Who are the living practitioners keeping the vaquero tradition alive today?

The living practitioners keeping the vaquero tradition alive represent a relatively small community of working ranch horsemen, clinicians, and dedicated enthusiasts who maintain the tradition's specific practices — the complete equipment progression, the hackamore work, the development toward the finished bridle horse — in a broader horse world that has largely moved toward more compressed timelines and more universal equipment. Martin Black is among the most prominent contemporary practitioners who explicitly works within the vaquero-influenced tradition alongside his working ranch context, teaching the principles of feel-based horsemanship grounded in the practical demands of actual livestock work while maintaining the tradition's commitment to developing genuine softness and lightness across the full developmental arc. Bryan Neubert, a California horseman who worked with both Tom and Bill Dorrance and with Ray Hunt, carries the vaquero tradition forward through his clinics and teaching, with particular attention to the hackamore work and the complete progression that the tradition values. The California Vaquero Arts Foundation and similar organizations work specifically to preserve and transmit the cultural heritage of the vaquero tradition, including its distinctive horsemanship, braiding arts, and equipment craftsmanship. Buck Brannaman, while perhaps most publicly associated with the broader natural horsemanship movement, explicitly grounds his horsemanship in the vaquero-Dorrance lineage and his teaching reflects the tradition's values even when his clinic audiences are far removed from the working ranch context in which the tradition developed. The rawhide braiders, bit makers, and saddle craftsmen who produce the traditional equipment of the vaquero tradition also serve as carriers of cultural knowledge about how the equipment is properly made and used, maintaining a dimension of the tradition that purely educational transmission cannot fully preserve.