Name-a-Day Calendar, September 13: UC Santa Barbara Gauchos

Page 311 of 365

Chosen in: 1934

Chosen by: The “executive council”, whoever that is; approved by the student body

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The school now known as the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), has undergone an abnormal amount of change in oversight since its initial founding in 1891. At that time, it was the Sloyd School, which mostly focused on trades. It was renamed the Anna Blake Manual Training School (for its founder) in 1899 before being acquired by the State of California in 1909 and becoming the Santa Barbara State Normal School.

From here, the school was added to a predecessor of the California State University system in 1921 and adopted a more general curriculum, changing its name yet again to Santa Barbara State College. Here’s when they started intercollegiate athletics; the first men’s basketball team took the court in the 1921-22 school year. This team was most often known as the Roadrunners, as were the other sports teams that followed, though they were often sometimes called the Hilltoppers on account of their original campus being located in the hills north of downtown Santa Barbara.¹

These monikers remained in effect until the beginning of the 1934-35 school year, when students suddenly held a vote to adopt a “new school emblem”. According to the student newspaper, in its first issue under the title El Gaucho,² the “executive council” proposed this item to the student body, who approved it.

The rumor around UCSB is that the original muse behind this mascot was a movie star. Purportedly, the 1927 film The Gaucho starred acclaimed swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks in the lead role, and he was so attractive that Santa Barbara students were still fawning over him seven years later.

However, this isn’t the official reasoning El Gaucho gave in the issue that announced the switch. According to them:

“El Gaucho, the hard hitting, fast riding cowboy of the Argentine pampas, courageous in time of adversity, self-sacrificing when loyalty demands, an individual who can work and play with vigor and sincerity is now the emblem of Santa Barbara State college.

“El Gaucho was chosen as the school emblem because it is essentially Spanish. Our college is Spanish in architecture; it uses many Spanish titles for its projects: Hoy Dia, the name of the alumni newspaper, La Cumbre, name of the college yearbook. Santa Barbara, with its Mission, its old Spanish historical buildings, its renowned fiesta, gala celebration that turns the city into a provincial Spanish town, is essentially Spanish.”

Surprisingly, UCSB sources also seem to universally misstate the year in which the switch happened. Unless that September 19, 1934, issue of El Gaucho is some sort of deepfake, it was definitely 1934, but UCSB says it was either 1933 or 1936 depending on whom you’re asking.

Santa Barbara State College began focusing heavily on research after its addition to what is now the Cal State system, so a few important City of Santa Barbara figures successfully lobbied the State to move the school over to the University of California system, which also focused heavily on research, in 1944. The Cal State system resented this, sued the State, and lost, but California then made it illegal for such a move to ever happen again, which probably goes a long way toward explaining why the Cal State system now has 23 campuses and the UC system only has 10.

In any case, this birthed the Santa Barbara College of the University of California, which was upgraded to a general campus in 1958 as part of the UC system’s plan to prepare for the baby boomer generation eventually becoming college-aged. Thus, 1958 is when the school was first officially known as UCSB, making it the first time the “UC Santa Barbara Gauchos” existed.

Today, UCSB’s mascot is Olé Gaucho, a costumed man who is ostensibly supposed to be a gaucho, but doesn’t really look like one. The current depiction has drawn some criticism for cultural appropriation, and a group of students headed efforts to change the mascot to the mapache (Spanish for “raccoon”) in 2018. Despite being so well-liked that even rival UC Irvine’s newspaper pushed for it, the mapache was not adopted and El Gaucho remains.

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1. The school moved from that campus to its current campus, a former Marine Corps Air Station wedged on the beach between Goleta and Isla Vista, in 1949.

2. This paper is now known as The Daily Nexus.