9. Joaquín Murrieta
and Popular Culture
The events of 1846–1848 are a shadowy but important shaping presence in Joseph Badger's 1881Beadle's New York Dime Library novel Joaquin, the Terrible: The True History of the Three Bitter Blows that Changed an Honest Man to a Merciless Demon. One of several Badger stories about the California social bandit Joaquín Murrieta, Joaquin, the Terrible features a villain, Don Manuel Camplido, who had served as a Mexican army officer in the “late war” and was infamous for his “arrant cowardice on the field of battle.”[1] In California, Camplido conceals his Mexican origins, takes on a new name, John Vanderslice, and runs a gambling establishment called the Wheel of Fortune. Because he is angry with Murrieta for marrying Carmela, Camplido joins forces with another Mexican villain, Raymon Salcedo, who is trying to despoil the Murrietas of their California land grant, which was given to them “long before the Americans conquered the country” (3). Camplido, Salcedo, and their accomplice Dirty Dick mercilessly persecute Carmela, Joaquin, and his brother Carlos, who are in turn defended by an Irish-American worker named John Lynch. Despite Lynch's muscular assistance, however, “three bitter blows” fall on the Murrietas. As a result of the villains' schemes, Carlos is murdered and Joaquin is stripped and whipped until blood-red welts rise on his “white back” (28). After this humiliation, Joaquin, Carmela, and Lynch leave the area and give mining a try, but ugly Americans soon appear on the scene, saying that because they defeated Mexico in the war they deserve all of the gold. One of these
In its ambivalent sympathy for the bandit Murrieta, Joaquin, the Terrible effectively evokes what Michael Denning calls the “short period between 1877 and 1883” when dime novel outlaws such as the James Brothers and Deadwood Dick “defied the law and got away with it, escaping the moral universe of both genteel and sensational fiction.”[2] Linking these dime novels to the 1873 depression and the labor struggles of the era, Denning persuasively argues that the dime novel outlaw was “both sufficiently distant from and implicated in the battles of labor and capital to offer a figure of those battles, a figure of vengeance and heroism.”[3] In what follows, I emphasize how in the lands newly acquired from Mexico, and elsewhere too, transformations in law, labor, and capitalism were inseparable from mid-nineteenth-century struggles over race and empire. This was true, first of all, because both manual labor and land ownership were racialized categories. By the 1860s in California, according to one historian, the Californios had lost the “vast majority” of their land, and by 1880 “almost half” of the Californios and an “over-whelming majority” of other people of Mexican origin worked as laborers.[4] Similarly, between 1850 and 1900 in south and west Texas, the proportion of rural Mexicans who were ranch or farm owners was roughly cut in half, falling from about one-third to 16 percent, while the proportion of manual laborers rose from about one-third to two-thirds.[5] Since the attribution of whiteness to people of Mexican origin was connected to land ownership and class, increasing rates of landlessness and manual labor among Mexicans affected ideas about their racial status. On the other hand, although access to land and a better position in the racially segmented labor market often depended on claims to whiteness, the U.S.-Mexican War had laid a foundation, as we have already seen, for racializing Mexicans as nonwhite. Second, as Alexander Saxton and others have shown, racial issues played a significant role in the new working-class institutions of the West. But Tomás Almaguer notes that in California until the early twentieth century the relatively “small numbers and
It is easy to imagine how the Joaquín Murrieta of Badger's 1881 novel could have served as a figure of vengeance and heroism for a wide audience of readers who were experiencing wrenching shifts in formations of race, labor, and capitalism during the last third of the nineteenth century. Originally a retainer on Santa Anna's estate, later a miner, and finally an outlaw who triumphed over his persecutors because of his bodily prowess, intelligence, and general derring-do before meeting a bloody death, Badger's Murrieta was a relatively humble figure who could credibly serve as a type of the heroic workingman. The alliance between Murrieta and the Irish-American worker John Lynch, a pairing between Mexican and Irish-man that should be familiar by now to readers of this book, is also notable. On the one hand, this pairing supports Denning's argument that a working-class audience may have viewed Western outlaws as figures of class conflict. Lynch could even be seen as a stand-in for such a reader, and his bond with Murrieta, forged over and against more powerful oppressors, might be understood as a muted and displaced call for an alliance of workingmen in response to the forces that subordinate them. All of the historical and still active associations between the Irish and Mexicans, on the basis of religion as well as similar experiences of nativism, colonization, and migration, could be mobilized by depictions of such an alliance.[9] But this novel also strongly suggests that part of Murrieta's broad appeal lies in his whiteness, which it emphasizes. Indeed, the bond between Lynch and Murrieta could also be seen as an alliance between marginal whites. Despite the intensified, racialized patterns of labor and land ownership that became more firmly entrenched in the West during this period, perhaps more than three decades of distance from the war as well as the relatively small proportion of Mexican workers in California
On the other hand, the racial liminality of the wealthy villain Camplido is especially threatening, precisely because he is “white” enough to pass as a non-Mexican but is still irredeemably alien and monstrous. In this revisionist scenario, the duplicitous, nonproducing Mexicans Camplido and Salcedo are to blame for Mexican land loss and for the violence of the post-1848 years. And if Murrieta can be cast as a white working-class hero in part because whites and Mexicans were not yet competitors in the labor market, representations of other Mexicans in this novel—one villain is described, for instance, as “a heavy-set, low-browed fellow in whose veins there flowed more Indian than Spanish blood” (4)—suggestively predict how U.S.–Mexican War era depictions of Mexicans as evil, treacherous nonwhites would resurface in times of crisis. This would be especially true during periods of economic depression in the twentieth century after large numbers of immigrants came from Mexico to the United States.
Since 1853, the Murrieta story has circulated in an astonishing array of popular cultural forms, including California newspapers; John Rollin Ridge's 1854 novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta; crime narratives serialized in police gazettes; dime novels; twentieth-century Western fiction; U.S. television shows and films; several Spanish-language corridos or ballads; plays in both English and Spanish, including one written by Pablo Neruda; and revisions published in Mexico, Spain, France, and Chile.[10] In Roaring Camp, her excellent study of the social world of the California Gold Rush, historian Susan Lee Johnson has written eloquently about how different versions of the Murrieta story illustrate “in microcosm some of the tensions between memory and history that characterize knowing the Gold Rush itself.” Although both “English- and Spanish-language accounts,” she suggests, have used “bandit narratives to make intelligible the events of 1853,” representations produced by Murrieta's “familial, political, and intellectual heirs”—including oral narratives collected by Frank Latta as well as a substantial body of Chicano Studies scholarship—often “call into question traditions invented to explain and justify the imposition of Anglo American dominance in the diggings.”[11] In his introduction to a recent reissue of a 1905 Spanish-language novel about Murrieta written by Ireneo Paz, literary scholar Luis Leal has also examined multiple versions of the story since 1854; he has suggested that all of them can be traced back to the John Rollin Ridge novel. In my conclusion, I move backward from the Bea-dle's dime novels of the 1880s to the 1850s, focusing especially on the
In this concluding chapter, I build on the argument, advanced throughout American Sensations, that U.S. racial economies and class relationships were fundamentally transformed by the U.S.-Mexican War and mid-nineteenth-century U.S. empire-building. In the previous chapters, I have suggested, among other things, that popular sensational writers with ties to working-class culture also wrote extensively about Mexico, the Americas, and the West; that popular representations of Mexicans during the war contributed significantly to the racialization of people of Mexican origin as nonwhite, but that representations of a minority of elite, usually landowning, “white” Mexicans also affected ideas about race; that U.S. imperialism provoked debates about the concept of an Anglo-Saxon national identity as well as discussions of nativism and free and unfree labor; and that all of these debates were variously intertwined with ideas about gender and sexuality. In this conclusion, I want to shift the discussion to a different context; that is, to the U.S. West and to the California Gold Rush, another important event marked by the American 1848. For if the war led to the remapping of national borders, the discovery of gold in California drew miners and other workers to the region from all over the world, but especially from Mexico, Hawaii, Chile, Peru, China, Ireland, Germany, France, the Eastern United States, and Australia.[12] While these shifts affected racial classifications in general, they dramatically influenced the racialization of former Mexican nationals and the construction of a transcontinental white national identity in particular.[13] Far from serving as a safety valve for class pressures, the newly acquired land in the West remained a battle-field where race and nationalism shaped class conflicts. These conflicts, as we have seen, sometimes erupted as nativism, often pitted white workers against people of color, and were always powerfully affected by the
In what follows, I trace the interdependent histories of three developments: the popularization of a fictive transcontinental white national identity; the postwar reracialization of former Mexican nationals and other Spanish-speakers; and the articulation of a disjunctive, transnational, mexicano cultural nationalism that both responds to and challenges developments one and two. The different versions of the Murrieta story suggest, in other words, how whiteness took hold as a unifying national and transcontinental structure of feeling and how its parameters began to shift decisively in the postwar period to include previously despised groups of Europeans and to exclude many of the newly conquered peoples in the West.[14] Although these parameters varied in different places and circumstances and although they would continue to shift in response to changing conditions, still, as I have argued in this book in a variety of contexts, popular sensational literature established many of the patterns for thinking about issues of race, labor, empire, and national identity that would remain influential long after the war, the Gold Rush, and the remapping of national boundaries had become history.
And yet, many border ballads refuse such a remapping of the territory. Insisting that he is not a stranger (extraño), the Murrieta who tells his story in one of these corridos argues that “California is part of Mexico because God wanted it that way” (“De México es California/porque Díos así lo quizo”). Such a heroic narrative of resistance may in turn perform closures of its own: the sanctification of Mexican sovereignty elides the Spanish and Mexican subjugation of indigenous peoples, and Murrieta's insistence on his status as a “native” could imply a disdain for immigrants such as the Chinese workers who are persecuted by his gang in some of the English-language versions of the story. What is more, figuring resistance to U.S. power as a paradigmatically masculine feat best accomplished by the corrido hero with a pistol in his hand marginalizes female agency, as many feminist critics have suggested.[15]
But if the corridos paradoxically try to locate a national community in transregional and transnational movements of male workers, during and after the war a good deal of popular U.S. sensational literature labors to redefine and restrict a white national identity by identifying a community of people of Mexican origin and other Spanish-speakers with a “foreign” criminality.[16] Postwar sensational crime literature, especially, continues the work of wartime representations by racializing this community
RACE WAR CRIMES
The criminal fait divers, by its everyday redundancy, makes acceptable the system of judicial and political supervisions that partition society; it recounts from day to day a sort of internal battle against the faceless enemy; in this war, it constitutes the daily bulletin of alarm or victory. The crime novel, which began to develop in the broadsheet and in mass circulation literature, assumed an apparently opposite role. Above all, its function was to show that the delinquent belonged to an entirely different world, unrelated to familiar, everyday life. … The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of “crime stories” in which delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place. … In such a formidable delinquency, coming from so alien a clime, what illegality could recognize itself?
— Michel Foucault,Discipline and Punish
It is easy to recognize the basic outline of the California Police Gazette's version of the Murrieta story in the pattern of the typical heroic border-corrido. As in the classic heroic corrido, in The Life of Joaquin Murieta, the Brigand Chief of California a man with a “very mild and peaceable disposition” turns into a criminal after being violently persecuted by white Americans and the regimes of law and lawlessness they bring with them.[18] But these two types of popular crime narrative show how complex and divided the international field of popular knowledge about crime and criminality was during this period. For although corridos take the part of the criminal and question the justice of U.S. law, the Police Gazette disseminates ambivalent representations of criminals but ultimately upholds the law by striving to make its victory over criminality seem natural, inevitable, and best for the safety of the public. That is, even though both types of popular crime narrative respond to what Michel Foucault calls “the desire to know and narrate how men have been able to rise against power” and “traverse the law,” corridos attack the legitimacy of the new forms of power and law that the Police Gazette ends up defending.[19] As popular crime narratives, corridos and the Police Gazette are engaged in a discursive battle not over a generalized, abstract law or power as such, but over the violent transition from Mexican to U.S. law in the postwar period.
Even the title of the California Police Gazette, which was apparently modeled on the more successful and long-lived National Police Gazette, already implies a panoptic gaze leveled statewide, pulling together diverse incidents, crimes, and historical events into a field of visibility for the eye of police power.[20] Founded in 1845, the National Police Gazette was itself modeled on British police gazettes and “promised to publish descriptions of criminals and accounts of crime for the avowed purpose of revealing the identities of criminals and to supplement the work of the police.”[21] During the U.S.-Mexican War the National Police Gazette even printed the names and descriptions of deserters from the U.S. ranks, and the War Department “thereupon authorized a large subscription for distribution among the soldiers.”[22]
The California Police Gazette, a weekly four-page journal published in San Francisco that sold for twelve and a half cents per issue, or five dollars per year, was first issued in January 1859. The Murrieta story ran from 3 September to 5 November of that year and was subsequently reissued as a pamphlet novel.[23] In the same issues of the California Police Gazette that contained installments of the Murrieta story, readers could find news of California prison escapes; an editorial advocating that the state take over the management of prisons, using convict labor to
Figure 15. Cover of 1859 edition of The Life of Joaquin Murieta, the Brigand Chief of California. (Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California)
In the territories newly acquired from Mexico, however, making the “system of judicial and political supervisions” seem natural and right was both a more difficult and a more urgent task. Thus the California Police Gazette imports sensational racial stereotypes from the popular literature of the U.S.-Mexican War that help, on the one hand, to make a hero out of a representative of the state—namely, Harry Love, the California Ranger and former Mexican War soldier who leads the company of men who finally kill Murrieta—and, on the other, to racialize Mexicans by identifying them both as essentially foreign and as similar to so-called savage Indians. In this way, people of Mexican origin are represented as natural criminals, as part of what one contemporaneous writer called “the semi-barbarous hordes of Spanish America, whose whole history is that of revolution and disorder.”[26]
The California Police Gazette makes crime both alien and familiar as it brings the story of the Sonoran bandit back into the homes of its readers. This version of the Murrieta crime narrative, which most of the Latin American versions seem to echo, follows Ridge's 1854 version closely, often word for word, but it mixes up the order of events, elides some passages and scenes, notably those that justify or excuse Murrieta's
Beginning in the 1850s, the story of Joaquín Murrieta began to circulate in a variety of such popular forms, but daily and weekly newspapers in California were one of its most important early sources. In January of 1853, California newspapers such as the San Francisco Herald, the Calaveras Chronicle, the San Joaquin Republican, and the Sacramento Union started carrying lurid articles about the crimes of a gang of “Mexican marauders” led by a Mexican named Joaquín.[28] These accounts placed “Joaquín” all over the state, attributing more crimes to him than he could possibly have committed.[29] Finally, in May, the California state legislature, unable to decide between the various Joaquíns that the newspapers had put into circulation, passed a bill authorizing a company composed mostly of former Mexican War combatants to capture “the party or gang of robbers commanded by the five Joaquíns, whose names are Joaquín Muriati, Joaquín Ocomorenia, Joaquín Valen-zuela, Joaquín Botellier, and Joaquín Carillo.”[30] This band of California Rangers narrowed the five Joaquíns down to one man, whom they killed, after which they cut off his head and preserved it in alcohol. Although many of the newspaper stories questioned whether this head belonged to the “real” Joaquín, it was publicly displayed, often along with
Newspapers, then, initially disseminated the story of Murrieta's criminality, spreading the news that the Mexican bandit's gang posed “a perpetual threat to everyday life” in the new state. But only a year later crime narratives about Murrieta were being published, including two that were serialized in relatively obscure weekly police gazettes and one novel, Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, which appeared in San Francisco.[31] Although Ridge's story was published as a book instead of being serialized in a paper, his novel cannot be neatly separated from the daily and weekly newspaper accounts of Joaquín's crimes. Ridge's narrative is episodic, sometimes reading like a series of newspaper stories loosely pulled together, and many of the incidents he describes recall the contemporary newspaper reports that Ridge almost certainly read while he was living in Marysville and Yuba City, California, during those years. The narrative registers its place in this larger world of popular crime writing when Joaquín reads crime stories in the newspapers such as the Los Angeles Star, “which made a very free use of his own name in the account of these transactions and handled his character in no measured terms” (R, 30).
From the beginning of the narrative, Ridge also alludes to different types of crime literature, placing his novel within an international field of popular knowledge about crime by comparing Murrieta to the “renowned robbers of the Old or New World, who have preceded him” (R, 7). This body of crime literature about famous robbers not only “precedes” the crimes committed by Murrieta's gang but also actively inspires them. Reyes Feliz, for instance, “had read the wild romantic lives of the chivalrous robbers of Spain and Mexico until his enthusiastic spirit had become imbued with the same sentiments which actuated them” (R, 17). So Ridge repeatedly registers his awareness of a larger body of crime narratives set in Spain and Mexico as well as in England, France, and the United States that provide a framework within which his own text will inevitably be read.[32]
But if Ridge borrows from newspapers and other crime narratives, he is also interested in making distinctions within the field of crime literature. In other words, he wants to make it clear to readers that this novel transcends wild romance and cheap sensationalism, that it is not meant to imbue “enthusiastic spirits” with the same sentiments, and that his purpose is not to minister to “any depraved taste for the dark and horrible
Being recognized as an author was also important to Ridge, and so when the 1859 California Police Gazette version of the Murrieta story appeared, he accused the anonymous writer of plagiarism in the pages of the Marysville Daily National Democrat, which he was editing at that time.[33] Many years later, when a “third edition” of the novel, which the publishers claimed that Ridge had written, appeared shortly after his death in 1871, it included an author's preface that denounced the “crude interpolations, fictitious additions, and imperfectly designed distortions of the author's phraseology” in an earlier “spurious edition”—almost certainly the 1859 version—which, it claimed, had “circulated, to the infringement of the author's copyright and the damage of his literary credit.”[34] For although Ridge worked as a journalist and news-paper editor in California for much of his life, he also had higher literary ambitions. During his lifetime in California he was fairly well known as a writer of romantic poetry, and even if in Joaquin Murieta he cynically worked within the conventions of the best-selling crime novel in hopes of making money, the novel still registers Ridge's concern with his “literary credit.” For instance, he inserted one of his most famous poems, “Mount Shasta,” into the narrative, and his language is often self-consciously literary as he includes romantic descriptions of nature, meta-physical ruminations about God and the universe, and moralizing assessments of the changes in Murrieta's character.
Much more than does the Police Gazette, Ridge makes Murrieta into a romantic hero by making him a rounder character. That is, although the California Police Gazette focuses on action and usually refrains from speculating about Murrieta's motives and feelings, Ridge gives him more of an interiority by giving us more information about his character. In the beginning, Ridge emphasizes “the nobility of soul” that Murrieta was forced to compromise when he became a criminal. According to Ridge, Murrieta's early criminal acts regrettably “shut him away forever from his peace of mind and purity of heart” (R, 14). Ridge suggests that Murrieta's criminality permanently stains him, but he also underlines the workings of Joaquín's conscience and his original moral superiority. In Ridge's text, Murrieta never entirely loses this moral responsiveness.
For instance, when he kills a young American named Allan Ruddle who tries to draw his pistol while Joaquín is robbing him, “Joaquin's conscience smote him for this deed, and he regretted the necessity of killing so honest and hard-working a man as Ruddle seemed to be” (R, 33). The California Police Gazette omits this glimpse into Joaquín's conscience, as well as many other similar passages that “would redeem with … refulgent light the darkness of his previous history and show him to aftertimes, not as a mere outlaw, committing petty depredations and robberies, but as a hero who has revenged his country's wrongs and washed out her disgrace in the blood of her enemies” (R, 80).
Passages like this one have led many to speculate that Ridge was projecting his own responses to racism as well as his feelings of victimization and desire for revenge onto Murrieta.[35] Ridge's family history is deeply implicated in the series of events that culminated in the removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia during the 1830s.[36] His relatively wealthy and prominent family initially fought removal but then acceded to it under pressure. That decision, however, was viewed as treachery by a faction of Cherokees led by John Ross. Members of this faction eventually murdered Ridge's father and grandfather in Arkansas, where they had relocated. Then in 1849, Ridge killed a man who had supposedly been sent by the Ross faction to provoke a fight with him. Ridge was forced to flee across the Missouri line and eventually to California, since he feared “that he would not receive a fair trial in the Cherokee Nation, which was controlled politically by Ross and his followers.”[37] Although he dreamed of revenge for years, Ridge never returned to the Cherokee nation.
The resemblances between Murrieta's story and Ridge's are certainly striking. As Ridge's biographer, James Parins, suggests, “Joaquín himself must have fascinated Ridge. Here was a man who had tried to live peacefully despite wrongs inflicted on his family and friends. Joaquín's only crime at first was that he did not belong to the faction in power. Driven over the brink by his enemies, he had to react violently. This action forced him into exile, where his intelligence and courage let him revenge himself on his persecutors. He was admired by his own people and feared by his enemies. In many ways Joaquín's early history was much like that of the writer who was to immortalize him; his later career had to appeal to Ridge's deep thirst for revenge.”[38] According to this logic, Ridge translates the battle between the Ross and the Ridge factions of the Cherokee nation into the conflict between Mexicans and “Americans” in the Murrieta story. Other critics have argued that Ridge was trying to
It is certainly true that Ridge is intervening in a slippery field of racial classifications that are in flux during this period and that often conflate Mexicans and Indians. But although popular sensational writers often made “Indians” a monolithic category defined by “savagery,” Ridge makes distinctions between different tribes on the basis of their distance from “savagery” and their success at adapting to “civilization.”[41] Peter Christensen convincingly argues that Ridge believed in a hierarchy “in which some Native American tribes, such as the Cherokees, Aztecs, and Incas are seen as the superior representatives of their race.”[42] Instead of aligning all Indians with all Mexicans, then, Ridge is more likely looking for resemblances between Cherokees as a superior type of Indian and Joaquín as the representative of a superior type of Mexican.
Internal hierarchies also stratify the category “Mexican” for Ridge. The editor's preface, probably composed by Ridge, suggests that Murri-eta is an “exception” to the judgment that Mexicans are a people “who have so far degenerated as to have been called by many ‘A Nation of Cowards’” (R, 4). Ridge's Murrieta is born “of respectable parents,” can speak English fluently, and is so light skinned that he can successfully disguise himself as a red-haired, white North American. Fired “with enthusiastic admiration of the American character” (R, 8) until squatters jump his claim, rape his girlfriend, and whip him, Murrieta seems more like Ridge's example of a special type of Mexican who would be capable, in the absence of racism, of assimilating to American “civilization” than the representative of Mexicans as a conquered and outraged people. A few years later Ridge would even write editorials supporting filibustering expeditions into Nicaragua and Sonora, Mexico. According to Parins, Ridge advocated “annexing Sonora with or without Sonoran assent unless the Mexican government [could] maintain law and order.”[43] Ridge also supported the claims of white settlers in California on Spanish and Mexican land grants, describing the conflict between the two as a struggle of “the masses against the aristocratic few who would rob and oppress them.”[44] Given Ridge's views on these issues, it is difficult to believe that
Instead, Ridge is championing the law and U.S. ideals but is claiming that “prejudice of color” may lead to “injustice to individuals” (R, 158) and the abrogation of law, which in turn engenders crimes such as Murrieta's. But if Ridge insists that Murrieta's story is a part of “the most valuable history of the State” (R, 7), the California Police Gazette restricts the meaning of Murrieta's example by making the latter only a part of “the criminal history” (PG, 1) of California. And although Ridge implies that the citizens of California need to think about how race prejudice turned Murrieta into a criminal, the California Police Gazette makes Murrieta into an example of an innate, alien criminality.
The California Police Gazette version of the Murrieta story gives crime a Mexican face, making it seem “very close” and yet still “quite alien”—an enduring stereotype that resurfaces today ad nauseam in debates about immigration, welfare, and citizenship. Indeed, it is the very combination of the “close” and the “alien” that makes the Mexican immigrant bandit seem especially threatening. Mexico is “close,” first of all, because it is geographically adjacent to the United States, sharing a common border. In both Ridge's version and in the Police Gazette, Joaquín and the members of his gang repeatedly cross and recross national boundary lines, mapping out transnational networks of migration and illegal activity. The gang is continually reconstituted through the departures and the arrivals of new members across the border, especially from Sonora but also from Chile and Peru. Ridge suggests that the “ramifications” of Murrieta's “organization” “are in Sonora, Lower California, and in this State” (R, 74), while the California Police Gazette notes at the beginning that Murrieta's “powerful combination” was “steadily increasing by arrivals from Lower California and Sonora” (PG, 8). In both versions, Murrieta's gang is a sort of international army that both recruits and deploys soldiers across national boundaries. Much of their business involves moving stolen horses from the United States to Mexico. Again and again, the narratives expose secret connections between Mexico and the United States, as when the wife of a “wealthy ranch owner in Guadalajara, Mexico” travels to California to “urge [Joaquín] on in his bloody warfare against the Americans” (PG, 105); or when Murrieta repeatedly sends “remittances of money” to a “secret partner” in the state of Sonora (R, 32). In these ways, the novels incessantly link the cross-border movement of money and people to international crime
This pattern of transnational movement is established in the beginning of the California Police Gazette version when Joaquín initially travels to San Francisco in 1848 to look for his brother Carlos, “who had long been living in California, and had obtained a grant of four leagues of land from one of those excessively generous governors who flourished about that time” (PG, 3). Not finding Carlos, Joaquín “retraced his steps homeward” (PG, 3) to Mexico. A year later, however, when a letter from his brother arrives that also brings news of the Gold Rush in California, Joaquín and his wife set out on the journey back to San Francisco. When they arrive, Carlos is about to leave for Mexico City, because his land has “been taken from him by the Americans, by means of forged papers” (PG, 3) and he needs to go to Mexico to “see the grantor himself, and so recover the land” (PG, 3). In the opening chapter of the novel, these actual and anticipated journeys across the border make national boundary lines seem porous and insecure, given the spatial proximity or “closeness” of Mexico to the United States. They also imaginatively link up northern Mexico and California, as the story of Joaquín's brother, who is a Sonoran, is identified with the history of the Californios, many of whom were forced to become involved in costly litigation over land grants. Carlos even plans to take “a young native Californian named Flores” (PG, 3) to Mexico with him to serve as a witness.
The journey into the heart of Mexico that Carlos proposes activates the memory of another system of political supervision, an older set of Mexican laws and institutions (the land grants of the “excessively generous” Mexican governors) that were in the process of being replaced by the U.S. political and legal system. But this transition did not happen seam-lessly, and the older order continued to clash with the new. So the “Mexican period” still seemed close and yet alien to U.S. settlers in the sense that California had until very recently been a part of Mexico and so had been governed by other laws and institutions. Mexico's property law, for instance, continued to be a factor in land disputes throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, when white immigrants squatted on land owned by Mexicans and went to court (sometimes with forged papers) to challenge land grants made by the old regime.[45] After California became a state within the U.S. system, the Mexican period was increasingly represented with both fear and nostalgia as a superseded stage of history, as
For during the 1850s, U.S. boundaries, laws, and institutions were strange, new, artificial, unevenly in place, violently enforced, and violently abrogated. Instead of war giving way to peace and the rule of law, after 1848 war continued to be fought by other means as Spanish-speakers and other so-called foreigners confronted racist legislation, claim-jumping, vigilantism, and lynching at the hands of newly arrived immigrants from the Eastern United States, many of whom had fought on the U.S. side in the war. In San Francisco, for instance, the members of the nativist vigilante gang called the Hounds, who were especially fond of persecuting Spanish-speakers, were mostly “disbanded soldiers from the regiment of the New York Volunteers.”[46] The war, in other words, was very recent, raw history that continued to shape the present as many of those who fought it reencountered each other in California.
The California Police Gazette tries to heal the wounds of war and to unify a heterogeneous society by defining a white American identity in opposition to what are constructed as the “savage” and therefore naturally criminal, essentially alien even if native, bodies of Mexicans, Latin Americans, and Californios within the state. This effort to stabilize differences responds to a crisis in the boundaries of whiteness and national identity in mid-nineteenth-century California. As we have seen, although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed “all the rights of citizens” to Mexicans who chose to remain in the new territories and although the California state constitution defined Mexicans as “white” and declared them, as opposed to Indians, eligible for citizenship, these legal provisions were unevenly enforced during the postwar period. The big wave of immigration from Mexico and South America during the Gold Rush years, especially, upset the system of racial meanings and classifications that were initially proposed in California.[47] Leonard Pitt suggests that whether “from California, Chile, Peru, or Mexico, whether residents of twenty years standing or immigrants of one week, all of the Spanish-speaking were lumped together as ‘interlopers and greasers.’ … In essence then the Latin-American immigrants were a sort of catalyst whose presence caused the sudden and permanent dissolution of the social elements.”[48] The precarious whiteness of certain Spanish-speakers
The racializations promoted by the Murrieta story must be understood in the context of what one historian has called “the great Sonoran migration of 1848–1856.”[49] During these years, between ten and twenty thousand miners made the long journey across the desert and up the coast from Sonora to the goldfields of California, bringing with them superior mining skills as well as “hard feelings towards Americans developed when the latter invaded their homelands.”[50] They were joined by five thousand miners from Latin America, most of them from Chile, in the year 1849 alone.[51] From the beginning, the Americans who were moving west in large numbers loudly voiced their resentment of “foreigners” in the mines; they believed that their recent victory in the war with Mexico entitled U.S. citizens and only U.S. citizens to claim the prodigious amounts of gold that had been discovered. In January of 1849, General Persifor S. Smith, whose ship had stopped at Panama on the way to California, where he would take command of the U.S. Army, issued a proclamation in response to this nativist hysteria, announcing his intention to fine and imprison “persons not citizens of the United States, who are flocking from all parts to search for and carry off gold belonging to the United States in California.”[52] Xenophobic U.S. Americans violently turned foreigners away from Sutter's Mill in April, and other vigilantes drove Sonorans “out of the Tuolumne, Stanislaus, and Mokolumne River placers in the summer of 1849.”[53] The Foreign Miner's Tax Law that was enacted in 1850 and that required all “foreigners” working in the mines to pay twenty dollars a month for a permit, was thus only one example among many of the ways that U.S. citizens quickly naturalized the new national boundary lines and, in Josiah Royce's words, “turned upon foreigners as a class, and especially upon Sonorans and South Americans.”[54]
Despite the efforts of many Californios to distinguish themselves from the new immigrants, most Americans included them within this newly revised “class” of foreigners.[55] Although “local attachments and loyalties, class differences, and subtle variances in customs and language patterns” divided the different groups of Spanish speakers from each other, many white Americans saw no significant differences among them.[56]
In a discussion of the criminalization of Spanish-speakers during this period, Josiah Royce scathingly exposes the essentialist logic that supported the classification of these diverse groups of people as a race:
It was, however, considered safe by an average lynching jury in those days to convict a “greaser” on very moderate evidence, if none better could be had. One could see his guilt so plainly written, we know, in his ugly, swarthy face, before the trial began. Therefore the life of a Spanish-American in the mines in the early days, if frequently profitable, was apt to be a little disagreeable. It served him right, of course. He had no business, as an alien, to come to the land that God had given us. And if he was a native Californian, a born “greaser,” then so much the worse for him. He was so much the more our born foe; we hated his whole degenerate, thieving, land-owning, lazy, and discontented race.[57]
The “denial, or flattening, of differences within a particular racially defined group,” which Michael Omi and Howard Winant identify as a key feature of racial essentialism, can be seen in the pejorative epithet “greaser” that collapses the differences between the “native Californian” and the “alien” Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians.[58] The more neutral but still homogenizing term “Spanish-American” that Royce chooses in order to distinguish himself from the nativist vigilantes also covers over differences between those who had elected to become U.S. citizens, those who became citizens by default under the terms of the treaty, those who retained other national or regional allegiances and never hoped to become citizens, and those who were excluded from citizenship because they were considered Indian or mestizo. And even though the nativists assumed that all “greasers” were “aliens,” even the qualifier “native” failed to protect the Californios from those who found a natural criminality, common to the native and alien alike, inscribed on their “swarthy” faces. Indeed, their (similarly problematic) claim to “native” status made them even more of a threat to the white settlers who coveted their land; it is not surprising that Royce added “land-owning” to the long list of racist adjectives that the white nativists used to vilify the “native” Californians.
Of course, many Californios were still legally considered white and were therefore in a much better position than the Chinese, blacks, and Indians, who were absolutely excluded from citizenship on the basis of their race, as well as many other people of Mexican origin. But racial categories were swiftly being recreated, reinhabited, transformed, and destroyed during the 1850s.[59] In practice, access to white privilege was, as I have already suggested, always severely stratified by class. As Tomás
Almaguer suggests, although the land-owning elite Californios were often considered white, assimilable, and worthy of intermarriage with other kinds of white people, working-class people of Mexican origin were “often denied their legal rights by being categorized as Indians.”[60] Even members of the elite, however, could lose their white privilege if they were dark skinned. Almaguer tells the story of Manuel Dominguez, who had served as a delegate to the California State Constitutional Convention of 1849 but was barred from testifying in a San Francisco court-room in 1857 because the judge ruled that he was an Indian. In the wake of the war and with the increasing dispossession and proletarianization of the Californio ranchero class and the influx of new immigrants, the hold on whiteness of any of these Spanish-speakers became increasingly tenuous as, more and more, they were all lumped together.
The California Police Gazette version of the Murrieta story exploits this ambiguous racial status but ultimately labors to unify and racialize these diverse groups by identifying them with an innate, savage criminality. As we have seen, the novel initially focuses on postwar injustices inflicted on different groups of Spanish-speakers, linking these injuries together only to override them in favor of a crime narrative that justifies state-sponsored violence. I have suggested that the story of Joaquín's brother, Carlos, whose Mexican land grant is taken away from him “by means of forged papers,” recalls the fate of the Californios, who were displaced during the postwar period through fraud, the complicated and costly Land Law of 1851, and frivolous lawsuits.[61] The ensuing scene—in which Joaquín is prevented from working the mines on the Stanislaus River by a group of “lawless and desperate” men—typifies a long, bloody history of Anglo claim-jumping and violence inflicted on Sono-ran miners during the Gold Rush. Finally, the existence of an extensive, hidden network of Californios, Mexicans, and Latin Americans who help Joaquín avenge his injuries implies that all of these groups have suffered similar injustices. The opening frame, then, suggests that Joaquín's injuries are representative of wrongs suffered by Californios, Sonorans, and Latin Americans as a group, and that the criminality of the group is to some degree a legitimate or at least understandable response to these postwar injuries. If the novel's opening emphasizes the constructedness of Joaquín's criminality, however, the narrative ultimately overrides this explanation in favor of one that suggests that this criminality is rooted in the dark recesses of his nature—a “savage” impulse that takes him outside the pale of white civility.
This redrawing of boundaries around whiteness depends upon the importation of stereotypes from U.S.–Mexican War era sensational literature that define U.S. Anglo-Saxon heroism by opposing it to Mexican “savagery.” One flashback in particular, which fleshes out Captain Love's U.S.-Mexican War encounter with a “hideous-looking fellow, half Indian, half Mexican,” suggestively indicates the larger project of this version of the Murrieta story. Echoing Ridge's language, the California Police Gazette sets up Love as a point of identification for its readers early on by characterizing him as a “hardy pioneer” who “during the Mexican war had performed valuable service as an express rider, carrying dispatches from one military post to another, over the wildest and most dangerous parts of Mexico” (PG, 14). But the Police Gazette embroiders with lurid and telling details a scene that Ridge only hints at as it interjects a long description of Love's victory over a band of guerrillas led by a “half Indian, half Mexican” warrior. The threat represented by this mestizo soldier, “whose face was marked with a deep scar across his right cheek … urging his animal on with such savage fury, that its sides were covered with gore” (PG, 15), haunts the narrative, which opposes white representatives of the racial state to “savage,” lawless Mexicans by reinserting both within the theater of the recent war.[62]
The novel repeatedly describes the gang's crimes as the continuation of war by other means. At night, the members of Murrieta's gang sit around the campfire remembering the war by telling gory, sensational stories about the battles they fought with “the guerrilla chief and priest, padre Jurata [sic]” (PG, 8)—a character loosely based on the famous Mexican fighting priest, Padre Jarauta. The brutal Three-Fingered Jack, in particular, who is closely identified with Jarauta and who lost his fingers while fighting the war, is a character straight out of U.S.–Mexican War era pulp fiction. A long story about Jarauta in combat, “sheathing his dripping blade in the bodies of the dead as well as the living, and in a perfect frenzy of excitement severing the neck-joints and casting the gaping heads into the rushing water” (PG, 21), is framed by multiple accounts of Jack's murderous abandon. Indeed, when one of the bandits suggests that Jack “takes rather too much delight in drawing blood,” another replies, “Not half so much as old Padre Jurata whom some of us had for a leader in Mexico” (PG, 20). As Jack satisfies “his brutal disposition” by “discharging three loads from his revolver into the head” of a corpse, tortures Chinese miners, and exults in “the luxurious feast of blood” (PG, 23), the Police Gazette implies that Mexican “savagery” has migrated from the battlefields of the U.S.-Mexican War to the California goldfields.
If early on the novel suggests that Joaquín is an “exceptional” Mexican who is made into a criminal by un-American Americans, by the end it identifies him with the essentially depraved and bloodthirsty Jack. Even in the opening chapters of the novel, however, Joaquín is more brutal than in Ridge's version. For instance, Joaquín's first vengeful murder, which is briefly described after the fact by Ridge, becomes a full-blown, bloody scene in The Life of Joaquin Murieta, the Brigand Chief of California. Joaquín's eyes glare “with the fury of an enraged tiger” and his body seems to “quiver with excitement” as he plunges his knife again and again “into the body, until the latter was almost hacked to pieces, for the demon of revenge possessed the soul of Joaquin and urged him to excess” (PG, 6). And when Joaquín and his gang later meet up with the men who killed Carmela, Joaquín, who has intermittently tried to control Jack's sadistic behavior, commands him to exercise his “natural propensity,” an order that encourages Jack to disembowel them and cut out their hearts. As the narrative proceeds, Joaquín's desire for revenge is thus figured, more and more, as savage, innate, and out of control, as something that links him to the utterly savage Jack, who indiscriminately hacks people to pieces because his “heart to its very core is black with evil” (PG, 29). In this way, the wild, brutal Jack is figured as Joaquín's inner “truth”: Jack is an indispensable part of Joaquín's organization that Joaquín cannot control, and ultimately does not want to control, as long as the “demon of revenge” spawned by postwar California possesses him.
By identifying Joaquín's gang and the extended network of people who support them with an innate, savage criminality linked to the U.S.-Mexican War, the narrative implicitly redraws the boundary lines around the white nation, collapsing the differences between diverse peoples of Mexican origin and other Spanish-speakers, whether they are “natives” or “foreigners,” and classifying them as an inassimilable body within the nation-state. When, after a day of adventure, the bandits sit around the fire singing a song called “Our Home Is Mexico,” which they claim was “a favorite with the padre Jurata” (PG, 64), this vision of an in-surgent alien nation within the white republic is even supported by a cultural nationalist anthem, albeit one that is sung to the tune of “The Maid of Monterey.” In this fantasy of postwar cultural hybridity, the California Police Gazette has Joaquín's men proclaim their eternal allegiance to Mexico (the novel includes a full set of lyrics) to the tune of a song that is about “south of the border” romance. Although the novel's representation of this musical interlude says a lot more about the work
JOAQUÍN MURRIETA AND THE CHICANA/O
COUNTERCULTURES OF MODERNITY
Joaquín Murrieta has been an important and pervasive symbol of resistance for people of Mexican origin in the United States in diverse forms of twentieth-century cultural production, from barrio murals to Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales's nationalist epic poem “I Am Joaquín” to versions of the Murrieta corrido sung by Los Madrugadores, Lalo Guerrero, and Lydia Mendoza, among many others.[64] Stories about Murrieta's severed head, which was exhibited in mining camps throughout California, seem to have stimulated many Chicana/o responses, including Luis Valdez's play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, Richard Rodriguez's essay “The Head of Joaquín Murrieta,” and Cherrie Moraga's Heroes and Saints. Moraga's play, which focuses on a woman who is born without a body because of her mother's exposure to pesticides in the fields of the Central Valley, might be read as a radical revision of the many male-authored accounts of displacement and loss provoked by Murrieta's head.[65] Rodriguez's essay offers one such account, albeit one which is unusual in that it ultimately recoils from rather than cele-brates Murrieta as a symbol of the larger community. Rodriguez writes in a half-satirical, half-serious way about his travels around the state with a Jesuit priest named Alberto Huerta in search of the head, which he describes as a symbol of California's violent, gothic past. But the more Huerta urges Rodriguez to help him pursue various leads and thereby calls him “to come to terms with California,” the more Rodriguez anxiously “pull[s] back” in order to return to “the California of Fillmore Street, of blond women and Nautilus-educated advertising executives, this California of pastels and pasta salad … where I live.”[66] These very different examples suggest that whether the myth of Murri-eta as symbol of a larger Chicano community has been enthusiastically endorsed, implicitly criticized and imaginatively transformed, or nervously relegated to a dead past, many Chicana/o cultural producers have felt compelled to come to terms with it.
Literary critics who write about Murrieta often privilege Ridge's novel as an authoritative text, implicitly distinguishing it from the subliterary newspaper accounts that preceded it in the 1850s as well as from the mass cultural texts, such as the California Police Gazette and the dime novels, that followed it. I have suggested that such an analysis elides a larger, violently divided inter-American field of popular knowledge about crime that responded to and helped to reshape class and racial formations in the wake of the American 1848. But if the low or mass-cultural world of cheap sensational literature and the crime gazette constitutes one important part of that field, the ballads and legends produced by diasporic corrido communities are surely another. In this concluding section, I want to do two things: first, to argue that corridos and other forms of cultural production by people of Mexican origin are an important part of the story of post-1848 U.S. popular culture; and second, to show how Murrieta and the American 1848 returned to haunt the 1930s, an era characterized by economic hard times, nativism, and the deportation and repatriation of Mexicans. The uncanny return of the Murrieta story during the years of the Great Depression suggests its relevance for more historically proximate as well as ongoing debates about law, labor, race, crime, and nationalism in the United States.
Neither the Police Gazette nor the corrido version of the Murrieta story can be attributed to an individual author, as Ridge's novel can, and that may be one of the reasons, aside from the fascinating set of issues that his text raises, that many discussions of Murrieta focus only on Ridge. The “author” of the California Police Gazette is unknown, but the text's close relationship to Ridge's novel, to the newspaper stories, and to the conventions of U.S.–Mexican War era cheap fiction make traditional notions of individual authorship untenable anyway. On the other hand, corridos also challenge such notions of authorship because they are extremely formulaic, influenced substantially by oral traditions, and because their producers are usually anonymous; rather than reflecting the views of an individual author, corridos offer, in Ramón Saldívar's words, “a heightened, reflexive analysis of the mutual values and orientations of the collective.”[67] In the case of the Murrieta corrido, we could go even further, for its migratory movements call into question notions of a stable, unitary community. The formulaic nature of the corrido, as well as its sensational, body-grabbing qualities, doubtless facilitated its transmission across widely dispersed sites. As José Limón suggests, “The sheer music, the strict predictable measured poetics, the Spanish language of the corrido” and its “strong sensory quality” may well have
“constituted a point of resistance” to U.S. capitalist modernity at “the level of form.”[68]
Because corridos are usually transmitted orally, it is difficult to confidently fix their point of origin. Luis Leal has suggested that the Murri-eta corridos are based on a song about Indian warfare from nineteenth-century Zacatecas that gives the date of the events it describes as 1853, and he concludes that there was probably an earlier prototype for both corridos that is lost today.[69] According to Víctor Sánchez, a member of the group that first recorded it in 1934, “The corrido was written before I was born; it is from the last century. I heard it as a child in Mexico, sung during the time of the Revolution, and later in Arizona.”[70] As this sensational crime story moves across regional and international boundary lines, it exposes the violence of U.S. empire-building and incessantly registers shifts in racial and national boundaries, thereby fore-grounding the historical contingency of changing definitions of the native and the alien.
The corrido recorded during the 1930s must be understood in relation to the virulent nativism of the period and to the English-language versions of the story that were issued during those years. Novels such as Ernest Klette's The Crimson Trail of Joaquin Murieta (1928), Dane Coolidge's Gringo Gold (1939), and especially Walter Noble Burns's The Robin Hood of El Dorado (1932), which inspired the 1936 Hollywood movie, look back upon an earlier era of immigration and state formation and try to exorcise the ghosts of race wars past, or rather to suggest that racial injustice and the violence of conquest are part of the dead past, which has given way to the rule of law. They also labor to make the post-1848 boundary line between the United States and Mexico seem natural and right by representing Spanish-speakers and especially people of Mexican origin as outlaws who threaten the state, in part because they easily move between nations. But the dead past is reanimated, the border becomes uncanny, and the alien and the native become hopelessly entangled in these narratives, which invoke ghosts that they cannot possibly lay to rest. To follow the ghosts in these Murrieta narratives means, then, as Avery Gordon puts it, to be startled into a recognition of the animating force of “what seems dead, but is nonetheless alive,” to confront “whatever organized violence has repressed and in the process formed into a past, a history, remaining nonetheless alive and accessible to encounter.”[71] For as debates over nativism and immigration grew more heated during the Depression years and as the 1930s began to uncannily resemble Murrieta's California, the ghosts of California's so-called past
More than a million Mexican immigrants crossed the border and re-settled in the United States between 1890 and 1920.[72] As David Gutiér-rez suggests, “Mexican immigrants filled a wide variety of occupations, ranging from agricultural labor, mine work, and railroad construction and maintenance, to common day labor on innumerable construction sites throughout the Southwest.” In California, workers of Mexican origin made up almost 17 percent of unskilled construction workers and almost 75 percent of the state's farm labor force.[73] During prosperous times the immigrants were welcomed by California agribusiness and other employers and were more or less uneasily tolerated by most white workers, who generally benefited from their better position within the racially segmented labor market. But after the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, Mexican workers became convenient scapegoats for white nativists. The American Federation of Labor, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American Legion, to name just three groups, supported the Immigration Service's intensified efforts to deport so-called illegal and undesirable Mexican immigrants, and between 1930 and 1939 Mexicans constituted “46.3 percent of all of the people deported from the United States”[74] During the early 1930s, U.S. Secretary of Labor William Doak specifically targeted labor organizers and strikers for deportation, and Southern California in particular became “the focal point of the deportation frenzy.”[75] Also, in August of 1931, the California state legislature passed the Alien Labor Act, which made it illegal for companies to hire aliens for public works projects such as construction of highways, schools, and government office buildings—a policy which often meant that workers who “looked” Mexican were presumed to be illegal aliens.[76] Finally, repatriation programs were established that, according to Camille Guerin-Gonzales, “made no effort to distinguish between immigrants and U.S. born Mexicans and, in fact, set numerical goals that included both groups.”[77] In all of these ways, nativists insisted that people of Mexican origin were fundamentally alien despite the promise of abstract equality enshrined in the rhetoric of liberal democracy.
For many writers, this context made the Murrieta story newly relevant. For instance, in Walter Noble Burns's 1932 novel The Robin Hood of El Dorado, racial injustice is deplored, but it is also relegated to the dead past, represented as part of an older age of terror and lawlessness that has been superseded by “the era of law and order.”[78] In the early
As California had fallen into American hands as spoils of war, the American miners were imbued with the idea that the gold of California was rightfully theirs and theirs only. But as selfishly human as the idea may have been, it was legally without justification. According to the constitution and the laws of the United States, Mexicans and all other foreigners had as much right to mine in California as Americans themselves. But the legality of the position of the Mexicans had no effect in mitigating American hostility towards them. The feeling between the two races grew more and more embittered. (44)
Here Burns extends some sympathy to the Mexican immigrant who is treated unfairly by the U.S. Americans. But as we shall see, he also mitigates this criticism of the nativists by calling their behavior “selfishly human,” and he justifies state intervention after Murrieta becomes an outlaw.
In Murrieta's California, according to Burns, the “law was a dead letter. Citizens were helpless and dared not defend themselves. The ma-rauders came and went as free as the winds with reckless bravado but they left no clews behind. Their trails were red with blood but from the scenes of their crimes they vanished like phantoms” (129). Inevitably, then, in Burns's account, law must be enforced by the state, which as he imagines it rightfully unleashes its “crushing power” to end what he sees as Joaquín's reign of terror. In Burns's narrative of state formation, an age of lawlessness and terror must give way to an age of law. As he puts it in the novel's concluding chapters, the “age of law was dawning in 1853. For more than three years, the state had endured Joaquin Murri-eta's reign of rapine and devastation. Now the Days of the Terror were drawing to a close. The state had grown weary of the red nightmare; and the weariness of the state was a menace of death. Heretofore communities, countrysides, counties, had fought Murrieta. For the first time he was to feel the crushing power of the state as a state” (256). Here Burns animates the state, endowing it with a kind of moral agency as it awakens from the “red nightmare” and crushes resistance. For Burns, the death of the Mexican immigrant outlaw coincides with the dawn of a new age. “As the outlaw died, the sun rose over the distant Sierras, and plains and mountains were bathed in the radiance of the morning. For California, a new era came with the sunrise—an era of law and order” (275). By concluding in this way, Burns suggests that the ghosts that haunted Murrieta, and the legally unjustified acts of nativist terrorism
If Burns labors to make the age of lawlessness and racial terror part of the dead past, however, there are several places in the text where his allusions to the present open up a wider, contemporaneous frame of reference for the Murrieta story. For instance, even as he tries to distance this story from his own time by making it, in the opening frame, a sort of gothic story told by an old-timer, a second-generation forty-niner who mourns the death of the old mining towns like a “mourner standin' by an open grave,” he still yokes the past to the present as he comments on the fate of the succeeding generations of white Californians: “The Forty-Niners dipped up a fortune casual-like from some nameless creek in a tin washpan,” the old-timer suggests, “but their children have had to scratch mighty hard for a livin'” (1). Here, this reference to economic hard times and perhaps to agricultural labor almost, but not quite, brings into view the scenes of nativist terrorism, labor competition, and white supremacist retrenching that were taking place in California during the early 1930s. Instead, this context eerily looms on the margins of Burns's story, only to be repressed by a temporal shift of the setting back to the California of the 1850s that Burns tries to place securely in the past.
Issues of law and racial terror are also significant in the 1936 MGM film The Robin Hood of El Dorado, but the movie's position on these issues was shaped by the requirements of Hollywood's new Production Code, which was energetically enforced after 1934.[79] Concerned that gangster films and other outlaw stories might make crime seem more attractive during this period of crisis, the code mandated that “the pre-sentation must not throw sympathy with the criminal as against the law, nor with the crime as against those who must punish it.” Furthermore, “Law and justice must not by the treatment they receive from criminals be made to seem wrong or ridiculous.” Identifying banditry as one type of a “class” of “sin which by its nature attracts,” the writers of the code concluded that this class “needs real care in handling, as the response of human natures to their appeal is obvious.” Sounding something like Burns in their appeal to a narrative of development and state formation, they even suggested that while in “lands and ages of less developed civilization and moral principles, revenge may sometimes be presented,” in “modern times” it “shall not be justified.” On the other hand, although its authors tried to ban any criticism of the law, the code also stated that the “just rights, history, and feelings of any nation are entitled
Even though Breen and the forces behind the Production Code pressured the filmmakers to de-emphasize revenge as a motive and to idealize legal justice, it is still easy to imagine that many moviegoers would have viewed Murrieta as a figure of vengeance and heroism during the Depression era. As C.L.R. James argues, popular representations of crime during this period often respond to the “bitterness, the violence, the brutality, the sadism simmering in the population, the desire to revenge themselves with their own hands, to get some release for what society had done to them since 1929,” and surely that helps to explain the appeal of the Murrieta story for a mass audience.[83] While some versions of the story position him as part of a wealthy Mexican family, this one makes him a humbler figure who falls in love with the daughter of a rich landowner only to be banished from the region after the U.S. takeover in 1848. Later, after enduring a series of humiliations that includes a public whipping, he joins a group of Mexican outlaws who attack upper-class hacendados as well as Americanos. The New York Times film critic found the film to be “a brutally frank indictment of American injustice, greed and cowardice in the years of the California gold rush,” and Murrieta's Robin Hood–like robbing of the rich of both groups might well have seemed like justice to those who were experiencing the devastating effects of the Depression.[84] The star of the movie was Warner Baxter, a matinee idol during the silent film era who successfully made the transition to talkies and who was one of the most popular actors of the 1930s. Baxter had previously played a wide range of both nonwhite and iconically white roles, from the tragic Indian
Alessandro in the 1928 Ramona and the Cisco Kid to Jay Gatsby. But although the casting of a big star as Murrieta probably contributed to the latter's appeal and although Breen had eliminated the references to “greasers” and was eager to avoid offending Mexicans, the film still contrasts a relatively whitened Murrieta with the murderous Three-Fingered Jack, and it also ultimately attempts to “throw sympathy” against the Mexican criminals and with U.S. law. Toward the end of the movie, one of the gang's robberies inadvertently causes the death of a young bride-to-be; her bereaved fiancé forms a posse to pursue the gang, and Murrieta is tracked down and killed by the posse. The denouement champions the rule of law, in other words, by insisting that breaking the law inevitably leads to horrible if unintended consequences. In the end, then, the film followed the Production Code injunction that although in “lands and ages of less developed civilization and moral principles,” revenge that flouted the law might be understandable, in “modern times” it could not be justified.
Both the novel and the movie versions of The Robin Hood of El Dorado try to uphold the ideal of the rule of law by rigorously distinguishing an earlier, “less developed” postwar California from a contemporaneous modernity. Novelist Walter Noble Burns's efforts to use a narrative of development to separate an age of terror from an age of law fail in part, as we have seen, because the 1930s context keeps resurfacing on the margins of his text, but also because his revision of the story, like the movie version, shows how law and racial terror frequently accompanied rather than worked against each other. In other words, the law to which both novel and film appealed often supported nativism and white supremacy.
This point is made even more forcefully in the Joaquín Murrieta corrido, “a song sung to a guitar,” which is also a product of 1930s California, a time when laws often enabled racial terror rather than prohibiting it. Luis Leal suggests that the earliest, most complete surviving version of the Murrieta corrido was recorded in 1934 in Los Angeles by Los Hermanos Sánchez y Linares, otherwise known as Los Madrugadores, or the Early Risers. According to Chris Strachwitz, Los Madrugadores “were one of the first groups to make an impact via Spanish language radio as well as via recordings in the Los Angeles area during the early thirties.” Jesús and Víctor Sánchez, the original members of the group, grew up in Sonora, Mexico, where their father worked as a miner. When the two were teenagers, the family came to the United States as contract laborers, and eventually Jesús and Víctor worked in the fields
But although the version of the Murrieta corrido recorded by Los Madrugadores in 1934 undoubtedly responded to the particular conjunction of postrevolution immigration, Anglo-American nativism, and mexicano cultural nationalism in Los Angeles, it also continued to transmit countermemories of the American 1848. For while a fictive, precariously unified white national identity was reformulated in the cheap sensational literature that was moving west along with the Americans who were rushing for gold and land, the U.S.-Mexican War also provoked other forms of national fantasy in the décimas, corridos, and other songs that accompanied the Spanish-speaking people who were migrating north to California during the postwar period. Although the apex of the heroic corrido tradition comes, according to Américo Paredes, during the Mexican Revolution, the post–U.S.–Mexican War era marks a crucial transitional time for Mexican folk music, as songs about the war, in particular, relied more upon narrative and thereby became more corrido- like. Paredes argues, for example, that “décimas about Jarauta, the fighting priest who was a guerrilla against Scott's forces and who was executed because he refused to recognize the Treaty of Guadalupe, are more purely narrative than most others of their time. Jarauta himself is cast in the pattern of the corrido hero.”[88] We last encountered Jarauta, you will recall, in Ridge's novel and in the California Police Gazette, where he was instead cast in the role of the bloodthirsty, savage leader of many of
María Herrera-Sobek and other corrido scholars have suggested that there was a “renaissance” in corrido production during the middle of the nineteenth century, when ballads dealing with conflicts between Anglos and Mexicans began to proliferate.[89] These songs helped to disseminate an uneven, contradictory national sentiment. As Paredes puts it, the “blaze stirred up by the daily conflict” between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans meant that a “nationalist feeling” arose in the borderlands before one was strongly and widely articulated in greater Mexico. Although “Mexican nationalist feeling does not define itself until the last third of the nineteenth century,” Paredes argues, in “the northern frontiers, however, and in the parts of the United States recently taken from Mexico, nationalism begins to be felt toward the end of the 1830s, if we may take the folklore of these regions as an indication.”[90] In the face of a conquest that was often figured as the dismemberment of Mexico, the postwar producers of décimas and corridos struggled to remember a truncated national body, reasserting its integrity by constructing a nationalist sentiment that was in many ways a defensive response to Anglo-American racism and the violence of U.S. nation-building.
I am arguing that, despite their different relationships to literacy, orality, and national languages, corridos and sensational crime literature such as the English-language Murrieta novels are intersecting, hybrid forms. But this hybridity does not magically dissolve differences or reconcile warring interpretations of the conquest and its consequences. Instead, the cultural syncretism of these popular texts forces us to confront the unequal power relations and the larger sphere of inter-American conflict that mutually shaped them.[91]
As popular forms, corridos and U.S. sensational literature might initially seem to belong to incommensurate worlds. Corridos are, after all, closely linked to oral traditions, while sensationalism signals the emergence of a U.S. mass culture marked by industrialized modes of cultural production and enabled by improvements in literacy rates, changes in print technology, and the development of transportation networks. This does not mean, however, that corridos were produced by a thoroughly premodern folk or that sensational literature is simply the corrupted,
For instance, “Kiansis I,” one of the earliest extant corridos, memorializes the experiences of Mexican vaqueros who drove cattle from Texas to Kansas during the 1860s and 1870s, recording the perils of the long journey and celebrating the superior skills of the vaqueros. Although “Kiansis I” opposes “Americanos” working the trail to the “mexicanos” who outperform them, it is unclear whether the mexicanos are Texas-Mexicans, Mexicans who came to Texas to work as cowboys, or workers who came to Texas from other parts of the United States. In other words, the “mexicano” community that the corrido invokes cannot be neatly circumscribed within a fixed space outside the migratory trajectory of the cattle drive. Similarly, “Los reenganchados a Kansas,” a corrido from a later period, follows the movements of Mexican workers who cross into the United States and are sent as contract laborers on a train to Kansas City.[95] Far from reflecting a premodern, fixed folk community, the corrido focuses on the rapid movements of the train and the journey from El Paso, Texas, where many of the agencies recruiting Mexican labor were located, through Oklahoma to the railroad yards of Kansas City. If, as Paul Gilroy argues, the ship is a crucial conduit for the
“early politics and poetics of the black Atlantic world,” then the train has surely been a crucial vehicle for the migratory meanings of community mobilized by the corrido. It is worth repeating, however, that not all forms of movement and displacement are the same. While U.S. settlers and sensational popular cultures moving west after 1848 tried to naturalize the new national boundaries and to assert a white U.S.-American identity, the workers moving from south to north—say, from Sonora, Mexico, to Sonora, California—in the wake of the war and in the face of brutal U.S. racism in many instances articulated a kind of disjunctive transnational nationalism that overflows, as Gilroy puts it, “the containers that the modern nation state provides.”[96]
But if corridos and sensational literature mark different routes through modernity, both exemplify the ways that modern nationalisms have, as Cynthia Enloe suggests, “typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation, and masculinized hope.”[97] Sensational U.S.–Mexican War literature and postwar crime narratives most often focus on violent encounters between men; nation-building is represented as a patrilineal enterprise; and women are usually figured as the spoils of war or as mediators whose bodies facilitate or threaten national unity. Susan Lee Johnson has argued that in the post-1848 state-building period, “persistent stories of Gold Rush violence and vengeance hark back to an earlier ethic, not yet archaic, in the 1850s, under which rape, lynching, and whipping took on meaning as affronts to male honor.”[98] Similarly, nineteenth-century corridos frequently valorize a violent masculine hero who steadfastly resists U.S. expansion and depredation, avenging a series of humiliations.[99]
In the version of the Murrieta corrido recorded by Los Madru-gadores, for instance, cowardly Americans murder his brother and kill Joaquín's wife, Carmelita, after making her suffer (“Carmelita tan her-mosa/Cómo la hicieron sufrir”). The corrido omits the third humiliation that is presented as decisive in the English-language texts: the public whipping that Murrieta is forced to endure at the hands of the Americans. In the corrido, the violence done to Carmelita seems to stand in for the physical punishment that Murrieta himself withstands in the other versions, for the outrage done to his wife is the occasion (“Vengo a vengar a mi esposa”) for his transformation into a Robin Hood–style social bandit who robs from the rich, takes his hat off to the humble and poor, and is called a bandit only because U.S. laws are so unjust. The writer of the California Police Gazette version, who suggests that Murrieta's wife, Carmela, is “ravished” and then killed, is
It could be argued that the Murrieta corrido evokes, in Julie Skurski's words, “ideas of undisputed origins, original creation, and sustained tradition” in order to suggest that people of Mexican origin “share an original identity which can be liberated or restored through the rejection of colonialism's pervasive influence.”[100] In other words, in response to U.S. imperialism, the corrido strives to make Murrieta the bearer of an originary, authentic “Mexican” identity, reasserting the wholeness and reintegration of the Mexican nation as a way of dealing with the trauma of the war and the losses imposed by the treaty. What is more, by naturalizing the connection between the soil and the Mexican nation (“I'm neither a Chilean nor a stranger on this soil which I tread. California is part of Mexico because God wanted it that way”), the corrido constructs a national sentiment that conceals its own constructedness.[101] An insistence on the integrity of the Mexican national body despite the ruptures of war is also signaled by the corrido's conclusion, which omits any mention of the severed head, so important in Ridge's and the Police Gazette texts, in favor of a first-person assertion of Murrieta's mexicano identity (“Yo soy ese Mexicano / de nombre Joaquín Murrieta”).
But if the corridos circulate a cultural nationalism that may seem to be formally equivalent to the white nativist nationalisms of 1850s and 1930s California promoted in the crime gazette and the sensational novel, the different relationships that these nationalisms have to the U.S. nation-state significantly affect their meanings. In other words, while nationalisms as such may be inherently exclusionary, the different material and political histories of U.S. and Chicano nationalisms suggest that their identity can be affirmed only at the cost of an extremely high
Even when the corridos seek to disseminate exclusionary national sentiments, they underline the impossibility of a unitary national identity as they incessantly register the disruptions, displacements, and movements that provide the unstable ground for asserting it. The very fact that we can only guess about the corrido's origins and that we have no access to a complete, unfragmented, certifiably nineteenth-century Murrieta corrido suggests that the folk tradition that transmits national identity is in this case manifestly synthetic, unavoidably responding to capitalist modernity even when resisting it. As Víctor Sánchez remembers, “We had many requests for this corrido, at parties, and then after we began to sing it on the radio, people would send us cards to the station and ask that we record it so they could have the disc. Felipe Valdéz Leal added three or four verses to make it fit both sides of the record—I don't remember which ones but possibly the one about coming from Hermosillo.”[104] In other words, the national sentiment preserved in the Murrieta corrido was not only disseminated through mass cultural media such as records and the radio but was also decisively shaped by these cultural technologies, since additions were made so it would “fit” the record. Finally, the transregional and often transnational trajectories of those who have performed this corrido—from Zacatecas to Sonora, from Sonora to Arizona, from Sonora–Arizona to California, and maybe back again, to name just a few possible routes—problematize any appeal to the idea of a static, unfragmented national community. These singers, musicians, field laborers, miners, and other workers have preserved memories of the American 1848 and of a postwar crisis in the racial state that continues to haunt the U.S. “home” in an age of law and racial terror that has not ended.
CODA: BEYOND 1848
I began writing about race, labor, U.S. politics, popular culture, and the American 1848 in the early 1990s, a time when nativist retrenching made strikingly apparent the resemblances between the post-1848 period and my own. During the 1990s Californians debated and then passed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, which would have made un-documented immigrants ineligible for public social services, health care, and education; Proposition 227, which virtually eliminated bilingual education in California; a “three strikes” law that contributed to the on-going and disproportionate criminalization and imprisonment of brown and black people; and Proposition 209, which invoked the ideal of color-blindness to dismantle affirmative action and other policies of racial redress. As I wrote the early drafts of this chapter on Joaquín Murrieta, it was clear that the interconnections among law, nativism, and class and racial hierarchies that I traced from the 1840s to the 1930s continued to significantly affect U.S. culture and politics.
Today in the year 2001, some things have changed, but much remains the same. In a departure from its overtly anti-immigrant platform in the previous presidential election, in 2000 the Republican Party presented as a candidate a former Texas governor and scion of a wealthy oil family who made overt and widely publicized efforts to win over Latino voters, an effort that included Spanish-language radio and television ads. Mean-while, George W. Bush's Mexican-American nephew, George Prescott Bush, frequently made public appearances to support his uncle, appearances that underlined the Bush family's own international romance, the marriage between a Mexican woman, Columba, and the candidate's brother, Jeb. The rhetoric of international romance also appeared in speeches in which Bush asked voters to imagine the relationship between Mexico and the United States on the model of the family, as when he called for a “special relationship” with Mexico in which differences would be “differences among family, not rivals.” For the most part, this familial vision of what one press release called “A United Western Hemisphere” meant “uplift” through NAFTA and applying “the power of the markets to the needs of the poor.”[105] Similarly, Democrat Al Gore aired a thirty-second television ad in which he spoke in Spanish “throughout the entire spot,” as the Gore-Lieberman 2000 website proudly pro-claimed. In his appeal to Latino voters, Gore also invoked the family, in-sisting that “in America, words like familia, communidad, opportunidad, and educacion are not just palabras—they are the values that guide our
On the other hand, Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan focused on the similarities between Gore and Bush on these issues and took a much more overtly nativist position. Articles posted on Buchanan's campaign website suggested that both Bush and Gore favored a “U.S. merger with Mexico”; that a vote for Bush meant a “vote for essentially making Mexico a 51st state”; and that the Democrats were seeking a new base in illegal immigration. Opening a policy statement called “Trouble in the Neighborhood” with the history of the 1836 Texas-Mexico conflict, the U.S.-Mexican War, and the cession of the Southwest and California to “America,” Buchanan promised voters that although “Mexican irre-dentism” was “alive and well,” he intended to fight it, for “we cannot allow to rise within our country a nation within a nation where Spanish is the language and anti-Americanism the ideology, while U.S. taxpayers pay for its schools and services as it swells inexorably towards the Nuevo Aztlan of the Chicano activists' dreams.” Sounding a lot like the anti-imperialist nativists of the 1840s and 1850s, in a book published in 2000 Buchanan called for “a republic, not an empire”: “We are not imperialists; we are not interventionists; we are not hegemonists; and we are not isolationists. We simply believe in America, first, last, and always.”[107]
After George W. Bush was officially awarded the presidency in a contest decided by the narrowest of margins, news exit polls showed that 63 percent of Latinos had voted for Gore, although Bush did much better among Cuban Americans, most importantly in Florida, the state where the election was ultimately decided.[108] Probably because of the use of the “butterfly ballot” in Florida's heavily Democratic West Palm Beach County, Buchanan picked up a surprising number of critical votes there but received only a small percentage of the national popular vote. The controversies that broke out in the wake of the Florida election, however, contradicted the rhetoric of racial inclusion, based on the model of the family, used by the candidates for the two major political parties. In addition to the disputes about the butterfly ballot, outmoded machines for counting the votes in many areas, and the intervention of the Supreme Court, large numbers of African and Haitian Americans claimed to have been “denied access to polling booths, intimidated, harassed, and even threatened when they attempted to vote.”[109] After the election, Kweisi Mfume, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, charged that there was “evidence of massive voter disenfranchisement of people of color during the presidential election.
The election in Florida was conducted in a manner which was unfair, illegal, immoral and undemocratic.”[110]
Despite the ongoing conflicts about the election and the legitimacy of the official results in Florida, Buchanan's poor showing may at least suggest to some that the popular appeal of nativism has finally waned. It should be noted, however, that even as Bush and Gore deployed the rhetoric of international romance with its emphasis on family ties, they also continued to insist upon the importance of policing the U.S.-Mexico border. During the campaign Bush championed projects such as El Paso's “Operation Hold the Line,” and in his “Century of the Americas” speech he promised to expand patrols to “make our borders something more than lines on a map.” Similarly, Gore praised the “openness” of America but also continued to worry about stemming “the flow of illegal immigrants to America”: “We must have secure borders and strong border control. We must return illegal aliens to their homes, especially criminal aliens.” This double emphasis should remind us of the international romances of the mid–nineteenth century that simultaneously promoted closer economic ties between the United States and the other Americas and expressed fears about threats to national boundaries and the incorporation of alien, especially nonwhite, people into the United States. Although the rhetoric of international romance and family is ostensibly more welcoming than that of nativism, it has often been used to legitimate or even to deepen dramatically unequal power relations. At the same time, it should be remembered that a rhetoric of inter-American romance has long coexisted with an exclusionary emphasis on border control and the policing of aliens. Both were prominently featured in the sensational literature of the American 1848, a moment that continues to haunt the present.