Sandoz Center exhibit features Mexican cowboys
The Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center will feature “Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy” exhibit March 16 through May 9.
In the early 1970s, noted Texas historian Joe Frantz offered Bill Wittliff a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—to visit a ranch in northern Mexico where the vaqueros still worked cattle in traditional ways.
Wittliff photographed the vaqueros as they went about daily chores that had changed little since the first Mexican cow herders learned to work cattle from a horse's back. Wittliff captured a way of life that now exists only in memory and in the photographs included in this exhibition.
“Vaquero” features photographs with bilingual narrative text that reveal the muscle, sweat, and drama that went into roping a calf in thick brush or breaking a wild horse in the saddle.
The exhibition created by the Wittliff Collections at the Alkek Library, Texas State University, is presented in partnership with Humanities Texas, the state affiliate for the National Endowment for the Humanities and made possible, in part, by a “We the People” grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Admission is free and open to the public 8 a.m. to noon and 1-4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to noon and 1-4 p.m. Saturday. The center is closed Sunday and holidays. For more information, contact Sarah Polak at 308-432-6401 or spolak@csc.edu.
—CSC College Relations
Category: Campus News