This is the best book on the presence of enslaved and free Africans and their descendants in cattle ranches across the Americas. Their employment in cattle herding was not exceptional, but rather the norm in the New World. This book examines how legal systems of land tenure intersected with both the ecology and the implementation of cattle ranching. Andrew Sluyter is at his best when analyzing land tenure systems, the environment, and herding practices. The question of African cultural influences is somewhat secondary, an issue to which the author usually dedicates a limited number of pages at the end of each chapter. For instance, the first twenty pages of chapter 1 are on the herding ecology of Veracruz, but no mention is made of Africa or black cattle herders until the story of “Juan el Negro” (pp. 44–45). While not a social and economic history of slavery on cattle ranches, this book constitutes a great examination of the herding ecologies in the New World.
After introducing European and African cattle herding, Sluyter examines early New Spain (mainly the lowlands of Veracruz), Louisiana, Barbuda Island, the Argentine Pampas, and the tasajo (jerked beef) trail from Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Cuba. Maps and figures are beautiful and serve well to illustrate his findings. The book—and its readers—would have benefited from the use of subheadings within each chapter.
Sluyter manages a vast array of sources written in English, French, and Spanish. A lack of Portuguese sources conceals the Luso-Brazilian South Atlantic, which had strong connections with colonial Argentina and Uruguay, as well as its own cattle culture exemplified by the southernmost Brazilian province, Rio Grande do Sul, where slaves herded cattle and produced tasajo well into the second half of the nineteenth century. Surviving sources make it easier to delve into the lives of the master class than into the lives of the enslaved. Because sources are elusive on the agency of black subjects, the author takes tangential routes to examine what black cowboys did.
Sluyter shows black majorities in the lowlands of Veracruz as a consequence of both Indian depopulation and the sixteenth-century slave trade, which together shaped the political economy of cattle ranching. In this herding ecology, the emergence of the saddle horn, a saddle with a horn, is probably the most visible transference from Senegambian herding to that in early Mexico, where this type of saddle was used for lassoing cattle by men on horseback. Such transference existed alongside transformation, often in the form of transculturation. For instance, the use of “living fences” to protect agricultural plots in the woodlands seems an adaptation of West African practices to both haciendas and to runaway slave communities such as the settlement founded by the famous Gaspar Yanga (pp. 55–56).
Other good examples of transference of practices by black cattle laborers are Louisiana and Barbuda Island, the two places the author knows best. Sluyter tracks in Louisiana the land purchases and titles of early ranchers in the Attakapas District as well as from where the cattle came. The pre-Acadian herding ecology seems the result of transculturation from Spanish, French, English, and West African practices. Here there was a definitive Senegambian majority, as sources on slave trading demonstrate. In Barbuda, where there is no trace of Senegambian captives having arrived, as the author attests, he suggests Senegambian cattle herding practices were more prevalent than British ones. Of course, black Barbudans, most born on this island, were the main herders. Here cattle herding underwent a process of transculturation in which British, African, and Spanish Caribbean practices influenced one another, leading to strategies such as enclosed water wells—a completely new development. The Barbudan example points to a complex web of cultural creation as well as to the historiographical debates on African cultures in the New World, a discussion with which the author rarely engages.
The point of African transferences is less evident in other chapters, such as in the case of the “bottomless bucket” in the Río de la Plata (pp. 164–65). Any link between this device—used to provide water to cattle—and the enslaved Africans arriving in Buenos Aires is tenuous at best. Here, as in other parts of the book, Sluyter shows a certain “Senegambian fixation,” that is, the idea that any creative development by slaves in cattle ranching had some connection with Senegambians disembarking in any given region. However, people from what are today Senegal and Gambia were a very tiny minority of the slaves arriving in the Río de la Plata; the large majority came from West Central Africa (Angola, Congo, and Benguela mostly). Sluyter misses the recent work on slave trading to this region, which shows that connections between the Spanish and Luso-Brazilians were central. Rio de Janeiro and Salvador were entrepôts between West Central Africa and the Río de la Plata, where 60 percent of the slaves arrived via Brazil rather than directly from Africa between 1777 and 1812.
The last chapter, on the production and trade of tasajo from Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Cuba, shows the intra-American connections behind the development of slave-based cattle ranches across the Americas, as these ranches mostly supplied internal economies. While cattle hides were sold both across the Americas and to Europe, beef was consumed locally, and tasajo was sold to internal markets in the New World. The main nineteenth-century consumers of jerked beef were the two post-1865 remaining slave societies: Cuba and Brazil. However, Argentinean and Uruguayan jerked beef was produced solely by free labor by that time. While tasajo plants (saladeros or charqueadas) used slave labor alongside free workers before 1840, abolition in both Argentina and Uruguay meant that no slave worked in this craft when it reached its peak, after 1850. This section is an excellent commodity chain study from production in Argentina and Uruguay to consumption by slaves in Cuba, where jerked beef became a staple of folk cuisine.
