We thank John Marx, Santiago Real de Azúa, Daniel Regan, Harold Sims and João Carlos Brum Torres for valuable suggestions.

¹ Coni, Emilio, Historia de las vaquerias de Rio de la Plata 1555–1750 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Devenir, 1956)Google Scholar. Jesuit missionaries also promoted rationalization prior to the integration of Latin American cattle ranching into the world market. See Morner, Magnus, The Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits in the La Plata Region: The Hapsburg Era (Stockholm: Library and Institute of Ibero-American Studies, 1953).Google Scholar

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³ Four of Frederic Lane's essays collected in Venice and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966) deal with this subject: ‘National Wealth and Protection Costs,’ ‘The Economic Meaning of War and Protection,’ ‘Force and Enterprise in the Creation of Oceanic Commerce,’ and ‘Economic Consequences of Organized Violence.’Google Scholar

⁴ Chevalier, , op. cit., pp. 44, 46, 51ff.Google Scholar

⁵ See Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., p. 61Google Scholar; Assunçao, , op. cit., pp. 32–34, 42Google Scholar; and Mörner, , op cit., p. 47.Google Scholar

⁶ Chevalier, , op. cit., pp. 116–17Google Scholar; Gibson, Charles, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule. A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp. 90, 28081.Google Scholar

⁷ Morissey, Richard J., ‘The Northward Expansion of Cattle Ranching in New Spain, 1500–1600,’ in Agricultural History 25, (1951), 115–21.Google Scholar

⁸ Denhardt, Rober M., ‘The Horse in the New Spain and the Border-lands,’ in Agricultural History 25, (1951), 145–50Google Scholar. This happened despite Spanish attempts to restrict the access of Indians to horses (Mörner, , op. cit., p. 37Google Scholar; Coni, , op. cit., p. 91).Google Scholar

⁹ Góngora, Mario, Vagabundaje y sociedadfronteriza en Chile (sighs XVII a XIX) (Santiago: Centro de Estudios Socio-Economicos de la Facultad de Ciencias Economicas de la Universidad de Chile, 1966), pp. 5–6, 11ff.Google Scholar; ‘Vagabondage et societe pastorale en Araerique Latine,’ in Annates: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 21 (1966) 159–77. See esp. 160ff.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Lattimore, Owen, ‘La civilisation, mere de Barbarie?’ Annates: Economies, Societes, Civilisations XVII–(1962) 95–108Google Scholar; ‘The Frontier in History,’ Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche, Vol. I (Firenze: Sansoni, 1955), 103–38.Google Scholar

¹¹ These ties were the object of serious concern for the Spanish Crown, which made strenuous efforts to limit and regulate them. The best work on the subject is Magnus Mörner, La Corona espanolay losforaneos en lospueblos de indios de America (Stockholh: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1970)Google Scholar. On different kinds of interactions between Indians and non-Indians in frontier areas see for instance Assunçao, , op. cil., pp. 42–8Google Scholar; Chevalier, , op. cil., pp. 10–12, 43–47Google Scholar; Gongora, , Vagabundaje, pp. 22–27Google Scholar; Coni, , El Gaucho. p. 182Google Scholar. Finally, Louis de Armod describes the systematic character of frontier warfare in colonial Chile. He notes that many mestizos deserted the army and joined the Indian tribes and that the latter soon learned Spanish war tactics. It seems likely that deserters played a role in the improvement of Indian war methods. See de Armond, Louis, ‘Frontier Warfare in Colonial Chile.’ Pacific Historical Review 23 (1954), 125–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² On the role of the mestizo as mediator see Wolf, Eric, ‘Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico,’ American Anthropologist 58 (1956) 1065–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an extended example see Robles, Vito AlessioCoahuila y Texas en la epoca colonial (México: Editorial Cultura, 1938), pp. 118 ff.Google Scholar

¹³ On the difficulties faced by frontier administrators see Lattimore, , ‘The Frontier,’ p. 126.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Robles, Alessio (op. cit., p. 165) documents Spanish deliveries of food and clothes to Indians in northern Mexico in order to maintain peace.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Lattimore, , op. cit., p. 108Google Scholar

¹⁶ Erikson, Kai T., Wayward Puritans (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1966)Google Scholar. The examination of the complex relationships between territorial and nonterritorial forms of social exclusion is a difficult–and fascinating–area for theoretical and empirical explorations. Some of the relationships are more or less obvious, such as the tendency of frontiers to attract deviants of several kinds. Besides this recruitment effect, one can suggest that the type of territorial frontier a nation has bears on the kind of political deviant its authorities are likely to ‘discover’ and label. The presence of a powerful enemy ‘on the other side,’ for instance, will have authorities concerned with an internal ‘fifth column.’ Examples of this process are commonplace in today's world. A systematic examination of the subject is lacking, even though suggestions can be found in Erikson, , op. cit., pp. 157–59.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Mörner, , La Corona, pp. 21–23, 29.Google Scholar

¹⁸ These ‘Spaniards’ almost certainly include mestizos who had been assimilated to the white group, as was common in the early period of colonization. For a discussion of the inclusiveness of the term Spaniard at this time see Möner, , La Corona, p. 113.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 27–35, 155–60.

²⁰ During the brief period in which mestizos were not yet sufficiently numerous to constitute a major problem for the obsessed categorizers of the developing ‘society of castes,’ recognition of illegitimate children and assimilation into Spanish society happened often. Mörner, Magnus, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 25–33, 40ff, 55.Google Scholar

²¹ Konetzke, Richard, ‘Los mestizos en la legislation colonial,’ in Revista de Estudios Politicos 112 (1960), 113–29, esp. 124ffGoogle Scholar. Magnus Morner suggests that the increase in the numbers of mestizos helped to set them apart as a special group (‘El mestizaje en la historia de Ibero-América. Informe sobre el estado actual de la investigation,’ in El mestizaje en la historia de Iber-America [Mexico: Instituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia, 1961], p. 33.)Google Scholar

²² Mörner, , La Corona, pp. 30, 105.Google Scholar

²³ Portuguese racial policy, according to Mörner, responded to the same ‘basic conditions and motivations’ as the Spanish one: see Race Mixture, pp. 49–52.Google Scholar

²⁴ René Echaiz offers the interesting suggestion that frontier mestizos were even more stigmatized than their counterparts in central areas, since they resulted from unions with very primitive, nomadic Indians, themselves far more stigmatized than the pacified Indians of the center. Also they were often children of kidnapped white women. For these reasons, he argues, frontier mixed bloods were assimilated in the Indian group much more frequently than mestizos in the urban areas. See Echaiz, René León, Interpretation historica del huaso chileno (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1955), pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

²⁵ Mörner, , Race Mixture, p. 89Google Scholar; Damas, Germán Carrera, Boves—Aspectos socioeconómicos de la Guerra de Independencia (Caracas: Ediciones de la Biblioteca de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1972), pp. 29ff.Google Scholar

²⁶ For example, in a report of Don Alfonso Carrio de la Bandera, Visitador de Postas y Correos de Su Majestad, quoted at length in Assunçao, , op. cit., pp. 173–74Google Scholar. The term ‘barbarian’ was current as a designation for intractable Indians who had to be defeated or settled. The indio kdrbaro (as opposed to the indio de razori) was a moral category that could be drawn on to describe the cowboy, just as the English stereotype of the Irish laborer—or of laborers generally—provided a model for the assignment of negative traits to blacks in the forging of U.S. racism (Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll. The World the Slaves Made, (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 298–99.Google Scholar

²⁷ As Joseph Love describes it, the Brazilian gaucho clearly distinguished himself from the three other races of humanity: the baianos (other Brazilians), the castelhanos (Spanishspeakers), and the gringos (other foreigners). See Love, , op. cit., p. 12Google Scholar. Frontier cowboys all over Latin America felt that those who did not ride were beneath contempt–the ‘equestrian conception of the world’ as Gongora puts it. Poor as these people were, their disdain for the work of settled agriculturalists was so intense that attempts to develop the Argentine pampas for anything but stockraising in the mid-nineteenth century required paying enormous wages to Irish immigrant laborers; three weeks of such earnings permitted them to quit for sheep raising. Scobie, James R., Revolution on the Pampas: A Social history of Argentine Wheat, 1860–1910 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), p. 14.Google Scholar

²⁸ See Halperin-Donghi, Tulio, The Aftermath of Revolution in Latin America (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), Ch. 3, esp. pp. 85ff.Google Scholar

²⁹ The English translation of Civilizatión y Barbarie is available as Sarmiento, D. F., Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants (New York: Collier, 1961)Google Scholar; Gilmore, Robert L., Caudillism and Militarism is Venezuela, 1810–1910 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1964), p. 82Google Scholar; Hahner, June E., Civilian-Military Relations in Brazil, 1889–1898 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 141–42Google Scholar; Pàez, José Antonio, Autobiografia (New York: H.R. Elliot, 1946), I, 5, 7.Google Scholar

³⁰ Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., 317–22.Google Scholar

³¹ Thus even the liberal enemies of Rosas participated in elaborating, ironically, a partial legitimation of his repressive rule. The liberal Argentine Sarmiento argued with disgust (whose force derives from the admiration with which it is mingled) that the strange savages of the interior had overwhelmed the European cosmopolites and produce monsters like Facundo and Rosas. The conservative Venezuelan Vallenilla Lanz differed only in approving the tyranny he regards, with Sarmiento, as founded on the barbarians. Both men, incidentally, saw only the ways in which the physical environment shaped the cowboy; both missed the significance of the forms of exclusion practiced by the urban centers and are utterly unconscious of their own contributions to the image of the barbarian.

³² Chevalier, , op. cil., p. 115.Google Scholar

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³⁴ Halperin-Donghi indeed makes the opposite claim from that of Chevalier, namely that extensive cattle raising needed little capital investment. See The Aftermath, pp. 60, 67–69. He argues that in the political chaos of the Independence period cattle could expand in Venezuela and Buenos Aires province precisely for this reason, while mining languished in other parts of the New World. We would add that protection costs were very likely lower for the cattle business, since cowboys could substitute for police as suppliers of needed violence.Google Scholar

³⁵ Chevalier, , op. cit., pp. 108–09, 120ff.Google Scholar

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³⁷ For examples of expedients used to build large herds and properties see for instance Chevalier, , op. cit., pp. 270ff.Google Scholar; Rodriguez, Molas, op. cit., p.75Google Scholar; Caravaglia, Juan Carlos, ‘Las actividades agropecuarias en el marco de la vida economica del Pueblo de Indios de Nuestra Senora de los Santos Reyes Magos de Yapeyu: 1768–1806,’ in Florescano, Enrique, ed., Haciendas, latifundios y plantaciones en America Latina (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1975), pp. 464–85.Google Scholar

³⁸ Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., pp. 173–74.Google Scholar

³⁹ Some of the largest landowners did control illegal commerce; see Caravaglia, , op. cit., p. 481. This was hardly true of all of them.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Caravaglia shows that Indians frequently deserted the strictly organized missionary settlements, attracted by the high wages paid in the vaquerias and, presumably, by the life style of the gauchos, (op. cit., p. 474.)Google Scholar

⁴¹ Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., pp. 273, 362Google Scholar. For the role of military recruitment in post-independence Venezuela see Gilmore, , op. cit., pp. 36–37.Google Scholar

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⁴³ This was, of course, a general characteristic of rural agricultural enterprises in Latin America. See Mörner, Magnus, ‘La hacienda hispanoamericana; examen de las investigaciones y debates recientes,’ in Florescano, Enrique, ed., Haciendas, latifundios, pp. 15–48, esp. p. 23.Google Scholar

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⁴⁹ Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., pp. 273, 400–1. The relatively inefficient protection afforded by landowners to settled workers, paradoxically, fitted well into the coercive system that attached labor to land. Total efficiency would have been counter productive, since cowboys would have grown confident enough to press wage and other demands upon the cattle raisers. Even though the landowners sometimes resented the conscription raids of the regular forces, such raids helped them to keep the climate of terror that ensured total control over labor: only a worker's submission would move a landowner to attempt to rescue him in the case of forced conscription. Cattle raisers profited from their protection failures.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Lacking a better word, we have been employing the term ‘nomad’ in a loose fashion and not in a technical sense. To what extent frontier populations in Latin America really resembled nomadic societies is an important issue, especially in view of various comparisons found in the literature from Sarmiento onwards. Unfortunately, we cannot settle the question. Gauchos and llaneros did not consititute tribes, nor did their migrations follow any consistent geographical cycle. These, among others, are characteristics of nomadic societies as described by anthropologists; see for instance Bacon, Elizabeth E., ‘Types of Pastoral Nomadism in Central and Southwest Asia,’ Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 10 (1954), 44–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Manoelito de Ornellas argues the essential similarity of gauchos and nomads in Gaúchos e beduinos (A origem etnica e aformacdo social do Rio Grande do Sul) (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Jose Olympio Editora, 1956)Google Scholar. See also Coni, , El Gaucho, pp. 177–78.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Góngora, , Vagabundaje, pp. 27–28.Google Scholar

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⁵³ Assunçao, , op. cit., also observes the existence of a continuity between vagrant and settled populations in the area which today is Uruguay; see pp. 14, 161.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Assunçao, , op. cit., proposes that gauchos followed patterned careers. Vagrants and adventurers during their youth, they would settle down in later phases of their lives. See pp. 189–90.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ See Sarmiento's descriptions of the rastreador and the baqueano, op. cit., 44–49.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ General Páez, in his charmingly narcissistic account of his youth, credits the harsh privations of estancia life for his later successful career as caudillo. ‘This was the school where I acquired the athletic robustness that often was so extremely useful to me later on. My body, from blows received, turned into iron’ (op. cit., p. 8.Google Scholar) On the robustness of llaneros and the misfortunes of the Spanish army in the Venezuelan savanna, see Lanz, Vallenilla, Cesarismo. pp. 13ff.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ We follow here a suggestion of Wolf, Eric, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), p. 29Google Scholar. Note that the leader of the greatest peasant uprising in twentieth-century America, Latin, Zapata, Emiliano, did not dress like a Zapatista—like a peasant of the Mexican south—but like a charro (which he had been).Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Assunçao, , op. cit., 212–14Google Scholar. Halperin-Donghi, Tulio, Politics, Economy and Society in Argentina in the Revolutionary Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 278. Notice that ‘recruitment’ could have multiple meanings. Governments were eager to enter into agreement with captains of war that they could not control; men like Jose Artigas could therefore move from the leadership of a band of smugglers to a captaincy in the Blandengues. Recruitment could also mean forced conscription.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Góngora, , op. cit., pp. 25–27Google Scholar; de Laytano, Dante, Fazenda de Criacdo de Gado (Porto Alegre: Oficinas Graficas da Imprensa Oficial, 1950), p. 23.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Forbes, Jack D., Apache, Navaho and Spaniard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Powell, Philip Wayne, Soldiers, Indians and Silver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952)Google Scholar and ‘Spanish Warfare Against the Chichimecas in the 1570s’ Hispanic American Historical Review 24 (1944) 580–604CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Oakah L., ‘Pueblo Indian Auxiliaries in New Mexico, 1763–1821’ New Mexico Historical Review 37 (1962) 81–109Google Scholar; Góngora, , op. cit.Google Scholar, Assunçao, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit.Google Scholar; de Armond, Louis, op. cit.Google Scholar

⁶¹ One Spanish official favored giving the Indians guns on the grounds that a mounted archer was as good a warrior as existed; the guns might at least make them dependent on the Spanish. See Moorehead, Max L., The Apache Frontier. Jacobo Ugarte and Spanish-Indian Relations in Northern New Spain, 1769–1791 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), pp. 127–28Google Scholar. As for equestrian skills, it has been claimed that Indians improved on the techniques received from the Europeans. See Lago, Tomás, El Huaso (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, S.A., 1953), pp. 56–62.Google Scholar

⁶² Gongora, , op. cit., p.23.Google Scholar

⁶³ While the frontier culture was neither aboriginal to America nor dominant in Iberia, it is hard to assess the extent to which the Latin American frontier culture may have been a transplant of an Iberian cattle-raising culture similarly developed on the Christian-Moslem frontier. See Bishko, Charles Julian, ‘The Peninsular Background of Latin American Cattle Ranching,’ Hispanic American Historical Review 32 (1952), 491–515CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘The Castillian as Plainsman: The Medieval Ranching Frontier in La Mancha and Extremadura,’ in Lewis, Archibald R. and McGann, Thomas F., eds., The New World Looks at Its History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), pp. 47–69Google Scholar. At least one pioneer in bringing cattle to sixteenth-century Venezuela had been a rancher in Spain (De Armas, , op. cit., p. 33). No doubt there are other continuities of personnel, but the scale of New World ranching is without Iberian parallel.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Chevalier, , op. cit., pp. 105ff.Google Scholar

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⁶⁶ The conflicting attempts of a local governor and of the far more distant royal authorities to regulate the ranching industry in eighteenth-century Texas was undermined by the resistance not only of Indians, rustlers, and frontier soldiers but mission fathers and ranchers as well (Faulk, , op. cit.).Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Góngora, , op. cit., p. 19Google Scholar. Coni observes that warnings of friends frequently allowed gaucho outlaws to elude capture. El Gaucho, p. 177.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Góngora, , op. cit., pp. 35–37Google Scholar; Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., pp. 465–66.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Eric Hobsbawm deserves credit for vividly demonstrating the interest of bandits, although his work is weakened by a lack of interest in distinguishing the origins, nature, and consequences of banditry from those of the myth of banditry. See his Bandits (New York: Dell, 1969)Google Scholar and Primitive Rebels (New York: Norton, 1959).Google Scholar

⁷⁰ An example of the ease with which one could switch sides is given in Sarmiento's stunning portrait of Uruguay's Rivera: ‘General Rivera began his study of the grounds in 1804, when making war upon the government as an outlaw; afterwards, he waged war upon the outlaws as a government officer; next upon the king as a patriot; and later, upon the patriots as a peasant; upon the Argentines as a Brazilian chieftain; and upon Lavalleja as President; upon President Oribe as a proscribed chieftain; and, finally, upon Rosas, the ally of Oribe, as a general of Uruguay; in all of which positions he has had an abundance of time to learn something of the art of the Baqueano [pathfinder].’ Sarmiento, , op. cit., p. 49.Google Scholar

⁷¹ It was a custom of families on the Brazilian-Uruguayan border to make their sons citizens of both countries to protect them from the consequences of defeat in revolutionary warfare. Double nationality could evidently be used to escape the consequences of common crimes. See Garcia, Nepomuceno Saravia, Memorias de Aparicio Saravia (Montevideo: Editorial Medina, 1956), p. 18.Google Scholar

⁷² Martin Güemes, a major Argentine chief, tried to use a land-reform program to build support among gauchos linked to other power brokers in Salta province, but it appears no one was interested. This left him dependent on the local elites (Haigh, Roger M., Martin Güemes: Tyrant or Tool ? A Study of the Sources of Power of an Argentine Caudillo (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1968), pp. 43–49Google Scholar). For Venezuela see Damas, Carrera, op. cit., pp. 198–200Google Scholar, and for a probable instance from colonial Argentina see Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., p. 78Google Scholar. The Villista movement in the Mexican revolution, in spite of the moral influence of the Zapatistas, was not concerned with land reform in the usual sense. Rather, as Friedrich Katz has shown, the Villista land program was organized almost completely to pay off Villa's soldiers–not to mention his generals. Katz, Friedrich, ‘Agrarian Changes in Northern Mexico in the Period of Villista Rule, 1913–1915.’Google Scholar Paper presented at the Fourth International Congress of Mexican Studies, 1973. On the drastic differences of Zapatista and Villista delegates at the Aguascalientes Convention see Quirk, Robert E., The Mexican Revolution, 1914–1915 (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 213.Google Scholar

⁷³ This analysis of the mobilization of cowboys seems not to apply to the contemporary world. The spread of class and party politics has probably affected cowboys as much as other sectors of the rural population, as demonstrated by the integration of Colombian llaneros in a movement of a socialist bent during the 1950s. See Campos, Germán Guzmán, Borda, Orlando Fals and Luna, Eduardo Umana, La Violencia en Colombia (Bogota: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1962–1964), esp. Vol. II, 55–151. The contemporary llaneros, like all the rest of us, find lawyers to help draft political position papers.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ The pulpero was in some cases the overseer (capalaz) of a ranch and in others the rancher himself. See Assunçao, , op. cit., p. 203Google Scholar. On entrepreneurs who sponsored large-scale vaquerias with legal authorization see Coni, , El Gaucho, p. 63Google Scholar; and Historia de las vaquerias, pp. 50–52.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Caravaglia, , op. cit., pp. 481–83Google Scholar, For further evidence on the process of ‘contracting and sub-contracting’ in frontier regions see Coni, , p. 178.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Assunçao, op. cit., pp. 146–51.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ We are talking about those eslancieros who lived in cities and were powerful officers or merchants. The small proprietor could well be a pulpero or smuggling chief himself.

⁷⁸ Assunçao remarks that the smuggling chief and the military leader were often the same person. The wars of independence and the era of caudillismo propelled bands of smugglers into adopting violence as their way of life and means of subsistence–especially since the turmoil seriously disrupted the cattle business. Another reason was the growing rationalization of whatever estancias were still operating, which tended to make cattle hunting obsolete (op. cit., pp. 207, 212Google Scholar). Military leaders were also contrabandists (as in the case of Boves); in many cases they had been overseers of cattle ranches, or pulperos. See Coni, , op. cit., p. 175Google Scholar; Lanz, Vallenilla, Cesarismo, pp. 76–79.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Góngora, , op. cit., p. 22.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Damas, Carrera, op. cit., pp. 182, 184–85, 193–202Google Scholar. Vallenilla Lanz observes that Boves and Paez, the two greatest caudillos of the independence period, had been in trouble with the colonial justice due to their illegal activities. See his Disgregacion e integration. Ensayo sobre la formation de la nacionalidad venezolana (Caracas: Tip. Universal, 1930), Vol. 1, 188, fn. 2.Google Scholar

⁸¹ Garcia, Saravia, op. cit., pp. 472, 483–84.Google Scholar

⁸² In their fine article on caudillismo, Wolf and Hansen emphasize the pervasiveness of pillage as a means of acquiring wealth but fail to emphasize that the selling of protection was as important an activity as direct pillage for Latin American caudillos. The successful caudillo had the business acumen to realize the possibilities of this form of exploitation of violence, as becomes clear in the impressive list of their entrepreneurial qualities compiled by Wolf and Hansen. Wolf, Eric R. and Hansen, Edward C., ‘Caudillo politics: A Structural Analysis,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (1967) 168–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸³ One might add that the armies of many chieftains started as small frontier bands that generally evolved into forces controlling nationwide extensions (Mjr) Góngora, , op. cit., p. 36Google Scholar). Mörner proposes investigating the question of whether military power precedes ownership of great estates or vice-versa for all types of rural enterprise in Latin America. ‘La Hacienda Hispanoamericana,’ p. 25.Google Scholar

⁸⁴ Damas, Carrera, op. cit., pp. 201 ff.Google Scholar, singles out the anti-vagrancy laws and the attempts of hacendados to appropriate the vast Venezuelan fields as the major reason why llaneros initially sided with royalists in the Independence War. Similarly, Góngora points out how a mentality of resistance to state authority—particularly to military service—fed continuous guerrilla warfare in Chile in the early 1800s. Vagabundaje, , op. cit., pp. 34–36.Google Scholar

⁸⁵ Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., pp. 465 ff.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ Franco, Costa, op. cit., p. 203.Google Scholar

⁸⁷ Fewer cowboys were necessary because a major task was no longer needed: keeping the animals within the boundaries of unfenced properties.

⁸⁸ Chevalier, , op. cit., pp. 25, 27, 401.Google Scholar

⁸⁹ Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., pp. 107–68Google Scholar. On the Spanish fondness for dangerous displays of riding skills see Lago, Tomás, op. cit., pp. 72, 124.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ The following conception of play and of violence as a playful activity is based on Huizinga, J., Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), esp. ch. 1.Google Scholar

⁹¹ Religion was also a universal component—all could, or rather should, be Catholic. But being Catholic did not bring social honor to anybody, while excelling in the arts of war did.

⁹² Willems, Emilio, ‘Acculturation and the Horse Complex Among German-Brazilians,’ American Anthropologist 46 (1944), 153–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁹⁴ Impressive evidence of this fact is given by the gaucho version of the duel with knives. The goal in such a duel was not to kill the opponent, but to mark him. In looking at his face the loser would have to acknowledge for the rest of his life the courage and skill of the winner. He would literally be a captive audience. See Sarmiento, , op. cit., p. 64. Death in these duels was described as ‘a misfortune.’Google Scholar

⁹⁵ For documentation of such occurrences see Aragón, Alfredo, El desarme del ejercito federal por la revolution de 1913 (Paris: Imprimeries Wallhoff et Roche, 1915), p. 68Google Scholar; Assunçao, , op. cit., p. 197Google Scholar; Ornellas, , op. cit., p. 124.Google Scholar

⁹⁶ For instance, Franco, Costa, op. cit., p. 207.Google Scholar

⁹⁷ Even in the absence of this'mirror effect,‘ frontier chieftains had a keen perception of the dramatic (in addition to the physical) uses of terror to assert their domination over a frightened audience. Sarmiento's classic description of Facundo is an excellent example (op. cit., pp. 70–81).Google Scholar

⁹⁸ Molas, Rodriguez, op. cit., p. 30Google Scholar; Góngora, , Vagabundaje, p. 9Google Scholar; Garcia, N. Saravia, op. cit., p. 46.Google Scholar

⁹⁹ Obviously, the pulperos had also other methods to force debts upon peons. See Molas, Rodriguezguez, op. cit., p. 236.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁰ Garcia, N. Saravia, op. cit., p. 20Google Scholar. Ornellas observes that bets on horse races were very high; op. cit., p. 350Google Scholar. Tomas Lago notes that excesses in gambling were frequent and that authorities sometimes intervened to restrict them. He cites a set of 1785 regulations which, among other things, established limits for horse-racing bets in the Santiago area (op. cit., p. 83). One can only guess at the extremes that gambling reached in the uncontrolled frontiers.Google Scholar

¹⁰¹ For Coni's views on this matter see Historia de las vaquerias, pp. 87ffGoogle Scholar; El Gaucho, pp. 12, 58, 67, 128–29Google Scholar. He even adds that ’gauchification’ was a process of European cultural decay, originated in the close contact and daily exchanges with Indians; p. 61. The careful researcher in Coni, however, has to admit the existence of continuities between gauchos and the settled sectors of the population, op. cit., p. 148Google Scholar. Elsewhere, he asserts that there were constant additions to the numbers of gaucho bands (op. cit., p. 151). If the latter were totally cut off from regular life, where would these constant additions come from?Google Scholar

¹⁰² Stein, Stanley J. and Stein, Barbara H., The Colonial Heritage of Latin America. Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar: Wasserman, Mark, ‘Oligarquia e intereses extranjeros en Chihuahua durante el porfiriato,’ Historia Mexicana 22 (1973), 279–319Google Scholar. On the introduction of the barbed wire by Americans see Brand, Donald, op. cit., p. 136,Google Scholar

¹⁰³ On the modernization of armies see Gilmore, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Lozoya, Jorge A., El ejercito mexicano (1911–1965) (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 1970)Google Scholar; Mörner, Magnus, ‘Caudillos y militares en la evolucion hispano-americana,’ Journal of Inter-American Studies 2 (1960), 295–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰⁴ A detailed description of their adventures can be found in Garcia, Saravia, op. cit. Although this work is a nephew's tribute to the heroism of General Saravia, the desperate situation of those relying on the tools and tactics of the guerra gaucha is evident.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁵ Isabelle, Arséne, Viagem ao Rio da Prata e ao Rio Grande do Sul (Rio de Janeiro: Zelio Valverde, 1949)Google Scholar

¹⁰⁶ See Cortés, Carlos E., Gaucho Politics in Brazil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), p. 23.Google Scholar

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¹⁰⁹ Rama, Carlos M., ‘The Passing of the Afro-Uruguayans from Caste Society into Class Society,’ in Morner, Magnus, ed., Race and Class in Latin America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 28–50, esp. p. 32Google Scholar. Halperin-Donghi, , ‘La expansión,’ p. 101.Google Scholar

¹¹⁰ Katz, Friedrich, ‘Labor conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies,’ Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (1974), 31ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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