Section 2: Who Were Black Cowboys? African Origins.

Many livestock ranchers… take on mestizos, and mulattos, and natives and their own slaves as majordomos, and entrust them with the said livestock, genuine and trustworthy people.

Viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almanza, Ordenanzas de Mesta para la Nueva España, 1574.

Cattle ranching in Africa has a long history. For millennia, open-range cattle herding has been practiced in a region that stretches from the Indian Ocean in the East to where the Senegal and Gambia Rivers flow into the Atlantic. West Africans participated in long-range cattle drives and used a lasso. As enslaved Africans

were brought to New Spain, they combined their ancestral cattle herding practices with Spanish methods of working from horseback. The mix of cultures in the Americas led to the wide use of these techniques by the nineteenth century.

The panel contains two images; one is a map, and the other is a lasso in New Spain - coastal modern-day Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. Captions follow: 

Caption (1): Map of open-range cattle herding across the Atlantic Ocean from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Creditline: Adapted from a figure by Dr. Andrew Sluyter

Caption (2): Use of the lasso in nineteenth-century New Spain.

Creditline: From a copy of Sartorius (1859, plate following 181) in the collection of Dr. Andrew Sluyter