The Mark of Zorro (3 page)

At first, Don Fernando is horrified, looking at the peon he must become “as human scum ... a snake which crawls the ground with his belly in the dust,” a biblical symbol of the fallen Satan.
¹⁹
Meanwhile, he will be accompanied by a peon named Pedro, who will advise him regarding his speech and actions. He must always abase himself before aristocrats, never look them directly in the face, for if he forgets and speaks or acts with pride, he risks flogging or even being hanged. The peons are treated like untouchables (the villain actually calls them “unmentionables”), and the novel is filled with grim details.
The Mark of Zorro
is often vague on the details of injustice, while
The Caballero
is quite explicit. But this harsh penance is for Don Fernando's redemption. “Before it ends,” says Fray Marcos, “may your heart be softened toward other men. May you learn that there can be honor and loyalty, trust and love even among the lowest of the low.”
²⁰
These things, he does eventually learn. “He knew that after this, whenever he looked at a peon or native, he would be looking at a human being, with feelings and emotions, and not at a clod. He would be just thereafter in all things.”
²¹
When his penance is over and he reemerges as Don Fernando, he is a sadder, wiser, and stronger man. Though The Caballero did not appear in book form until 1947, it was originally serialized in 1936, during the heart of the Great Depression. McCulley might well have had the dust bowl migrants in mind when he wrote of the contempt and oppression heaped upon the peons.

By the time McCulley was writing his California novels, the past he drew upon had already been somewhat mythologized, and he contributed to the myth. Since works of historical fiction and drama necessarily are influenced by three different time frames—the time about which they were written, the era during which they were written, and the time in which they are experienced—it is often difficult to assess their presentation of events. In
The Mark of Zorro,
the layers of history and myth are especially convoluted, and have been constantly reinterpreted on film through more than eighty years of profound demographic change in southern California.

The Mark of Zorro
is set in a complex period of California history and was written when what historian Carey McWilliams called the “Spanish Fantasy Past”
²²
was being exploited by civic boosters, especially in Los Angeles. McCulley, writing about a California past which had already become idealized, blended the period of the missions and of the
haciendas
and
rancheros,
and thus the periods of Spanish and Mexican rule. Essentially, he created a classic myth of the Spanish Fantasy Past, the past of dark-eyed
senoritas
and dashing
caballeros, fiestas
and
bailes, hacienda
hospitality, and a serene state of existence, blessed by saintly friars and happy Indians dwelling in picturesque missions. As a promotional history of Los Angeles claims, “Here dwelt ease and plenty and the glory of untrammeled freedom. Here romance reigned supreme.... Here was to be found Spanish life at its flood-tide.”
²³
The reality was often quite different.

The Spanish government, in order to establish a claim on the potentially lucrative Pacific coast, which was also being explored by the English and Russians, established military posts (
presidios
) and missions in Alta California, the first of which was San Diego de Alcalá, July 16, 1769. (There was no
presidio
in Los Angeles, but McCulley needed one for his narrative and put it there.) At first, only the officers could afford to bring their wives and families. The enlisted men found wives among the Indian women, which eventually resulted in a generation of
mestizos.
In order to establish a more permanent colony, since Spaniards were reluctant to leave Spain or Mexico for a distant frontier, the Spanish government granted amnesty to prisoners if they would settle in Alta California. Some were hardworking people glad of a second chance; some continued their lawless activities. So there were indeed in Alta California all the elements of the myth: a “pure Spanish blood” aristocracy, a subliminal middle class with varying levels of intermarriage, the peons and Indians, on whose backs was created the wealth, be it of mission,
hacienda,
or
rancho,
and a
bandido
element. The
bandido
became a submyth of the romantic outlaw working on behalf of the poor, with or without a political agenda. The most enduring and useful legacy of Spain was agricultural methods sustainable in an arid land, techniques for raising cattle and sheep, mining expertise, and legal practices, particularly concerning water rights and the concept of community property.
²⁴

It is unclear whether the evil governors residing in the Monterey of Zorro's day were Spanish or Mexican, but of the governors during the years between Mexican independence, which came in 1821, and conquest by the United States in 1848, “Only one of these failed to have a revolution or two during his term of office.”
²⁵
Beginning in 1834 the missions were secularized by decrees of the governors. In theory, the land was to become the property of the mission Indians. In practice, since for the most part they were completely ignorant of concepts of deeds and legal ownership (and were by and large not officially enlightened about these matters), the Indians were swindled, and the vast mission estates became the property of
rancheros,
who raised cattle, or
hacienderos,
who engaged in agriculture. In an arid country, vast acreage was required, especially for grazing cattle, and water rights themselves were a complex legal specialty.

Between the beginning of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1846 and statehood in 1850, there was “really no government,” and thus the era was an unprecedented period of lawlessness and violent crime, including numerous lynchings, almost all of Mexicans and Indians.
²⁶
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had guaranteed the rights of the Californios, conferring automatic citizenship upon those who chose not to return to Mexico. But with statehood, the Californio
hacienderos
and
rancheros
were required to establish legal title to their lands, and in the process most of their vast holdings passed into Anglo hands. Unlike the United States' other acquisitions in the name of Manifest Destiny, California was not a vast space populated by savages, but a quite civilized land which had passed from Spain to Mexico without losing its own sense of national identity. For the Californios, the arrival of the Anglos was a conquest, and their adjustment to being part of the United States was vastly different from that of immigrants from other countries.
²⁷
Thus there was some basis in actuality for romanticizing preconquest California, from the nostalgic perpsective of the losing side in a war.

By the time McCulley came to California in 1908, this involved and often ugly history had been thoroughly romanticized, “evoking a past that never existed to cast some glamour on an equally unreal today.”
²⁸
The credit (or blame) was largely due to Helen Hunt Jackson, who, after
writing A Century of Dishonor
in defense of the Indians, came to California, discovered the missions, and inspired their restoration, largely through her novel
Ramona. Ramona
romanticizes the Indian heroine and hero, the missions, and the
haciendas
while attacking bigotry toward Indians and their exploitation. Published in 1884,
Ramona
became incredibly popular, was “translated into all known languages,”
²⁹
and its version of mission life came to be accepted as fact. A version of the
Ramona
drama was first performed in Los Angeles in 1905. It continues to be performed each spring in Hemet, California. It was filmed four times, with Mary Pickford (1910), Adda Gleason (1916), Dolores del Rio (1928), and Loretta Young (1936) in the title role.

In 1894, Los Angeles had begun
La Fiesta,
a celebration with a parade including
caballeros
on horseback,
señoras, señoritas,
authentic Indians imported from Yuma, Arizona, and Chinese dragons, all brought to a halt by a combination of objections to the accompanying rowdiness and tensions leading to the Spanish-American War in 1898.
³⁰
In addition, the Spanish Fantasy Past colored the advertisements for real estate, designed to lure Easterners to settle in Los Angeles, and “mission” architecture sprawled over the landscape. Significantly, the fantasy ignored the culture of Mexico and the Mexicans, who were employed, for the most part, in menial jobs, such as making bricks for this fantasy architecture under conditions little better, or possibly worse, than peonage.
³¹

Opening in 1911 and running into the 1930s, John Steven McGroarty's
The Mission Play,
depicting California history from the conquistadores to the death of its hero, Junipero Serra, was performed at the Mission San Gabriel, where Zorro's friend Fray Felipe had presided. It was such a huge hit that people traveled clear across the country and even from overseas to see it and claimed it was better than the
Oberammergau
Passion Play. McGroarty, who became poet laureate of California, gave perhaps the ultimate romanticization of the Spanish Fantasy Past, writing that “it was around the old missions that the colorful social life of the early Spanish inhabitants centered. Song and laughter filled the sunny mornings. There was feasting and music, the strum of guitars and the click of castanets under the low hanging moons. Toil was easy and the burden of existence light. It was a sheer utopia.”
³²

McCulley knew better: Don Diego frequently observes that “These be turbulent times.” One of Zorro's chief activities is helping the Indians and punishing those who abuse them. They in turn help him, several times rescuing him from imprisonment and possible hanging. He also helps the oppressed padres (even though the secularization of the missions did not begin until 1834, and Zorro is usually placed in the 1820s). McCulley fails to connect the abuse of Indians with the missions, where, in fact, they were forced labor, supervised by soldiers and flogged if they ran away or tried to go to another mission.
³³
In
Captain Fly-by-Night,
he blames the soldiers' “license and cruelty,” which “had done much to make the Indians dissatisfied and undo the work of the frailes.”
³⁴
McGroarty sentimentalizes history and demeans the Indians, claiming that the Franciscan missionaries “took an idle race and put it to work—a useless race that they made useful in the world ... a heathen race that they lifted up into the great white glory of God.” He calls the missionaries “the patient and loving teachers” of the Indians.
³⁵
But more Indians died than were born under the harshness of mission life, which was, as McWilliams points out, “a nightmare for the Indians.”
³⁶

McCulley, Fairbanks, and his wife Mary Pickford must have been aware of the constant presence of Spanish Fantasy California in everything from architecture and Los Angeles boosterism to real-estate advertising. They might possibly have seen either
The Mission Play
or
Ramona
or both. Thousands of schoolchildren were taken in groups to The Mission Play, among whom could have been Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Tyrone Power, the 1940 Zorro, was saturated with The Mission Play. His father (also named Tyrone Power) played Father Serra in the 1917 season, and his mother, Patia Power, played the heroine of Act III for years.
³⁷
He himself was in it for five seasons, playing a variety of children. “Master Tyrone Power,” then ten years old, appears in the 1924 program credits as “Juanito, an Indian boy,” who sings “La Golondrina.”
³⁸
Power would certainly have grown up steeped in the Spanish Fantasy Past, as would filmmakers of Fairbanks's and Power's generations. It is not surprising, then, to find the colorful and glamorous elements of this past in
The Mark of Zorro
and the film versions.

The most recent and literary elaboration on the Zorro story is Isabel Allende's novel, provisionally titled
Zorro: The Legend Begins,
published in the summer of 2005. Allende, asking herself how Diego became Zorro, created the first twenty years of his life from 1795 to 1815, with a new perspective on Diego's years in Spain, where he would have been exposed to the ideals of the rights of man exported by the French Revolution, despite the Reign of Terror and Napoleon's occupation of Spain.
³⁹

Zorro also is part of the
bandido
tradition, most closely associated with the possibly mythical Joaquin Murrieta and the historical Tiburcio Vasquez.
⁴⁰
As well as these local California legendary figures, Zorro is an American version of Robin Hood and similar heroes whose stories blend fiction and history, thus moving Zorro into the timeless realm of legend. The original story takes place in the Romantic era, but, more important, Zorro as Diego adds an element of poetry and sensuality, and as Zorro the element of sexuality, to the traditional Western hero. Not all Western heroes are, as D. H. Lawrence said of Cooper's Deerslayer, “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,”
⁴¹
but in the Western genre the hero and villain more often than not share these characteristics. What distinguishes Zorro is a gallantry, a code of ethics, a romantic sensibility, and most significant, a command of language and a keen intelligence and wit.

Though McCulley wrote Zorro stories to the last year of his life, it is film and television that have carried on the legend, with many differently nuanced retellings from 1920 on. Before
The Mark of Zorro,
there had of course been period and costume films, usually very short adaptations of literary classics that were often lacking any flair, humor, or acrobatics, though some of them included a perfunctory duel. By contrast,
The Mark of Zorro,
directed at a brisk pace by Fred Niblo, who later directed the silent
Ben-Hur,
is an immensely entertaining blend of comedy, romance, and adventure, in which Fairbanks set the model for the swashbuckling hero—dashing, athletic, romantic, dueling at every opportunity, going into action with a daredevil grin, obviously enjoying himself as he crosses blades with his antagonists. It is possibly his best film, yet he was so uncertain of it that he followed it with another contemporary comedy,
The Nut,
which flopped. The Mark of
Zorro,
however, was such a huge hit that it changed the course of Fairbanks's career. For the next ten years, he made nothing but costume swashbucklers, such as The Three Musketeers (1921), Robin Hood (1922), The Thief of Bagdad (1924), and The Iron Mask (1929), the films that created the image for which he is fondly remembered. Elaborately produced, these were among the most popular films of the decade. The two major swashbuckling heroes of all time had been Robin Hood and d'Artagnan. Fairbanks played them both and added Zorro, who has become the most legendary swordsman of them all.