Assimilation and the Decapitated Body Politic in The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta

JESSE ALEMÁN Assimilation and the Decapitated Body Politic in The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta Since the year of 1849 a certain animosity (so contrary to a magnanimous and free people) has existed between the Mexicans and the Americans, to such an extent that the Americans have wished with all their heart that all the Mexicans put together had no more than one head to cut off (to do away with them all at once). Francisco Ramírez, Inquisición," Ei Chmor Público, August 28, 1855 As legend has it, Joaquín murieta, the (in)famous California Mexican bandit, met his demise in 1853 at tne hands of Captain Harry Love, a Texan transplanted to California and hired to lead a legally sanctioned lynch mob to capture Murieta and his notorious partner "Three Fingered Jack" dead or alive. Being Mexican in post-Mexican War California, Murieta and "Jack," a.k.a. Manuel Garcia, came back more dead than alive. Love decapitated Murieta and cut offJack's hand as a way of proving their identities to California's lawmakers and collecting the $1,000 reward for Murieta's "capture." Unfortunately, Murieta was such an enigmatic figure—as much folklore as fact by the time Love and his rangers were hired—that no one, Love included, could positively identify the head as belonging to one of the five feared Mexican bandits named Joaquin who sacked the highways, houses, and travelers of rancho California during the Gold Rush. Nevertheless, by August 1853, the pickled head traveled the state as a circus exhibit for Arizona Quarter!^ Volume 59, Number r, Spring 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 72 jesse Alemán several years and remained a curiosity until it was lost in the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake (Jackson xxiii-1).1 A year after Murieta's alleged death, John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), a mixedblood Cherokee on the lam in California, penned The life and Adventures ofJoaquin Murieta, the first Native American novel and lengthy narrative, aside from newspaper accounts, to give birth to the folklore surrounding the Murieta legend. According to Louis Owens, it is no coincidence that Rollin Ridge fictionalized Murieta's exploits. As a displaced Cherokee, Rollin Ridge appropriated Murieta 's racial rebellion and revenge to mask Ridge's own desire for vengeance following Cherokee removal and the internecine aftermath that targeted his family for assassination (32-33). Cheryl Walker echoes Owens' point, arguing that the significance of Ridge's Murieta is its articulation of a conflict between collective and individual identity, a conflict, Walker suggests, implicitly pitting collective Native American identity against Anglo-American individualism (136). In this sense, Rollin Ridge's novel also prefigures Native American novel writing in general. With Murieta, Owens explains, the mixedblood author vacillates between Anglo and Native cultures; wrestles with his internalization of dominant culture's Indian hatred; and produces a hybridized, dialogic narrative that registers the fractured identities ofNative American writers: "This first novel by an Indian author," Owens writes, "demonstrates in fascinating fashion the tension arising from conflicting identities that would emerge as the central theme in virtually every novel by a Native American author to follow" (40). As Shelley Streeby rightly notes, Rollin Ridge's text may not be the origin of the Murieta legend (168), but it is the starting point of the Native American novel and its articulation of ethno-racial dislocation, rebellion, and ambivalent assimilation. In fact, his novel is a precursor to contemporary ethnic American cultural production—Native and Mexican American in particular—that critiques the United States for not living up to its claims of social equality. Even if the pirated AngloAmerican version of Joaquin Murieta that circulated in the California Police Gazette in 1859 critiques nineteenth-century U.S. colonialism, as Streeby contends, the ethnic content and Native significance of Rollin Ridge's narrative give its critique a unique and complex place in American cultural production. John Carlos Rowe's claim that Rollin Ridge's Murieta expresses its author's assimilationist stance and longing Life and Adventures ofJoaquin Murieta 73 for progressive individualism to overcome the racism and lawlessness of Gold Rush California, for instance, overlooks...