Arnold Rojas

Arnold R. Rojas (1898-1988) has the distinction of chronicling the life and lore of California's Vaqueros. He came by the knowledge honestly. As a young man he moved from Pasadena to the San Joaquin Valley to pursue a passion to be a Vaquero. "The only work I could get in Pasadena was orange picking, but I wanted to be a rider." Rojas once said. The vaqueros whose stories he told were Mexican cowboys who employed the Spanish la Jineta style of horsemanship in which a rider's body directed his mount; in the more conventional American cowboy style, reins are used to control a horse. This is an important distinction because the riding style symbolized a heritage; as Rojas explains in his 1974 collection that we feature here, These Were the Vaqueros: The Collected Works of Arnold R. Rojas, " By vaquero I mean the man who brought the cattle to the West and herded them for a hundred years or more before the United States took possession of half of Mexico's territory."