Cattle in Latin American History

People on other continents had been raising domesticated cattle for millennia, mainly breeds of humped zebu (Bos indicus) in the tropics and of humpless taurine (Bos taurus) in temperate latitudes by the time the first cattle reached the Americas in 1493. From an initial beachhead on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, by the close of the 16th century, cattle had reached ranching frontiers throughout the region, from New Spain to the Pampas of the Río de la Plata. While regional varieties of cattle—such as the Corriente of Mexico, the Longhorn of the borderlands, and the Criollo of the Pampas—developed on each of the frontiers, they shared many characteristics: an emphasis on raising large herds of feral cattle on an open range to the virtual exclusion of crops in order to produce hides, tallow, and beef. Over the colonial period, herders pushed into new frontiers, and their social, cultural, and environmental characteristics became differentiated through the hybridization of antecedent African, European, and Indigenous practices. In addition to ranching, cattle became central to many other aspects of colonial societies, incorporated into farming to provide meat and dairy products as well as used as draft animals to pull carts and plows and power sugar and grain mills. Cattle had a major impact on Indigenous peoples, who not only adopted them into their agricultural systems but also suffered crop damage from free-ranging herds. In terms of environmental impacts, cattle herding had a broad impact on the vegetation of grasslands through grazing, rangeland burning, and the introduction of African grasses. Throughout much of Latin America, the end of the colonial period in the 19th century resulted in not only an expansion of cattle ranching but also the closing of the open range. The opening of export markets, urbanization, growing domestic markets, technological changes such as wire fences and refrigerated shipping, genocidal wars against Indigenous peoples to open new ranching frontiers, and the abolition of slavery all irrevocably altered the patterns and processes established during colonial times. Enclosing pastures with wire fences, for example, permitted ranchers to control breeding and thereby maintain European breeds such as Aberdeen Angus and Hereford that largely replaced Longhorns and other colonial breeds. In the 20th century, ranchers with herds of zebu breeds, such as Indubrasil, began to expand into new frontiers in tropical forests, particularly the Amazon, with immense impacts on Indigenous peoples and the environment.