09/16/2026
A.O.C should not speak every thing out of her mouth is stupid. What Marco Rubio said Horses had been extinct in the Americas for thousands of years. Cattle didn’t exist here. Both arrived with the Spanish. Cortés landed horses in 1519. Cattle followed. The ranching system—open-range herding from horseback, the reata/lasso, the saddle style, the language—came from Iberian practice that the Spanish then implanted in New Spain.
The people who did the work were mostly Indigenous Mesoamericans and mestizos trained by Spaniards. Some enslaved Africans and North African Moors were put to the same labor early on because Spanish landowners treated it as below them. That is not the same as “the first cowboys were Mexican and African American slaves.” Mexico as a nation did not exist. “African American” is a later U.S. category. The system was Spanish colonial.
Those vaqueros then carried the methods north into what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—still Spanish, then Mexican, territory. Anglo settlers later hired them, copied the gear and the vocabulary (lasso, lariat, chaps, bronco, buckaroo, rodeo), and built the post–Civil War trail-drive cowboy on top of that foundation.
Black cowboys were real and numerous. In the late 1800s cattle-drive era, historians commonly estimate about one in four. Enslaved herders worked Texas brush country before that. They mattered. They were not the inventors of the institution, the animals, or the core techniques.
So the accurate version is: Spain supplied the animals and the ranching template. Vaqueros in New Spain developed it on the ground. The American cowboy is what happened when that tradition moved into U.S. territory and mixed with Anglo, Black, Mexican, and Native riders. You can credit every group that actually did the work without pretending the Spanish origin is a myth.
That’s the word history actually has.this woman should not speak its always stupid comes out of her mouth.