Richard Slatta has produced a work that contributes significantly to research on comparative frontiers in the Americas. He compares and contrasts the social, economic, environmental, and cultural factors that shaped the frontier life of the cowboy in the major Anglo-American and Spanish-American frontiers. His broad canvas includes cowboys from Alberta, Canada, and the western United States, the vaquero of northern Mexico, the Argentinian gaucho, the Chilean huaso, and the Venezuelan llanero.
Slatta’s thesis, which he substantiates with an array of primary and secondary works, is that the Spanish influence has dominated and shaped cowboy life and culture. Clearly, many factors, such as the environment, economics, and the English influence in Canada, account for significant differences in cowboy culture; but the author demonstrates the extraordinary similarity among cowboys, who share key values and characteristics in vastly different areas of the Americas. Cowboys everywhere performed similar types of labor, for example the use of la riata (lariat) during the round-up. Cowboys also shared similar riding techniques and work characteristics as well as dress, values, social roles, and range laws. Not only did the cowboys get their original horses and cattle from Spain, it was also the source of their horsemanship and fierce independence.
The author traces the development of cowboys from their Spanish origins to their demise in the late 1800s as a result of fencing, political violence in Mexico and Venezuela, farming, overstocking, economic changes, and natural disasters. Along the way, Slatta describes cowboy character (machismo) and appearance (the gauchos rode barefoot); explains the extraordinary variety of the cowboys’ habitats; and discusses their relationship with ranchers, their ranch life, and their leisure activities. Slatta also presents the cowboy (as depicted in literature, drama, folklore, and films) as a cultural symbol of national importance. In Argentina, the once-reviled gaucho became the epitome of national virtue.
Slatta writes well and provides the reader with an in-depth study of a fascinating subject. The book has lavish illustrations, a valuable glossary, and good bibliographical notes. It suffers from an excessive repetition of facts (we learn again and again that Alberta was less violent than the western United States), as well as from a failure to provide a complete analysis, especially in South America, of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Nonetheless, this is an important work that will interest any student of Latin America and that will certainly stimulate additional research on comparative frontiers.
