{"id":126722,"date":"2018-07-09T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2018-07-09T13:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126722"},"modified":"2018-07-09T14:45:32","modified_gmt":"2018-07-09T18:45:32","slug":"the-legend-of-joaquin-murieta-a-history-of-racialized-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/09\/the-legend-of-joaquin-murieta-a-history-of-racialized-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Legend of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta: A History of Racialized Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 <\/p>\n

Like its elusive hero, The Life and Adventures of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(1854) is difficult to pin down. It has the distinction of being the first novel published in California, the first novel published by a Native American, and the first American novel to feature a Mexican protagonist. Its story draws together transformational events in the history of three nations, connecting the California gold rush with the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the Mexican-American War. It blends elements of epic, folktale, revenge tragedy, and romance\u2014yet historians have often treated it as a factual record. It has been repurposed, and sometimes plagiarized, throughout the U.S., Mexico, Europe, and Latin America; in publications ranging from the California Police Gazette<\/em> to the popular Fulgor y muerte de Joaqu\u00edn Murieta<\/em>\u00a0(Splendor and Death of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta<\/em>), a play by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda; and the 1998 Hollywood film The Mask of Zorro<\/em> (in which Joaqu\u00edn\u2019s brother, played by Antonio Banderas, takes up the mask of Zorro). While few Americans today would recognize the name of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta, most are familiar with figures such as Zorro and Batman, whose creators were inspired by this sensational account of vigilante justice and righteous violence. Paradoxically, John Rollin Ridge\u2019s book (published under his Cherokee name, Yellow Bird) has become both one of the most influential and one of the most invisible novels in the history of American literature.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In addition to its profound and wide-ranging cultural influence, Joaqu\u00edn Murieta <\/em>is distinguished by Ridge\u2019s formal and thematic ambitions. Formally, Ridge stretches the conventions of sensational crime fiction to plot not just the rapid and mysterious movements of his protago\u00adnist across California\u2019s sparsely settled landscapes but also Murieta\u2019s conflicted character and the ideological tensions between individual and collective motives. The novel\u2019s formal idiosyncrasies\u2014interpolating a landscape poem; jumping around in space and time; and shifting among the perspectives of Murieta, the minor characters who comprise his organization, and the men who try to hunt him down\u2014express the social frictions at the heart of Ridge\u2019s concerns. Meanwhile, Joaqu\u00edn Murieta <\/em>takes up some of the most complex themes in American litera\u00adture: cultural assimilation, racist and anti-racist violence, the tension between ethical and political action, and\u2014perhaps most centrally\u2014philosophical questions about the legitimacy of state and extralegal violence. It stands along\u00adside such works as Nat Turner and Thomas Gray\u2019s The Confessions of Nat Turner <\/em>(1831), William Apess\u2019s \u201cEu\u00adlogy on King Philip\u201d (1836), Herman Melville\u2019s \u201cBenito Cereno\u201d (1855), Frederick Douglass\u2019s The Heroic Slave, <\/em>Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dis\u00admal<\/em> Swamp<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>and Martin R. Delany\u2019s Blake; or, The Huts of America <\/em>(1859) as a classic American story of anti-ra\u00adcist insurrection.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The publishers\u2019 preface to the 1854 edition inaugu\u00adrates one influential model for reading Joaqu\u00edn Murieta <\/em>by suggesting that the novel reflects \u201cthe tragical events\u201d and \u201ccivil commotion\u201d precipitated by the federal gov\u00adernment\u2019s removal of the Cherokee Nation from their an\u00adcestral lands. In the wake of the estimated four thousand Cherokee deaths resulting from the Trail of Tears, negotiations with the U.S. government caused intense ideologi\u00adcal conflict among the Cherokee. Ridge\u2019s father (John Ridge), grandfather (Major Ridge), and cousin (Elias Boudinot) were prominent Cherokee leaders who be\u00adlieved that the only way to protect the Cherokee Nation\u2019s rights was to negotiate a treaty with the federal govern\u00adment. Without the approval of the Cherokee National Council or Principal Chief John Ross, they signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, which ceded the Cherokee Nation\u2019s territory in the Southeast and established a basis for forced removal. In 1839, when Ridge was twelve years old, a group of Ross\u2019s supporters assassinated Ridge\u2019s fa\u00adther, his grandfather, and Boudinot for having signed the treaty; in the lurid terms of the publishers\u2019 preface, \u201cwhile the bleeding corpse of his father was yet lying in the house, surrounded by his weeping family, the news came that his grandfather, a distinguished old war-chief, was also killed; and, fast upon this report, that others of his near relatives were slain.\u201d Ridge\u2019s mother (Sarah Bird Northrup, a white woman) fled with her children to Fay\u00adetteville, Arkansas, where Ridge studied law. In 1849, Ridge killed a Ross sympathizer named David Kell in a horse dispute and fled the state. He moved to California to join the gold rush in 1850 but soon gave up mining to work as a poet, a journalist, and the editor of several newspapers.<\/p>\n

In California, Ridge witnessed a young state shot through with social contradictions and upheavals. Cali\u00adfornia had been transferred to the U.S. under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which concluded the Mexican-American War (1846\u20131848). The treaty stipulated that Mexican inhabitants of the territory could choose to re\u00admain in California and receive U.S. citizenship, and the majority of California\u2019s Mexican inhabitants chose to re\u00admain. However, California\u2019s constitution restricted vot\u00ading rights to white men (thus disenfranchising Mexicans of black or Native descent), and the federal government failed to honor the property rights of former Mexican citizens. In the same years, the California gold rush led to rapid growth as miners from all over the world swelled the non-Native population from fifteen thousand in 1848 to a hundred sixty-five thousand in 1850. By contrast, this influx of settlers brought about a catastrophic decline in the state\u2019s Native population. \u201cFrom 1846 to 1873, colonization policies, abductions, diseases, homicides, executions, battles, mas\u00adsacres, institutionalized neglect on federal reservations, and the willful destruction of indigenous villages and their food stores seem to have reduced California Indian numbers by at least 80 percent, from perhaps 150,000 to some 30,000,\u201d Benjamin Madley writes in\u00a0An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian<\/em>. The nascent state government quickly moved to legislate white supremacy by imposing racially targeted laws. In 1849, General Persifor Smith, the U.S. military governor of California, sanctioned the rumor that it was illegal for noncitizens to dig gold in the state. In addition, voting rights were withheld, black and (later) Chinese witnesses were prohibited from testifying in court, Native Americans charged with \u201cvagrancy\u201d were subjected to forced labor, and in 1850, California insti\u00adtuted a foreign-miner tax that was chiefly (and often violently) enforced against Mexican, South American, and eventually Chinese miners. (In the novel, Ridge re\u00adfers to the last of these outrages when he describes Murieta\u2019s robbery of a group of Germans as \u201ccollect[ing] taxes off of them for \u2018Foreign Miners\u2019 Licenses.\u201d) Ra\u00adcially motivated lynchings and other forms of mob vio\u00adlence such as those depicted in Ridge\u2019s novel were common occurrences. In 1851, Native Cahuilla and Cu\u00adpe\u00f1o warriors conducted a series of raids in Southern California before their alleged leader, Antonio Garra, was captured and executed. Newspaper accounts of the \u201cGarra uprising,\u201d which reported that the charismatic leader was secretly aided by Californios, may have in\u00adformed Ridge\u2019s account of Murieta\u2019s activities.<\/p>\n

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John Rollin Ridge.<\/p><\/div>\n

Although Ridge advocated for the rights of the Chero\u00adkee Nation and Mexican Americans in his writings, his ideas about race and identity were complex and often in\u00adcoherent. Ridge did not believe in the equality of races. Descended from a family of slaveholders (Ridge had held slaves while living in Arkansas), he opposed both aboli\u00adtionism and the Civil War. In Joaqu\u00edn<\/em> Murieta<\/em>, he depicts California Indians as uncivilized cowards and presents titillating descriptions of the well-known bandit Three-Fingered Jack\u2019s brutal massacres of passive Chinese min\u00aders. Even among his characters of Mexican descent, Ridge distinguishes between the nobility of Murieta (whose \u201ccomplexion was neither very dark nor very light\u201d) and the frequently ignoble, undisciplined character of his followers. In his newspaper writings, he endorsed amalgamation and cultural assimilation as the best path forward for Native Americans. Whereas many Native Americans emphasized the importance of sovereignty and self-determination, Ridge believed that more \u201ccivilized\u201d Native groups such as the Cherokee were worthy of the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship. He also \u201cshared with many Euro-Americans the racist assumption that in\u00adtermarriage between whites and Natives was a necessary precondition for \u2018civilizing\u2019 indigenous peoples.\u201d This may explain why, by contrast with the Tejon Indians, the \u201chalf-breeds\u201d at Cherokee Flat provide such effective support (in the form of torture and extrajudicial executions) to Captain Ellas in his search for Murieta\u2019s men.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The Life and Adventures of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta <\/em>is Ridge\u2019s novelization of a series of sensational newspaper accounts of Mexican bandits robbing white and Asian miners and travelers between 1851 and 1853. The name Joaqu\u00edn Murieta refers to just one of many men accused of lead\u00ading these bandit organizations. There were at least five Joaqu\u00edns who figured prominently in accounts of Mexican bandit raids. In 1853, the California legislature authorized Captain Harry Love to organize a group of twenty rang\u00aders and lead them to capture \u201cthe party or gang of robbers commanded by the five Joaquins, whose names are Joa\u00adquin Muriati, Ocomorenia, Valenzuela, Botellier, and Carillo, and their band of associates.\u201d When Love and his rangers killed several Mexican horse thieves in a gunfight on July 25 of that year, they decapitated one of the corpses and preserved the head in alcohol along with a hand supposedly belonging to Three-Fingered Jack. The head was displayed across the state as that of \u201cJoaquin Murrieta.\u201d While Love and his rangers claimed six thousand dollars in reward money for securing this trophy, some commentators questioned its authenticity. For example, a review of Ridge\u2019s novel in San Francisco\u2019s Daily California Chronicle <\/em>suggested that \u201cthe book may serve as very amusing reading for Joaqu\u00edn Murieta, should he get hold of it, for notwithstanding all which has been said and published to the contrary, we have little faith in his reported death at the hands of Love\u2019s party.\u201d But for those who did believe Love\u2019s claims, the preserved head retroactively singled out Murieta as the most notorious of the five Joaqu\u00edns and the most celebrated of California\u2019s Mexican bandits.<\/p>\n

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Poster from 1853 advertising the display of the bandit Joaqu\u00edn Murieta\u2019s head.<\/p><\/div>\n

For both aesthetic and political reasons, Ridge\u2019s novel af\u00adfirms that the preserved head was Murieta\u2019s, and insists upon his hero\u2019s individual responsibility for crimes that oc\u00adcurred throughout the state. Condensing the activities of scattered bandit groups into a single organization led by a man of extraordinary capacities, Ridge gives social disorder a perceptible shape and a storyline with a beginning and an end. Representing Murieta and Three-Fingered Jack as extraordinary, mythical figures, he fits them into familiar conventions such as the romantic youth, the chivalric ad\u00adventurer, and the sadistic murderer. This double representa\u00adtion of Mexican bandits as a combination of noble hero (Murieta) and murderous monster (Three-Fingered Jack) elicits readers\u2019 sympathy for Murieta while also suggesting the need for vigilante methods for suppressing the bandits. What begins as a story about a heroic insurrectionary against white supremacy becomes an ambivalent argument for the judicious deployment of extralegal violence\u2014a justification of, as Ridge writes in the novel, \u201cdiscretionary power, so necessary to be used in perilous times when the slow forms of law \u2026 are altogether useless and inefficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

Packed with melodrama, bravado, daring escapes, and graphic violence, Ridge\u2019s short novel (the first edition, published by San Francisco\u2019s W.\u2009B. Cooke, was just ninety pages) traces Murieta\u2019s transformation from a young Mexican immigrant into a legendary bandit and insurrectionary. Murieta starts off as an \u201cexceedingly handsome and attractive\u201d young man who arrives in California \u201cfired with enthusiastic admiration of the American character.\u201d Like the young Ridge, he is displaced, assaulted, and forced to witness assaults on his family when white men jump his claim, rape his wife, take his farm, murder his half brother, and publicly whip him. After numerous attempts to live an honest life in the face of racial violence, Murieta turns outlaw, kills all the men in the mob that assaulted him, and organizes a statewide network of bandits secretly aided by Mexican civilians. A master of disguise, a brilliant tactician, and an eloquent speaker, he unfolds a plan to raise and supply a band of \u201cfifteen hundred or two thousand men\u201d for a mass raid of Southern California: \u201cto kill the Americans by \u2018wholesale,\u2019 burn their ranchos, and run off their property at one single swoop so rapidly that they will not have time to collect an opposing force before I will have finished the work and found safety in the mountains of Sonora.\u201d His own suffering at the hands of white attackers represents the plight of all Mexicans whose rights went unprotected following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: \u201cMy brothers, we will then be revenged for our wrongs, and some little, too, for the wrongs of our poor, bleeding country.\u201d After narrating a series of adventures, run-ins with the military, near misses, massacres of Chinese people, and incidents illustrating Murieta\u2019s noble character, Ridge shifts to an account of numerous efforts to hunt down the bandits. The outcome of Harry Love\u2019s campaign, in which Murieta\u2019s head and Three-Fingered Jack\u2019s hand are preserved and exhibited around the state, would not have been news to many of the novel\u2019s nineteenth-century readers. What would have come as more of a surprise is Ridge\u2019s interpretation of the story: \u201cThere is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals<\/em>\u2014whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source \u2026 a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society and to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the Westerns and vigilante narratives it influ\u00adenced, Joaqu\u00edn Murieta <\/em>presents a conflicted drama about the legitimacy of violence in a time and place where the rule of law was not firmly established. In the novel, conflicts are settled by mob rule, extrajudicial \u201ctrains,\u201d inequitable laws, vigilante policing, and summary lynch\u00adings rather than by the courts. Under such chaotic condi\u00adtions, justice depends on the discretion of righteous individuals. For example, Murieta takes justice into his own hands when he kills the men who flogged him, when he plots revenge for the wrongs committed against all Mexicans, when he decides not to steal from a poor fer\u00adryman, when a well-spoken youth persuades him to spare a group of hunters, and when he returns a kidnapped woman to her mother and fianc\u00e9. At times, Ridge pres\u00adents his hero\u2019s ethical deliberations, retributive killings, forcible collection of \u201ctributes\u201d from white and Chinese miners, and cautious governance of his outlaw followers as a kind of shadow government that enacts Murieta\u2019s vi\u00adsion of justice in the absence of just laws. Murieta\u2019s vir\u00adtue, however, has clear limits. This is most evident when he allows Three-Fingered Jack to torture and kill Chinese men indiscriminately because he cannot attain his aims without Three-Fingered Jack\u2019s support. Murieta\u2019s belief that the ends justify the means is difficult to distinguish from the vigilante tactics of his pursuers, who torture and execute Mexicans suspected of aiding the bandits without due process.<\/p>\n

In the novel, Murieta is mirrored by his most formida\u00adble pursuers, Captains Charles Ellas and Harry Love. Ellas emerges as a counterweight to the intensification of the bandits\u2019 activities in 1853. \u201cSo diverse were their op\u00aderations, so numerous and swift, that I shall not attempt to give a minute account of them,\u201d Ridge writes. Ellas, a courageous, active, and honorable \u201cyoung man of fine appearance,\u201d is \u201cnaturally looked to as a leader\u201d by the terrified populace. Like Murieta, however, Ellas finds himself torn between his \u201cchivalrous\u201d character and the exigencies of his mission. He relies on information ac\u00adquired through the arbitrary detention, torture, and mur\u00adder of suspicious-looking Mexicans, and (like Murieta) he delegates these methods to others: \u201cA doubt arising in the minds of some persons \u2026 as to whether it was right to put the fellow to death, Ellas left him in charge of the two Cherokee half-breeds with the request that they would give a good account of him.\u201d The two litho\u00adgraphs included in the first edition, portraits of Murieta and Love, invite readers to compare the bandit with the man who killed him. Ridge describes Love as Murieta\u2019s counterpart, an energetic and \u201cstealthy pursuer\u201d whose \u201cbrain was as strong and clear in the midst of dangers as that of the daring robber against whom he was sent, and who possessed a glance as quick and a hand as sudden in the execution of a deadly pur\u00adpose.\u201d If the state\u2019s agents of discretionary violence ap\u00adpear to help establish the rule of law, they also spread chaos and insecurity. With armed parties scouring the countryside, \u201carrests were continually being made; popular tribunals established in the woods, Judge Lynch installed upon the bench; criminals arraigned, tried, and executed upon the limb of a tree; pursuits, flights, skirmishes, and a topsy-turvy, hurly-burly mass of events that set narration of defiance.\u201d Even the suspected \u201charboring places and dens of the robbers\u201d\u2014presumably the homes of Mexican noncombatants\u2014are systematically destroyed and burned by a mob of angry citizens. While Ridge generally uses the distancing techniques of euphemism and passive voice to describe atrocities committed in the name of the law, at one point he breaks off his narrative to offer an ironic commentary on the \u201ccustom\u201d of lynching: \u201cBah! it is a sight that I never like to see, although I have been civilized for a good many years.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the last sixty-plus years since the novel\u2019s 1955 republica\u00adtion, critics have come to interpret Ridge\u2019s novel variously as a folk story of a charismatic Robin Hood\u2013like bandit, an impassioned protest against racial injustice, a troubled justification of state violence, a thinly veiled plotting of Ridge\u2019s personal revenge fantasies, an allegory of the ten\u00adsions between ethnic assimilation and anti-colonial resis\u00adtance, and a foundational work of Native American and California literature. These readings explore important questions about the novel\u2019s significance: Does Murieta stand in for the wounded and vengeful Mexican body pol\u00aditic, or does he unravel Mexican group identity by embrac\u00ading an elitist individualism? Does his ability to move undetected throughout California em\u00adpower him, or does it give license to the state\u2019s deployment of extraordinary police powers? If Three-Fingered Jack\u2019s violence and lack of self-restraint represent the antithesis of Murieta\u2019s noble character, what are we to make of the fact that Murieta\u2019s plans depend on Three-Fingered Jack\u2019s brutality? If Joaqu\u00edn Murieta <\/em>allegorizes the injustices experienced by the Cherokee, why does Ridge depict Cherokees torturing suspects to help hunt down the bandits? Does the novel evoke the need for impartial law and \u201cpure administration\u201d (in the words of Ridge\u2019s romantic poem about Mount Shasta, included in the novel), or does it advocate for natural rights and individualist ethics as opposed to legal doctrine? Does Ridge represent women as objects and prizes fought over by men, or does his portrayal of the stealthy murder of an abusive bandit by the bandit\u2019s wife represent a woman heroically taking justice into her own hands?<\/p>\n

Critics have also traced Joaqu\u00edn Murieta<\/em>\u2019s diverse in\u00adfluences across genres, media, and national boundaries. Ridge\u2019s intention \u201cto contribute my mite to those materi\u00adals out of which the early history of California shall one day be composed\u201d was eventually realized when historians\u2014many of them influenced by Hubert Howe Bancroft\u2019s History of California <\/em>(1882)\u2014<\/em>cited his fic\u00adtional narrative as a factual record. Although the novel was not widely reviewed upon its 1854 release, the California Police Gazette <\/em>serialized a plagiarized version in 1859 under the title The Life of Joaquin Murieta, the Brigand Chief of California<\/em>. This version, which demonized Murieta by omitting some of Ridge\u2019s psychological and legal explanations for Murieta\u2019s motives, was a popular success and became the source for numerous dime novels, such as Joaquin the Saddle King: A Romance of Murieta\u2019s First Fight <\/em>(1881) and The Pirate of the Placers; or, Joaquin\u2019s Death Hunt <\/em>(1882). (In 1871, a posthumous \u201cThird Edition\u201d of\u00a0The Life and Adventures of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta<\/em>,\u00a0revised and expanded by Ridge, was published by Frederick MacCrellish; in his preface, Ridge claims that his intention is to correct the misrepresentations propagated by these derivative versions, which he refers to as \u201cthe spurious work, with its crude interpolations, fictitious additions and imperfectly disguised distortions of the author\u2019s phraseology.\u201d) Published during the Great Depression and adapted as a film by MGM in 1936, Walter Noble Burns\u2019s The Robin Hood of El Dorado <\/em>(1932) helped to revive Ridge\u2019s portrayal of Murieta as a hero fighting for the poor and downtrodden. This revival of interest in Murieta gave rise to both popular manifestations\u2014such as a 1949 Western True Crime <\/em>comic book adaptation and the George Sherman film Murieta! <\/em>(Pro Artis Ib\u00e9rica, 1965)\u2014and the influential University of Oklahoma Press edition of Joaqu\u00edn<\/em> Murieta<\/em>, published in 1955. Ridge\u2019s novel has also been profoundly influential as an unambiguous representation of anti-colonial resistance and resurgent cultural nationalism in Mexican American, Mexican, and South American literature and culture. The popular ballad \u201cEl Corrido de Joaquin Murrieta,\u201d for example, depicts the bandit chief as a fearless enforcer of higher law who appears in saloons \u201cpunishing Anglos\u201d while wrongly condemned by the state\u2019s \u201cunjust laws\u201d: \u201cAy, que leyes tan injustas<\/em> \/ fue llamarme bandolero<\/em>\u201d (\u201cOh, what unjust laws \/ to label me an outlaw\u201d). In texts such as Ireneo Paz\u2019s novel Vida y aventuras del m\u00e1s c\u00e9lebre bandido sonorense, Joaqu\u00edn Murrieta <\/em>[Life and Adventures of the Most Celebrated Sonoran Bandit, Joaqu\u00edn Murrieta<\/em>], published in Mexico City in 1904; the poem \u201cYo Soy Joaqu\u00edn\u201d [\u201cI am Joaqu\u00edn\u201d] (1967), by the Chicano activist and poet Rodolfo \u201cCorky\u201d Gonz\u00e1les; and Pablo Neruda\u2019s 1967 play about him, Murieta emerges as a popular hero standing up against U.S. racism and colonialism. Gonz\u00e1les\u2019s poem\u2014which connects Murieta with other revolutionary figures from Mexican and Chicanx history\u2014made the bandit an icon of the Chicano movement against economic and cultural imperialism in the 1960s: \u201cOur art, our literature, our music, they ignored \/ so they left the real things of value \/ and grabbed at their own destruction \/ by their greed and avarice. \/ They overlooked that cleansing fountain of \/ nature and brotherhood \/ which is Joaqu\u00edn.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Authors who have rewritten Ridge\u2019s Joaqu\u00edn Murieta <\/em>for commercial and political purposes have frequently simplified the novel\u2019s cross-racial empathy and political complexities. The historical background of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the displacement and disenfranchisement of many Californios is completely excised in the most popular manifestations of the Murieta legend. While Zorro\u2014first introduced in Johnston McCulley\u2019s The Curse of Capistrano <\/em>(1919)\u2014echoes Murieta\u2019s ro\u00admantic and chivalrous character and his vigilante meth\u00adods, the pre-1846 setting of the Zorro stories makes Mexican rulers, rather than Americans, the agents of in\u00adjustice. Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, acknowledges Zorro as an important influence on Batman\u2019s vigilante persona, but the Batman comics transform the masked vigilante into a member of the wealthy white elite. Whereas Zorro and Batman focus on redressing individ\u00adual injustices, Ridge emphasizes Joaqu\u00edn\u2019s network of fel\u00adlow outlaws and their effort to avenge the U.S.\u2019s racial injustices toward all Mexicans. In this trajectory of pop\u00adular vigilante heroes, Ridge\u2019s Murieta becomes increas\u00adingly wealthy, white, and cut off from the social context of anti-Mexican racism.<\/p>\n

That the seeds of such diverse (and often contradictory) interpretations and rewritings are contained in Ridge\u2019s brief action-packed novel testifies to both Ridge\u2019s capacities as a writer and his political ambivalence as a writer of Cherokee descent who advocated for both disenfranchised Californios and the impartial rule of \u201csovereign law.\u201d The novel continually undermines Ridge\u2019s suggestion that the \u201cpure administration\u201d of the state government might put an end to \u201cinjustice to individuals<\/em>\u201d and \u201cprejudice of color\u201d: If Mount Shasta symbolizes the impartial rule of law in Ridge\u2019s poem within the novel, we learn on the very next page that Murieta\u2019s outlaws hid themselves \u201cin the rugged fastnesses\u201d of the mountain. The novel concludes with the grotesque exhibition throughout California of Murieta\u2019s severed head and Three-Fingered Jack\u2019s severed hand\u2014a display intended to terrify would-be outlaws while publicizing the state\u2019s monopoly on violence. Al\u00adthough Ridge\u2019s novel did not result in the establishment of impartial laws, sensational stories about Mexican bandits certainly contributed to the justification of police powers in California. Just a year after Joaqu\u00edn Murieta<\/em>\u2019s publica\u00adtion, California passed the Anti-Vagrancy Act, commonly known as the \u201cGreaser Act,\u201d which targeted \u201call persons who are commonly known as \u2018Greasers\u2019 or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood \u2026 and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joaqu\u00edn Murieta <\/em>is not just a foundational narrative of the state of California. It remains a vital novel today as racial profiling, deportations, criminalization, police vio\u00adlence, and racialized dispossession continue to devastate American communities in spite of putatively \u201ccolor-blind\u201d laws. Ridge\u2019s sympathetic account of Murieta\u2019s forma\u00adtion by unjust laws and racial violence offers a bracing rejoinder to racially disproportionate rates of incarcera\u00adtion, the systemic nature of antiblack police brutality, and the intensified militarization of the United States\u2013Mexico bor\u00adder fueled by racial stereotypes such as President Trump\u2019s invocation of \u201cbad hombres.\u201d Through both its psycho\u00adlogically nuanced portrait of Murieta and the parallels it presents between him and the men authorized to enforce the law, Ridge\u2019s novel enjoins readers to reconsider U.S. laws and their administration in connection with histo\u00adries of racialization, dispossession, and state-sanctioned violence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hsuan L. Hsu is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of <\/em>Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain\u2019s Asia and <\/em>Comparative Racialization and Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature.<\/em><\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Life and Adventures of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0by John Rollin Ridge, to be published on July 10, 2018, by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Introduction copyright \u00a9 2018 by Hsuan L. Hsu.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Like its elusive hero, The Life and Adventures of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta\u00a0(1854) is difficult to pin down. It has the distinction of being the first novel published in California, the first novel published by a Native American, and the first American novel to feature a Mexican protagonist. Its story draws together transformational events in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1543,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[34592,34586,775,34580,34590,34584,25404,34589,2861,34587,34577,34583,34579,17303,34591,34593,34578,34582,34588,34428,34585,34581,1346],"class_list":["post-126722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-anti-vagrancy-act","tag-biandits","tag-california","tag-california-gold-rush","tag-charles-ellas","tag-extralegal-violence","tag-folk-tale","tag-harry-love","tag-history","tag-horse-thieves","tag-joaquin-murieta","tag-john-rollin-ridge","tag-native-american","tag-race","tag-robin-hood","tag-state-sanctioned-violence","tag-the-life-and-adventures-of-joaquin-murieta-the-celebrated-california-bandit","tag-the-mask-of-zorro","tag-three-fingered-jack","tag-trail-of-tears","tag-treaty-of-guadalupe-hidalgo","tag-u-s-mexican-war","tag-westerns"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Legend of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta: A History of Racialized Violence<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"John Rollin Ridge\u2019s \u2018The Life and Adventures of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta\u2019 was the first novel published in California, the first novel published by a Native American, and the first American novel to feature a Mexican protagonist.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/09\/the-legend-of-joaquin-murieta-a-history-of-racialized-violence\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Legend of Joaqu\u00edn Murieta: A History of Racialized Violence by Hsuan L. 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