Arnold R. Rojas has the distinction of chronicling the life and lore of California's Vaqueros in a series of books that are acknowledged to be regional classics. The vaqueros whose stories he told were Mexican cowboys who employed the Spanish la Jineta style of horsemanship in which a rider's body directed his mount; in the more conventional American cowboy style, reins are used to control a horse. This is an important distinction because the riding style symbolized a heritage; as Rojas explains in his 1974 collection, These Were the Vaqueros: The Collected Works of Arnold R. Rojas, "By vaquero I mean the man who brought the cattle to the West and herded them for a hundred years or more before the United States took possession of half of Mexico's territory." He said further that "the vaquero was a westerner, a Californian" whose "influence went north and east while the...