Vaquero
The vaquero is a horse-mounted livestock herder of a tradition that has its roots in the Iberian Peninsula and extensively developed in what is today Mexico from a method brought to the Americas from Spain. The vaquero became the foundation for the North American cowboy, in Northern Mexico, Southwestern United States, Florida and Western Canada.
The cowboys of the Great Basin still use the term "buckaroo", which may be a corruption of vaquero, to describe themselves and their tradition. Many in Llano Estacado and along the southern Rio Grande prefer the term vaquero, while the indigenous and Hispanic communities in the age-old Nuevo México and New Mexico Territory regions use the term caballero. Vaquero heritage remains in the culture of Mexico, along with the Californio, Neomexicano, Tejano, Central, and South America, as well as other places where there are related traditions.
Etymology
Vaquero is the Spanish word for cowherd or cattle-herder, from vaca, meaning "cow", and the suffix -ero used in nouns to indicate a trade, job, occupation, profession or position. It derived from the Medieval, which means cowherd, from vacca, meaning “cow”, and the suffix -ārius used to form nouns denoting an agent of use, such as a dealer or artisan, from other nouns.A related term, buckaroo, still is used to refer to a certain style of cowboys and horsemanship most often seen in the Great Basin region of the United States that closely retains characteristics of the traditional vaquero. The word buckaroo is generally believed to be an anglicized version of vaquero and shows phonological characteristics compatible with that origin. Buckaroo first appeared in American English in 1827. The word may also have developed with influences from the English word "buck" or bucking, the behavior of young, untrained horses.
History
The origins of the vaquero tradition come from Spain, beginning with the hacienda system of medieval Spain. This style of cattle ranching spread throughout much of the Iberian Peninsula, and it was later brought to the Americas. Both regions possessed a dry climate with sparse grass, and thus large herds of cattle required vast amounts of land in order to obtain sufficient forage. The need to cover distances greater than a person on foot could manage gave rise to the development of the horseback-mounted vaquero.Arrival in the Americas
During the 16th century, the Conquistadors, and other Spanish settlers brought their cattle-raising traditions as well as both horses and domesticated cattle to the Americas, starting with their arrival in what today is Florida, Mexico and Central America. Among the earliest Spanish Vaqueros in the Americas were in Spanish Florida who arrived with Ponce De Leon in 1521 with their Andalusian cattle. The traditions of Spain were transformed by the geographic, environmental and cultural circumstances of New Spain, which later became Mexico and the Southwestern United States. They also developed this culture in all of western Latin America, developing the Gaucho cowboys in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and Peru. In turn, the land, and people of the Americas also saw dramatic changes due to Spanish influence.The arrival of horses in the Americas was particularly significant, as equines had been extinct there since the end of the prehistoric ice age. However, horses quickly multiplied in America and became crucial to the success of the Spanish and later settlers from other nations. In “Libro de Albeyteria”, the Spanish-Mexican horseman and veterinarian, Don Juan Suárez de Peralta, asserted that horses were so abundant they “roamed wild in the countryside, without an owner” and that there were “horses and mares that are over twenty years old, and they die of old age without ever seeing man.”
The earliest horses were originally of Spanish, Barb and Arabian ancestry, but a number of uniquely American horse breeds developed in North and South America through selective breeding and by natural selection of animals that escaped to the wild and became feral. Spanish army Captain, Bernardo Vargas Machuca, wrote in 1599, that the best and finest horses were the Mexican ones, stating that they were “light and marvelously fast, they rein well and respond to punishment, without bad habits like those from here in Spain, and they breed better and stronger hooves.”
The Mustang and other colonial horse breeds are now called "wild", but in reality are feral horses—descendants of domesticated animals.
16th to 19th centuries
The Spanish tradition evolved further in what today is Mexico, and the Southwestern United States. Most vaqueros were men of mestizo, and mulatto origin while most of the hacendados were ethnically Spanish.The vaqueros in New Spain in the 16th century were mostly mulatto and black, with the natives also taking part. By the 1570s, though, mulattoes and blacks had become the overwhelming majority, especially the former, as a result from the high mortality rate of the indigenous Mexicans due to European and African diseases and war, according to a Mexican Mesta ordinance. The ordinance, dated March 5, 1576, states:
“Don Martin Enriquez &c. Inasmuch as by the older cattle breeders of this New Spain it has been reported to me that all the cattle ranching, as well as the branding, collecting and removing the steers for the butcher shops, and doing the rodeos, was almost universally done by Mulattos, and since there began to be cattle, and cattle ranching, they had never received more than twelve, fifteen, twenty, and at most up to twenty-five or thirty pesos a year; and that for the last two years now, as there had been a high mortality of Indians who also helped in the said cattle ranching, the said Mulattos had demanded higher wages, and asked for fifty, eighty, one hundred, and even two hundred pesos, and they did not want to continue working if they were not given the said wages...”
By the late 16th century, with the growth of the mestizo population, mestizos and mulattoes had become the bulk of the vaquero population. In “Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions”, Spanish Priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón explained the distinct geographic, environmental and cultural circumstances of Mexico and the racial composition of vaqueros:
“Since in this land it is so necessary, so common and so easy for every kind of people to ride on horseback, because all the land is very rough, the settlements are very far apart, the roads lack provisions, and horses and other beasts exist in large quantities and along with this there are many herds of cattle where large quantities of Mulattos, Mestizos, Indians and other vile people work as vaqueros; and although the majority of those in this occupation of vaquero are mestizos or mulattos, even so I make mention here of this because Indians also take part ”
In Santa Fe de Nuevo México, however, both Hispano and Pueblo people owned land and livestock.
Those early vaqueros in the 16th century, whether slave or free, lived on a cattle estancia and worked for a single cattle baron for most of their lives. But towards the end of that century, in the Bajío region and in the Kingdom of Nueva Galicia, the largest cattle ranching region of all New Spain, a new type of vaquero began to appear. Called “hombres de fuste”, “vagamundos”, and “forajidos”, these vaqueros roamed the Mexican countryside on horseback going from village to village, estancia to estancia, working for the highest bidder. They were superior horsemen and spent their entire lives on horseback. Many were runaway black or mulatto slaves, others dabble in the crime of “abigeato”, among other crimes. They carried weapons such as an arquebus, desjarretadera, sickle, and knives. Spanish priest and auditor Gaspar de la Fuente warned of the existence of these outlaw nomadic vaqueros in a report to the king, dated April 1, 1603 in Guadalajara:
“The number of Mestizos and Mulattoes has grown so much in these realms, and so have the excesses and crimes that they commit every day, striking terror to the heart of the population, who is unable to do anything about it, because as Vaqueros, they ride on horseback with desjarretaderas and scythes, and they gather in gangs and nobody dares to confront them. His Majesty would remedy this by ordering that none of the aforementioned be able to carry such a weapon in a town or in an uninhabited place if it is not on the appointed days that they are cattle hunting, and in the company of their boss...”
In another description, in a letter dated April 20, 1607, by Spanish priest and lawyer Luis Ramírez de Alarcón, states:
“In the Royal mining town of Zacatecas and towards the north, it fills up with Black, Mestizo and Mulatto outlaws, all of them Vaqueros, and they cannot be captured and be punished because they have light horses and protection from the estancieros these people are agile, robust and grow in their generation and multiply too much, and one can very well expect trouble, because there are men that gather 300 horsemen from these outlaws to work as vaqueros, and most are well armed with strong cueras, arquebuses, scythes, desjarretaderas and other weapons”
Andrew Sluyter argues that the lasso originated among Mexican vaqueros. A set of discriminatory laws passed by the Mesta in 1574 prohibited black, mulatto, mestizo, and indigenous vaqueros from owning or keeping a desjarretadera, a hooked lance used to capture and kill cattle. Those caught with one would receive a punishment of either a fine of 20 gold pesos—ten months of pay for the average vaquero—or at least 100 lashes in public. Black and mulatto slaves fared worst since they received no salary, so the automatic punishment was lashing. According to Sluyter, black and mulatto vaqueros circumvented the law by roping from horseback as an alternative way to capture cattle. He further argues that the saddle horn has a specifically Afro-Mexican origin, and is derived from West African saddle designs where the horn was used to hang bags.