The modern gold-and-rhinestone, big-money televised sport of rodeo owes just about everything—its traditions, its attitudes, its fashions—to rough-and-tumble Mexican cowboys of the early 1800s. These ranch hands, known as vaqueros, perfected the roping and riding skills we see in today’s competitions. They also innovated rodeo fashion: leather boots, chaps, big hats and the rest. And it was in Mexico that the sport got its name, derived from the Spanish verb rodear: to encircle or round up.