Abstract: | The article means to approach the ideological dimension of âZorroâ, the Mexican-American Early Californian Robin Hood avatar, primarily created as a literary character by dime novel and newspaper serial writer Johnston Mc Culley, for the All Story Walky Magazine, in 1919, in Los Angeles, and published regularly as The Curse of Capistrano, soon to be turned into a movie. The narrative will be seen as an answer to the political needs of a budding regional entity and as the provider of a new syncretic identity.
Our hypothesis will be that a pliable historic object, a caballero who could appear as a trinity made up of three different individuals, all secessionist Mexican politicos of the California of the 1830ies, has been adapted if not transformed, at least slanted, in accordance with a pervasive or smoothly persuasive ideology. It would contribute to reassure the Anglo consensus about its right to own the coveted territory of California, would morally justify the 1848 legal dispossession of Mexico, legitimize hegemonic claims by subtly inventing a culprit: distant, aristocratic Spain, rather than closer Mexico, to be opposed to democratic California, emblematic of a recently empowered United States. |
