Culture-Tectonics: California Statehood and John Rollin Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta

Martin Ramirez. UNTITLED (CABALLERO ATOP A TRIANGULAR PED­ ESTAL). Ca. 1960-1963. Gouache and graphite on pieced paper. 24" x 19". Collection ofJennifer Pinto Safian. © Estate of Martin Ramirez. C U L T U R E -T E C T O N IC S : C a l i f o r n i a S t a t e h o o d a n d J o h n R o l l i n R i d g e ’s J oaquín Murieta M o l l y C r u m p t o n W i n t e r The word disfranchised is applied to citizens in contra­ distinction to foreigners. A man who is not franchised cannot be disfranchised; a foreigner in the United States, who is not a citizen, cannot be disfranchised. — Mr. J. M. Jones, San Joaquin delegate at the Cali­ fornia Constitutional Convention. Length of resi­ dency in Calif.: four months (qtd. in Browne 35). A review of the critical responses to The Life and Adventures ofJoaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) reveals that most scholars, in light of its status as the first novel by an American Indian, approach it as a Native American text and thus read the narrative as an allegory of John Rollin Ridge’s Cherokee history, as a sublimated revenge fan­ tasy connected to the factional violence within his tribe, or as a veiled response to U S Indian policies.1 These readings are informative and valid, but it is important to remember that the text contains other significations. Joaquin Murieta— widely regarded as the first California novel— should also be considered as a founding document of the state. Reading the novel together with other founding documents, such as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the California Constitution, one can trace the troubled shifting of relationships, the “culture-tectonics,” of the era: those unexpected and often jarring encounters between dif­ ferent groups that mirror the geographical phenomena that, in a way, define the state. A t the time when California was in the process of being classified as an extension of the United States of America, Ridge’s novel gave voice to a rumbling undercurrent of dissatisfaction at the ways in which the articulated democratic ideals of state and nation were undermined by exclusionary laws and practices. Ridge’s novel begins the same year that California ratifies its constitution, which presents to the world a story of a free and unified state. The narrative of Joaquin Murieta, however, disrupts this official fiction and interferes with its attempts to present a Western American Literature 43.3 (Fa ll 2008): 259-76 2 6 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 8 seamless transition of power. Like the ever-present threat of a California earthquake, Murieta and his band of outlaws strike randomly and with­ out warning, shaking up communities as well as the new foundations of a state that was trying to overlay white hegemony on a previously and currently pluralistic territory.2 The newly arrived settlers from the eastern United States were attempting to superimpose a homogenous vision based on the privileged history of the country without taking into consideration the unique state of California with its own Native American, Spanish, and M exican history. In California, the destruction that earthquakes cause comes from people building without assessing the land they are building on, whether it is on a fault line, whether the foundation of the ground is bedrock or sand. Similarly, the destruction in the novel is caused by the attempt to construct a new society without first assessing the existing cultural foundations. The vision of and desire for a homogenous society, one which con­ tinues the official national narrative of manifest destiny and is based on the obdurate notion that placed Europeans at the pinnacle of creation, can be found in a document that is contemporaneous to Ridge’s novel. In the transcription of the California constitutional debates, one delegate is recorded as saying: “The future, to us...