When I left my small town in rural Colorado for Brown University, I left my cowboy boots behind. They sat by the front door: scuffed, dusty, and still carrying a faint tint of dirt from last summer’s weekly rodeos. I figured I wouldn’t need them in Providence. Cowboy boots belonged to home – I certainly didn’t expect to see them again, least of all on the polished walkways of Brown’s campus.
But within the first week, I started spotting them everywhere – not on ranch hands or rodeo-goers, but on students in oversized blazers, flowy skirts, and carefully curated “vintage Western” fits. These boots were spotless, their wearers most likely proudly liberal, with their purpose being purely aesthetic. It was strange to see something so practical, so tied to my hometown, reborn as an ironic fashion statement in a place where few people had ever set foot on a ranch.
Back home, cowboy boots were functional. Everyone had them, and not as a political marker or fashion experiment, but as part of life.
“You wore them because they worked. Because the dirt was real, the animals were real, and the rodeo came every Thursday summer night, whether you voted red, blue, or not at all.”
My friends had all kinds of political beliefs, but when we wore out boots to watch the bull riding from the bleachers, politics seldom entered the conversation.
In my hometown and amongst my friends, politics shaped opinions, not identities. On campus, however, I have noticed a political polarization that feels sharper and more totalizing than what I knew back home. At Brown, political alignment feels more like a social ticket. Certain ideas dominate conversations, and diverging from them can feel risky, but not in a dangerous way; instead, it acts as a more quietly alienating experience. In classes and dining halls, people speak with fluency in a shared moral language, one that prizes awareness and correctness. It’s not that this culture is unkind – it’s often well-intentioned – but it can also be brittle. Politics here organizes belonging, whereas at home, belonging existed independently of politics.
That difference changes how people interpret symbols like cowboy boots. On campus, their meaning is unstable: part costume, part provocation, part personal brand. When someone else wears cowboy boots, they read as playful rebellion: a more liberal reimagining of Western toughness, minus the politics that usually accompany it.
Further, cowboy boots at Brown highlight a subtle tension in campus culture. The university encourages curiosity and individuality. However, social norms influence how symbols and personal expression are perceived. The contrast between the West’s cultural tradition of boots and Brown’s fashionable adaptation is striking, illustrating how objects carry different significance depending on where they are and who wears them.
As a predominantly non-conservative rodeo-lover from a rural town, I don’t want my boot-wearing to be read as a fashion statement, let alone as performative or ironic. For now, my cowboy boots will stay in Colorado, where they earned their shape and meaning and are interpreted as such. Tension between origin and reinvention speaks to how meaning depends on context, and why sometimes the simplest way to respect that meaning is to leave it where it belongs.