Thursday, April 06, 2023

Chicanonautica: Joaquín Murrieta in the Streamosphere

by Ernest Hogan

Joaquín Murrieta refuses to die. First Captain Harry Love cuts his head off and puts it on display, then his legend gets whitewashed into the character Zorro, strange Hollywood versions show up over the years, then Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzales (with some help of others, I’ve heard) make him central to Chicano iconography in the poem I Am Joaquín. Books still come out. I keep having to write about him. And then there’s the recent The Head of Joaquín Murrieta on Amazon.

I’m not sure how to categorize it. Is an Amazon production “Hollywood?”


What is Hollywood these days? A place? A concept? How “international” and “independent” can it be with the prerequisite corporate connections?


Welcome to the Global Barrio. It needs heroes and mythologies as well as profits.


Details about the production are surprisingly hard to find, even with Google. Where was it filmed? Who put up the money? How did it come to be?


 I keep getting a whole lotta nada. As for what I could find . . .


The “creator,”’as they like to say these days, is Mauricio Leiva-Cock, born in Bogata, Colombia, and a graduate of Columbia University.

 

Joaquín is played by green-eyed Mexican actor Juan Manuel Bernal, who is dressed like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, only he wears a sarape instead of a poncho.


At first, I wanted to say it was made in Mexico (sure wasn’t the USA), but it didn’t quite look like Mexico. There were also some interesting pronunciations “cabrón” and “chinga.” Think we may have a spaghetti western situation here, this being another global streaming multilingual release. 


Amazon is becoming its own country. 


There’s also a knife-wielding Chinese girl sidekick who seems to have escaped from a Hong Kong martial arts film, an Irish Obi-Wan Kenobiesqe alcoholic renegade priest, Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, and blacks. Captain Harry Love takes the Darth Vader role, while the California Rangers wear blue uniforms like the U.S. Calvary and are his stormtroopers while looking like the guys who come to the rescue at the end of a helluvalotta Hollywood westerns. 


Then there’s a Tarahumara/Rarámuri psychedelic trip. And this Joaquín is an artist.


This is beyond spaghetti western, or even tortilla western. Maybe it’s a rasquache western, trying to wrench the genre out of the clutches of the white supremacists. 


It’s entertaining enough. Lots of dazzling visuals, action, sex, and blood. 


And the surrealistic ending suggests more to come.


It’s not historically authentic, but who really knows the true story? Was Joaquín an avenging hero, or a racist serial killer? Could he have been both? Questions that can’t be answered without a time machine.

But then, this isn’t history, it’s myth, and it’s evolving into a new technological and geopolitical environment. I’ve called it mythoteching. 


It’s alive and well in the Global Barrio–not a place, more an entity without a location or body . . .


Or a decapitated legend.


Or as Ishmael Reed has said, a new loa.


Ernest Hogan will be teaching Papí Sci-Fi’s Ancient Chicano Sci-Fi Wisdom at Palabras Del Pueblo Writing Workshop, online May 20-21 and May 27-28. May 1st is the deadline to apply. Let’s take over imaginative literature, raza writers!

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