Old California Strikes Back: The Fantastic Return of a Californio, Scott Russell Duncan, 2024, FlowerSong Press
Anglo racist hostility to Latinos in the United States is one thing, but Donald Trump and his collaborators conceal a trait far more insidious because it is based on a philosophy.
Behind the many examples of crude, sometimes incidental, bigotry that have littered this US president’s career is a conviction about white supremacy based on the lies that underpin scientific racism.
The man himself has repeatedly denied this, despite frequently having fallen into racist tropes and drawing moral equivalence between white extremists and their critics.
Yet there is longstanding and abundant evidence of positions that confirm Trump has not only tapped into the racial resentment of his Maga heartland but believes in far more malicious notions.
Organisations from Amnesty to The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights have indicated that his executive actions have been deeply rooted in white supremacist ideologies.
Indeed, the granddaddy of civil rights in the US, the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been warning about this for nearly a decade.
Nonetheless, it is hard to directly associate throwaway lines on the campaign trail that are easy to dismiss as rhetoric playing to the crowd with a coherent, if toxic, belief system, mainly because Trump has cleverly sought to conceal this.
An emerging academic consensus, however, draws attention to incremental steps by the administration that indicate a determined effort to reverse the conclusions of years of research into the concept of “race” which conclude beyond reasonable doubt that this is a social construct.
Trump’s executive order 14253 of 27 March aimed at museums and monuments is a small but significant example, aiming as it does to prevent replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology”.
The Legal Defense Fund courageously spoke out about this, stating baldly: “It bears chilling parallels to the tactics of Nazi Germany, where history and cultural institutions were manipulated to serve the fascist goals of that regime and advance a narrative of racial superiority. The order even goes so far as to suggest that race is ‘a biological reality’—reviving a discredited pseudo-scientific notion that has historically been used to dehumanize Black people and other marginalized groups.”
For Blacks and Latinos who all their lives have lived at the unpleasant end of ubiquitous WASP prejudice based on the belief in a natural racial hierarchy, however, none of this must come as a surprise.
We get a strong sense of the lived experience of that prejudice—the grinding, daily restatement of the white superior reflex that has a profound impact on the psychology of its victims—from Old California Strikes Back, a short but punchy novel by Scott Russell Duncan.
Duncan, an award-winning Xicano writer, was editor on the first Chicano sci-fi anthology, El Porvenir, ¡Ya!—a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards—and is director of Palabras del Pueblo, a writing workshop.
Old California Strikes Back is an entertaining, eloquent and eccentric romp through California with the head of Joaquin Murrieta, the legendary “Californio”—an original Californian before the territory was stolen by the United States—who became associated with the fictional character of Zorro.
The tale veers from the hard reality of prejudice towards Mexicans into bizarre fantasy in a territory where dreaming is very much part of a shared culture—even if white society systematically seeks to erase Latinos from its dreamworld.
We are, therefore, treated first and foremost to an off-the-wall exploration of the mind of Murrieta through the travails of his long-suffering head—said to have been evidence of his demise brought in by a bounty hunter sent to track him down.
Murrieta was a Mexican bandit in old California whose historical existence has been a matter of debate but who nonetheless lives through legends of an original Californio avenging his family’s mistreatment at the hands of newly arrived Anglos.
Most importantly, however, Murrieta— known as the “Robin Hood of the West”—is considered to be the basis for the character of Zorro created by writer Johnston McCulley in 1919, the epic Hispanic spirit who haunts the very modern reality of California.
We are also introduced to the mythology of Ramona, a character who first appears in a popular novel of 1884 by the poet and writer Helen Hunt Jackson that dramatised the mistreatment of Native Americans in Southern California after the Mexican–American War.
Jackson’s sentimental portrayal of Mexican colonial life through the romantic story of a Scottish-Native American girl had a profound influence on the identity of Southern California. Indeed, as Duncan points out, the story of California and the story of Ramona—the mixed ethnicity Californio—are intertwined.
That mixed status is important here, because not only does it chime with Duncan’s own condition as the son of a white father and Mexican-American mother, it is a key component of Latin American identity production, not least the notion of the mestizo upon which the Mexican “cosmic race” was constructed.
Martín Cortés, the first-born son of the conquistador Hernán Cortés and La Malinche, his indigenous interpreter, is considered to be one of the first mestizos, but his story embodies the inferior status attributed to people of mixed descent in what was Spanish America. As Duncan notes, the other California will always treat him like a tourist.
The half-indigenous Martín Cortés had a half-brother, also called Martín, his father’s child to his second wife, an aristocratic Spaniard, who by virtue of his “legitimate” status was bestowed with the moniker “Don” and succeeded to the title of the Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca.
These observations are relevant in any consideration of the Chicano inheritance because they draw attention to the continuing fight for equal status both of mixed ethnicity Americans with a Latin heritage but also of Native Americans in a society that tells itself it is of white European stock.
Which brings us last but not least, to the third and perhaps most important strand of this novel in which we are steered by Duncan through the complex social maze that he as a Chicano has had to navigate—at once “American”, yet a target of quotidian racism.
SRD, as the author refers to himself, is the genealogical product of a complex mixed heritage that included Mission Indian, Mexican and white components, who originally hailed from California but ended up living in Texas with his father.
The seeds of his passion for the tales of old California and metaphysical return are sown by his feisty grandmother, who informs him he is a descendant of Ramona.
Duncan writes: “That moment I realized Ramona’s confused mixed-race story was my own story … Whenever I dreamed, I dreamed of oranges, chilies, and the perturbed waves of the Pacific. Ranch houses, church bells, Mission graveyards and family house parties. Winding mountain roads and bandidos in the hills.”
The author leads us on a journey to self-realisation through his own experiences as a Chicano that serves to remind us, in an often admirably self-deprecating way, of an undeniable and sobering historical truth: California is the historic homeland of Mexicans and Native Americans, and that this millennial reality will always hover above Anglo cultural hegemony.
Indeed, the US “border” is an historical anomaly, scored upon a map of what was once part of northern Mexico in the 1840s after many generations in which Mexicans migrated back and forth from Baja California to what is now a US political entity called California.
SRD’s identity is at times as conflicted as the relationship between his divorced parents, but it is always self-aware of its contingent position in the land of Ramona.
He talks of constant references to Mexican Americans as “beaners”, white men who talk down to Latinos, street attacks by white thugs showing off to white girls, the disdain and danger of racist white cops, the toxic bias of white institutions.
His awkward self-awareness is brought into stark relief by a conversation with a Spanish teacher about his name: “What’s your name?” “Scott.” “There isn’t a cognate. You have to choose a Spanish name.” “I’m Chicano, so it’s a Chicano name.” “No, it isn’t. Your last name isn’t a Latin name either. What part of Mexico are you from?” “I got my last name from my white dad. My mom’s side is from California and New Mexico.” “That’s not Mexico.” “We were before the US invaded.”
After a bizarre journey accompanied by Zorro’s head, interrupted, followed and harassed by the protagonists of white Californian history, our hero eventually finds himself back at the origins of Ramonaland in the state where “dreams meet”.
Romantic, wistful and surreal, Old California Strikes Back is a quixotic thesis on culture that scratches away the superficial hide of Anglo California to reveal the dreams of its Hispanic and Native forebears—with a little help from a Chicano spiritual guide.
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Categories: Mexico, North America, United States