Constance Jaeggi’s Escaramuza takes as its subject the all-female precision-riding teams whose members perform intricate manoeuvres side-saddle and at speed, dressed in traditional Mexican attire. Published by GOST Books in 2025, the 128-page volume considers the practice as it continues in the United States, attending not only to equestrian discipline but also to the identities of its Mexican and Mexican-American participants.

Escaramuza developed in the 1950s within charrería, the culture of horsemanship and ranching whose origins reach back to sixteenth-century Mexico. Its emergence gave women a formative place within a tradition historically dominated by men. Jaeggi’s portraits approach the riders through this layered inheritance: physical coordination and ceremonial dress are inseparable from questions of family, migration and gender. The book also draws a historical line to the soldaderas who fought during the Mexican Revolution and later inspired the escaramuza tradition.

Photography is joined by poetry from ire’ne lara silva and Angelina Sáenz. This collaboration broadens the book beyond a visual account of performance. Portraits can register bearing, costume and affiliation, while poetry introduces another means of addressing memory, cultural continuity and belonging. The combination is especially apt for a subject in which public display and private inheritance are closely entwined.

For collectors concerned with contemporary portraiture, equestrian culture or representations of diasporic identity, Escaramuza merits attention for the specificity of its focus. It records a living, female-led practice while placing that practice within longer histories of Mexican horsemanship, revolution and migration to the United States. Rather than treating spectacle as an endpoint, Jaeggi uses it to frame a more searching account of how tradition is performed, transmitted and claimed.