Introducing Joaquín Murieta

Howe based his play on the historical Joaquín Murieta, an alleged outlaw and notorious bandido—and one of the first historical Latinx representations in US California. Historical records reveal that in 1853 the state of California placed a bounty on Murieta, wanted dead or alive. Together with his gang, he reportedly had been stealing from and killing mostly Americans of Anglo descent. The Murieta crime and revenge spree began after his wife was violently raped, his brother was lynched by a white Anglo mob looking to rid themselves of Mexican and Latinx competition in the Gold Rush, and Murieta himself was tied to a stake and flogged in the town square of Stockton, California—apparently for demanding justice.Footnote ¹⁰ A New York Tribune article in June of 1853 recorded Murieta's words swearing “eternal warfare against everything [sic] and person American,” after he “has been despoiled over and over again . . . his dearest rights invaded and trampled under foot.”Footnote ¹¹ State authorities contracted Captain Harry Love and his mercenaries to capture the alleged bandit. Love hunted, shot, killed, and beheaded Murieta on 25 July 1853, and with the head as proof collected the state-sponsored reward.Footnote ¹² Two of Murieta's men were captured and taken into custody; the rest escaped.Footnote ¹³ Numerous contentions surround the life, history, and interpretations of the lawlessness and justice surrounding Joaquín Murieta and his men.Footnote ¹⁴ Nevertheless, Murieta's pickled head in a large jar was featured on a tour (Fig. 1), along with the pickled hand of his lieutenant, Three-Fingered Jack.Footnote ¹⁵ The profitable display of his head as a touring spectacle of death at carnival sideshows, theatres, and museums, lasted into the early twentieth century and furthered the myths surrounding Murieta.Footnote ¹⁶ It invited paying customers to experience vicious antagonistic empathy—to experience their own emotions heightened by the imagery of the pickled head. Onlookers may have paid for the spectacle because it propped up their belief in a reasoned settler colonial subjugation of Indigenous and Latinx populations.

Figure 1. Advertisement for the display of Murieta's head, from the San Francisco Herald, 20 August 1853.

Murieta's heroic but tragic resistance became legend across the new American California due to Yellow Bird's historical novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, published in 1854, the year following Murieta's death.Footnote ¹⁷ Yellow Bird, or John Rollin Ridge, was a Cherokee Native American whose culture and family suffered violently under Anglo-American subjugation. He is the first known Indigenous novelist in North America and was the first writer to capture the anxieties, myths, and history of mid-nineteenth-century California through his adaptation of the Murieta story. In his novel's introduction, he reflects on California's “prejudice of color, the antipathy of races, which are always stronger and bitterer with the ignorant and unlettered” and afford excuses for “unmanly cruelty and oppression.”Footnote ¹⁸ He associates deepening strife in California and the nation with the crude ethnocentrism of uneducated Americans: “the lawless and desperate men, who bore the name of Americans but failed to support the honor and dignity of that title.”Footnote ¹⁹ As critical perspective on a burgeoning morality, he writes how the character of the historical Murieta

Yellow Bird's humanistic discourses are philosophical and empathetic engagements with race and cultural fusions. As the narrator in his novel, Yellow Bird yearns to understand the everyday life of ordinary people and their language, and the motivations and relationships born from cultural confrontations.

Charles E. B. Howe lifted his play's narrative structure and dialogue from Yellow Bird's novel. However, he also introduced a significant amount of original narrative, characters, dialogue, and technique in his work. Howe's Victorian adaptation shifted Yellow Bird's literary, humanistic discourses to violent, often melodramatic transgressions by and upon Latinx characters. As a playwright, he deserves credit for the birth of Murieta as a theatrical representation. Howe's Joaquin Murieta de Castillo, the Celebrated California Bandit (1858) carried the spectacle of death and containment forward, continuing as a mythmaking apparatus that invited readers and potential theatregoers to witness the violent, racialized melee of mid-nineteenth-century California and its fascination with Murieta's demise.

Scholarship on Charles E. B. Howe and his play is fairly limited. Aside from Joaquin Murieta de Castillo, he also authored a much shorter and less ambitious play, Signing the Declaration of Independence; or, Scenes in Congress, July 4th, 1776—published by Samuel French circa 1887, yet previously produced in San Francisco in July of 1863.Footnote ²¹ George R. MacMinn's The Theater of the Golden Era in California (1941), Glenn Loney's California Gold-Rush Plays (1983), and Bruce Thornton's Searching for Joaquín (2003) dedicate four pages between them to Howe's 1858 play. MacMinn highlights the play as a “specimen of ‘high art’” that, “despite its shortcomings . . . , showed a higher-degree of concentration upon a peculiarly Californian subject.”Footnote ²² Loney includes Howe's play in his California Gold-Rush Plays and dedicates two pages to historical dramaturgy, including how

Like Loney and MacMinn, I believe the playwright was holding up a mirror to the audience. As a chronicle of a quickly changing mid-nineteenth-century environment and culture, the play provided Howe the opportunity to create and experiment with theatrical spectatorship. It reveals a sense of living in the pure present moment of 1850s California, within the excitement, turmoil, and demands of nation forming. As one of the first plays written and set in the American West, it constructed images and choices of identification for spectators (re)constructing their morality within US California.

Howe's own experiences of precarity likely influenced his approach to telling Murieta's story. He elegantly narrated his frontier struggles in his private diary, “Reminiscences,”Footnote ²⁴ reflecting on the burgeoning US state of California, specifically during the years 1848–50. Physical, mental, and financial struggle are evident in the diary entries, providing a window into a lifestyle of fear and toil for survival, at least in the early stages of his California exploits. At times, his prose and handwriting style is refined. Exhaustion, cold, and hunger often set in, and elegance slips into incomprehension; one cannot help but imagine the challenging constraints of Howe's life in mid-nineteenth-century California. His narration captures a perpetual suspense about whether he will survive hunger, disease, the environment, and bitter cold. Bouts with Panama fever and cholera almost killed him. Somehow, he was still able to capture his present:

That he was able to record his circumstances affords an understanding of his empathy as shaped by personal experience: a desire to understand his own suffering and the suffering around him is consistent throughout his entries. This intellectual pursuit perhaps supports his need not just to survive, but also to engage deeply with the experiences and the world around him.

Perhaps Howe, like Yellow Bird, identified with Joaquín Murieta, seeing him as the ultimate figure of resilience within the material, spiritual, and physical competition of settler colonial capitalism in California. Yet however novel his adaptation of the Murieta story, Howe's art is constrained by a dominant ideology that motivates antagonistic empathy and furthers a sharply constrained understanding of Latinidad and Latinxs. Murieta's, Yellow Bird's, and Howe's efforts to espouse an equitable possession of the self and possession of the land and its resources were met by racialized laws and ideologies that hijacked their artistic labor. Shaped into yet another arm of the settler colonial apparatus examined in the next section, spectatorship and antagonistic empathy negated Latinx subjectivity as a valued element of US nationhood.

Californian Coloniality

Before we engage with Howe's play, this section contextualizes the complexity of historical forces that operated in the text and shaped its 1858 publication. The US–Mexico border conflict (which continues in the present) is rooted in the rivalry between England and Spain in the early modern era, specifically the territorial and ideological rivalry between Protestantism and Catholicism. New Spain (1521–1821) and its descendant, Mexico, as Catholic and Spanish-speaking nations, were natural enemies to the pro-Protestant, English-speaking United States. With foundations in militant Protestantism and Calvinism, Manifest Destiny ideology was a matter of justifying—morally, practically, and ethically—aggressive and violent acquisitions of North American territory belonging to Indigenous and Mexican populations. Beginning in the 1830s, the spiritual and cultural ideology of Manifest Destiny became the American political ideology of westward expansion.Footnote ²⁶ However, by the start of the eighteenth century—in the western and southwestern regions of the North American continent, including Texas, Arizona, and California—the Spanish culture and the emerging Mexican culture were firmly established. Latinidad as a concept and as a reality stood in the way of westward expansion; as of 16 September 1810, these territories belonged to Catholic, Spanish-speaking, “Mestizo”Footnote ²⁷ Mexico. Manifest Destiny's ideology envisioned Mestizos, or racially mixed peoples, as racially and linguistically “impure.”Footnote ²⁸ Asserting a hierarchy of religion, language, ethnicity, and race in order to acquire economic prosperity via land ownership had driven expansion since the colonial era.Footnote ²⁹ The supposedly “logical” predestination of Anglo-Americans to possess and inhabit North America rationalized the seizure of land from Mestizo and Indigenous populations.

In 1846, westward expansion spurred the Mexican–American War (1846–8), leading Mexico to surrender the northern half of its nation to the United States. Thus, the first California Mexican Americans, Mestizos, and Indigenous populations were not immigrants. “We did not, in fact, come to the United States at all,” says Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino in California. “The United States came to us.”Footnote ³⁰ Valdez describes the sudden impact of wildly different cultures forced intraculturally to negotiate different languages, representation, and socioeconomic inequity—challenges that continue in the present.

Anxieties over intracultural flux prevailed in 1848 California. Californios, Footnote ³¹ now Mexican Americans, were deeply affected by the massive migration of would-be miners from around the world and simultaneously from the Eastern United States. Most Californios remained, relying on the treaty's guarantee of their American citizenship and property rights. With California under US rule, emerging cultural and political ideologies, including new laws and courts, were susceptible to Protestant Calvinism and Manifest Destiny that predestined the Anglo-American usurpation of land. Anglo-American squatters unlawfully occupied land and relied on complexities in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which necessitated lengthy court proceedings that would eventually bankrupt most US Californio landowners. Corruption, language barriers, ethnocentrism, violence, and a legal system designed to separate non–Euro-Americans from their land greatly favored squatters.

The most egregiously treated victims of California's transfer of sovereignty were Indigenous populations. The Californio culture had expanded equitable rights and opportunities starting in 1824 with the new Mexican constitution that abolished castas (castes) culturally and politically inherited from the Spanish empire.Footnote ³² However, Andrew Gibb notes that in US California, “Native- and African-descended Californians would quickly find their expanded rights and opportunities revoked” as US control immediately reversed the historic attempt at racial equity.Footnote ³³ Despite the fact that the law set down by Articles VIII and IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed Indigenous populations and newly created Mexican Americans (former Mexican citizens who opted to stay in California) citizenship and equal protection, the US California state constitutional convention negated these and other treaty provisions.Footnote ³⁴ As a result, Indigenous populations were subjected to forms of genocide and extermination as victims of murder, starvation, land theft, and slavery.Footnote ³⁵

California historian Leonard Pitt notes that American “[n]ativism,” or the ideology that Anglo-Americans were the rightful owners of land in California, was “born in the months of 1849 and early 1850 when mining enterprise was most individualistic, government most ineffectual, and immigration most rapid.”Footnote ³⁶ Days before the end of the Mexican–American War, gold had been discovered in Coloma, California, which spurred the onset of the California Gold Rush. The principal Gold Rush competitors for westward expansionists were native Californios and immigrants.Footnote ³⁷ Xenophobia and racial violence were prevalent between English-speaking immigrants from the East and native, Spanish-speaking California residents and citizens, including Californios and Indigenous populations.Footnote ³⁸

Between 1850 and 1855, three laws passed in California exemplified the ideological dominance of American nativism. First, the Foreign Miners’ Tax of 1850 explicitly and excessively taxed non–Euro-American citizens—Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, Mestizos, and persons of mixed ancestry and race generally—who wished to work in the mines. Pitt describes it as “a system of taxation and indenture . . . to exploit alien caste laborers rather than expel them.”Footnote ³⁹ Second, An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, also passed in 1850, “facilitated removing California Indians from their traditional lands, separating at least a generation of children and adults from their families, languages, and cultures . . . and indenturing Indian children and adults to Whites.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Historian James Rawls notes how the benign name of the law disguised its extreme, racially based inhumanity. Any Anglo-American could declare a Native American they deemed to be loitering a “vagrant.” A justice of the peace would then lawfully have the “vagrant” sold at auction, where buyers had the right to four months of Indigenous labor with no compensation.Footnote ⁴¹ Third, also disguised as an antivagrancy statute, the so-called Greaser Act of 1855 identified individuals by ethnoracial background, especially “all persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood . . . and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons.”Footnote ⁴² Interpretation of the law allowed any Mexican American, Mexican, or Mestiza/o to be arrested for acting or speaking in a manner deemed inappropriate or unacceptable for their race. The language and enforcement of the three statutes construct a biological association between viciousness and race, lawlessness and ethnicity, crime and foreignness, quietness and heritage. Francisco P. Ramirez, leader of El Clamor Público, the first Spanish-language newspaper in US California, argued in his editorials how, in a country where slavery is lawful, Manifest Destiny is institutionalized, and new citizens are denounced as “greasers,”Footnote ⁴³ guarantees of liberty by the US constitution are not attainable.

What was unfolding in the cultural sphere of newly colonized postwar California makes the late 1850s a crucial time for Latinx experience and representations, as newly defined performances of Latinidad, on and off the stage, were molded by conceptions of a racialized nation. Douglas S. Harvey reminds us how “[o]ne of the emerging national issues of the nineteenth-century was whether or not slavery was to expand and whether ‘free blacks’ would be tolerated in newly incorporated territory.”Footnote ⁴⁴ How free Indigenous and Latinx populations were contained as of 1848 includes the curtailment of freedom for Black Americans in the West and Southwest. The necessary containment of people of color was part of the westward expansion movement—an ideology that justified disparities, from racial distinctions of intellectual, linguistic, and theatrical superiority, to immigration policies and incarceration rates, what Clare V. McKenna calls “a special kind of justice.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Under Duress

Howe's Joaquin Murieta de Castillo, the Celebrated California Bandit (Fig. 2) is set shortly after Mexico ceded California and the Southwest to the United States in 1848. It is the first known theatrical rendering of the historical Murieta, published just five years after the outlaw's death. In 1860, California's population was 379,994, of which 85 percent were white.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, we can assume that potential readers and theatre spectators were Anglo-dominant. Although evidence of the play's staging could not be found (though my search continues), I consider it highly likely to have been staged by amateur theatre troupes throughout the Central Valley.Footnote ⁴⁷ Given the popularity of its mythical protagonist, the published playtext, and the success of Yellow Bird's novel, what an incongruity if it had not been brought to life!

Figure 2. Title page of Charles E. B. Howe's Joaquin Murieta de Castillo, the Celebrated California Bandit (1858). Photo: Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

The closest archival reference to an actual performance of the play is Albert Kimsey Owen's diary from 1872.Footnote ⁴⁸ Owen witnessed the melodrama Joaquin Murieta with the Murieta protagonist performed by a Don Gabutti in Hermosillo, Mexico, on 3 November 1872, and it seemingly was performed in English. The recorded spectators’ reactions afford us some proximity to nineteenth-century responses to burgeoning intercultural confrontations. Owen writes:

The incensed reaction of “frenz[ied]” applause and reactions that vilify Anglo-Americans during and after the play ends reveal the reliable stimulation provided by Murieta's demise and California's tragic constructions of race. Perhaps this empathy for Murieta and resulting communal consciousness are what Howe intended. However, empathy mutates into antagonistic empathy in California's postwar territory that was colonized via ideologies of racial supremacy. The play is a representation of the intercultural negotiations that quickly became intracultural catastrophes as the United States colonized the West—cultural constructions of systematic, racialized inequities that resonate in the present.

The first scene of the play is set in the Santa Cruz Monastery in Mexico.Footnote ⁵⁰ Gonzalles, a Catholic priest and a former militia fighter in the Mexican–American War, opens act I looking to escape the “land of the wiley Aztec.”Footnote ⁵¹ In soliloquy, he reveals that his objective is to travel back to the Old World, back to Spain where people are happy, “[u]nlike all we meet here” (6/24). Gonzalles has hidden documents proving that Joaquin Murieta, one of the mission's young wards who was fostered and reared there, is set to inherit a Spanish dukedom, though Murieta is unaware of his lineage. Gonzalles aspires to advance his class standing and enjoy economic prosperity in Spain by having Joaquin Murieta killed and then using the secret documents to impersonate Murieta.

The plot thickens when Gonzalles hires Garcia, otherwise known as Three-Fingered Jack, a notorious Mexican soldier left destitute after the Mexican–American War, to kill Murieta. Remarkably and in true melodramatic fashion, Murieta overpowers and befriends Garcia and has him swear his loyalty:

The code of honor they share, Spanish in origin, is politically, religiously, and culturally telling. It has its origins in the Spanish culture's survival during and after eight hundred years of Muslim Moors ruling over the Iberian Peninsula. The fervent, militant Catholicism under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel that defeated the Muslim Moors also unified the Iberian Peninsula's nation-states under one Spanish nation. In 1492, Spanish-Catholic nationalism provided Spain with the resources, and perhaps the drive, to colonize the Americas.Footnote ⁵² The importation of this HispanicFootnote ⁵³ code of honor emphasizes Murieta's and Garcia's shared ancestry.

The setting then shifts to US California. It is the early 1850s and the new national border has been drawn. The characters are now in a liminal territory wherein struggles for language, space, and power are won by accumulating and distributing wealth through strategic and competitive machinations. In US California, Gonzalles can now deploy methods prohibited by Mexican codes of honor and watchful, cultural traditions. He fervently plots to return to Spain with a new identity—one transformed and acquired by manipulation, murder, and capital accumulation. Gonzalles's character allows spectators to see how the US California frontier seems to offer a new exploitative morality with innovative justifications. A dynamic relationship among the realms of morality, religion, the courts, and the cultural sphere had emerged, as differing interpretations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo circulated in the courts, in cultural spheres, and in religious discourse. It is critical to keep in mind that nineteenth-century English-speaking Americans “fervently believed that God had ordained that U.S. citizens should populate and govern the vast expanse of land west of the Mississippi River.”Footnote ⁵⁴ These social negotiations, spurred by the cultural sphere and its products, such as Howe's play, influenced how beliefs in removing Indigenous populations and Mexican Americans from their land would continue or would be challenged.

The play's use of the crucifix prop (i.e., “Kisses the cross”) and the dramatization of land contentions between Anglo Protestantism and Mestizo Catholicism would have invigorated a mid-nineteenth-century audience. Through the priest's villainy, Howe establishes an “anti-Catholic” representation juxtaposed with Murieta's honor. Audiences witness Murieta's “honorable Catholicism” when he befriends and aids Anglo-American migrants under threat from a Mexican guerilla band on US land: “I swear I will kill the first who raises a hand against these defenseless people. . . . [I]f harm befall one of these that's here, I will murder you all; I swear it” (14/32–3). One can imagine the roaring applause this would elicit from a bourgeois audience invested in the expansion of US territory. Murieta's Latinx heroism as he defends the Anglo family is brief but significant to set up the tragic shift: soon thereafter, he is forced to change his relationship to this intracultural, Anglo-American–dominated environment.

Racialized competition for resources comes to a head in act III when the community of California miners begin to forge their Mestizo competition as another race that does not belong:

Texas Bill's use of Spanish (“vamose”) highlights a xenophobic tendency encouraged by economic zeal, utilizing linguistic difference to oust competition. Zeke and Texas Bill attend a town hall meeting where they convince the miners of Woods Creek,Footnote ⁵⁶ California, to take measures “to drive all the Spanish population out of the country” (24/43). To rid themselves of the more successful Mestizo miners, they confirm new resolutions, including the hanging of “every greaser found in this county after ten days’ notice . . . [because] every murder, theft, and horse stealing, which has been done in this county, was done by greasers” (25/44). To justify this violent expulsion, the Anglo-American characters deploy language that stigmatizes Mestizos as slippery individuals, difficult to get a hold of literally and figuratively. The use of “greasers” reinforces Mestizos’ cultural stigmatization as vicious, foreign, and potentially criminal.

According to Linda Heidenreich, the aforementioned Greaser Act of 1855 “authorized local militias to keep the Mexican community at bay by terrorizing its members; it allowed Anglos to confiscate Mexican property; and even allowed Anglos to lynch ‘recalcitrant individuals’ with impunity.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Although the term “greaser” originated “as a derogatory reference toward those of Mexican origin, . . . its use expanded over time to encompass Peruvian and Chilean miners during the California gold rush and, more broadly, to describe anyone of Spanish origin.”Footnote ⁵⁸ These were not just ideological strategies; legislation such as the so-called Greaser Act granted the dominant population the pathway to less competition as well as facilitated land acquisition and perhaps religious dominance, as the Mestizos made up the bulk of Catholics in the state. These early US California laws linked the West to a nation building under Anglo-American dominance that subjected people of color to dread. Through Howe's play, we find a capitalist system in the United States organized by settler colonialism and its efforts to dehumanize Latinxs as irreducibly alien.

After Zeke and Texas Bill's resolutions are confirmed by the community leadership, Joaquin is falsely accused of being a horse thief and about to be hanged. The competing Anglo miners use Murieta's race, language, and ethnicity to justify their supremacy over him and their right to whip and lynch him. Instead of death, the perpetrators decide to “cure him” with violent torture:

The whipping takes place onstage as a parallel to Murieta's historically documented public flogging, after which Joaquin returns home and finds his dying wife, Belloro, who had been violently raped by several Anglo miners. Non-Anglo spectators would be terrified by this plot point, but antagonistic empathy, as the ideologically pure disposition of the bourgeois spectator, may have shielded Anglo-dominant spectators from dread and terror, and thus provided entertainment that reassured them of their (personal and financial) security as non-Latinxs.

The ideology of (forcibly) possessing the Latinx female Other also finds its US theatrical origin in this play.Footnote ⁵⁹ The wartime logic used to promote Manifest Destiny justified Anglo-Saxon dominance of supposedly lesser races via slavery in the slave states and via the whitening of Latinx populations through the sexual assault of Latin American and Indigenous women in the West and Southwest. Manifest Destiny consistently presented Mexican women as sexually desirable, wanting, and submissive. The 30 January 1848 New York Herald reported on an important public meeting, “The Great War Meeting at Tammany Hall: Tremendous Gathering of the People—Shall the Whole of Mexico Be Annexed?” where Sam Houston, senator from Texas, concluded his speech at the event with this:

This “recommend[ation]” from a US senator was proposed just three days before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on 2 February 1848. It presents Mexican women as willing victims of forced acquisition, or rape, and is presented as a patriotic choice representative of a progressive culture. Bodily assault on Latinx women is offered as a calculated strategy to speedily annex and colonize Mexico's northernmost territories. The politician politicizes the violation and possession of othered women to possess an othered nation. In the play, Belloro's loyalty and chastity to Murieta, and the inverse—Murieta's loyalty and chastity to Belloro—symbolize the nationhood and purity of the Latinx culture within the American nation. Theatrical representations sanctioning violence against these characters would have left audiences with a lasting impression of a dehumanized community that was too dangerous to challenge—or to empathize with publicly—in an already strained culture.

Howe's play adapts and presents the settler colonial terrorizing of Latinx women by giving voice to Belloro's trauma in her exchange with Joaquin: “Touch me not, Joaquin! (Rises in bed.) I tell thee I am foul—polluted—a being not fit to live, nor yet prepared to die!” (29/47). In accordance with Victorian emphases on female purity, Belloro feels that the sexual violations committed against her have destroyed her ability to fulfill her role as a woman. She deems herself “not fit to live.” As a devalued Mestiza in an increasingly hostile, Anglo-dominated area, her sexual purity is perhaps the only universally recognized value she possesses, and Howe's victimization of Belloro's Victorian womanhood (synchronized with her Mexican Americanness) might have been designed to lead audiences to feel deep empathy for her, thereby complicating the period's moral values as they intersected with race and ethnicity. However, I theorize that in practice, dominant audiences invested in racialized settler colonial frameworks would be unable to “establish grounds for mutual goodwill”Footnote ⁶¹ and a desire to find commonality with racially and linguistically impure Mestizo, Latinx characters. Empathy for Belloro, who is arguably the first female Mexican American or Latina protagonist in Western US Theatre, is suppressed in a cultural atmosphere where class is racialized and nativism is a political advantage; or, given that empathy and feeling are variable, empathy may present itself as gratitude for the privilege of not being Latinx—an antagonistic empathy. The artistic expression of Latinidad presented by Howe's play may have inadvertently fostered Anglo-dominant audiences’ desires for economic dominance by cultivating such antagonistic empathy. As the Foreign Miner's Tax, the “Greaser Act,” and An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians produced and supported economic, psychological, and social advantages for Anglos and Europeans, antagonistic empathy in dramatic art would have probed and negotiated racialized constructions as cultural advantages.

In the play, Belloro asks Murieta for his forgiveness and dies uttering his name. Her victimhood may have been viewed as normal or acceptable to audience members rather than tragic because of the intersections of her gender, ethnicity, and race. For Joaquin, Belloro's death propels a radical transformation. His choice for revenge is tragic because his suffering and death are imminent; his quest to uphold Belloro's dignity, his own, and his culture's cannot produce any enduring gain. Howe's Murieta represents resistance as a predestined failure in the context of settler colonial power relations:

Murieta calls on “devils” that will transform his ability to fight the evil exercised upon him, his loved ones, and his culture. He must fight evil with evil; like the capital-driven culture around him, Murieta employs tactics that include racializations and violence against Anglos. His friends volunteer to join him in his revenge to find and kill the Anglo-Americans associated with his whipping and with the death of his wife. Howe adapts the historical Joaquín Murieta who refuses to speak as a typified, subjected Latinx individual and instead seizes subjectivity. Nonetheless, the audience's potential empathy for the Latinx characters is once again foreclosed, this time by Joaquin's alliance with the devil, which creates the correspondences of Latinx with evil, Mestizo with danger, non-Anglo with villainy. Murieta's character reversal demands equality via violence. His representation counterintuitively functions as a resistance to a US culture that excludes Latinxs within its already “deep-seated anxiety about identity, security (financial and psychic), labor, and value.”Footnote ⁶² The depiction of Latinxs as villains, as bandits, as dangerous, as Other because they will negate the racializations proposed by dominant culture and use their own racializations to compete, presents an alternative history and narrative to Anglo-dominant ideology and society. It reveals how Belloro and Murieta are disallowed their bourgeois ambitions as Gold Rush miners and are denied their Americanness as Mestizo Latinxs. Violence and dishonor distance them further and further from an equitable, dignified life.

The courthouse scene in act V, scene iv, gives Murieta the opportunity to compete civically by deploying language, performance, and racial appearance rather than physical violence; he appropriates and adapts what the culture and the law require to access the protections of the legal system: an Anglo-American persona. Joaquin uses theatricality to help his ally and himself escape persecution. One of his men, Pedro, is captured, chained, and being tried in “a Court of Justice” (35/55):

Murieta, “dressed as an American,” goes into an extended monologue posing as Anglo-American “Sam Herrington . . . a packer from the town of San Jose” (36/55–6). This scene highlights Murieta's success with manipulating systemic racism—a devil in disguise of sorts, as he later says, “The devil takes care of his chickens” (37/57). By hiding his mestizaje, or his biologically and culturally mixed racial identity, he is also hiding his presumed impurity and criminality. Consequently, he convinces the Judge and those in attendance that Pedro is an innocent Mexican who works for him with “no positive proof against him, yet there was so strong a prejudice against Mexicans that there was great danger of his being hung” (36/56). The Judge fully trusts “Sam Herrington” and releases Pedro to him. The law and its performance relied (and still rely) on this settler colonial system of respectability where the dominant race—its language, skin color, gestures, dress—warrants value and trust, as well as the power to define the other for its own benefit.

In act V, scene v, Gonzalles identifies the individual “dressed as an American!” (37/58) as Murieta to Byrnes, a Lieutenant in Captain Harry Love's band. Love has been commissioned by the California Senate and Assembly to capture Murieta for several murders he has committed as acts of revenge, including blowing out the brains of those who whipped him and those who sexually assaulted Belloro. Eventually, Gonzalles gives up Murieta's location for a bag of gold, and Murieta and his men are ambushed by Captain Love and his mercenaries. Love catches him and threatens to “blow the top of [his] head off,” and Murieta tells his men: “Boys, every one [sic] for himself—go!” (42/61). Murieta is shot, and as he dies says, “Don't shoot any more. My work is done. (Falls.) My wife—my Belloro—I—come. (Dies.)” (42/61). His concern for his men's escape, his completed “work” or vengeance, and his desire to see his wife in the afterlife give the spectator one more chance to empathize with Murieta. However, Love's dialogue immediately follows and ends the play: “Crime brings its own reward, and the stern hand of justice deals out the weight of its punishment” (42/61). Murieta's subjective satisfaction is juxtaposed with Love's settler colonial justice.

Anglo-dominant audiences’ economic interests overwhelm any possibility of positive empathy for Murieta and Belloro by the play's end, as identification with them would contradict a culture structured by racialized economic security. Offstage, these racialized concepts were being performed systematically by denying Latinxs equal opportunities to prosper—via disparaging ideologies, lynchings, and other acts of violent deterrence. There were “at least 597” persons of Mexican origin lynched nationally during 1848 to 1928.Footnote ⁶³ For the state of California alone there were 352 lynchings and summary executions recorded between 1850 and 1935.Footnote ⁶⁴ The last man to be publicly executed in California was Mexican American Tiburcio Vásquez, hanged in 1875.Footnote ⁶⁵ Participation in US culture through a subjected position is how Latinxs were culturally corralled from the very establishment of US California. Murieta's resistance to his containment and his positionality was his greatest asset and his greatest liability, both in the play and in real life.

California Historical Landmark no. 344, located in Coalinga and registered 8 August 1939, records the purported location of the historical Murieta's ambush and execution. The plaque's inscription reads:

Like the play, the plaque foregrounds Love's heroism as well as Murieta's criminality and terrorism; the succinct narrative begins by labeling “notorious bandit” Murieta specifically as a threat to Love's determined effort to bring him to criminal justice before depicting Murieta as a broadly terrorizing force. Like the head in the jar, the play and landmark memorialize and eternalize the mid-nineteenth-century spectacle and narrative that initiated the historicized otherness of Latinxs in California. Each display of Murieta's head, each reading of the published play, and each potential performance contributed to the culturally dominant paradigm that would try to keep Howe's version of Latinidad preserved for public consumption in a figurative jar. These circulating performances efficiently transmitted representations that profoundly shaped the emerging US California culture and helped to curb the evolution of US Latinidad.