The wild horse soon came to emblematize the fertility and abundance of the Spanish colonies. In 1579, Juan Súarez de Peralta wrote about the bountiful effects of such growth in Noticias históricas de Nueva España: “there are today a very large number of cattle and mares, so many that they go wild in the country, without owners, which ones are called cimarrones; they grow old without knowing man.”Footnote ¹ Associated with abundance and fertility, the cimarrón (translated to English as “feral,” “wild,” or “untamed”) in Súarez de Peralta’s formula roamed freely, without owners or any human interaction.

As a newly introduced domesticated species, horses highlighted Spanish colonial presence as they spread throughout the Americas. Horses imported from Spain to seed or supplement horse stock in the Americas had their own classifications, often distinguished by the denomination of castas. The promotion of livestock husbandry and the trade of animals to supply expeditions generated new admixtures across a wide geographical range. The increase in horses also led to new descriptions of their varieties, with cimarrón being one of these new categories. The development of horse breeding across colonial settlements also presented a new set of challenges: What would be the outcome of breeding horses in new geographies, and how far could this be controlled by breeding regulations? Of great interest to Spanish colonizers and the ruling monarchy was what to call these “New World” horses and their offspring, and the qualities that most defined them.

For centuries in Europe, horses had been used for specific purposes, and this functionality defined the horse as a domesticated animal. In a general sense, domestication is a long-term process that began with various plants and animals in the Neolithic era and refers to efforts to control the reproduction of animals in captivity to improve their fitness for human uses. From a biological perspective, a set of morphological and behavioral changes occur during the process of domestication such that domesticated animals become a subspecies that is evolutionarily distinct from their wild progenitors’ contemporary descendants.Footnote ² Domestication has also been defined more broadly by economic claims of ownership and norms of cultural control.Footnote ³ More recently, studies of domestication have emphasized forms of mutualism, coevolution, and niche-construction in the relationship between human domesticators and plant or animal domesticates, suggesting that it is not a directed, one-way process but one that requires interspecies cooperation.Footnote ⁴

Attempts to define the markers of domestication date to eighteenth-century natural philosophy taxonomies. Identifying points of difference between wild and domesticated animals was an instrumental piece of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the nineteenth century, as he used the effects from artificial human selection in domesticated breeding as a model to formulate his hypothesis that an analagous natural selection for fitness shaped populations in the wild. Similar to the early modern taxonomic impulse to differentiate species, breeding practices also generated taxonomies for describing types and qualities of domesticated animals. In a modern sense, domestication asserts an irreversible divergence from the “wild” that is predicated on varying degrees of human intervention in animal reproduction.

Predating scientific taxonomies of domesticated species, Renaissance and early modern animal husbandry already held that human intervention had the power to harness, tame, and utilize nature, particularly in its influence on breeding animals. In earlier centuries, medieval Christian views of nature suggested that animals had divinely defined relationships with humanity, be they intended for farming, hunting, companionship, or, more generally, as didactic marvels.Footnote ⁵ Bringing order to human–animal relations – literally, putting things in their place in relationship to the home (domus) – was at the root of civilization, and in this sense, the colonizers saw their introduction of European animal husbandry to the Americas as a civilizing or domesticating influence.Footnote ⁶ When placing indio towns under the oversight of religious orders, for example, stipulations for these new, sometimes forcibly established, communities included instruction in farming and small livestock production. Beasts of burden helped establish trade routes and cultivate land. Such improvements were essential elements to developing traditional European precepts of civil society in the Americas. In the case of horses, Iberian horse culture influenced Spanish colonial settlements by making horse breeding a fundamental tool for incorporating new territory, and the growing abundance of horses measured, in some sense, the progress of Spanish colonization.

Against this backdrop of domestication, the cimarrón presented a problem – so much so that it required a new category to describe horses that had become “wild” and ownerless. Horses known as cimarrones had entered what today we would consider a post-domestication state of “ferality,” where they were no longer subject to the intervention and influence of humans. Feral horses transgressed a sense of order in horse breeding and being out of place also had the potential to undermine Spanish authority in unexpected ways. Yet, these feral horses had also emerged from the traditional free-ranging Iberian husbandry used to seed horse populations in the Americas, meaning that the term cimarrón did not denote a physically distinct type. In fact, it could be argued that the trail of colonial policies supporting horse breeding practices also created feral horses. In this sense, becoming feral did not change the animal’s characteristics; it remained what it was before acquiring this label. Instead, the category cimarrón indicated new concerns that were raised by the abundance of horses and a new taxonomy of social value. Becoming feral highlights the shifting and socially interested categories that were applied to horses, ones that reflected changing ecological and social relations.

In general, the growing horse population in the Americas tested the viability of animal domestication – in particular, whether a desired type of horse could maintain itself naturally or under constant intervention and oversight. In addition to the cimarrón, criollo (native) horses and other castas (types or breeds) of horses arose from an interplay of husbandry practices and colonial breeding regulations with the reproductive ecologies of the horse in new colonial geographies that also provided challenges to reaching the desired outcomes of those practices. Remarks made by colonizers, chroniclers, and travelers on the quality of regional horse types were frequently matched by discussion about their persistent decline, indicating that Spanish breeding practices shaped horse populations, but so too did natural and environmental pressures. These accounts show an impulse to intervene in shaping types of horses, yet also affirm that this control was partial and that attempts to reproduce certain features could have undesirable outcomes in domesticated animals.

The surprising abundance of horses shows that both uncontrolled breeding and traditional husbandry methods contributed to a large population of cimarrones. Spanish husbandry practices helped produce feral horses in some cases. But forms of ferality also manifested in more closely controlled horse populations. Attempts to breed horses for desired traits encountered a different sort of feral nature in the unruly feedback of horse’s bodies and environmental pressures. Ferality might first be viewed as a rejection of or even a rebellion against domestication, but in this context, it can also be viewed as an alternate manifestation of domestication. Here, the feral encompasses the “counter-intentional forms” of nature theorized by anthropologist Anna L. Tsing and others that adapt and evolve despite human efforts to intervene and control.Footnote ⁷ Bringing horses to the Americas introduced practices of horse breeding as forms of both political and biological control under the auspices of empire, but these also contained within them the possibility of going feral.

5.1 Naming the Cimarrón

The mesta regulations implemented throughout the colonies oversaw the growth of livestock, including horses. In this tradition, horse populations were broadly managed with “loose husbandry,” meaning that for much of the year, the animals lived at liberty rather than in programs of tightly controlled breeding. The usefulness of uncontrolled breeding for fostering a large horse population across colonial municipalities is evident. The practice of loose husbandry has deep roots in the earliest examples of domestication, and the interbreeding of domestic and wild animals was a feature of early herd management techniques. In the aftermath of an original domestication event (or multiple simultaneous events), continuing to breed “loose” animals with “contained” ones was an effective use of resources.Footnote ⁸ For centuries, horses were bred in the marshes or marismas of the Guadalquivir River in Andalusia using similar methods.Footnote ⁹

In a complement to free-ranging livestock, mesta ordinances prevented enclosures in order to protect access to the commons. Instead of enclosures, other methods, such as registering brands and holding auctions for unclaimed animals, identified individual owners of these animals. At specific times for breeding, ejidos (public pastures owned by the town) or dehesas (pastures designated to specific people or uses) might be selected for keeping the mares with stallions, which were left to breed at liberty. But such enclosures – like corrales (corrals, fenced enclosures) or potreros (specifically for foals, or the male colts, potros) for performing the work of branding or separating new foals – were rare and frequently temporary. Typically, during biannual roundups of livestock, the members of the mesta and their hired assistants located the newest members of the herds when they were still dependent on their mothers and applied the owner’s brand or marking to it. As horse populations grew, reforms to mesta ordinances added requirements to post guards for livestock herds or designate pastures for specific uses, and these additions intended to preserve the management of semi-feral populations of horses rather than alter it.

In 1609, Garcilaso de la Vega offered his own explanation of the phenomenon of the cimarrón:

Garcilaso uses raza to identify these feral horses, a term commonly translated into English as either “breed” or “race.” However, he describes the cimarrón not as an animal carefully selected by a breeder for specific traits, but as the product of a natural coincidence of an original population and the effects of uncontrolled breeding, including the intermixing of “tame” and “wild” horses. These horses were a resource that towns and livestock breeders could then “harvest” from the mountains, annually or biannually rounding up the most promising colts for riding and training.

Horses, thus, could by nature be domesticated, but also not necessarily be tamed or trained and left out at pasture for long periods of time.Footnote ¹¹ Behaviorally, the cimarrón did not differ from other horses in any striking way, and typological differences in morphology would not have been apparent. The label, therefore, had a strong rhetorical component, insofar as the typical Spanish horse was not more “domesticated” than its “wild” counterpart. The primary distinction for the cimarrón lay in the realm of ownership, as in horses that go “without owners.”

Mesta regulations provided a means to designate ownership over animals that spent most of the year out at pasture, using a combination of brand registries and roundups. Once a livestock owner had acquired a sizeable enough herd to be included in the mesta, they would register their brand with the city council. Brands ranged from notches cut into the animals’ ears to iron brands shaped into distinguishable patterns on the animals’ haunches. Brands were used to sort animals according to their owners in roundups and to tally new offspring identified by the mothers’ brand. The alcaldes de la mesta also used brands to identify and deal out fines and penalties for stray animals that encroached on agricultural lands or city limits, and to track a chain of ownership in the event of accusations of theft. Notably, ownership was not based on bodily control of the animal – a free-ranging horse that appeared “wild” could, in fact, be branded and owned.

Before the category of the cimarrón emerged, the mesta offered its own set of terminology for dealing with animals of questionable ownership. The degree of tameness and docility of individual horses varied according to how they were handled, if at all. The term manso (tamed) applied only to a select group of horses with training to be ridden. Generally, animals were referred to as alzado (loose) when they were not enclosed and of uncertain origin. Horses collected by the mesta for reallocation among registered ganaderos (owners and breeders of livestock) were called mestengo (the origin of the term mustang). Horses that were subsequently auctioned off by the city because they were both unbranded and unclaimed were known as mostrenco. Although all three categories refer to free-ranging herds, only this last category had lost the characteristic of ownership.

Instead of using these existing categories, a new loan word was used to identify the cimarrón. The etymology of cimarrón is uncertain: It may be a loan from the Taíno language spoken in the Caribbean, or it may derive from an archaic Spanish term. It is clear that the term originated in the Caribbean to refer to runaway or rebellious slaves or Indigenous subjects, and it is related to the labels “Maroon” and “Seminole.”Footnote ¹² First emerging in archival records in the 1530s, some of the earliest uses of cimarrón appear in Cuba (“indios cimarrones”) and shortly after in Puerto Rico and Panama (“negros cimarrones”). Cimarrón also migrated south to Peru to describe persons who had avoided imposed tributes, and Guamán Poma, for example, described migrations of “indios cimarrones de sus pueblos” (indios run away from their towns) and “indios ausentes y cimarrones hechos yanaconas” (missing indios and runaways made into yanaconas).Footnote ¹³ Cimarrón also began to refer to ownerless animals in the 1550s, especially in complaints about cows, dogs, or pigs.Footnote ¹⁴ By the eighteenth century, the Diccionario de Autoridades (1729) defined cimarrón as any wild animal that might be hunted in the forest, and listed it as synonymous with silvestre; most modern translations of cimarrón refer to anything wild, savage, or untamed.Footnote ¹⁵

In 1550, a complaint lodged in the region of Bayamo in Cuba noted that some colonists were going out to hunt cimarrón livestock, but were taking both ownerless animals and animals with owners; the two ran together, making them indistinguishable to the naked eye.Footnote ¹⁶ In this sense, the cimarrón represented a social category, rather than a discernible difference in horse breeding or behavior. This use of the term cimarrón coincides with a marked abundance of horses, which peaked in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. The quality of being owned was not identifiable in the animal itself; rather, the term was marshaled to identify animals that were considered problems. This distinction was largely arbitrary in substance, when referring to the actual horse population, but it was socially instrumental in defining transgressive behaviors. In this way, cimarrón aligns with other new “problem” categories specific to the Americas, like criollo (native born) and mestizo (mixed descent), which both date to the 1560s in their first recorded uses.Footnote ¹⁷

Distinguishing between feral and “owned” horses initiated a distinct social typology of horse quality, even though traditional forms of horse husbandry differed little from those that produced the “wild” horses. This example illustrates how ferality, in the work of Hyasein Yoon, is an intersubjective state of being that “emerges through and with the border technologies that produce, intervene in, and dispose of it.”Footnote ¹⁸ Ferality, in this sense, is also a “leaky” category, one whose boundaries are evident when performed.Footnote ¹⁹ The emergence of the feral horse in this context highlights the social perceptions influencing equine taxonomies. Activating the category of the cimarrón, in this sense, reflects interactions among the diverse Indigenous, Spanish, and Creole populations making social claims based on these animals within the same landscape.

5.2 Breeding Criollo Horses

The criollo or creole horse represents the full extent of the expansion of the free-ranging horse population in the Americas. This creole heritage includes the criollo in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, and is associated with ranching cultures that took on various names and regional identities (gauchos, chalanes, huasos, chagras). Examples of criollo horse types are the montañés, a horse found in the Andes that can handle stresses on the cardiovascular system incurred from higher elevation, and the paso, a horse found in coastal Peru and Chile (the Paso Peruano), as well as in Colombia, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico (the Paso Fino) that is differentiated by a particular gait.Footnote ²⁰ Breed distinctions have a slightly different trajectory in North America, but generally the creole type would correlate to the mustang, which is assumed to have descended from Spanish colonial horses, or breeds associated with Native American communities in the southeast and the west.Footnote ²¹

Tending to romanticism, descriptions of criollo horses’ origins often establish a direct connection to horses from the Iberian Peninsula and then emphasize the relative isolation of these horse populations as they adapted to a wide range of climates. Commonly, the language used to describe criollo horses emphasizes the hardiness required by the terrain and focuses on their medium-sized hard hooves, good lungs, and sturdy constitutions. The predominance of paso horses in the Caribbean and coastal South America, for example, often leads to presumptions that the gait developed based on its usefulness in the coastal, sandy terrain.

Although this rhetoric emphasizes that new creole horse types emerged from adaptations to the environment, a trail of colonial breeding regulations points to the human interventions that maintained healthy populations. The same practices recommended for breeding horses in Spain applied in the Americas. In areas where horses were scarcer, such as in Peru, implementing these common breeding regulations was more impactful. In regions where horses were overly abundant, such as in New Spain, standard breeding controls were more diluted. The example of horses introduced to Argentina is the most instructive here. Although the growth of horse populations in the pampas of South America are well known, the breeding regulations related to their growth are not.

Led by Pedro de Mendoza, the Spanish established settlements in the Río de la Plata early in 1536. These also failed early, by 1541. After Mendoza’s death in 1537, Domingo Martínez de Irala took over the first rocky settlement in the area of Buenos Aires, where he was elected Captain General of Río de la Plata. Irala decided to move the inhabitants of Buenos Aires inland and upriver, retreating to Asunción, and formally abandoned the lowland settlement by 1541. Juan de Rivadeneyra wrote to Philip II to report that they had abandoned Buenos Aires, and with it forty-four horses and mares. When the region was more permanently resettled in the 1580s, the returning settlers were amazed to find herds of thousands of horses.

How were the forty or so horses that were abandoned in Buenos Aires connected to the massive herds that materialized in the intervening decades? Martin Dobrizhoffer relies on the feral horses’ natural adaptation to the environment to explain the volume of horses found in the plains along the Río de la Plata River as it spills into Paraguay and Brazil: “the mutual interaction of horses, grass and Indian carried the four-footed friend of man into the Plains of Paraguay ahead of the white man; so that the first gold hunters in Matto Grosso were met by great tribes of equestrian Indians mounted on the descendants of the feral Andalusian steeds.”Footnote ²² Río Moreno has argued, however, that it is highly implausible that these forty-odd horses could have reproduced at such a fabulous rate to reach the 80,000 horses reported in the region fifty years later, even given the abnormally high fertility rates that livestock imported to the Americas initially experienced. Moreno points to the use of staging points for expeditions in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Chile, such as those used by Cabeza de Vaca to bring mares from Charcas and Peru, as well as others in Chaves, Cáceres, Garay, and Hernandarias.Footnote ²³ In other words, ongoing expeditions and trade supported the development of horse populations in adjacent areas, and routes via the Andes (Potosi-Tucumán) made major contributions to the arrival of the horses and nascent gaucho culture in Argentina and Brazil.

Determining the trajectory of these herds of horses is complex and requires piecing together multiple colonization efforts to flesh out the story. Evidence of the governmental promotion of horse breeding and mesta policies in these areas further demonstrates that feral horse populations increased over time in response to introduced breeding and husbandry methods. Additionally, the regulations used to promote horse breeding did not rely on registering or tracking lineages, but they did foster a culture of inspecting horses to determine quality castas in the region.

In the intervening period between the 1540s and 1580s, governance of the entire South American region, including Río de la Plata, remained under the Audiencia of Lima. In 1546, Philip II, as the new Prince Regent, took the reins from Charles V and expressed explicit interest in the breeding of horses in the region. He ordered that the governors of Río de la Plata could not breed their horses with any mares in the region unless they had been examined for this purpose, on penalty of 1,000 pesos. The king’s cédula (royal decree) referred to problems that had previously arisen due to the governors and corregidores abusing their privileges of office to breed their own horses, rather than selecting the best horses as studs: “mandado por leye destos reynos que ningun gouernador ni corregidor pueda hechar ni heche sus cauallos a las yeguas q hubiere en la juridisdicion donde tuviere el [cargo] por los ynconbenientes q dello se siguen” (that some governors of the said province bred their horses to mares without being examined and that the form be instituted to breed to the best horses of the pobladores (town founders and settlers)).Footnote ²⁴ It required universal compliance with the breeding examinations required by law. The standards for examining and selecting the mares and stallions used to breed horses in each municipality were intended to increase the number of horses available while also preserving their quality. The growing quantity of horses is evident in a response in the same cédula to a request from the governors of Río de la Plata for relief from the requirement to pay the diezmos (tithe) on all new livestock. This request is a testament to the increasing horse population, and the region was allowed a five-year reprieve (rather than the requested fifteen) from paying a tithe on the new crianzas (annual crop of offspring).

These rules applied not only to the region of Buenos Aires but also the broader scope of the Río de la Plata area from Bolivia to Paraguay and Argentina, including critical locations for staging and managing trade and expeditions across the Andes in Tucumán, Asunción, and Santa Fe. Identical language about the breeding of studs and the requirements for examinations was issued in the new Viceroyalty of Peru, appearing in both the libros de cabildo of both Lima and Quito in 1548. These referred back to instructions issued in Castile in 1539, “about the examination of mares and stallions prior to any breeding by the yeguarizo (guard or keeper of the herd of mares) or albeitares (veterinarian) or others known for breeding horses.”Footnote ²⁵ The striking consistency of the language requiring municipal cabildos to examine the horses to be used for breeding across South America confirms that it was standard for municipalities to be charged with developing and sustaining horse populations as a mandate of colonial governance.

Between the 1540s and 1580s, when the Audiencia of Lima governed South America, Santiago de Chile founded its own horse breeding operations to support its frontier military conflict with the Mapuche. In 1545, the bishop Rodrigo González spearheaded the cultivation of a horse population in estates in Quillota and Milipilla.Footnote ²⁶ The ongoing conflict generated massive transfers in horse property from the Spanish to the nomadic Mapuche camps. Reports from Chile place at least five hundred horses in Spanish stables by 1550. The area at peace that was suitable for breeding at this time sat between the Copiapó and Bío-Bío Rivers. In 1551, Francisco Villagarcia sent an additional six hundred horses to Chile, and by the winter of 1551, there were enough mares and colts to require the cabildo’s use of a branding book. Pedro de Valdivia’s letter from February 27, 1551, records, “because in this city there are many mares and foals that are not branded it is possible that these mares and foals are lost or go where they cannot be found or even appear so similar the owners do not know their own.”Footnote ²⁷ The cabildo designated men as herraderos (blacksmith/veterinarians) who were to record the hierros (brands) of the breeders at the city hall within four months’ time. This was around the same time an annual rodeo also began to bring all the livestock to the plaza of Santiago to be branded and selected for breeding.Footnote ²⁸ Simultaneously, the first mesta ordinances were introduced, with restrictions specifically for breeding methods. In Santiago de Chile, these restrictions were specifically aimed at avoiding the inheritance of infirmities in offspring. In January of 1552, the city issued: “Because, as we see by experience, Patricio had a colt born with esparavanes y alifafes (equine ailments affecting the hock joints of the rear legs, spavins) and Marco Veas another, and I [the procurador] another. If the casta continues to multiply in this manner it is a disservice to His Majesty and a great harm for this land.” Breeding with the aim of avoiding specific ailments required examination and regulation, and would, it was assumed, result in improving the casta of the horses from Chile.Footnote ²⁹

The municipal privileges that supported officials’ access to horses did permit private breeding. However, the regulations instituted in each municipality tried to prevent personal interests in horse breeding in favor of a uniform examination of the mares and stallions to be bred. Moreover, these controls demonstrate the general assumption that intervention improved the quality of horses, and the desire to intervene in the quality of a semi-feral horse population. They did not, however, indicate a systematic interest in inbreeding or linebreeding within horse herds. The variations in horse types that were produced by these breeding practices can be examined more closely through common methods for differentiating horse populations: brands, regional environments, and recommended breeding practices.

5.3 Brands and Branding Practices

A common practice in dealing with livestock, branding is evident both in mesta ordinances and in other municipal and private breeding efforts. Brands, registered to individual owners, signaled ownership claims and offered a limited form of classification. Looking at documents in which brands are referenced (primarily mesta records in cabildo meetings, and in specific petitions about claims of horse theft), it becomes clear that the brand was not commonly used to indicate essential qualities or morphological features of a horse. Rather, it identified the chain of ownership in breeding, buying, and selling an individual horse.

Registering a brand was a legal requirement for participating in the mesta, and the registry focused on the brand symbol’s relationship to the individual owner rather than to the animals being branded. The city council registered the brands of the mesta by recording the symbol chosen by the livestock owner together with his name and the type of animal (cattle, horse, sheep, etc.), without any other identifying characteristics for the animals in question. These brands came into play in notarial transactions recording point of sale or transfer of horses and similarly in legal disputes over horses. In these cases, the brands, when recorded in the marginalia, primarily served to document the chain of possession of the animal. Reference to brands in these cases did not bring with it discussion of the breeder or the qualities attributed to the individual animal.

When combined with local knowledge, brands could point to a place of origin for horses that had been bought or sold elsewhere. During the first decade of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the majority of brands would have been registered in Cuba and Jamaica. Brands directly registered by the México City cabildo appeared with the first mesta ordinances in 1528.Footnote ³⁰ Some attained notoriety: In the early years of Cortés’s campaigns, conquistador Gonzalo de Sandoval had a remarkable reputation for selecting the finest horses, and he offered to send a specimen to the king in Spain. Because of the restrictions on the movement of horses across jurisdictional boundaries, brands of government officials would have been the most visible and the most easily transported across borders. The brand of Viceroy Mendoza of Mexico, for example, achieved both high prices and a good reputation according to Lima’s notariales records. Similarly, the brand of Luis de Ávila in Michoacán gained broad recognition, as his horses were shipped from Mexico to Peru, and his extended family was involved in horse breeding operations that reached from Santo Domingo to Nicaragua and Michoacán. In these cases, the brand generated a reputation for the breeder and became a tool for selling individual horses on the market. However, archival documentation of brands does not provide any accompanying insights into the physical traits of individual horses, only the reputation of the breeding family. Nor does it offer much information about the relationship of individual horses to others marked with the same brand, although these presumably had a degree of familial relation because it was common to breed within private herds. In short, branding indicated ownership rather than a sense of breed, although a reputation of quality could be developed in particular instances.

Brands appear primarily in archival documentation of matters involving stray animals and complaints of theft, where they were used to identify ownership or chain of possession. In northern New Spain, in the region of Michoacán and the Gran Chichimeca, the first municipal case of horse theft appeared in 1563, the year that the mesta was organized in this area.Footnote ³¹ The same year, complaints were made to the viceroy that the nearby city of Guayangareo was having its own mesta but not following the rules to permit proper claims to ownership.Footnote ³² A few years later, the alguacil of Pátzcuaro denounced Bartolomé Garcia for rounding up livestock without calling the other stockholders to claim their animals, and taking some mares and their foals from Luis Blasquez and Hernando Yáñez at the mesta of Yuririapúndaro.Footnote ³³ In 1566, Juan Herrero reported that his horse had been stolen from the “savanna” in Pátzcuaro a month and a half earlier, and he had found it in the possession of his neighbor, Pedro Riberas. Juan and his witnesses testified that he had purchased the horse from the cleric and breeder Fray Rodrigo Obregón, and it was marked with his brand. Riberas, for his part, claimed he had purchased the horse over two months earlier on the road from Mexico City. The horse was returned to Herrero, based on his claims of ownership, traced through the registered brand marking and the color of the animal.Footnote ³⁴ In these cases of theft, references to brands as registered and legal categories only infrequently match any commentary about individual horse’s characteristics and traits – which, if described, primarily included color.

In the Viceroyalty of Peru, notarial transactions serve as the primary archival mention of horses. In the records of these sales or transfers, horses are commonly described by color and previous owner, and only on rare occasions by brand. In this sense, a brand continued to be a mark for tracing ownership rather than for highlighting or defining qualities in the individual animal. Initially, horse brands were marked with notches on the ear of the animal. However, as judges frequently recognized, such markings were easily replicated or altered. In Quito, for example, notches were used early on for branding livestock, but the limited variety of such markings did not accommodate the diverse registrations necessary. In the region of Cuenca, the Indigenous population was imitating these ear notches by the 1560s, and the cabildo declared that any marked animals found in their possession would be assumed stolen. Thieves thus began to target young offspring, before they were rounded up for branding. In Trujillo, for example, two mares with their as-yet unweaned foals were stolen before being branded in the biannual mesta roundup.Footnote ³⁵

Three cases discussing brands in the region around Trujillo, Lambayeque, Valle de Saña, and Valle de Túcume, where horse trade was active, demonstrate that brand and quality were only occasionally associated. Don Francisco Nieto complained of the loss of a bay mare that he had left in the care of Maria Lezcano and her son Pedro, but then found in the possession of Francisco Sanchez. Using the brand marking and claims about the horse’s transfer, the judge was able to determine that Nieto had kept the horse in mountain pasture (la sierra) with a guard, that the Juan and Luis Roldan family had branded it, and another breeding and merchant family, the Lezcanos, took care of it.Footnote ³⁶ In this instance, the brand was used to document the chain of possession, rather than indicate specific features of the animal or its breed. Another complaint lodged in 1561 revolved around the exchange of a sword for a colt, with the seller demanding the return of his colt when the sword was not procured. The colt had already been sold by its new owner, and found in the possession of another individual in the Valle of Túcume. When the cabildo confiscated the colt in question, this last owner demanded the return of the gray horse he had traded for the colt.Footnote ³⁷ Here also, the use of the brand tracks the individual horse, rather than as a horse representative of a type or kind. Finally, a third legal dispute from 1562 brings to bear the quality of the horse in question based on its physical abilities rather than in relation to its brand. Luis Roldan brought a case against Alonso Gutierrez Maldonado over the trade of a chestnut horse and a young colt with an overo coat (a pinto coloring of brown and white splotches). Both young men in their twenties had been boasting about their horses, each suggesting that the other had overpaid for his horse given its quality, but Roldan lost his horse in an impromptu bet. Roldan protested his loss, calling in witnesses to confirm that his chestnut horse should have been valued between 150 and 200 pesos, based on what people had seen it do, whereas Maldonado’s young colt, which was perhaps not even trained, was not worth more than 50 pesos. Maldonado was held in the cabildo jail until he paid the difference in the horses’ value, which he eventually did by having a deputy sell one of the enslaved people belonging to his estate (demonstrating also the callous hierarchy in which the horse could be valued more than a person).Footnote ³⁸

Because brands were registered by governing cabildos, they held geographical references in addition to identifying ownership. But given what we know about the growing abundance of horses, the preservation of common land rights, and the slowly developing mesta requirements, it is unclear what these brand markings could actually indicate about a type of horse based on its place of origin. Owners could change their brands or buy out the rights to another’s brand, making the brand independent of the breeder and particular herd. Indeed, some horses were branded more than once as a form of proof of their changing ownership. As viceroys in the late sixteenth century noted, brands were not safe from fraud. Moreover, not all horses carried a brand, regardless of the mesta requirements. As a result, brands did not clearly identify horses as coming from a particular region, nor did they generally lay claim to a certain quality or type of horse.

5.4 Regional Types: Castas and Razas

Descriptions of horse populations in the Americas in the sixteenth century praise certain horses for their quality, although hard distinctions about particular groups are difficult to pinpoint, and descriptions that go beyond mentioning casta, color, or origin are rare. When describing differences among horses, the most common reference point is the notion of a breed. In Spanish, the term casta is commonly translated to English as “breed”; its derivation from the Latin castus, meaning “chaste,” also implies an interest in lineage. Distinct from grouping individuals together based on a common characteristic (size, color, or function), the idea of casta also reached across generations. In his oft-cited dictionary El Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana (1611), Covarrubias relates casta to lineage through procreation, and especially to procreation intended to avoid dissolute behaviors that would threaten the quality of the lineage. He closes with “Castizos llamamos a los que son de buen linage y casta” (“Castizo we call those who are of good lineage and casta”), a phrase that indicates that the notion of quality in lineage is akin to, yet also distinct from, the quality of being de casta. Although casta refers specifically to the kind or quality resulting from a good lineage, it is also associated with the range of factors that influence the general process of generation. It was in use from the fifteenth century and applied to both people and animals.

The Spanish term raza is also often translated as “breed” or “race,” yet unlike the relatively clear etymological origin of casta, raza has a much more complicated story. It came into use in Spanish in the fifteenth century from varied possible origins, including a defect in the production of pottery, an inconsistency in the weaving of cloth, a ray of light, and a crack that formed in a horse’s hoof.Footnote ³⁹ Raza’s connotation of a stain or defect across generations appeared in legal semantics in the regulation not only of cloth but also of blood purity (limpieza de sangre), which determined a person’s eligibility for office based on their degree of descent from non-Christian ancestors.Footnote ⁴⁰ Raza’s uses were quite circumscribed within these separate technical fields until the sixteenth century. Covarrubias’s dictionary was the first to collect these various uses of raza to refer to differences in cloth quality and Jewish or Muslim ancestry, and it also offered a special designation for horses, linking both raza and casta: “RAZA, la casta de caballos castizos a los quales señalan con hierro para que sean conocidos” (RACE, the casta of horses of pure origin marked with a brand to be known). Whereas casta was defined in a general sense by qualities ensuring the reproduction of a lineage, raza here referred to a more specific set of horses known by their brand.

With these definitions in hand, both casta and raza place an individual in the context of a kin group or kind and designates differences among these, and this use is evident in early modern horse breeding. However, from there, many deviations muddy the waters. Descriptions of horses in the Americas signal the importance of being able to identify the quality of a horse across generations as well as a range of possible reasons for its quality that go beyond the focus on lineage found in dictionary definitions of casta or raza. These classifications of difference are informed by the mutual influences of humans, animals, and environments, as well as by social, cultural, and economic contexts.

Breeds today are defined and maintained by formal breed associations, which variously define breed by documented pedigree, color, function, region, or standard measurements of desired physical traits. This diversity of current definitions of breed suggests some of the challenges in using breed to understand horses in the Americas in the early modern era. In Europe at that time, records of pedigrees were quite rare, and their use, particularly as a tool for certifying the transactional value of purchasing an animal bred somewhere else, did not become commonplace until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁴¹ The use of regional designations (e.g., a “Turcoman” from Turkey or a “Friesian” from Friesland) to indicate an animal’s origin were more common in the medieval and early modern period. Supported by the assumption that horses generally did not travel far from their places of birth, such regional designations also suggested that related populations with common identifying traits related to height or build developed within the given regional ecosystem and its environmental resources.Footnote ⁴² These classifications build a picture of a population-based “type.”

These labels’ assurance that the animal was from that region ended there, however; a horse could be given a regional designation, but by no means was it certain that it had ancestral roots there, nor that it was representative of its type.Footnote ⁴³ Regional typologies, moreover, were only an approximate tool for getting at the important question of a horse’s qualities, and particularly, whether it was “good.” Determining the quality of a horse required ascertaining more particular factors, such as whether it could fulfill the designated task in question, which might require strength, speed, or general good health. Qualities like these could be assured by physical inspection of the individual animal, but the goal of classifying animals was also to offer some kind of guarantee of its quality or type that could be assured by the owner or breeder, or by broader generalizations of regional or national pride.

At this time, horse typologies were also related to social function, as it was defined by physiological characteristics. Among horses that were trained for specific uses, some were of higher quality than others. The rocín, for example, referred to a horse that had a poor level of training and lacked characteristics for the particular functions of war – namely, size and strength. Mounts for transportation fell into several general categories, with differing social value and price points. These included the trotton, the haca, the quartao, and the corser. The trotton referred to the quality of the horse’s trot, having ability to “pace” or the trotting motion of swaying rather than using diagonals, which led to a smoother gait and was desirable for long-distance transportation. The haca or hackney referred to a general horse for transport of medium size that was often associated with greater ease of control, and was the most frequently mentioned type of horse in licenses for indigenous leaders to ride horses. These terms implied a judgment of relative quality, but primarily served as a reference to function. Some of these qualities could also be associated with a particular regional horse or a breed lineage, but the labels themselves were insufficient to act as indicators of qualities that extended beyond the individual horse in question.

Take, for example, Garcilaso’s description of cimarrones as a raza that formed when free-ranging herds interbred with introduced mares. Here, the idea of a known lineage or brand vanishes, while the climate’s impacts on the island population and their geographical isolation come to the fore. Further, Garcilaso claimed that the horses bred in the Caribbean were good for gentlemen, each having thirty or fifty in their stables, and young colts trained in just a few months could be used for displays of horsemanship like the juego de cañas (game of canes).Footnote ⁴⁴ He complimented the size and colors of these horses and asked why more were not sent to Spain for the court. Considering the development of horse populations in the islands, the Caribbean horses that Garcilaso praised likely included horses produced in both controlled and uncontrolled breeding environments.

Horse breeding programs in the new colonial settings followed the special privileges and obligations of officials appointed by the Crown, and casta referred to these officials’ efforts to breed their own personal horses, too. Colonial officials had greater control over their own horses than the horses of most livestock owners regulated by the mesta. For example, in 1547, Francisco de Ávila, a regidor, tesorero, and vecino of the island of Española intended to send four colts – prime specimens – to Prince Philip II. Ávila had written to the prince earlier to inform him that he had achieved truly excellent horses (“tan buena casta”) and the prince asked him to send some for his own stables. Ávila was given a license to send these horses back to Spain, with the Audiencia paying the costs of their passage in the armada of Luis Colón. Unfortunately, this pending shipment was urgently redirected so that an armada could be sent with the incoming viceroy La Gasca to Peru in order to settle the ongoing rebellion against the Crown, taking thirty-eight horses from the stables of the Audiencia of Hispaniola, as well as seventy-four mules for cargo, for a price of 1,440 pesos.Footnote ⁴⁵ In this instance, it was the personally bred horses that were labeled as a casta.

Use of the casta label ranged from the specific (an individual breeder’s casta) to the general (a regional type). Within Spain, casta was used to distinguish northern varieties from the southern Andalusian horse; these varieties were of uncertain qualities except by way of contrast to the horses of Andalusia.Footnote ⁴⁶ The exact nature of the native horse in Spain is speculative, but it is known that there were ponies in the marisma (marshes) of the southwestern coast of Spain and possibly in the mountains in Granada. The particular qualities of the southern Andalusian horse were most likely the result of the native Spanish horse population reproducing with horses brought by successive invading groups from North Africa, known as the Barb.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is presumed that methods of breeding horses in the marshes of the Guadalquivir, dating back to at least the eleventh century, gave rise to what was known as the casta andaluz.Footnote ⁴⁸ In general, Andalusian horses were considered “good” and were often sent by Spanish kings to other princely courts for their studs and exported with licenses to the colonies in the Americas.

Indeed, most horses imported to the Caribbean shipped from southern Spain. Yet, these same horses, when brought and bred in new environments, gained new distinctions of type in various regions. Environment or region of origin could certainly enhance their health, but given that these distinctions emerged in a relatively short amount of time, it is difficult to consider these landraces or ecotypes – that is, as the product of a reservoir of genetic resources that exhibit distinctive features that complement the local environment.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instead, particular desired characteristics, such as height or speed, would have resulted from controlled breeding of a particular subpopulation.

Bernardo Vargas Machuca, for example, who was knowledgeable from his experiences in campaigns in various regions in the second half of the sixteenth century, remarked admiringly on the qualities of horses from New Spain. In the Militia Indiana (1599), he wrote:

In praising Mexican horses, Vargas Machuca notes qualities of speed, slenderness, and aptitude for running. He does not indicate that these horses have a specific breeder or owner, but rather gives the general idea that horses in this region are of good quality for military or political uses. These qualities draw from the horses’ health and hardiness, which are marked by hard hooves and continued health in old age. Whereas health is a trait that could be related to environmental factors or to the careful maintenance of the local population, speed is more likely a trait that would have been selected. Notably, these horses are “gaited,” meaning the sequence of their footfalls in a walk, trot, and canter followed a different pattern than the norm for most horses. This variation in locomotion is tied to a genetic mutation that can be expressed with either one or two copies of the gene, meaning that this characteristic could be bred for as an inherited trait, or it could spread in a horse population as a dominant or recessive trait.Footnote ⁵¹

Praise for horses from a particular region related to their health and specific traits, like speed or gaits, but also more generally to their athletic performance. A later traveler also offered high praise for horses in Michoacán, noting that their use in a festival game (cristianos y moros) demonstrated the excellence of the horses and the riders; Mathías de Escobar called them the “celebrated jerezanos,” equating Michoacán with the area of Jérez in Andalusia, which is renowned for excellent horses and horsemen.Footnote ⁵² In this instance, the quality of the horse is closely tied to its ability to perform a specific function, and this ability draws on the horse’s health or physical characteristics as much as on the training that went into preparing for the festival games and on the skills of the riders to show them to their best advantage.

In his Historia general, Herrera y Tordesillas also opined on the Central American regions (encompassed within the Real Audiencia de los Confines de Guatemala y Nicaragua or later in the Reino de Guatemala) with the best horses.Footnote ⁵³ He singled out Chiapas for having exceptional horses that were not surpassed by Iberian animals. This he credited to the local Chiapanecas’s skills in breeding, training, and riding horses. In Herrera’s assessment of the quality of breeding, training was as important as physical characteristics. He also praised the province of Nueva Valladolid, in present-day Honduras, as the greatest source for horse stock in the sixteenth century. In contrast to the careful breeding he noted in Chiapas, he attributed the quality of horses in Valladolid to the rocky ground and its positive effects on the horses’ general health.

In South America, Velazquez Espinoza (1620s) offered additional opinions on the locations of the best horses, highlighting Chachapoyas in Peru. Families in Chachapoyas gained a reputation for raising horses destined for the viceroys or colonial elites there who raced horses as a hobby. Juan de Orduña Pinedo, corregidor of Chachapoyas, owned three encomiendas in the region (Comacocha, Colcamal, and Timal) 1584.Footnote ⁵⁴ According to Vázquez de Espinosa, the horses he bred there earned special designations as the “casta rica” or “luyanos.” Vázquez de Espinosa also praised horses in Cochabamba (Bolivia, Gran Chaco), a region that shared the role of a frontier outpost important for remounts, similar to Chachapoyas.Footnote ⁵⁵

The active interest that religious organizations showed in horse breeding was also reflected in the reputation of the livestock where their activities were concentrated. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the tithe or diezmos applied to the multiplication of agricultural goods, both plants and animals, so breeding livestock operated under it. In Guadalajara, for example, the Hospital de la Veracruz was given permission to collect the ganado mostrenco (unclaimed, free-ranging livestock) in the province of Guadalajara in 1567.Footnote ⁵⁶ Another example of this success was the brand established by Padre Obregón in the region of Pátzcuaro and Morelia.Footnote ⁵⁷ At times, the benefits gained by producing livestock seemed to surpass charitable causes. In 1587, Eugenio de Salazar presented a petition to Viceroy Villamanrique, asserting that officials and clergy were raising horses and selling them for profit, using indios to raise the hay and feed the horses. Salazar asked the viceroy to limit officials to owning just two horses. The viceroy considered it reasonable that each official or clergy member could have at most three horses for his own use, and ordered them to pay their indio servants in money rather than hay.

Similarly, the Convento de Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Panamá, Nicaragua, and Peru became actively involved in transporting horses from Central America to Peru. The oidor of Panama, Dr. Alonso Criado del Castillo, in 1575, noted that Nata, in the region of Panama, was a center for mules that transported goods from the ships in Nombre de Dios. Outside Panama City, the Order of Merced bred horses “para el servicio común” (for the common good) beginning with their arrival in 1522, although the best horses still came from Nata, Villa de los Santos, Pueblo Nuevo, and Nicaragua. For a sense of the proportionally greater number of livestock in these breeding centers, the diezmos on goods like agricultural products and livestock for the city of Nata totalled 2,500 pesos in one year for livestock in the area, whereas collections for similar tithes only reached 200 pesos in other localities in Central America.Footnote ⁵⁸ These efforts at horse breeding, however, did not necessarily develop a reputation for a casta.

Although references to casta are closely aligned with regional characteristics, the descriptions mix elements of physical quality, environmental health, and breeder influences, rather than neatly distinguishing between them. Most commonly, a region was called out for the quality of its horses in a general sense, and this quality could have many interpretations, from the number of available horses to their size, speed, stamina, color, health, or conformation. These casta categories often obscure the relative importance of each of these factors, and makes it difficult to compare across horse types or to classify them as breed lineages, landraces, or functional types. Although the available terminology did not differentiate unique breeds, it did demonstrate the general assumption that intervention improved the quality of horses.

5.5 Issues of Decline

Regardless of the quality of some horses within the Americas, remarks about their decline recur in discussions about the breeding of these horses. This narrative of decline provides evidence that breeding regulations remained the most important factor in the emergence of new types of horses, even as it acknowledges the influence of local ecology on the evolution of horse populations that were supported by breeding regulations. As with the concerns about health and casta in Santiago de Chile, concerns about quality and decline also tested the outcomes of standard colonial horse breeding practices.

Early on, Ecuador had established a reputation for breeding horses in the Quito Valley. It was noted in the Relacion Geográficas de Guayaquil, however, that “many colts are bred but few turn out good.”Footnote ⁵⁹ An early traveler to Quito, Rodrigo de Paz Maldonado, also complained in 1577 that the horses there were not any good. He noted that “the cabildo had lost control of the casta of the stallions and furthermore the indios load up the colts at just four months.”Footnote ⁶⁰ That is, a reputation for good horses came from controlled breeding and rearing, rather than from a cornucopia of wild horses benefiting from a generous terrain, and yet this quality was quickly challenged by the abundance that these same breeding practices fostered.

Fray Lizárraga cast key areas of the Viceroyalty of Peru has having a reputation for good horse breeding around 1600, yet he also described a period of a flourishing horse breeding followed by a decline in their quality. In his opinion, the best horse – “la mejor casta de todo el Peru” – had been bred in Guamanga (Ayacucho), but already by 1603 this was in decline. He considered the “negligence of the breeders” to be the primary cause. Similarly, across the border in Argentina, the city of Santiago de Tucumán, which became central in the production of horses and mules throughout South America, had an excellent reputation for horses. On his own inspection, however, Lizárraga assessed that the city had likewise neglected to maintain the stock (“cuidaron la estirpe”), and by 1603, their horses were in poor shape.Footnote ⁶¹ As a widespread tendency, therefore, the blame belonged to the breeders for not following the general system of horse breeding that the Spanish had implemented through municipal regulation. After the end of the civil wars in Peru, it also seems that the breeding of horses had declined in favor of breeding mules. In 1601, Viceroy Luis de Velasco II ordered that twenty-five out of a hundred mares could be bred for mules.

Further south in Chile, the population of horses bred for the continuing war with the Mapuche also flourished outside of Spanish control. Writing around 1614, however, the chronicler Nájera noted “la disminución de nuestros caballos” (the decline of our horses). He recalled the thick bands of horses when he had first arrived in 1601 and traveled from Santiago de Chile to the tierras de guerra (land of war).Footnote ⁶² In contrast, the horses now kept by the Spanish were stunted in size, lacked fields for sustenance, and were poorly trained. Nájera noted that the colts were cared for by indios de paz (peaceful indios), but many of the potreadores (trainers for young horses) were actually captives of war, and he did not approve of their training methods.Footnote ⁶³ He expressed dismay with the prices commanded for the poor quality of horses; whereas previously one could have found 150 horses for 30 to 40 pesos each, now it was difficult to find even 15 to 20 horses at 100 to 150 pesos apiece.Footnote ⁶⁴

The general sense of decline and the shortage of horses might be encapsulated by this anecdote: in 1624, pirates attacked Guayaquil, and the vecinos of Quito, “lacking sufficient horses,” came to their aid on mules and pack animals.Footnote ⁶⁵ Short of horses, the coast guard had devolved dramatically. This concern echoed long-standing worries over the decline of the horse in the Iberian Peninsula as, after an initial abundance of horses in Latin America, the decline of the casta emerged as a major theme in commentary on horses in the Americas.

When conquistador Miguel López de Legaspi arrived in the islands of the Philippines in 1576, he found that there were no horses available.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1589, Philip II sent instructions to New Spain to send twelve mares and two stallions to the Philippines to address the lack of horses that had forced Francisco de Sande, the first Spanish governor, to go on foot.Footnote ⁶⁷ Shipping horses from Mexico to the Philippines took around three months, but shipments of horses began to arrive on an annual basis in order to circumvent the restrictions from accessing the horse markets of India and the Middle East imposed by the agreement of Tordesillas (1494). Replicating the manner of introducing horses to settlements in the Americas, a stock of horses was established and bred in large numbers by the early 1600s. Inland, in the mountainous spine of the major islands of the archipelago, horses were also permitted to range freely and the population likewise grew to the extent that reportedly it was not possible to determine their exact number. At the same time, the Spanish also feared declining quality of these semi-feral horse populations, and their characteristically small stature was a point of criticism.Footnote ⁶⁸

In general, the discussions of casta correspond to concerns about achieving and maintaining desired types of horses as a task that required constant intervention and oversight. That is, human intervention in horse breeding assumed that equine bodies were malleable, but also recognized that there were limitations to control over the outcomes of selective breeding. Mentions of different castas of criollo horses in the Americas demonstrate both the results of human intervention and the “counter-intentional” responses of adapting and evolving horse populations.

5.6 Domestication and Ferality in Spanish Colonization

Horse breeding regulations expanded apace with colonial expansion. Did introducing horses help control this new territory? Cimarrones illustrate some of the limits of domestication – namely, that it introduced oversupply and new anxieties about quality. Control was tenuous and uncontrolled breeding was common. At the same time, horses were the product of an environmental process of conquest.Footnote ⁶⁹

The fluid exchange between domestic and feral horses reveals that this terminology is constructed. More generally, the same is true of the socially interested categories of breed. Spain’s colonial strategy emphasized horse breeding as a central component for governing newly conquered territory. However, horse breeding was not deployed in the form of controlled reproduction that is implied by modern notion of breeds among domesticated animals, and government breeding policies did not aim to control breeding for purity. Regulations demonstrate that purposeful intervention improved the quality of horses even while the general standards of animal husbandry did not demonstrate rigorous control or use of in-breeding.

Sixteenth-century travelers and chroniclers employed regional and personal identification to describe the horse population that established itself in the Americas, suggesting both the assumed influences of environmental factors on the characteristics of the horse and the social importance of categories like the cimarrón, casta, and criollo horse. Yet, these types were also responding to the issues of climate and generation that made them vulnerable to decline. As Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart have cautioned: “An animal is not simply ‘invented’ as such, nor is breeding simply the outcome of human endeavor. A breed is as much the product of the subtle influence of environmental factors and the animals’ innate adaptive abilities as it is of human manipulation.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In this sense, emphasizing “practices of domestication” in husbandry and horse breeding elucidates how these equine types are at once the product of human interventions and subject to the mutual interdependence of biodiversity and ecology.Footnote ⁷¹