Luis Leal: An Auto/Biography

Chapter Eight: Work and Reflections at Ninety

Chapter Eight Work and Reflections at Ninety Leal with President and Mrs. Clinton at the presentation of National Humanities Medal at the White House, September, 1997. MG: I want to discuss your own most recent work. I understand you’ve written a book on Joaquin Murrieta. Why did you decide to do a book on Murrieta? LL: I’ve always been interested in Murrieta as a popular hero. Some time ago, as I was collecting recordings of corridos, I found one on Murrieta. I think it was the very first corrido recorded about Murrieta. It was done in the 1930s in San Antonio. This began my interest in Murrieta. I then later came across the novel about him written by John Rollins Ridge in 1854. I began reading everything I could find about Murrieta. I became fascinated about his identity . Who was he? According to the California newspapers of the early 1850s, when Murrieta was alleged to have been a bandit, there were actually five Joaquins. At first I thought I would only do an article, but I collected so much material that I decided to write a whole book. For example, there were many dime novels written about Murrieta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another interesting thing that I discovered was that Ridge’s book on Murrieta was later published in different languages and in different countries , and all of these books claimed to be original versions and ascribed to Murrieta a different nationality. For example, shortly after the publication of Ridge’s book in 1854, it was reproduced in a publication in San Francisco called the Police Gazette. This version was then translated in 1862 into French and published in Paris. Following that, someone from Chile translated the French edition into Spanish, published it in Chile, and claimed that Murrieta was really a Chileno who had come to the gold fields of California during the gold rush after 1848. It’s possible that the French edition already claimed that Murrieta was Chileno. I’ve discovered that there is a copy of the French translation in the National Library in Paris, and I’m trying to get a copy of it. To make matters more complicated, the Chilean edition was reedited in Mexico by Ireneo Paz, the grandfather of Octavio Paz. People began to assume then that the true author of the Murrieta book was Irineo Paz rather than Ridge. Paz’s version was then translated back into English, crediting Paz as the author. In fact, of course, it was Ridge who all along was the original author. Finally, a second edition of Ridge’s book on Murrieta was published, which many in this country have accepted as being the original. But in other countries, they still accept either the French ver188 luis leal sion, the Chilean version, or the Mexican one. Part of my work is to definitely prove that all of these editions are simply copies or versions of the original Ridge one. So is your study an examination of these different publications? Part of it is. My study is entitled Joaquin Murrieta in Literature. Part of it is to deal with just who Joaquin Murrieta was, since, as I mentioned, five Joaquins are referred to by contemporary newspapers and all are linked with so-called bandit activity. Only one of them has the surname Murrieta. But why, for example, was this Joaquin selected by Ridge to be transformed into a folk hero and into what later scholars would refer to as a ‘‘social bandit’’? The story goes that when Murrieta or one of these Joaquins is eventually captured, his head was cut off. However, some claimed that the decapitated head later exhibited was not the head of Murrieta. One anecdote actually says that Joaquin Murrieta himself went to see his own head! Father Alberto Huerta at the University of San Francisco wrote an article a few years ago in The Californian about his research concerning the head of Murrieta. He claims that it had been deposited in a museum in San Francisco, but that in the 1906 earthquake the jar containing the head broke. Father Huerta goes on to say that he actually discovered the head in Berkeley, where some antiquarian has it. Richard Rodrı́guez in Days of Obligation has written about Father Huerta’s search for the head of Joaquin Murrieta. I’m also showing that Murrieta was...