Lori Lee Wilson. The Joaquin Band: The History behind the Legend. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Maps. xiv + 322 pp. $29.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8032-3461-1.

Reviewed by Daniel Justin Herman

Published on H- (July, 2012)

Commissioned by Eileen V. Wallis (Cal Poly Pomona)

From Lori Lee Wilson’s new study of the “in order to feature the voices of sources I en‐ Joaquín Murrieta legend, we learn that Murrieta countered” (p. 261). was a real bandit, though not necessarily a social Northern California Whigs, argues Wilson, bandit (the Hobsbawmian bandit who attacks used stories of Murrieta to jab at California’s hegemonists and assists subalterns). Or, maybe he Democratic governor in the early 1850s. Accord‐ was a social bandit. It depends on the perspective ing to Whigs, the governor’s expenditure on the of the teller. What we know is that Murrieta was pursuit of Murrieta (and four other bandit leaders no pure version of Robin Hood, stealing from the supposedly named Joaquín) was wasted money. rich and giving to the poor. However, he did expe‐ The Joaquín hysteria, they insisted, was rience persecution at the hands of Americans dur‐ overblown. After a posse claimed to have killed ing the . Subsequently he (and others) Joaquín--and exhibited his pickled head in a jar to took to robbing and killing Americans, as well as prove it--one Whig editor maintained that the the Chinese and, on occasion, fellow Mexicans. pickled Joaquín was the wrong man. Oral testimo‐ When in Monterey, California, he may have told ny by those claiming to have known the real Mur‐ an American--who published a newspaper story rieta points both ways. It seems likely, however, based on Joaquin’s “confessions”--that American that the posse killed the correct bandit. cruelty had forced him into outlawry, and that he The Democratic editor of a rival northern Cal‐ would never kill a fellow Mexican. Be that as it ifornia newspaper, not surprisingly, made con‐ may, his gang showed little compunction about trary assertions, playing up the terrors of Murri‐ killing anyone. In contrast to earlier scholarship, eta and his gang and lavishly praising those who Wilson presents, for the frst time, a comparative killed him and, thus, the Democratic governor anatomy of the Murrieta legend. “I chose to who hired them. The posse, he insisted, had got‐ marginalize the story [of Murrieta],” she explains, H-Net Reviews ten the right Joaquín, one “Joaquín Valenzuela.” fghting oppression, but in history it was Ramírez The posse’s leader, , claimed that his who did so” (p. 196). men had killed Murrieta, a fact that the editor lat‐ Americans were not the only lynchers in er reported. What mattered initially, it seems, was 1850s California. Sometimes Mexicans and Ameri‐ not the name, but the fact that a very bad Joaquín cans held joint “tribunals” and agreed on who to had been killed--the worst of the Joaquíns--no lynch. At other times, Americans, reacting with a matter which of them it might have been. mix of hysteria and cold premeditation, lynched Democrats also infated the legend of Murri‐ innocent Mexicans who were accused of being eta to endorse, at least implicitly, American fli‐ part of bandit gangs. Such acts both confrmed busterers who sought to bring law and order to and extended the racism that in earlier years had supposedly oppressed Sonorans. Democrats thus given rise to the Foreign Miners’ License Tax and endorsed attacks on that mirrored Murri‐ attacks on Sonoran miners. eta’s attacks on Americans. Murrieta and his It is somewhat strange, notes Wilson, that friends, some said, were nationalist guerillas who only Murrieta made it into folklore. Murrieta was fought to protest American vigilante terror along no more active in banditry than others. Several with the Foreign Miner’s License Tax (which sets of brothers, including Claudio and Reyes Fél‐ forced Sonorans out of the gold felds), and per‐ iz, Jesús and Joaquín Valenzuela, and Bernardo haps to avenge Mexico’s loss in its recent war and Francisco “Pancho” Daniel, plied their bitter with the United States. Americans, oddly, decried avocation on California’s lonely roads. So did the “guerillas” even as they themselves sought to be‐ more famous Salomon Pico, who--with the Murri‐ come the same. At least two hopeful flibusterers, eta of legend--became the inspiration for the sto‐ William Walker and Henry Crabb, recruited white ries of . Sometimes, the Mexican bands in‐ Californians for forays into Mexico. Walker failed cluded white Americans. Almost invariably they in an attempt to overthrow the government of came to bad ends, often at the end of a rope. Their and to lead it to independence (or union careers, like Murrieta’s, were exciting, bloody, and with the United States), then died during a later short. attempt to do the same in Nicaragua. Crabb--an What propelled Murrieta into folklore was ardent vigilante in California--found his grave in irony. By infating Murrieta’s powers and the Sonora, where Mexicans executed him and his numbers in his gang, Democratic editors helped crew after their failed flibuster in 1856. Chicanos, over a century later, to see a vast army In Southern California, editors fought a some‐ of Mexican guerillas fghting injustice in 1850s what diferent newspaper duel about the mean‐ California. What also propelled Murrieta into folk‐ ing of Murrieta. One Hispanic editor warned Mex‐ lore were sympathetic writers of his own time, icans (both and Sonorans who had both Anglo and American Indian. It was the come during the Gold Rush) not to lionize Murri‐ anonymous “Monterey correspondent”--presum‐ eta, who was a mere criminal, as eager to rob and ably a white American--who lamented the fact kill his countrymen as to rob and kill Americans. that American injustice toward Mexicans gave Another Mexican editor, Francisco P. Ramírez, Murrieta the aura of heroism. Murrieta’s popular‐ used his paper (El Clamor Público) to deride ity, he suggested, revealed the hypocrisy of Ameri‐ American vigilantism. In seeking to bring Murri‐ can ideals--justice, fairness, and democratic equal‐ eta and his fellow bandits to justice, Americans ity--that ostensibly stood behind expansion. killed innocents. “In Spanish-language folklore,” , scion of the noted writes Wilson, Murrieta has been depicted as patriarchs who signed the treaty that justifed

2 H-Net Reviews their people’s removal to Indian Territory, wrote and methodology. Ordinarily, one might note an the frst full-length biographical account of Murri‐ author’s methodology without praising it. The eta in 1854. Once mocked by justice, maintained praise stems from the fact that Wilson uses a post‐ Ridge, Murrieta mocked back. The Murrieta story structuralist approach of charting dueling narra‐ became a proxy for the story of Ridge’s own tives about Murrieta rather than insisting that Cherokee people, wronged by Americans and qui‐ there must be one “real” story. Everybody in Wil‐ etly longing for retribution (there is “‘nothing so son’s book has their own slant on Murrieta, and dangerous,’” wrote Ridge in his Murrieta book, no one is altogether right or wrong. Early Ameri‐ “‘as injustice to individuals--whether it arise[s] can-era California becomes neither a place of bad from prejudice of color or from any other source’” Americanos and good Californios nor the reverse. (p. 13). Though Ridge’s book sold few copies, the It becomes a rhetorical landscape of competing Police Gazette published a pirated and amended voices, some of which gain temporary hegemony version that sold widely. Thus--with the help of by condemning Murrieta and exaggerating the contemporary Democrats who dramatized Murri‐ threat of banditry. Despite that temporary hege‐ eta’s crimes, a Cherokee emigrant who made mony, it is the anti-hegemonic Murrieta story that Joaquín into a surrogate for his people’s story, a took deeper root. New York-based scandal rag, a series of twentieth- Wilson’s book might also be said to look be‐ century pop historians who sought the “real” yond discourse and hegemony to mundane inter‐ Murrieta, and, fnally, Chicano activists in search actions. Most of the events that she charts were of an early hero--Murrieta became the most fa‐ decidedly not mundane, but she chronicles inter‐ bled of early California bandits. action and even agreement between white Ameri‐ There are some faws in Wilson’s book. The cans and Mexicans as well as discord. Race rela‐ foremost is perhaps the failure to mention anoth‐ tions, as I argue elsewhere, get created via day-to- er recent treatment of the Murrieta legend: Bruce day human interaction as well as through dis‐ Thornton’s Searching for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, course (discourse is the product of those interac‐ and History in California (2003). The fact that En‐ tions, though it shapes them, too). One fnds at counter Books publishes conservative literature least some attention to day-to-day interaction in (just about all its books take a right-wing slant) Wilson’s book, though we must leave other schol‐ makes Thornton’s book worth discussing, whether ars to study it more closely. to praise, critique, or dismiss. Too, the rather puny Wilson accomplishes all that without any maps in Wilson’s book do not appear until the bows to poststructuralist theorists. Perhaps there reader is half way through. One desperately longs was no need. What could any methodological dis‐ for a two-page map somewhere toward the begin‐ cussion add to all the other methodological dis‐ ning of the book showing where Murrieta and cussions in scholarly books? Wilson, moreover, others rode, robbed, and died. We do, however, writes for a popular as well as academic audi‐ get an index of historical names at the end, ex‐ ence. She received a grant from the Wild West plaining which men were associated with which History Association, an organization not hallowed gangs. That is fortunate, because the names, oh in academe’s halls. Wilson’s work is a prime ex‐ my god, the names, they are legion and confusing ample of what old-fashioned research can accom‐ (I wrote a book with the same problem; it cannot plish when fltered through the newfangled lenses be helped in this sort of study). of discourse, contestation, and multiplicity, even if What is praiseworthy in Wilson’s book is its the fltering goes unacknowledged. “Truth” takes remarkable research, clear writing and exegesis, a backseat.

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Most lay readers would not deign to buy any self-proclaimed poststructural history. They will likely buy and read Wilson’s book, however, with‐ out realizing just how her methods resonate with poststructuralism. More power to her.

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Citation: Daniel Justin Herman. Review of Wilson, Lori Lee. The Joaquin Band: The History behind the Legend. H-California, H-Net Reviews. July, 2012.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34724

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