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