Decapitating Murrieta: Violence, Race, and Publics in the Pacific World, 1848–1925

Examining traveller letters, journals, and the Pacific press, this article begins to unravel the story of the founding and destruction of the “Chilitown” settlement in San Francisco to suggest that Chilean prospectors played a key role in building local, hemispheric, and U.S. racial identities. It focuses specifically on the “invention” of Joaquin Murietta,  the nineteenth-century borderland bandit of disputed identity—possibly Sonoran, possibly Chilean—presented as an avenging angel reacting to anti-Latin@ violence in the 19^thcentury borderlands.

How does Murrieta’s story make sense in a “Pacific” context and what does it reveal about this social, cultural and racial world? How does violence shape this story and inform the very idea of race in the intertwined Pacific, transnational and  U.S. borderlands? And what does it tell us about how different actors imagined themselves as national, hemispheric or variously “American” actors?

The narrative of Murrieta’s killing and of the display of his body was woven through Pacific newspapers, literature, and theater. I trace the circulation of material evidence and visual depictions of violence against this renegade “Latino” body—set in the context of demographic, social, and visual transformations in a region that was quickly becoming the epicenter of an interconnected “Pacific World.”   My investigation sheds light on the role that itinerant Latin@s played in knitting together a surprisingly connected Pacific world; the role that violence enacted upon, around and by Latin@ bodies played in shaping U.S. racial structures; and that embodied and visual performances of race played in helping re-draw the lines of and between Latin@ and U.S. identities. Ultimately, this research provides a lens through which to resituate and re-periodize broad, “American” histories that draw on rich traditions in social history, urban studies and visual culture in and between the United States and Latin America.