The American Western and its cowboy is a myth. In the classic, Hollywood Western—and in the literature it was based on—a white cowboy protagonist surrounded by untamed wilderness and unhinged outlaws saves the day. The genre seemed to embody all the notions that our young country idealized; freedom, the self-determination of men and the promise of a new life just over the horizon. For these reasons, the Western reigned for the first half-century of film history. However, at its heart, the Western also rests on racial conflict and erasure. But this portrayal is inaccurate. The frontier was full of people of color—Chinese immigrants, Black and Native American cowboys, vaqueros and more.
In my hometown, like in many other suburbs throughout Southeast Los Angeles, it’s not uncommon to see horses trot along the roadside, straddled by men. These men are typically immigrants who settled in Los Angeles, and it’s often assumed that they brought with them the vaquero culture of their homeland. “Vaquero,” is Spanish for cowboy and unbeknownst to many Americans, including myself, vaquero culture has been here for a long time.
What we think of as cowboy culture: the stirrups, the bandana, the ranch lifestyle and spurs—these are all staples of vaquero culture. That is to say, they are the inventions of Latinxs. Spaniards brought the techniques used for raising livestock, now associated with vaquero culture, to the newly-colonized Americas. Along with the vaquero culture, the Spanish imported horses and made themselves ranch-owners, or “hacendados.” These ranch-owners trained the native populations to herd cattle for them. Meaning the earliest vaqueros in the Americas were actually Native American.
Later, Americans settled in Texas and adopted this lifestyle. They didn’t have a name for it, so the settlers borrowed from the Spanish words “rancho,” meaning farm, and “rodeo,” the semi annual round-up of cattle, and anglicized these words to ranch and rodeo.
Just as the “hacendados” had Native Americans herd their cattle, the newcomers imported slavery to Texas in order to have Black Americans work the livestock. By the late 1800s, one in three cowboys was Mexican, and one in four cowboys in Texas was Black.
Life for the Black cowboy was relentless. They worked as cooks, riders, ropers, top hands and horse-breakers. Even when they weren’t enslaved, prejudice and discrimination were still commonplace and they were expected to do the toughest work. More often than not, if a river needed to be crossed the Black cowboy was the first to cross that river.