Book Description

Killing Joaquín begins in 1519 with the arrival in Mexico of Joaquín's ancestor Juan Murrieta, who is part of the Spanish invasion force led by Hernan Cortez. The early part of the book relates the family's background in Mexico and the social reality that motivates the northward migration of the Murrietas during three centuries of avoiding the Spanish boot their own family had once worn. The political structure in Colonial Mexico is as follows: Spaniards born in Spain, Spaniards born in Mexico, Mestizos, and Indians, in order of descending power. The people in Spain think of the Spaniards in Mexico as subordinate intermediaries necessary in the extraction of wealth from the colonized country. Time widens the gap, and the colonists become separate from the people who had originally sent them to Mexico as agents of subjugation and avenues of revenue. Their lowered status compounds the far greater duality that is soon caused by the genetic blending of Spanish and Indian people throughout Mexico, whereby the majority of the population becomes both the oppressor and the oppressed, which is a major component of the Mexican Dilemma. In 1776, there are fewer than one hundred non-Indian people in the entirety of California, and not all of them are Hispanic. The children born here to the largest of these settler groups are the first generation of the Califorñios - people born in California of Spanish-speaking parents. The Califorñios, like the Murrietas, seek a life free from Spanish rule, and they are a group comprised of ethnically Spanish Mexicans and culturally Spanish Mestizos, more of the former than the latter. The earliest arrivals also include some pure Indians whose family members have intermarried with the Spaniards. The Califorñio culture develops separately from Mexican culture and establishes itself during a hundred years of living in grace, being far enough from the seats of power in Spain and Mexico to ensure the benign neglect in which that culture prospers. By the 1840s, the Califorñios have established California as an autonomous region of Mexico and are moving toward independence, hounded by the external predation by foreign nations and an internal revolution by a mostly Anglo-American group that wants to establish California as an independent republic called the Bear Flag Republic, as Texas had earlier done. All those aspirations are crushed by the United States, when the 1848 Treaty of Guadalúpe Hidalgo ends what we call the Mexican War by moving forty percent of Mexico to the United States, at which time California experiences a sudden population shift, with Anglo-Americans streaming into the newly acquired territory and changing everything for the mostly Indian and Hispanic Californians. Later that same year, gold is discovered and Paradise is lost. The Mexicans native to California see this influx as a terrible immigration problem, as they themselves still are to the more than 300,000 California Indians, while our predecessors don't consider themselves immigrants. Having just taken the place from Mexico, they see themselves as moving into their own house, entitled by Divine Providence and Manifest Destiny to possess this land and supplant the long-established cultures here. To that end, the federal government passes laws encouraging Anglo settlement and driving non-Anglos from the gold fields. In 1850, California statehood finalizes the acquisition. In 1851, the Spanish and Mexican land grants are broken, negating the pre-1848 land titles held almost entirely by Hispanics. This allows those properties to be divided into homesteads and claimed by Anglo settlers without payment to the owners; thereby disenfranchising the resident population, ensuring the demographic predominance needed to consolidate the gain, and completing our nation's transcontinental expansion. That is the historical context for this true story of the transfiguration and death of Joaquín Murrieta, who comes here in 1849 to go into the wild horse business with his half-brother Joaquín Carrillo (Murrieta). The plan is to capture the horses in California and take them to Mexico, where the horses sell for half again as much as they do here. But bad things happen, including a rape and a murder. In taking revenge for those acts, Joaquín Murrieta becomes a known outlaw, with no possibility of turning back. The horse gangs (work crews) become raiding gangs, robbing the miners and sending the gold to Mexico with the monthly horse drives. Other Mexican miners, meeting with the same government-supported mistreatment experienced by Joaquín, also become outlaws, whose activities are then blamed on Joaquín. He becomes a symbol of what the Americans fear in California. The federal and state governments desperately want Anglo-Americans to move to California and settle the just-stolen state, and no one is going to move in until the bandits are moved out. If the authorities can kill Joaquín, the needed migration will occur. How this true story unfolds from there is to be found in the pages of Killing Joaquín, which is available through Xlibris or wherever else books are sold.