous, 1993), but nevertheless highlight the materiality and animality of skins. Cowboy boots aestheticize death but push consuming tourists to consider – even if temporarily – their own moral positioning vis-a-vis wearing hides. For, even those of a disposition to disavow animal welfare concerns and thus wear ‘exotic’ skins unselfconsciously do so in full view. Ostentatiousness as well as the resonant sensory qualities of skins ensures that animal origins cannot be masked. A seemingly superficial souvenir of a trip to Texas thus entangles paradoxes of animal ethics and political economy: of craft production, mobilities of migrant labour and the leather trade. On the one hand, cowboy boots exemplify the brute capitalist appropriation of animal life for profit, while, on the other, the agentic qualities of the constitutive materials ‘multiply the actors and complicate the politics involved’ (Castree, 2002: 111). A shopping trip for boots in Texas is one fleeting moment where modernity’s denial of animal subjectivity is overcome, however problematically, and a new and ethically fraught form of tourist–animal encounter is enabled.