Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta: Banditry, Counterinsurgency, and Colonial Power after Guadalupe-Hidalgo

Abstract

The article explores the role that the language of banditry and outlawry played in the transformation of Mexican territory into American national space in the wake of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Through a reading of Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, it suggests that the appellation of “bandit” attached to Mexican resistance worked to delegitimate racialized resistance to American colonization while authorizing anti-Mexican, vigilante violence as a nationalizing activity for Euro-Americans living in the borderlands.