Who are these Gauchos?

While the real cowboy in Western Colorado is diminishing, his South American cousin the Gaucho is going strong. Here we see our norte traditions falter with the emergence of gentlemen ranchers, drug store cowpunchers and urban refugees riding the range. On the fertile pampas it’s still all spurs and saddles, cows and campfires.

Rodeo in Montevideo, Uruguay, 2012

My friend Sergio runs a 2000-acre estancia that is primarily a cattle operation, but caters to tourists from all over the world during the summer months. He cuts quite a pose when he comes into Punta del Diablo for some Friday night beer drinking. Sergio is no slouch in the fashion department. He’s dressed in a crisp, long-sleeve white shirt, riding breeches tucked into his high boots, black beret, his bola hanging and a tarantula mustache waxed “especially for the ladies”. He’s thirsty after a week on the pampas and despite his ultra-carnivorous diet on the range, you can bet he’ll be looking for a steak before the night is over.

“If a Gaucho doesn’t get at least one steak a day he loses his magical powers,” he laughs, “and he has to take up fishing,” he cracks, loud enough for the adjoining table full of pescadores (commercial fishermen) to hear him. “If things really get bad he might even have to look into newspaper work,” he smiles at me, making sure he insults everyone in earshot equally.

Actually the perennial gentleman, he is also my impeccable source on the Gaucho culture, since his family goes back generations in these rolling grasslands near the sea. His great grandfather was even a payador (a wandering minstrel) when he wasn’t trading in contraband or herding cows. Often quiet and observant, my friend cannot shut up when the subject of the Gauchos is on the table.

Today Sergio is traveling in the company of some rough looking hombres that he says are his primos from over in Brasil. They quickly warm to the idea of this gringo writing about their culture. Beers and women are given no quarter as our table gets louder and louder but, since Walter, the bar owner, is drinking with us, nobody can do much about the decibel levels. Soon the singing starts and serenades the dirt-street town and the moonlight sparkling on the Atlantic, just a stroll from our perch. Then, as if on cue, my equally rowdy neighbor, now Uruguayan resident from Western Ireland, shows up and there’s more singing and toasts.

The first trace of the Gaucho in Uruguay was as early as 1600 when they were seen by polite Argentine society as ruffians. The word gaucho was not complimentary yet these cowpunchers were not to be denied. When the flatlands began to be overpopulated with Cimarron cattle, brought from Spain by Pedro de Mendoza, the gauchos began their coming out party. They quickly became an integral part of the global leather industry which was floating the boats of many in southern South America in those days..

“They didn’t even like the way we cooked and ate beef,” said Sergio, “and now the population embraces the asado as part of everyday life. Strangely it was the influx of immigrants from Europe and not the caudillos (the New World born Spanish) that embraced the romance inherent to the gaucho way of life in the early 18th Century. My family most likely came from the Basque country by way of the Canary Islands long before that,” he explained, “but we’re pretty sure we got mixed up with the Guarani (the prevalent indigenous tribe in southern Brasil) and probably the Charrua (a fierce now extinct group that inhabited Uruguay when the Spanish first arrived). The origins are not clear since our history was primarily verbal and everyone was to busy trying to survive to keep score.”

Most of the gauchos from these pampas could easily pass for a Basque herdsman in Colorado.

“We’re not too tall but we pack a punch,” he laughed. “When I was in Spain I was mistaken for Basque at every turn which usually worked out well. A lot of the people I met on the Iberian Peninsula  thought the Gauchos had all but disappeared. I was there to set them straight. We’re here and we’re healthy!

“We’re still not much different than the undomesticated cattle that escaped from the Spanish in the 15th Century. We don’t live in town or on the farm. We have a strong identity and strict code of conduct. We like to play cards, drink mate and fight.

Does that sound like someone you know in Colorado? All we have to do is substitute a little camp coffee for the mate and we got a Rocky Mountain cowboy, chaps, Stetson and dead to rights.

– Manuel Flushe