The Other "Others": The Construction of the West in José Mallorquí's El Coyote

The American West, the Wild West, the West that was constructed and exported in the vast array of movies that were shown worldwide in the middle decades of the twentieth century has always evoked passion and a deep attraction in Spain. Through Westerns the Spanish public obtained a very definite (and probably biased) image of the West in which the specific setting, the archetypal characters, and the firm line between good and evil were essential elements that constructed the West as a symbol that equated the United States with the West. This imagined, collectively shared representation of the West was also described in the widely read popular Western literature that arrived in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century. These novels were at first translated from their original American versions. Later during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and because of the sociocultural and historical context of a country that had undergone a civil war and where people lived in poverty and scarcity under a dictatorial regime, Westerns were no longer imported and local authors emerged. The essentially formulaic structure of the genre (Cawelti) was clearly adopted in the Spanish version. Thus, the Spanish Western "dime" novels emulated and perpetuated some of the stereotypes that had been established and preserved (and assimilated as genre-markers in the original novels) in the classical Westerns of Hollywood, and later on, in their European versions, the Spaghetti Westerns. Here the dichotomy of the forces of good and the forces of evil, embodied in the cowboys and the cavalry on the one hand and the Native Americans on the other, was the axis around which the action and its narrative revolved. This conflict and the colliding forces of the protagonists were assimilated in Spain as historical facts. It thus came to be assumed that Western movies were a reliable historical source that accounted for "the conquest of the West" and indeed for the formation of the United States as it is today.

Taking into consideration the convulsive sociohistorical and cultural situation in Spain at the time when the popular Spanish Western novels were proliferating, and the fact that these novels were initially imported and imitated, this essay considers the way in which the good-versus-evil axis is constructed in the works of the prolific popular Spanish Western novelist José Mallorquí. The study provides a sociohistorical contextualization of the moment when Mallorquí wrote his novels and focuses predominantly on the representation of heroes and villains in them. It addresses the conscious erasure of the "Other" protagonist in the historical conquest of the West—the Native American—and the creation of a new "Other" villain: the Anglo settler who is in opposition to the original Californio. It observes the way in which the conflict between good and evil changes from the binary poles of white man and Native American toward those of Californio and Anglo settler in an attempt to conform to the sociocultural demand on the arts during Franco's regime as well as to the political impositions at that time. To that purpose, the essay looks at the first novel of the El Coyote saga, which was the series of novels that turned Mallorquí into one of the most widely read authors of the time. Before delving deeper into the matter, I consider it necessary to provide some thoughts about the origins and development of the popular novel in Spain.

The Popular Novel in Spain: Its Origins and Development

Undoubtedly, the Spanish Civil War left a profound mark on the sociohistorical, political, cultural, and economic situation of Spain. This cruel and violent episode in Spanish history not only divided the country into two irreconcilable ideological parts but also influenced its cultural development, which was brought to a halt during the years of the confrontation (1936–1939). As with other aspects of the sociocultural situation in Spain during the twentieth century, the expansion and impact of the Spanish popular novel can be explained by looking at two different periods: the first dating from the beginning of the century until...