6 - “I am Joaquin!”: Space and freedom in Yellow Bird's The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit

Summary

Christopher Newman, that quintessential American abroad, opens Henry James's The American by occupying a huge circular divan at the Louvre; he sits, spreads his arms and legs, and fills up all the space he possibly can. He is, of course, from the West (where else?), where his prodigious energy and WASP identity have given him direct access to the American dream. A French aristocrat quite rightly nominates him for the title of “Duke of California.”

The word “California” has always had a certain poetic resonance for Americans, partly because of the state's tremendous size but also because of its unique and abundant beauty. It is the original dream of the New World garden magnificently enlarged and gilded. Indeed, the term “golden republic” refers not only to the native grasses, themselves emblematic of the state's general fecundity, but also to the mother lodes of gold discovered in the mid-i8oos, images that underline the tensions inherent in the state's identity. Aware of these ironies, Yellow Bird (John Rollin Ridge), in The Life and Adventures ofjoaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, gives us a saga of space and freedom set in the golden republic's halcyon days of the 1850s. It is, to be sure, a story with a didactic purpose that pushes a moral message, and much of it is mediocre and slack. At its best, however, it is a powerful reminder of how the metaphysics of access to the American dream have always depended on the appropriation of space for the concept of identity, and how the politics of displaced and relocated peoples can give rise to heroic and sometimes mythical folk literature.