Zorro and the Edge of Whiteness: The Pulp Fiction Hero and Mexican Identity in the Early 20th-Century United States

Zorro’s black mask, gleaming rapier, and pencil mustache remain iconic even if the character’s origins are not fully clear to most people. Pulp-fiction writer Johnston McCulley created Zorro for the serialized novel The Curse of Capistrano in All-Story Weekly in 1919. The swashbuckling hero has since enjoyed a century of recurring popularity including his most recent outing in the lavish 2024 Amazon Prime streaming series. From the beginning, producers imagined that Mexican Americans would be an enthusiastic audience for Zorro stories. Throughout the Southwest, theaters frequently advertised showings of Zorro films in Spanish-language newspapers and often paired him with films produced in Latin America.

Yet, questions about how to understand the character’s racial identity have been in place since his creation. Uncertainty about whether we should think of Zorro as “Spanish” or “Mexican” (or both) hangs around the character like his long flowing black cape. This paper will take up this question by arguing that Zorro’s racial identity sprang from ongoing uncertainties about Mexicans’ place within the United States’ past and present. Zorro emerged during a moment when California’s boosters and scholars sought to explain the meaning of the greater Southwest’s racial heterogeneity to the larger United States. His creator participated in these efforts by creating a hero who acknowledged the region’s colonial Spanish and Mexican past. By looking more closely at McCulley’s early twentieth-century writings we learn, though, that even the whitest Mexicans that he could imagine were not white enough for him to consider them as equals with Euro Americans.