Who said there were no cowboys on the East Coast? Following its 2024 Sundance premiere, general audiences finally have a chance to meet Ponyboi. The titular character, penned and performed by River Gallo, is an intersex sex worker navigating New Jersey in the precarious hours between dusk and dawn. It’s Valentine’s Day in the early 2000s, and like every great film that unravels over the course of one night, Ponyboi finds himself panicking at a crossroads. Estranged from his Salvadoran parents and endangered by his pimp (Dylan O’Brien), Ponyboi dwells at the intersection of gender and cultural identity. Should he take the path to freedom or forgiveness?
The first lines of dialogue in the film are in Spanish, a soft masculine voice saying, “There we go. You look like a real cowboy.” But the tenderness is quickly tainted by what Gallo, who wrote the film based on their own experience with forced plastic surgery and testosterone treatment, described to Latina Media Co as “feeling medicalized… like my body belong[ed] to the doctors.” The masculine voice continues, “That’s what the doctors are going to do for you. To make you a big, strong man. Like Papa.”
Gallo, a Salvadoran-American, depicts how Latin identity adds richness to but also clashes with the experiences of those who don’t fit neatly into the gendered boxes thrust upon them. The layered motif of the vaquero in Ponyboi is not only evident in the titular character’s name but also in his fringe leather jacket, his elusive rendezvous with Bruce (Murray Bartlett) who drives a Mustang, and, of course, the memories of his father.
“There’s an aspect of the movie that’s about not necessarily reclaiming the cowboy or reclaiming masculinity, but rather presenting a more varied perspective of the fact that so much of Salvadoran culture is plagued with a really horrific and toxic form of masculinity that is passed down generationally,” the star and writer explained.
Gallo begins that contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a white man in the Western U.S. to be a cowboy. Gallo was raised by vaqueros in El Salvador, growing up on the family’s cattle ranch that they still own. The film viscerally captures the beauty of the vaquero but also how the figure can represent the friction between a father’s idealized masculinity and a son’s inability to achieve the narrow expectations that go with it. It’s a dynamic Latinos know all too well.
“I have found that in making Ponyboi, a lot of what I had been thinking on is ‘How does my dad love me? How have I felt betrayed by his love? How have I betrayed his love?’” Gallo asked, “And I think it’s a complicated thing that is specific to Latino culture, specifically people that moved to America, how we relate to our fathers and how we learn to love here.”
While Ponyboi is an English-language film, these Spanish snippets are vital in coloring Ponyboi’s complex relationship to his culture. He only speaks Spanish in one scene, on a phone call with his mother, as she reveals that his father is dying. The two begin the conversation in Spanish, but Ponyboi grows upset and switches back to English. For first-generation Americans, fluency with the language can be fickle, and the scene captures that familiar territory. Not only is Gallo an astute screenwriter, but their performance shines with remarkable earnestness.
“It’s one of the parts in the movie that I’m actually most proud of,” they shared. “I always wanted to act in Spanish. My mom came to Sundance [to see the film]. And her English, she can understand it more than she can speak it – and so I was really excited for her to see that scene in her language.”
Another moment in the film that’s particularly attuned to cultural identity occurs in a space that starkly contrasts the shabby laundromat in which Ponyboi spends most of his time. It’s at the Empress – a space that’s more than a bar. It’s a sanctuary for other queer folk, and the misty, glowing cinematography amplifies its other-worldliness. The scene opens with a Latine drag performer named Gloria Rosa (Chiquitita) lip-synching to Kali Uchis. Afro-Taino Charlie, played by Indya Moore, owns the Empress, and she does not get along with Ponyboi. Despite the tension, their conversation is what Gallo considers to be the heart of the film. That the core of Ponyboi, directed by Colombian-American filmmaker Esteban Arango, deftly highlights nuances between Latin cultures speaks to the crew’s intuitive, creative choices.
“Sometimes intention just comes from the impulse of being yourself. I am a Salvadoran American, and Esteban is from Colombia, and so we were just making choices based on our lived experiences, our interests, our tastes, and those things were represented,” Gallo said. “I’m so proud of that because now I can see how much we put of ourselves in the movie.”
Gallo shared that their father picked them up at the airport and drove them to New York for the film’s premiere. I confessed that I described the film’s end and vaquero motif to my Cuban cowboy father, and he admitted that he would weep if he watched it. Ponyboi is that stirring of a feature, and even minor cultural touchstones like a mom asking if you’re hungry while already offering a plate hit just as hard as the popping guns and revving engines that comprise this mob drama from the heart.
