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.