1 Tompkins, Joanne, “Performing History's Unsettlement,” in Critical Theory and Performance, rev. ed., ed. Reinelt, Janelle G. and Roach, Joseph R. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 72Google Scholar.

2 The narrative voice of this epic poem is Joaquín Murieta, the mid-nineteenth-century historical figure examined in this study. A major text of the Chicano Movement, I Am Joaquin (1967), by Rodolfo [“Corky”] Gonzales and Y. Vasquez (Santa Barbara: La Causa Publications, 1967), was adapted into a short film by Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino in 1969. The film was made part of the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2010 and included in the Academy Film Archive in 2017.

3 Charles E. B. Howe, Joaquin Murieta de Castillo, the Celebrated California Bandit (San Francisco: Commercial Book and Job Steam Printing Establishment, 1858). Two original copies of Howe's 1858 publication remain: one at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and one at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. This study examined the latter original copy. Howe's play is also included in California Gold-Rush Plays, ed. Glenn Loney (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983), 21–63.

4 For this reason, I refer to the English-speaking state as “US California” throughout the essay.

5 Latinidad is the first of a handful of transhistorical terms used for academic analysis in this study. First utilized by Felix M. Padilla as “latinismo” in his 1985 book, Latino Ethnic Consciousness: The Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 64, 69, 163, Latinidad, or Latinness, indicates Latin American cultural affects at large. It is a nonessentialist Spanish word that refers to the attributes of Latin American people inherited from their ancestors and from the attributes of their continually evolving cultures. Latinidad is disseminated through the interpretive imagery of Latin American histories, art, and people, and has varying expressions in different national contexts.

6 The complexity of historical forces and identifiers within settler colonialism renders “Latinx” not as a term of historical identification but as one of academic analysis; the “x” represents the array of biological, cultural, and racial mixing—or homogeneity—in individuals of Latin American descent. It includes individuals of all genders as well as those who identify as nonbinary, gender neutral, or nonidentarian. The “x” allows each individual to “fill in the blank” from an endless array of cultures, identities, races (Black, European, and Indigenous), and histories that include, as the core, Latin American descent.

7 Signed in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican–American War. For Mexico, it included the territorial losses of New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, parts of Colorado, and California. It also guaranteed American citizenship and its “unalienable rights” for Mexicans who decided to stay within those territories. Those guarantees for citizenship and land ownership were not met. The official title of the treaty was the “Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic.” See Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).

8 Rodríguez, Clara E., Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 35Google Scholar.

9 I credit the locus of this concept to Jose Muñoz's scholarship, which suggests looking at performance “as symbolic acts of difference that insist on ethnic affect within a representational sphere dominated by the standard national affect”; Muñoz, José Esteban, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs),” Theatre Journal 52.1 (2000): 67–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 69. Muñoz argues how media culture immerses and contains Latinidad within spiciness and exoticism, and “performance work functions as political attempts to contest and challenge . . . stereotypes” with accounts of survival (69). He poignantly asks us to consider when ethnic affect is “brown” enough, and if it is not, if it is deemed part of the cultural logic of “whiteness.”

10 It is not possible to separate myth from fiction with such a seminal historical figure such as Joaquín Murieta. Different versions of his brother's lynching exist. See Luis Leal, “Introduction,” in Ireneo Paz, Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Bandit, Joaquin Murrieta: His Exploits in the State of California, trans. Frances P. Belle (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001), ix–xcvii, at xvii, xxiv–xliv; and Bruce S. Thornton, Searching for Joaquín: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 78–84.

11 Geo., M. B., “California,” New-York Daily Tribune, 14 June 1853, 6, col. 2; https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1853-06-14/ed-1/seq-6/, accessed 12 October 2019.

12 The reward totaled $1,000; see Thornton, Searching for Joaquín, 22–3.

13 “California State Rangers,” California Militia and National Guard Unit Histories (California State Military Museum); https://militarymuseum.org/CaliforniaStateRangers.html, accessed 4 October 2019. This material seems to derive from Works Progress Administration, with the Adjutant General's Office of California and California State Library, National Guard of California, vol. 10: The California National Guard and the Mexican Border Service ([Sacramento], 1940).

14 The most exhaustive compilation of materials on Joaquin Murieta seems to be Frank L. Latta, Joaquín Murrieta and His Horse Gangs (Santa Cruz: Bear State Books, 1980). In Mexico, the principal researcher of Joaquín Murieta is Manuel Rojas, who authored Joaquín Murrieta, “El Patrio”: El “Far West” del México Cercenado, 3d ed. (Mexicali: Instituto de Cultura de Baja California, 1992). Articles on Murieta appear in a number of dictionaries and encyclopedias, including the Diccionario Porrúa de historia, biografía geografía de México (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1964), and the Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Perhaps the most dramatic historical account, besides Yellow Bird's (see note 17), is Walter Noble Burns's The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga of Joaquín Murrieta, Famous Outlaw of California's Age of Gold (New York: Coward–McCann, 1932).

15 Leal, “Introduction,” xiii, xlii–xliv.

16 Controversies on the head's authenticity have never ceased. The latest venture is The Head of Joaquin Murieta, a 2016 PBS documentary by John Valadez, who seeks to find the head of Murieta and bury it. The infamous 1981 mondo film Faces of Death II stages its self-professed real depiction of Murieta's pickled head.

17 See Thornton, Searching for Joaquín, 86–8; Leal, “Introduction,” xii–xxv; and Joseph Henry Jackson, “Introduction,” in Yellow Bird [John Rollin Ridge], The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, new ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), §III, xxxi. See also my note 13.

18 Yellow Bird, Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, 9–10.

19 Ibid., 9.

20 Ibid., 7.

21 Glenn Loney, “Introduction,” in California Gold-Rush Plays, ed. Loney, 7–20, at 15.

22 George R. MacMinn, The Theater of the Golden Era in California (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1941), 242.

23 Loney, “Introduction,” 16.

24 Charles E. B. Howe, “Reminiscences,” holograph, 1854[?], BANC MSS C-D 5149, Bancroft Library Rare Collections, University of California, Berkeley.

25 Ibid.

26 US President James K. Polk (1795–1849) and his 1845–9 administration galvanized the US Congress to expand American territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean. They believed the West was destined for conquest and occupation by Anglo-Americans. See Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2018) and The Diary of James K. Polk during His Presidency, 1845 to 1849, ed. Milo Milton Quaife, 4 vols. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 1: 495–7.

27 As a term that originated to distinguish hierarchical class distinction according to race, “Mestiza/o/x” can carry pejorative connotations in Latin America, including Mexico. Detractors claim that the concept of a Mestizo nation “[in Mexico] pretends to synthesize the composition of the population, but in reality excludes those ethnically differentiated from the group assumed as referent.” See Miguel Alberto Bartolomé, “Pluralismo Cultural y Redefinición del Estado en México,” Série Antropologia 210 (Brasília: Universidade de Brasília, Departamento de Antropologia, 1996), 12; translation mine. Its usage emphasizes a politically advantageous disidentification from Indigenous heritage in which assimilation into the majority or dominant group—Mestizos—is favored. In this study, I use Mestiza/o when it is historically appropriate, to reiterate the colonial, historicized use of the term. It is not used to detract from the multiple ethnic and racial identities that make up Mestizos, including Black, Indigenous, and European, nor is it used as a present-day stratification.

28 See Greenberg, Manifest Destiny, 16–17 (quote on 17), 137, 140, and doc. nos. 11, 12, 18, 25, 31, 32, and 37; and Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 45, 47, 52, 54. See also my note 45.

29 Greenberg, Manifest Destiny, 15–16. She notes how “Many of the most active proponents of Manifest Destiny owned foreign investments in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America that would vastly increase in value under the US flag. . . . [R]ace and not civilization became the determining factor in this equation. Increasing numbers of ‘Anglo Saxon’ Americans believed their claims to North America to be superior to those of any racially ‘impure’ peoples” (16–17).

30 Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, Actos (San Juan Bautista: Curaracha Press, 1971), 5.

31 Californios were Mexicans native to the state of California comprised mostly of Criollos, or Mexicans of full Spanish descent, and Mestizos—blended Criollo and Indigenous populations. The caste system, or castas, as an inherently racial stratification of hierarchy in Spanish America, including California, was used to distinguish among social classes in accordance with racial (im)purity; these included, in order of their social standing: Spanish-born Peninsulares; the Spanish born in the New World, or Criollos; and Mestizos, individuals of mixed European, Indigenous, and Black racial identities. The lowest strata comprised Indigenous and Black peoples. This hierarchy continued in Mexican California until 1824 when a new Mexican constitution abolished castas. See Gibb, Andrew, Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 19Google Scholar; and Haas, Lisbeth, Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 119Google Scholar.

32 Haas, Saints and Citizens, 119. Castas were “the classification system that tracked racial inheritances through multiple generations, [which] acted as a tool for sustaining ideologies of racial ‘purity’ within the Spanish empire”; Gibb, Californios, Anglos, 18–19.

33 Gibb, Californios, Anglos, 19.

34 “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” in Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949, vol. 9: Iraq–Muscat, ed. Charles I. Bevans (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1949), 791–806.

35 Griswold del Castillo, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 68–70.

36 Pitt, Leonard, “The Beginnings of Nativism in California,” Pacific Historical Review 30.1 (1961): 23–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 23.

37 California Gold Rush immigrants were mostly from Malaysia, Hawaii, China, Mexico, Chile, France, Peru, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. See Thornton, Searching for Joaquín, 56.

38 Griswold del Castillo, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 67.

39 Pitt, “Nativism in California,” 28.

40 Kimberly Johnston-Dodds, Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians (Sacramento: California State Library, California Research Bureau, 2002), 5.

41 Native American genocide was facilitated by the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which occurred in tandem with state and federal government rewards for Native American bodies as evidence of their killing: $25.00 was the average price for evidence of killing indigenous males, $5.00 for children. When Native American children were spared, they were often sold or taken in for indentured servitude by the bounty hunter who killed their parents and/or family. See “The Gold Rush: Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,” American Experience, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goldrush-act-for-government-and-protection-of-indians/, accessed 14 February 2019.

42 Steven Bender, Greasers and Gringos: Latinos, Law, and the American Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2003), xiii.

43 The word “greaser” originated in the Mexican–American War as a derogatory term to refer to Mexicans and “the practice of Mexican laborers in the Southwest greasing their backs to facilitate the unloading of hides and cargo.” See Bender, Greasers and Gringos, xiii. It may have also been used to refer to a “treacherous Mexican male who was sexually threatening to and desirous of white women.” See Hutchinson, Darren Lenard, “Ignoring the Sexualization of Race: Heteronormativity, Critical Race Theory and Anti-Racist Politics,” Buffalo Law Review 47 (1999): 1–116Google Scholar, at 87, cited in ibid.

44 Douglas S. Harvey, The Theatre of Empire: Frontier Performances in America, 1750–1860 (London: Routledge, 2016), 138.

45 See Clare V. McKenna, “A Special Kind of Justice: The Treatment of Hispanic Murderers in California, 1850–1900,” in Chicano Social and Political History in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo with Manuel Hidalgo (Encino, CA: Floricanto Press, 1992), 95–103, at 99. Disparities as a result of comparing Anglo and Hispanic sentencing rates in nineteenth-century California highlight judicial powerlessness and domination. These San Quentin Prison registers, regarding first-degree murder convictions during 1850–1900, are included by McKenna (ibid., Table 3, “Victim/Perpetrator Sentencing, 1850–1900,” at 100):

Source: San Quentin Registers of Action.

Source: San Quentin Registers of Action.

46 “1860 Census: Population of the United States—California,” United States Census Bureau, www.census.gov/library/publications/1864/dec/1860a.html, accessed 26 February 2019. The 1860 US Census reveals a rapidly diminishing nonwhite population within an emergent, US state. Historians theorize that a significant amount of the California “Hispanic” population at that time did not participate in the census, out of fear. Hence, although the population percentages tabulated historically lack accuracy, they do demonstrate a culture of marginalization, subjection, and concealment for non-Anglo individuals. It is possible that “Hispanic” populations also feared attending mainstream public events, such as English-speaking theatre.

47 See MacMinn, Theater of the Golden Era, 242–3; and Loney, “Introduction,” 16.

48 See Albert Kimsey Owen Papers, 1872–1923, 1940–1969, Box 1, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

49 Ibid.

50 The monastery's location is not specified in the play. The closest contemporaneous monastery in name and function is the Santa Veracruz Monastery located in the historical center of Mexico City, established in 1586 by a religious order founded by Hernán Cortés. It is Mexico's second oldest church. Carmen Galindo and Magdelena Galindo, Mexico City: Historic Center (Mexico City: Ediciones Nueva Guía 2002), 174.

51 Howe, Joaquin Murieta de Castillo, 6; also in California Gold-Rush Plays, ed. Loney, 23–4. Subsequent page citations to both editions are given parenthetically in the text.

52 Acknowledgment of violent, bloody, and murderous colonial conquest is certainly in order, as is recognition of the European colonization that came to be in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

53 The use of “Hispanic” throughout this essay refers to a descendance from the Iberian Peninsula; this geographic region included modern-day Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and the British territory of Gibraltar. Essentially, the words Spain, Spanish, and Spaniard are of the same etymology as the Latin Hispanicus. Those opposed to the use of the term “Hispanic” to encompass all individuals of Latin American descent rightly point out its limited scope to peoples of “Spanish” descendance. The term excludes all Indigenous, mixed ethnic, and racial identifications, and emphasizes a “Spanish” origin or descendance. The use of “Hispanic” is unavoidably pejorative, as it attempts to encompass descendants of forced and violent Spanish colonization in the Americas as “Spanish.” “Hispanic” is distinguishable from (Afro-)Latinx, which includes Latin American, Indigenous, African, European, and Caribbean descent, and from (Afro-)Chicana/o/x, which includes individuals who assert a political consciousness and deny, as Jorge A. Huerta notes, “both a Mexican and an Anglo-American distinction, yet [are] influenced by both.” Huerta, Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual Press, 1982), 4.

54 Griswold del Castillo, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 4.

55 The word “vamose” refers to the Spanish-language “vámonos,” which translates as “let's go.” Modern English has “vamoose,” meaning to depart suddenly.

56 Woods Creek is located in Jamestown, California, which is in Tolumne County. It is one of the original counties of California established in 1850, the year California became the thirty-first state of the United States. Jamestown was one of the major California Gold Rush (1848–55) towns, and the Woods Creek area and river were reputed to contain some of the largest gold deposits.

57 Linda Heidenreich, “‘Greaser Act’ (1855),” in Latino History and Culture: An Encyclopedia, ed. David J. Leonard and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2010), 1: 218.

58 Bender, Greasers and Gringos, xiii.

59 Nineteenth-century Mexican American novelist María Amparo Ruiz de Burton consistently contends with Manifest Destiny and its violent, racist, and gendered constructions.

60 “The Great War Meeting at Tammany Hall: Tremendous Gathering of the People—Shall the Whole of Mexico Be Annexed?” New York Herald, 30 January 1848, 1.

61 Naomi Rokotnitz, Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 8.

62 Anthony Kubiak, Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 53.

63 Carrigan, William D. and Webb, Clive, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928,” Journal of Social History 37.2 (2003): 411–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 413.

64 Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 1850–1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 240 n. 20.

65 Luis Valdez adapted the historical figure of Tiburcio Vásquez in his 1981 play Bandido!

66 State of California (1939), California Historical Landmarks, “CHL No. 344 Arroyo de Cantua—Fresno,” Coalinga, California; visited 4 October 2018.

67 Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–7, at 4.

68 First coined by Carey McWilliams in North of Mexico [1949] (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961), “fantasy heritage” is aptly described by Rosa Linda Fregoso as naming “the selective appropriation of historical fact, the transformation of selected elements of history (e.g., the economic system of missions and haciendas [in California]) into a romantic, idyllic past that repressed the history of race and class relations in the region.” See Fregoso, “Tracking Latina Bloodlines,” in MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 103–25, at 103.

69 For Chile, see Simon Collier and William F. Sater, A History of Chile, 1808–1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 81. For the controversy, see Paz, Life and Adventures, xviii–xix.