Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
For 50 years, screenwriter and El Teatro Campesino founder Luis Valdez has been looking under Zorro's mask, trying to figure out who the romantic Latin hero really was.
Jul 23, 1998 | Back around 1948, when I was just a kid, Zorro rode into my life across the flat cotton fields of the southwest San Joaquin Valley like a silent dream. Going to the movies in those days meant paying an extra dime to catch the Greyhound bus to Delano with my brother. We lived in Earlimart, you see, 11 miles to the north on Highway 99. Our funky, dusty little migrant farm worker town didn't even have a Catholic church. How could it rate its own show?
One day an old man pulled into town in a rattling panel truck, hauling a battered trailer. He offered me and my brother a quarter each if we'd help him clear an empty lot of broken glass. Then he hired a couple of men to help him erect a small, worn-out circus tent and we helped him set up his benches, his screen and his kerosene projector. As it turned out, the old man was part of a dying breed from the '20s, the traveling picture show, barely surviving in the rural backwater barrio towns of California.
That night Douglas Fairbanks Sr. rode into our town in "The Mark of Zorro," made in Hollywood in 1920 in glorious black and white, and totally silent. It was unforgettable. It was like being at the birth of the movies, when the myth of the romantic Latin hero itself was born. To an 8-year-old migrant Chicano kid, it was a revelation, and the start of a strange mystery: Who is this guy who's supposed to be me? And for the last 50 years, as a playwright, activist and filmmaker, I have been looking under his mask.
To his countless legions of fans all over the world, Zorro is pure fictional fun and unmitigated entertainment. In raising the old western movie and TV icon to late '90s standards of amazing action, gender balance and digital effects, the producers of this latest effort no doubt hope to turn Zorro's legend into pure gold again. Reality has nothing to do with it -- this is serious worldwide show business. Zorro and his distant Hollywood cousin, the Cisco Kid, are the only two enduring Hispanic franchises in the entire history of the movies. So if they aren't broke, why fix them?
It is no surprise that "The Mask of Zorro," the new Antonio Banderas movie, evokes that hero's favorite disguise. Over the last 80 years, Hollywood has constantly titled and retitled its latest Zorro adventures by oblique references to his mark, his son, his ghost, his whip and even his gay blade. Yet it is his black half-face mask, like his rapier Z slash, that forever evokes the caballero with classic intrigue and simplicity. One can only wonder, after four generations of cinematic reincarnations, if Zorro's real face is any closer to reality. Does it matter?
If you look closely under the mask, you might discover another identical mask, starting to crack with age. Under that is an even older mask, followed by still older replicas dating back to silent days. There is no real face. The legend of Zorro (Spanish for "fox") was born fully formed in 1919 in the conquest fiction of Johnston McCulley -- who, with only a cursory knowledge of California history, penned an original story called "The Curse of Capistrano."
With a rapier stroke of his fictive pen, McCulley established the pedigree of his fox so unerringly that the legend of Zorro has remained basically unchanged, providing the last four generations of Americans with their only lasting exposure to Spanish California "history." Yet, historically accurate or not, the tale was the soul of political correctness in an era that saw D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915) extolling the virtues of the Ku Klux Klan. And this is the enduring mystery of the masked avenger: Just who was McCulley's hero avenging, and what was he masking? Could it be real California history?
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