Cattle and Sheep from Old to New Spain: Historical Antecedents

Abstract

The transfer of cattle and sheep from Spain to Mexico during the sixteenth century raises questions about regional evolution and variability of livestock economies in the source area, the regional and socioeconomic roots of the emigrants, and the ecological and economic integration of specific animals, management methods, and related products within New Spain. Such issues of diffusion, cultural adaptation and transformation must be disentangled before interpretation is attempted, and this paper focuses on the Old World antecedents. Traditional nineteenth-century patterns of livestock herding in different regions of the Iberian Peninsula were already established in Roman times and changed but little during the Islamic period. Long-distance sheep transhumance is verified prior to the Christian reconquest and was greatly amplified thereafter. Yet late Medieval Spain was not a great ranching frontier, but an agrosystem in which farming and livestock raising always formed a complementary but interlinked economy. This duality was expressed in different forms of land ownership: cultivated land was intricately subdivided and carried clear title, while pasture zones remained to some degree in the public domain. Sheep raising, both within the mixed, Mediterranean economy and in the form of long-distance transhumance (the Mesta), was broadly familiar throughout Castile and was reflected in similar counterparts on the Mexican plateau. But cattle raising was small-scale and of subordinate importance in Spain, except in the estuarine marshland below Seville. Whereas the early cattle owners in Mexico came from all over Spain, their highly extensive management style appears to derive from the Marismas of Sevilla. This evidence may be explained by the interplay of cattle owners and cattle herders as they adjusted to a new ecology in the tropical lowlands.

Key Words:

• agrosystem
• diffusion
• Mesta
• Mexico
• Spain
• ranching
• transhumance