"You're a Traitor to your Country and Your Class": Rollin Ridge's Legend of Joaquin Murieta as it Survives Print Culture, Zorro, and Batman in the 20th Century

This paper examines how John Rollin Ridge's 1854 novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta has been adapted, lost, and found again through the narratives of Zorro and Batman. Rollin Ridge’s original text, when adapted... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines how John Rollin Ridge's 1854 novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta has been adapted, lost, and found again through the narratives of Zorro and Batman. Rollin Ridge’s original text, when adapted to films meant for popular consumption, loses nearly all critical, cultural, and historical qualities. It is through the pulps, comics, and a completely reimagined Zorro film that Rollin Ridge’s original narrative survives. Because of these texts, Batman is created and recreated as yet another critique of class and racial identity politics in the United States. These complex perspectives get relegated to seemingly low-brow forms of production, largely ignored by historians and literary scholars alike, yet they survive and reach considerable numbers of the population. These characters gain and lose value as they shift genres, print culture modes, but ultimately are restored through the 1998 Mask of Zorro film and Christopher Nolan's Batman Trilogy. Joaquin Murieta's commentary on the performativity of race, class, and national identity are what create Zorro and subsequently what creates the character of Batman. The inverse narrative of attempting to rise to class mobility is told when Don Diego De La Vega and Bruce Wayne shirk their high class personas in favor of "fighting for the people." Rollin Ridge's original text and its exclusion from the American literary canon reiterates the racism present in Gold Rush California, along with the classed assessment of print culture modes of Johnston McCulley's pulps and Batman comics.