March Madness is usually rife with quirky mascot names. Part of what makes universities fun is that for every six Tigers or Eagles you’ll be rewarded with Anteaters or Artichokes.
Southern California seems to have a few of these fun nicknames, including the UC-Santa Barbara Gauchos.
A “gaucho” can be very loosely translated to a “cowboy” in South America. They’re generally associated with Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile. A cowboy in Mexico would be referred to as a “vaquero.” An example is the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Vaqueros.
UCSB has had the nickname since 1936, and it has the women of its student body at the time to thank for it.
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Why is UCSB called the Gauchos?
UC-Santa Barbara adopted the Gauchos nickname in 1936 because of the 1927 movie “The Gaucho.” The name replaced the previous nickname, the Roadrunners, and was voted upon by the women of UCSB as a replacement.
According to the UC-Santa Barbara website:
“The University has used the Argentine cowboy as a nickname since 1936 when, inspired by Douglas Fairbanks’s performance in the 1927 film The Gaucho, the female student population led a vote to change the mascot from the…
