1. Joseph Badger, Jr.,Joaquin the Terrible: The True History of the Three Bitter Blows that Changed an Honest Man to a Merciless Demon, Beadle's New York Dime Library 13, no. 165 (21 December 1881): 6. Hereafter cited in text.

2. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, rev. ed. (1987; London and New York: Verso, 1998), 160.

3. Ibid., 166.

4. Lisbeth Haas Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2, 69.

5. David Montejano Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 73.

6. Tomás Almaguer Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 72.

7. Alexander Saxton The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 303.

8. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 165.

9. See chapter 4.

10. See John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955); and the California Police Gazette version of the story, which was published under the title The Life of Joaquin Murieta, the Brigand Chief of California (1932; Fresno, Calif.: Valley Publishers, 1969). The latter includes a bibliography listing some of the different versions of the Murrieta story (117–20). For some of the corrido versions, see Luis Leal, “El Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta: Origen y difusión,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 11, no. 1 (winter 1995): 18–23; and liner notes, “Joaquín Murrieta,” Corridos & Tragedias de la

Many of the Spanish-language versions, including a novel published in Los Angeles in 1919, seem to be based on the California Police Gazette adaptation. See Joaquin Murieta, the Brigand Chief of California, x. Subsequent citations from the two novels appear in parentheses in the text. Citations from the Police Gazette version are preceded by PG, and those from the Ridge version are preceded by R. All quotations from the Murrieta corrido, whether in Spanish or in English translation, are from the Arhoolie Records liner notes, and will also appear parenthetically in the text.

11. Susan Lee Johnson Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 28, 48, 50. This study appeared just as I was finishing my revision of the manuscript.

12. Malcolm Rohrbough Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 216–29. See also Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 26–29; Jay Monaghan Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Alexander Saxton, “Mines and Railroads,” in The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 46–66; and Johnson, Roaring Camp, 57–95.

13. On the reconstruction of whiteness in this period, see Reginald Horsman Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Eric Lott Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); David Roediger The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991); and Saxton, Rise and Fall.

14. On “structures of feeling,” see Raymond Williams Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133–34.

15. See JoAnn Pavletich and Margot Gayle Backus, “With His Pistol in Her Hand: Rearticulating the Corrido Narrative in Helena María Viramontes' ‘Neighbors,’” Cultural Critique 27 (spring 1994): 127–52; Rosa Linda Fregoso and Angie Chabram, “Chicana/o Cultural Representations: Reframing Alternative Critical Discourses,” Cultural Studies 4, no. 3: 208; Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, “I Throw Punches for My Race, but I Don't Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—Chicanos (Girl, Us)/Chican as—into the Movement Script,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 81–95. For an analysis of female soldiers in corridos, see María Herrera-Sobek The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 84–116.

16. See Carl Gutiérrez-Jones Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

17. Etienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-Racism?” in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 20. Balibar further defines the immigrant complex as “a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions” (21).

18. On the epic heroic corrido, see José Limón Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 16–77; John McDowell, “The Corrido of Greater Mexico as Discourse, Music, and Event,” in “And Other Neighborly Names”: Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore, ed. Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 44–75; Américo Paredes “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958); and José David Saldívar, “Chicano Border Narratives as Cultural Critique,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, ed. Héctor Calderón and Saldí-var (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 170–73.

19. Michel Foucault, ed., I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother … (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 206.

20. See Frank Luther Mott A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 186–87, 325–37; Alan Nourie and Barbara Nourie, eds., American Mass-Market Magazines (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1990), 284–91; and Gene Smith and Jayne Barry Smith, eds., The Police Gazette (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972).

21. Nourie and Nourie, American Mass-Market Magazines, 285. See also Saxton, Rise and Fall, 207–9.

22. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 326.

23. See H.H. Bretnor The California Police Gazette, a brief description (typescript in Bancroft Library, #88305, 1955); and Joaquin Murieta, the Brig-and Chief of California, v.

24. California Police Gazette, 24 September, 8 October, and 15 October 1859.

25. Ibid., 24 September 1859.

26. Alonzo Delano, Life on the Plains and among the Diggings, 157, quoted in Winifred Storrs Hill Tarnished Gold: Prejudice during the California Gold Rush (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1995), 10.

27. See Pedro Castillo and Albert Camarillo, eds., Furia y Muerte: Los Bandidos Chicanos (Los Angeles: Aztlán Publications, UCLA, 1972); Daniel Cohen Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the

28. James Varley The Legend of Joaquín Murrieta: California's Gold Rush Bandit (Twin Falls, Idaho: Big Lost River, 1995), 48–65.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 75–76. See also Johnson, Roaring Camp, 38.

31. Varley, The Legend of Joaquín Murrieta, 138.

32. Johnson also notes that Ridge's novel “owed a debt to the genre of cheap fiction” about banditry. See Roaring Camp, 48.

33. James Parins John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 107.

34. Ibid.

35. See Cheryl Walker Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 111. According to Walker, although Ridge was of Cherokee descent, he was “a metropolitan, acculturated Indian who migrated from Indian territory to California and upheld views repugnant to those who wished to maintain traditional Indian cultural practices” (111). Nonetheless, Walker suggests that Ridge “speaks as much as an Indian as he does as a voice of white culture” (112). See also John Carlos Rowe Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 97–119.

36. On Cherokee Removal, see William Anderson, ed., Cherokee Removal: Before and After (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Lucy Maddox Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15–28; and Priscilla Wald Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 23–47. See also Walker, Indian Nation, 112–19.

37. Parins, John Rollin Ridge, 55.

38. Ibid., 103.

39. Karl Kroeber, “American Indian Persistence and Resurgence,” boundary 2 19, no. 3 (fall 1992): 6.

40. Peter Christensen, “Minority Interaction in John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta,” MELUS 17, no. 2 (summer 1991–1992): 63.

41. On James Fenimore Cooper's distinctions between “good” and “bad” Indians, see Saxton, Rise and Fall, 191.

42. Christensen, “Minority Interaction,” 62.

43. Parins, John Rollin Ridge, 126.

44. Ibid., 129.

45. Rosaura Sánchez Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 275–79.

46. Hill, Tarnished Gold, 40. See also Donald C. Biggs Conquer and Colonize (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio, 1977), 202–6.

47. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 9 and throughout.

48. Leonard Pitt The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 53. See also Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 55; and Ramón Gutiérrez, “Unraveling America's Hispanic Past: Internal Stratification and Class Boundaries,” Aztlán 17, no. 1 (spring 1986): 89.

49. Sister Mary Colette Standart, “The Sonoran Migration to California, 1848–1856: A Study in Prejudice,” in Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. David G. Gutiérrez (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 3–21.

50. Douglas Monroy Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 206. For the figure on Sonoran migration, see David Gutiérrez Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 19.

51. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 52. See also Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

52. Cited in Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush, 114. See also Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 55–56.

53. See Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 56; and Standart, “The Sonoran Migration to California,” 7.

54. Josiah Royce California From the Conquest of 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1886), 361.

55. See Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 53; Royce, California, 277; Standart, “The Sonoran Migration to California,” 10; and Johnson, Roaring Camp, 38.

56. David Gutiérrez, “Introduction,” in Between Two Worlds, 10.

57. Royce, California, 364.

58. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56, 79.

59. Omi and Winant define racial formation “as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (55).

60. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 57.

61. Ibid., 65–68.

62. In Roaring Camp, Johnson suggests that “the rangers seemed soldiers engaged in a rearguard action designed to shore up the gains of the late expansionist war” (37).

63. I borrow the term “national fantasy” from Lauren Berlant The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

64. For more on Gonzales's “I am Joaquín—Yo Soy Joaquín” and the Murrieta bandit narrative, see Johnson, Roaring Camp, 50.

65. On the limitations of Chicano responses to displacement and loss that codify “machismo as a concept around which to ground cultural affiliation,” see Gutiérrez-Jones, Rethinking the Borderlands, 123–62.

66. See Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (New York: Viking, 1992), 140. Thanks are due to Barbara Brinson-Curiel for telling me about this essay. See also Rosaura Sánchez, “Calculated Musings: Richard Rodriguez's Metaphysics of Difference,” in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, ed. David Palumbo-Liu (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 153–73.

67. See Ramón Saldívar Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 32, 36; and McDowell, “The Corrido of Greater Mexico as Discourse, Music, and Event,” 45–46.

68. Limón, Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems, 34.

69. Leal, “El Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta,” 1–23.

70. Liner notes, “Joaquín Murrieta,” Corridos & Tragedias de la Frontera, 37.

71. Avery Gordon Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 66.

72. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 40.

73. Ibid., 45.

74. Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930's (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 53.

75. Ibid., 55.

76. George Sánchez Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 211.

77. Camille Guerin-Gonzales Mexican Workers, American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 78.

78. Walter Noble Burns, The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga of Joaquin Murrieta, Famous Outlaw of California's Age of Gold [1932] (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). Hereafter citations will appear in text.

79. See Thomas Doherty Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 319–72. This book includes three appendixes that contain the text of the Production Code as well as related documents.

80. Cited in ibid., 351, 352–53, 356, 362, 364.

81. Helen Delpar The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 169, 170.

82. Alfred Charles Richard, Jr., Censorship and Hollywood's Hispanic Image: An Interpretive Filmography, 1936–1955 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993), 22.

83. C.L.R. James, American Civilization, ed. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 121.

84. New York Times, 14 March 1936.

85. Chris Strachwitz, “The Singers,” in Mexican-American Border Music. Vols. 6 and 7:Corridos & Tragedias de la Frontera, Arhoolie Records, 1994, 16, 18. See also Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 183.

86. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 184. According to Sánchez, District Attorney Burton Fitts, who “believed that only English should be heard on the radio and that only American citizens should have the right to broadcast” (184), was responsible for the arrest.

87. See ibid., 178, 183–85; and Gutiérrez-Jones, Rethinking the Borderlands, 2–3, 50–56. I agree with the latter that González's example shows how “the stereotypical ascription of ‘criminality’ to Chicanos must be read in the context of larger U.S. institutional aims, including the maintenance of Chicanos and Mexicanos as a malleable, productive underclass” (3).

88. Paredes, Folklore and Culture, 135.

89. María Herrera-Sobek Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), xxiii.

90. Paredes, Folklore and Culture, 9. According to Paredes's logic, a “nationalist sentiment” would first be strongly articulated in Texas because of the battles there in the 1830s. In general, nationalist feeling was weak in the borderlands areas after Mexican independence in 1821, especially in California, which was so far removed from greater Mexico. See also Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 30. According to Gutiérrez, “[In] the quarter century before annexation, many, if not most, Spanish-speaking residents of Mexico's northern provinces did not even identify themselves as Mexicans and instead probably thought of themselves first as Nuevomexicanos, Tejanos, or Californios” (30).

91. My understanding of hybridity has been influenced by Lisa Lowe's discussion of this concept in the Asian American context in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Lowe suggests: “Hybridization is not the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities. It is the uneven process through which immigrant communities encounter the violences of the U.S. state, and the capital imperatives served by the United States and by the Asian states from which they come, and the process by which they survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives” (82).

92. See Paredes, Folklore and Culture, 137–38, for information about décimas, corridos, and the Mexican broadside press.

93. See Sánchez, Becoming Mexican-American, 21–22.

94. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–112.

95. Herrera-Sobek, Northward Bound, 34–63, esp. 41–43.

96. Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 40.

97. Cited in Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Nationalism, Gender, and Race,” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 260.

98. Johnson, Roaring Camp, 33. See also 35 for a compelling analysis of how ideas about manhood figure in the Murrieta story.

99. For an excellent discussion of violence in working-class forms of popular culture in the 1930s, see C.L.R. James, American Civilization, ed. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 118–48.

100. Julie Skurski, “The Ambiguities of Authenticity in Latin America: Doña Bárbara and the Construction of National Identity,” in Becoming National, ed. Eky and Suny, 371–40.

101. In Spanish, the lines are as follows: “No soy chileno ni extraño/en este suelo que piso./De México es California,/porque Díos así lo quizo.”

102. Citing Fichte, Balibar suggests that for nationalism to take hold of subjectivities, “the ‘external frontiers’ of the state have to become ‘internal frontiers’ or—what amounts to the same thing—external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and will always be—‘at home.’” See Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class. Hence the unheimlich qualities of the corridos, which haunt the U.S. home and make its borders unfamiliar.

103. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 95.

104. Liner notes, “Joaquín Murrieta,” Corridos & Tragedias de la Frontera, 37.

105. All Bush quotations are from the georgewbush.com website.

106. All Gore quotations are from the gorelieberman.com website.

107. All Buchanan quotations are from the buchananreform.com website.

108. ColorLines, 30 April 2001, 6.

109. Los Angeles Sentinel, 29 November 2000. See also the Chicago Defender, 11 November 2000, 1.

110. Miami Times, 23 January 2001, 1A.