Colombia Passport

It wasn’t long before Bertha Trujillo decided she’d taken a fancy to the bull. A senior instructor at Cali’s bullfighting academy in Colombia, Trujillo walked by the breeding pens every day after she finished teaching class, and in one corral roamed the biggest, meanest animal she had ever seen. Even though the bull charged the fence and scuffed the ground in frenzy if anyone dared peek over the gate, she nicknamed him ‘Cariñoso,’ or ‘Sweetie.’  

Several tussles and one nearly-fractured shoulder lately, Trujillo and Sweetie soon struck up a special rapport of their own.

“He liked me to come up to him from behind and grab him by the balls,” she said, laughing. “Strange, no?”

Throughout her life, Trujillo has had many an encounter that would shrink a pair of lesser testicles. Otherwise known as the ‘Morenita del Quindio,’ she is one of the first female matadoras – or bullfighters – in the world.

While other female bullfighters such as Conchita Cintrón (who died last February) may have earned more fame and praise from international celebrities like Orson Welles, perhaps none have had as long and as perilous a career as Trujillo. While Cintrón and other female bullfighters fought mainly from horseback, Trujillo has always fought on foot. In a career spanning forty years, she killed 2,748 bulls. She was gored eight times, and received seven bone fractures and eleven concussions.

But the physical injuries were the least of her problems. Male toreros repeatedly refused to join her in the ring, and she was banned from fighting corridas in Mexico City and Madrid, the most prestigious bullfighting arena in the world. Her passionate marriage with another one of Colombia’s most acclaimed bullfighters, Marco ‘El Colombiano’ Gomez, ended bitterly over what she says were personal rivalries.

“It wasn’t as though anybody treated me more comfortably, just for being a woman,” she said. “But when it came to bullfighting, I was always treated as an equal. If anything, I was given the fiercest fights of all.”

How Bertha became La Morenita

Trujillo, who was born in Armenia, a city in Colombia’s coffee region, says she has three ages, the artistic, the personal and the professional. In true Colombian feminine fashion, she will only disclose the artistic, which she says “has always been about twenty years old.” As an orphaned girl, raised by an aunt and a grandfather, she was fascinated by the young bulls raised in the Armenian pastures.

“My girlfriends were always saying come on, let’s go to the movies, and I would say, no, I want to go and watch the bulls,” she said.

At age 14, she married Marco Gomez, a much older bullfighter who later became her coach and mentor.

“When I asked him to begin teaching me, I didn’t have any intention of actually doing any bullfighting myself,” she said. “I just wanted to know the why and the how of things, because it was such a big part of his life.”

With her husband’s encouragement, she trained by fighting toros cebuses (humpbacked bulls) and toros criollos, a particularly nasty mixed-breed that will repeatedly attack a bullfighter with kicks, bites and even its tail. But soon she moved on to fighting high caste bulls.

“The last time I ever saw a low-pedigree bull, it was a steak on the table,” she said.

By May 12, 1968, she made her official debut as a matadora in Mexico, with her husband watching on. That time, she said, because no other male bullfighter was willing to share the ring with her, she finished the corrida herself – facing and killing six bulls, alone. The first bull she killed during her official ceremony was called ‘Presumido,’ and at 485 kilograms, weighed nearly ten times more than she did.

The Morenita del Quindio and her husband were soon selling out plazas from Lima, Peru to Houston, Texas. There, Trujillo fought a bull decked with NFL-style shoulder pads, since strict animal-rights laws dictated that no animals could be injured. The extra padding did not make for a nicer bull.

“He tossed me up into the air,” Trujillo said. “When I got up from the ground, I saw the Americans had put this giant sign in the stands, like the kind you would use for a football game. And in flashing lights the sign read, TORO – 1, MORENITA – 0. So I thought to myself well, I guess they think the bull won that one.”

For better, for worse

In late 1968, she was invited to a press conference in Mexico, where she met the three American astronauts who’d recently completed the first lunar landing. Through a translator, they joked that she should try bullfighting on the moon. “It’s tough enough on the ground,” she told them.

And the more acclaim she won inside the bullfighting ring, she said, the tougher things became with her husband. Other bullfighters mocked him for his unusual wife, sneering that he should stay at home with a dustpan and broom while his wife gutted bulls in the arena.

“People are very impudent, and it was very distressing for him,” Trujillo said. “It never bothered me. People would call me crazy, all sorts of things. But if you’re a woman who fights bulls, you have to stop paying attention to people.”

Marco Gomez was increasingly fearful that she would be seriously gored or killed, she said, and also increasingly suspicious of other people’s intentions towards his wife. Once in Spain, she had to fight in a suit borrowed from a chubby female matador, Juanita Cruz. Her husband refused to let her tighten the baggy costume, she said, for fear that the crowd would ogle her more prominent waist.

The breaking point came later in Spain, when she was offered to conduct a series of exclusive fights. Gomez demanded that his wife refuse – instead, she left him.

“He just didn’t like it – I don’t know why,” she said. “He said he was afraid that something would happen to me, but I was more famous than he was in Spain and Portugal during that time, and he knew it and I knew it. I think it was personal and professional jealously. Things just ended very badly between us.”

Despite the legions of admirers that both Gomez and Trujillo gained as a bullfighting power duo, she said the two of them were always loyal to each other. “Then again, you never know with men,” she said. “They always have their sneaky ways of doing things.”

Cali

Trujillo continued fighting bulls until she retired in 1990, and helped establish Cali’s prestigious bullfighting academy some years before that. As an instructor at the school, she would watch and critique videos recorded while the young students battled humpbacked bulls just as she did many years ago. The last time she saw her ex-husband was during his retirement ceremony in Medellin in 1989, where she made an unexpected appearance.

“He wouldn’t speak to me, so I came as a surprise,” she said. “His sister helped sneak me in. When he saw me sitting in the stands, you should have seen his face. Right in the middle of the fight, he came up to me and kissed me in front of the whole stadium. There were people crying in the audience.”

They did not speak again after that. Trujillo has since found another romantic partner, although she said she does not want her ex-husband to know. She now contents herself with her students and with befriending ‘Cariñoso,’ the violent bull that lived in the Cali breeding pens. She was delighted when he began peering his sharp horns over the fence, waiting for her to emerge from class every day.

But administrators at the Cali bullfighting plaza were increasingly nervous that she would seriously injure herself, in her attempts to stroke, pet and even ride the bull. They decided to ship Cariñoso off to a farm outside of the city. Trujillo accompanied the animal on the journey.

“We were riding in a truck, and I just cried and cried, I couldn’t stop,” she said. “The truck driver kept turning his head and looking at me. And finally he said, ‘Ma’am, I don’t think you would ever cry for your husband the way you cry for that bull.’”