ABSTRACT
Vargas Machuca's work demonstrates how horsemanship could be used to make social claims, explicitly for his own advancement and social appointments, but also by proposing a new vision of nobility gained through the study of a science of horsemanship and tested by experience. This example underscores the festival performance of horsemanship, and its many possible interpretations, as an arena where the negotiation of nobility took place. Horsemanship a la jineta served its role in the Americas as frontier conquests substantiated the virility of Spanish military strength in the service of religious conversion. Bernardo Vargas Machuca (1557–1622), a minor nobleman who used jineta horsemanship in directing his own colonial campaigns, derived a striking assertion of horsemanship on the frontier as a new form expressing nobility. Part of the novelty of the version of horsemanship a la jineta practiced in the Indies lay in how it represented a "science" of horsemanship, linking horsemanship to a more general theory of governance.
