Cattle Call Rodeo

On Friday and Saturday nights at the Cattle Call Arena in Brawley the gates open at five and the show starts at seven. On Sunday the gates open at eleven and the rodeo begins at one. The 2026 performances fall on November 13, 14 and 15. The arena stands on 50 acres in River Park, on Cattle Call Drive, along the banks of the New River. Shaded stadium seating rises over the bucking chutes, and above it an announcers stand holds the sound and scoreboard electronics.

Each performance opens with the Grand Entry. Curt Rutherford, whose uncle Ed was one of the founders, produces it. The committee describes it as “a big production number in a Broadway show, with music, choreography on horseback, a stirring narration, brilliant colors, costumes and flags.” The Rough and Tough Wild Horse Race follows. Committee member Don Alford, who once competed as a saddle bronc and bareback rider, puts it together. Several three-member teams try to catch an untrained bronc, saddle it, mount it and stay aboard until the horse reaches a marked area of the arena. In the committee’s telling, the race’s shotgun start signals the beginning of action at every performance. At the 2023 Sunday show a Calexico Chronicle reporter watched teams of a shankman, a mugger and a rider work against a two-minute limit while the horse was “dragging and busting up its contestants.” Ryan Ford of Brawley told the paper, “The wild horse race is my favorite part of the rodeo.” His wife, Michelle, named the bull riding.

Six PRCA events and a hometown penning

Cattle Call is a PRCA season opener. The riders, ropers and WPRA barrel racers who travel to Brawley come for an early edge in the world standings. Competitors confirm only weeks out, and in the words of the committee’s own site the lineup “comes together right up until game day.” The card carries six PRCA events: bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, steer wrestling, tie-down roping, team roping and bull riding. The WPRA brings the barrel race, and the ticket site adds women’s breakaway roping. Team Penning closes on a local note, with five teams of local cowboys and cowgirls racing the clock to pen three steers. Chino Torres, the committee’s newest member, first saw the wild horse race and team penning as a high school student. He rode in the wild horse race from 2003 for more than 15 years and has competed in team penning since 2021.

The stock belongs to the Flying U Rodeo Company. Its home ranch is in Marysville, in northern California, and it travels to more than 50 rodeos and bull ridings a year across the West. It often winters some of its stock in and around Brawley.

Friday night rodeo is recent. The Holtville Tribune reported that the 2024 Friday show, on November 8, was only the third. Before 2022 the rodeo ran on weekends alone. That night the paper’s reporter saw the Cattle Call princess and junior princess helping pen calves after the tie-down runs. The calves kept eluding capture, and the announcer blamed the clown, saying his jokes were “messing with the calves.” Charlie “Too Tall” West clowned and John Harrison worked as barrelman. Between events, riders circled the arena carrying the sponsors’ flags. In the mutton busting, children lay on the backs of unsheared sheep and held on while the sheep tried to buck them off. Most of them ended in tears. A girl no more than 5 years old held on for almost 20 yards and won a rodeo belt buckle. Susan Godinez, who has attended since early childhood, had a tip for the stands: “Bring a blanket, it gets really cold up in the stands even if you’re in warm clothes.”

The mutton busting takes 10 children per performance, ages 5 to 8 and under 60 pounds. Before each show, children 10 and under dig in the arena for 100 dollars in the Dollar Dig. Sunday is Family Day, with free pony rides, face painting and a roping exhibition before the rodeo, and the ticket site adds a petting zoo. “Grandpa” Morales of Brawley, who has attended for 40 years, described his family’s routine to the Chronicle in 2023: “It started with our kids and my wife used to make our matching shirts, and now we buy our grandchildren their matching shirts. Our little grandson did the mutton-busting today.”

Local non-profit organizations run most of the food stands. They sell carne asada burritos, tri-tip sandwiches, Polish sausage, hamburgers, corn dogs, nachos, kettle corn and homemade ice cream, along with deep-pit barbecue and a Beer Garden. The committee also sells beer tabs and brisket dinners ahead of time, and buyers redeem them inside the arena. In 2024 the most popular plate, according to the Tribune, was a local church’s pulled pork sandwich with coleslaw and cheesy potatoes. A jerky maker, Baja Vida, told passersby that all its beef was grown and bred in Brawley.

Chili on Main Street, mariachis on the plaza

The rodeo is the Rodeo Committee’s work. The days before it belong to the Brawley Chamber of Commerce, which in 2026 presents the celebration with One World Beef under the theme “The Platinum Roundup.” The program runs from November 6 to November 15. It opens with a golf tournament at Del Rio Country Club, which the Imperial Valley Press calls the inaugural one. The Chili Cook-Off and Rib Contest follows on November 7 at 9 a.m. on Main Street and the plaza, back on what organizers call its traditional morning schedule. The chamber expects more than 7,000 people there. A Kick-Off Mega Mixer at Mechanics Bank follows on November 9.

Mariachi Night falls on Wednesday, November 11, with mariachi bands on stage and more than 65 vendors of food, crafts and cultural goods. The chamber calls it the biggest community event of the Imperial Valley. Its own page gives the crowd as 14,000 in one passage and more than 16,000 in another.

On Saturday, November 14, the day begins in the dark with the Chuckwagon Breakfast, a community fundraiser of pancakes, eggs and coffee. The chamber’s page tells people to arrive at 5:30 in the morning. The Imperial Valley Press lists the breakfast at 5:00 a.m. in South Plaza Park. The grand marshal starts the parade at 9:30 by the chamber’s account and at 9:00 by the newspaper’s. The parade runs 1.5 miles through Brawley, with floats, classic cars, marching bands, horses, walkers and riders, and the chamber estimates 15,000 people along the route. In 2024 residents set out lawn chairs on Main Street the night before to hold their places. The City of Brawley estimates that the rodeo and its events together draw 200,000 people to town.

Many of them come from far off. “We get people from all over southern California, we get people from Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Texas and in the past we actually had people from Canada,” Ramiro Urias, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Brawley, told KYMA in 2023. Yadira Valdez of Brawley told the Tribune, “I come every year and see so many people that I don’t get to see throughout the year because sometimes they only come for Cattle Call.”

A river bottom of rattlesnakes and skunks

The celebration began in 1957, when the Chamber of Commerce noticed that Brawley had no annual event of the kind its neighboring valley towns held. The chamber decided to salute the cattle industry with a parade and a rodeo, and the rodeo went up on the Brawley High School football field. A contest was held to name the event. Mrs. Rex Hudson won it with “Cattle Call,” and the committee’s history gives her name as Marial Hudson. The history says the name seemed right because the Imperial Valley was cattle country, and that she received a $25 government bond from the chamber, “a handsome sum then.” The same history traces the name to a 1934 song that Tex Owens wrote in Kansas City while a snowstorm kept him in a hotel. He took the melody from “The St. Paul Waltz,” and Eddy Arnold made the song his signature tune in 1944.

After that first year, Louise Willey, Ed Rutherford, Al Smith and Dick Smith met at the Planters Hotel and decided to build a permanent arena. They chose a brush-filled river bottom owned by the city, inhabited, by the committee’s account, only by rattlesnakes, rabbits, coyotes and skunks. The four became known as the Arena Committee. They gave their own money and asked others for theirs. Local companies donated much of the equipment, materials and labor, and service clubs added to the building fund. The town pitched in and finished the arena barely in time for the 1958 rodeo, then called the Brawley Cattle Call and Imperial Valley Rodeo. Within a few years it became the Cattle Call Rodeo. One of the original bucking chute gates, built in 1958, is on display at the grounds.

Under a lease with the city, any money left after expenses and purses goes back into the plant. That money paid for an equestrian center with 24 pens, a wash rack, a round pen and a tack room, completed in the spring of 2004. It also paid for the 128-seat grandstand over the chutes, built in 2007 in what the committee calls its most comprehensive upgrade. The committee reports more than $750,000 invested in the arena over the past ten years.

The committee now has eight members. Two descend from the original group: Curt Rutherford, and Carson Kalin, the son of Louise Willey. Kalin ran errands at rodeo time as a boy. He joined the committee in 1976 and has been treasurer since 2000. In 69 years he has missed only one Brawley rodeo, when midterms at Cal Poly intervened. “Our goal is to make each rodeo better than the last one,” Kalin says on the committee’s page. The committee bills the 2026 rodeo as its 69th annual. The chamber and the Imperial Valley Press call the 2026 celebration the 70th.

The 64th, in an empty arena

In 2020 the committee weighed cancelling. It held the 64th rodeo instead, with no spectators, on November 14 and 15, and streamed three performances online. Sponsors and donors covered the lost ticket sales. “It’s one of the largest events held in the Valley, and we just couldn’t go without it,” Kalin said. One photograph from that weekend shows Ky Hamilton of Mackay, Queensland, Australia, on a bull named Hawaiian Bond in the empty arena.

The chamber moved its week online. Chili cooks filmed themselves at their stoves. The old Whiskerino contest judged beards and mustaches by Facebook likes. Parade entrants built floats no larger than 24 by 24 inches and filmed them floating in water in 15-second clips. Tony Cardenas won the decorating contest with a lawn of cowboy and cowgirl silhouettes swinging ropes, each wearing a facemask. Mariachi Night moved to a single 43-minute YouTube video. It was dedicated to Francisco “Kico” Guerrero of Desert Prosound Entertainment, who had run the sound for just about every Cattle Call event and had recently died of a COVID-related illness. Arturo Cossio had sung professionally for about 24 years and had never entered a competition. He won with 340 votes. “I think I will enter next year,” Cossio said, “but I hope it’s live.”